Ask the questions that no one else will

Ever since I was accused of spreading racist ideology by a University of Richmond professor because I had asked whether a certain U.S. president was racist, I feel much freer to express my opinion. You can tell a lot about people by their response to an unorthodox question. When the answer is nothing short of a personal accusation, and the responder happens to be a University of Richmond professor or an administrator, you begin thinking, "OK, maybe I am being indoctrinated with their own beliefs instead of being taught to judge for myself."

Over the years I have developed a clear understanding of fear-mongering and scare tactics. I come from a place where it is expected to be skeptical of authority, any authority. Throughout Eastern Europe, it is common to hear the phrase, "I love my country, but I hate its government." Perhaps because of the size of my home country, it is quite simple to see how political parties control certain news channels, ministers represent corporations and the political party system is a sham — they are different faces of one party, that of Power and Privilege.

In my country, there is little publicity given to dissenting opinions. Even when I interviewed people about their life during the communist regime (20 years ago), some of them wanted to remain anonymous because they feared they would lose their jobs. There is still fear more than 20 years after the fall of communism. This is what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the "quiet, passive acceptance of evil."

This fear originates from our understanding that by being quiet and minding our own business, we will get further in our life. We think "maybe if I get on this professor's/boss' good side, he can give me a good recommendation." The higher the stakes, the more passive we are encouraged to be. The bigger the authority, the more we should keep our mouths shut. You can criticize war, but not the reasons behind it, criticize the president, but not his authority.

These limits exist in the mainstream media, but should not be imposed in any classroom, unless the professors consider themselves a part of the government's propaganda apparatus. I am a strong believer that professors should take sides on issues (how else would they expect us to do the same?), but they should in no way hinder our ability to judge for ourselves.

When I discuss politics at the University of Richmond, sometimes I feel like I am talking to a representative from the Ministry of Truth. If I reach certain topics, I feel pressured to prove my allegiance to the Party (similar to what people living under a totalitarian regime had to do if they didn't want to be reported). If people are entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts, as Daniel Moynihan said, should it be the case that questions should be disproved with facts, instead of personal accusations?

A comparably insignificant but nonetheless relevant parallel is when students at Richmond were appalled by college gossip sites. They tried to address the issues of Internet anonymity by proposing to ignore the site, rather than to face the fact that a small fraction of Richmond students are indeed racist and homophobic.

A part of my professor's argument that I was spreading racist ideology was that I had read about that particular U.S. president on the Internet. Naturally, the Ministry of Truth fears the Internet, because it brings up unpopular questions, generating the need for a more sophisticated way of disseminating the facts or avoiding an answer.

Then, there is WikiLeaks. Its recent "Iraq War Diaries" uncovered a minimum of 15,000 more deaths of Iraqi civilians between 2004 and 2009. The Ministry of Truth, however, would completely disregard the results of these reports and instead talk about how sensitive information should not be let out to the public. What could have turned into a discussion about previously unknown civilian deaths and the horrors in Iraq and Afghanistan was "spun" into an issue about the organization that exposed it.

The total number of Iraqi civilian casualties since 2003 is often highly underestimated. Officials and most mass media outlets often quote the Iraqi Body Count (IBC), a London-based NGO which uses passive surveillance and data from English-language sources to gather his estimates. Naturally, after the uncovering of the 15,000 deaths, they had to readjust their numbers, totaling to around 120,000 -- a number which does not take into account excess deaths as a result of war, or additional after-attack assessments.

Media outlets conveniently ignore and/or smear peer-reviewed scientific studies such as the Lancet studies, which place the excess death toll close to 655,000 (Washington Post), based on mortality rate and epidemiological methods, rather than passive reporting.

In addition to underestimating the total number of dead civilians, many newspapers, news channels and politicians attack WikiLeaks' founder and engage in scare tactics, implying that that the people who work for WikiLeaks have blood on their hands. Such automatic, collective responses eventually lead to social indoctrination and anti-intellectualism.

Sensitive information should not be let out to the public, but does that mean that we should not address these issues now that we know about them? What if it were a million deaths (as may be the case)? Just how many people have to die so analysts and journalists could admit the facts, instead of twisting them to fit their Think Tank ideology, or satisfy their newspaper talking points for the day?

But we shouldn't have this discussion, because WikiLeaks is, after all, an evil organization.

This is not an issue of Republican versus Democrat, liberal versus conservative, etc. Let's stop following worthless rhetoric and labels. This is a problem of avoiding human issues based on morality, for the sake of political bickering -- burying the gist of the issues under a thick-layered, self-important, selfishly driven, desire to avoid interpreting, or at least considering, vital information. Notice how these issues do not in any way involve a debate between being for or against war, or whether "this is war, this stuff happens." Nevertheless, more often than not, debates pursuing similar inquiries take such routes.

In The Collegian, I often see ambiguous graphs, polls and articles aimed solely at enhancing one's argument. What's missing are issues, often under-reported, but of great importance, such as the Supreme Court decision to allow unrestricted funding for political candidates (NY Times), Obama administration's claim to have the authority to target and kill U.S. citizens without due process, known as targeted killings (Salon.com), or a scientific study claiming that the U.S. toxic legacy in Fallujah is comparable to that of Hiroshima (The Independent).

These issues do, in fact, exist in the public space. It is all a matter of one's conscious decision to bring them up. In the words of Howard Zinn, "There are victims, there are executioners, and there are bystanders ... and the 'objectivity' of the bystander calls for inaction while other heads fall." I prefer being falsely accused of spreading racism than participating in a self-perpetuating notion of neutrality, derived from egocentric aspirations.

I would like to encourage incoming students to ask more unorthodox questions, question their beliefs and detect common Ministry of Truth answers.