Essay: Silence as a symptom of an unhealthy democracy and its potential applications in resisting authoritarianism
Silence as a symptom of an unhealthy democracy and its potential applications in resisting authoritarianism
Harry Couchman, Politics and International Relations Student, University of Bristol
In the midst of the Cold War, countries in Latin America’s Southern Cone experienced a wave of coups that overthrew their democratically elected governments. What followed was a period of harsh rule by military dictatorships, characterised by extreme political repression and extensive human rights violations. These governments, united by their desire to hold onto power, formed a secret intelligence network called Operation Condor, which ‘hunted down’ and crushed any perceived leftist political dissidence (McSherry, 2002: 38). Even those who sought refuge abroad were captured and subjected to extensive torture before being executed (McSherry, 2002: 38).
Severe repression, such as this, goes against accepted democratic ideals which encourage citizens to be vocal and to partake in discussion throughout society. Despite debates about whether certain forms of expression, such as hate speech, should be protected or not, it remains that the principle of free speech fundamentally encourages vocalisation of political beliefs. In this sense, free speech aims to create a society with very little political secrecy, since citizens readily participate in democracy and reveal their views. Conversely, a society filled with silence, where political views are withheld, would be one with high levels of secrecy. Given the association of a ‘noisy’ society with healthy democracies, it is interesting to consider to what extent silence denotes an unhealthy democracy. Therefore, this essay will examine the causes of silence within a society as well as what its presence indicates and the role that it plays. Here, I will argue that the presence of high levels of silence within a society is indicative of an unhealthy democracy, yet, in spite of this, silence also has certain applications which are of value in restoring the integrity of a country’s democracy.
To do so, I will utilise Operation Condor, and similarly repressive modern Middle Eastern autocracies, as examples to explore how silence and secrecy can be forcefully imposed onto a society and why an authoritarian regime believes it is desirable to create this environment. This will lead to a discussion on how silence can be a symptom of an unhealthy democracy. Following this, I will employ silent protests by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and the silent Community Women’s Group (CWG) network investigated by Emily Van Duyn (2021) as examples of how silence can also operate as a form of resistance for those who are faced with intimidation.
Silence is often considered by existing literature in conjunction with the idea of ‘voice’. Voice is a powerful tool, and this concept has been heavily utilised in feminist theory since the 1960s, acting as a means to empower women (Luke, 1994: 211). In contrast, silences from women ‘in public contexts have been read by feminists as symptomatic of their subjugated social status’ (Luke, 1994: 213). This illustrates the powerful as having voice while the powerless are limited to silence. Carmen Luke (1994) does oppose this view and discusses silence as a form of resistance, but in terms of resistance against patriarchy rather than against an authoritarian state.
There has also been opposition to limiting discussion on silence to an existence solely within the realms of resistance versus domination. Silence is deemed so elusive that ‘a search for the politics of silence, for the determinative classification of the power dynamics inherent within silence, is consequently doomed to fail’ (Ferguson, 2003: 62, original emphasis). Mónica Brito Vieira (2019: 424-425) cites this work by Kennan Ferguson as being ‘groundbreaking’ and uses it as the basis to explore the differences and similarities between speech and silence, as well as what this comparison indicates about the nature of silence and what potential implications it has for democratic politics. Building upon this, Vieira (2020) further considers the relationship between speech and silence. The argument made here is that speech is not an opposite of silence, as feminist theory had assumed, but rather they are both signals ‘soliciting engagement by a representative system earning its legitimacy from giving-voice-to’ (Vieira, 2020: 987). Here, silence is no longer the absence of something; it is instead a presence which requires representation (Vieira, 2020: 987).
However, something lacking from these publications is a consideration of exactly what it signifies about a society when there are high levels of silence and secrecy. The relationship between speech and silence is examined, but not what the presence of silence suggests. Also lacking is an exploration of how silence can also be utilised by citizens to resist authoritarianism. For example, while Vieira (2020) considers how to represent silence, the focus remains on how representative systems may adapt. Therefore, the meaning of silence within a society and its potential as a political tool of citizens remain unexplored.
Before analysing what the presence of silence indicates, it is important to first consider how silence and secrecy are connected, and how silence can produce secrecy. States hold a vast number of documented secrets, hidden by levels of classification that limit access to them and redactions which obfuscate their meaning. Classification and redaction are tools for allowing the government to remain silent on certain subjects, thereby limiting information and knowledge, and generating secrets. For the years in which Operation Condor was in existence, there was silence by Latin American governments regarding the network. Silence did, at least temporarily, conceal the secrets of Operation Condor. Even once declassified, authorities made it difficult to locate incriminating evidence and the newly democratic Paraguayan government in particular was uncooperative in releasing documents that would form the Archive of Terror (Zoglin, 2001: 61).
Despite this silence, some knowledge of Operation Condor’s impact did remain, even at a time when there was limited evidence of a wider collaborative network. In Argentina, the number of forced ‘disappearances’ was already estimated at somewhere ‘between 10,000 and 30,000’ before the fall of the country’s military junta (Coad, 1980: 41). Death squads from one Condor member were also able to travel to another member in order to carry out executions and disappearances in a manner which was largely ‘deniable by the state’ (McSherry, 2007: 16). This concealment and silence from Latin American states provided them with a form of plausible deniability that allowed the network to continue functioning in secret. Furthermore, while death squads alone could silence threats to the government, the fear associated with the unknown, mysterious disappearances also proved to be effective in creating silence amongst any who might wish to oppose the government.
These Latin American dictatorships that formed the Condor network committed an egregious number of severe human rights violations in the name of silencing their citizens and crushing political opposition. It is therefore important to enquire about their motivation for doing so. Intimidation is an integral part of how authoritarian regimes maintain control. They often have such little popular support and such little legitimacy that they must intimidate the political opposition or silence critics in order to continue holding power. In addition to the detention or outright murder and torture of any dissidents, this can also come in the form of electoral intimidation and preventing fair and free elections, such as when two Ethiopian parties withdrew from the 2005 elections ‘due to harassment and intimidation of their candidates and supporters’ (Aalen & Tronvoll, 2009: 113). It can also manifest itself through censorship of creative voices such as writers and musicians (Glasius, 2018: 528).
On this evidence, authoritarian governments, including Operation Condor members, clearly prefer that their critics stay silent, but why is it that they deem simple criticism to be such a threat to their regimes? Simply put, the act of breaking one’s silence in order to criticise the government is an act of revealing something which had been kept secret up until now. It is a form of confession and in doing so, a citizen is electing to make themselves vulnerable, but they are also beginning to normalise criticism of the government in public discourse and erode the fear associated with speaking out. Therefore, it may encourage others who hold a similar secret belief to confess it and to reveal their anti-government attitudes, and this can develop into a more fully fledged democratic or anti-government movement. This is evident from the erosion of Middle Eastern authoritarianism and the resultant increasing democratisation efforts. This is a movement which owes much to social media for the way in which it readily provided information that was not controlled by the state, and allowed citizens to document and share the violent repression which was occurring (Salamey & Pearson, 2012: 492). There is a slight difference here in that social media was used to communicate these anti-government beliefs, something which did not exist at the time of Operation Condor. Consequently, it could be viewed as an imperfect example, but, principally, the same phenomenon can occur through word of mouth, and for that reason I would argue that it remains an accurate illustration of how the potential for outspoken criticism was perceived as a threat by Latin American governments.
Of course, these beliefs may not always coalesce into a significant movement. A number of other external factors aside from purely state repression were responsible for these uprisings in the Middle East, such as food inflation and rising costs of living (Salam, 2015: 123). However, the mere threat of such a movement worried the authoritarian regimes of Latin America enough that they moved towards harsher repression to intimidate citizens into maintaining a collective silence, thus generating greater secrecy in the region as a whole. This situation can then be reframed as the following statement: state violence in Latin America intimidated people into remaining silent and keeping their political views secret. It follows then that a society in which people feel it is a necessity to withhold their political beliefs in this manner, and to keep them secret, is one which is likely rife with political violence. Therefore, high levels of silence and secrecy would be associated with a highly eroded democracy.
It could be argued, however, that silence is instead perceived by authoritarians to be a threat, depriving them of the information they require about themselves and others in order to operate effectively (Vieira, 2021: 387). The lack of information and the ambiguity associated with silence are what provide it with this strength, not only by potentially forcing the authoritarian regime to lose touch with reality, but also by making it a ‘lower-cost alternative to voice’ (Vieira, 2021: 387). Drawing from this argument, it would suggest, contrary to what I have contended, that silence is ultimately undesirable for authoritarian regimes.
While there is strength in arguing that ambiguity provides silent approaches with strength, particularly through how it provides a degree of defence for anyone resisting, evidence from Latin America during Operation Condor contradicts the notion that silence is something authoritarian regimes fear. These dictatorships certainly did rule through silence, and they were severe in doing so. Additionally, these silencing tactics seen in Latin America remain important tools for many present authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. During the Arab Spring, civilians and activists in Bahrain had their family members abducted and tortured, while protestors, both violent and nonviolent, were routinely killed by government forces, with the regime taking every possible measure to silence them (Al-Khawaja, 2014: 194). Furthermore, Saudi Arabia has, unsuccessfully, attempted to silence online dissidence through physical repression, such as imprisonment (Pan & Siegel, 2020: 123), and Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt ‘almost completely shut down’ internet in the country in response to protests in 2011 (Lynch, 2011: 303). These are not the actions of states which perceive silence as a significant threat. This contemporary evidence from the Middle East, in conjunction with that from Latin America, demonstrates that enforcing silence does remain a key objective of authoritarian regimes in how they rule, regardless of any fear they may have, and, as such, silence is ultimately symptomatic of an unhealthy democracy.
In light of this, it is curious then that one of the highest profile and most effective methods of resistance against the Argentine state during these Operation Condor years, breaking the silence that had been instilled through fear and intimidation, was precisely through remaining silent. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were a group of mothers in Argentina whose children had been ‘disappeared’ by the state. Not knowing who had abducted their children, or why, they set out to report their abduction to local authorities, the military or the government, only to be presented with the story that there was no one on record with that name (Thornton, 2000: 281). These mothers were sent from one place to another in search of answers and eventually, with a certain sense of trepidation, they began to communicate with other mothers who were facing similar ordeals (Thornton, 2000: 282). Over time this communication developed into a series of weekly silent protests in the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the country’s presidential palace.
Of course, while the Mothers remained physically silent on these marches, in reality they were making a loud statement and expressing their political beliefs against the government. The action of marching alone was an act of breaking their political silence, and it was sufficient for the dictatorship to deem them subversives. As a result of their movement, some of the founding members of the group also became victims of these forced disappearances (Thornton, 2000: 282). Given they had already placed themselves in a position of danger, they could have elected to make as much noise as possible in order to raise awareness but instead, they remained silent. It was an emotionally driven act, reflecting the silence which the government had inflicted on their children. The actions of the Mothers here illustrate how, paradoxically, physical silence is not always silent; it can still carry a significant meaning. As such, the imposition of silence by an authoritarian government through state sponsored terror and censorship, while effective to an extent, cannot entirely prevent dissent. This silence can instead find a new role in providing an opportunity for the opposition to continue expressing themselves in an alternative manner.
Another way of utilising silence as a method of resistance is explored by Van Duyn (2021), who investigates the CWG, an organisation of women in Texas who meet up secretly to discuss their political views due to the fear they felt about doing so publicly. In this sense, secrecy through silence is a protective measure but it also allows community building (Van Duyn, 2021: 200). This appeals to a slightly different scenario to the one in which the Mothers found themselves in. The Mothers and the CWG exist in states which suffer from differing degrees of democratic erosion, as illustrated by the different actors attempting to silence the groups. The CWG is faced with intimidation derived from polarisation between Republicans and Democrats in the US, while the Mothers faced intimidation directly from the state. While the US Capitol attack, on January 6, 2021, was clearly intimidating and sufficient to push people into hiding their political views, it remains visibly different from the extensive state sponsored political repression which the Mothers faced in Argentina. Indeed, Van Duyn (2021: 213) emphasises that while democracy in the US is ‘dark’ it is not yet dead. Although it is utilised differently, the use of silence remains consistent across both examples, therefore demonstrating it can be employed in a variety of ways by those facing intimidation.
There are, however, instances of silence being used as a form of protest in countries widely considered to be free, liberal democracies, something which may form the basis for criticism of the notion that silence is indicative of an eroded democracy. One such example is the silent protests in Finland, an act described by Katariina Kaura-aho (2021: 132) as appearing ‘potentially subversive’. Of course, the response by the Finnish state was not to ‘disappear’ the protestors as the Argentine state had done, but that such an act of silence would occur in a liberal democracy could suggest that silence does not indicate an erosion of democracy.
It is important to note though that those who protested in Finland were refugees. Clearly, their political situation is vastly different to that of an ordinary Finnish citizen. Refugees are often marginalised such that they are limited in how they can communicate politically and must resort to methods of resistance to convey their messages (Kaura-aho, 2021:121). In the context of this marginalisation, it remains that silence is symptomatic of an unhealthy democracy because these refugees are unable to enjoy the same democratic rights that the rest of the population do.
Authoritarian regimes, both past and present, utilise silence as a tool through which they attempt to limit dissent, something illustrated by the Operation Condor network which existed in Latin America, as well as existing regimes in the Middle East. Above all, it is the threat of free speech and subsequent criticism that these regimes find menacing, due to the way in which these elements empower people. The imposition of silence through severe political repression is a consequence of this fear of free speech, and therefore indicates a democracy which has been eroded. Despite silence being an objective of these regimes, it can also be utilised in such a way that it presents a route back towards democracy. Silent protests against Argentina’s military junta by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were of great significance in eventually restoring democracy and the CWG in Texas, as examined by Van Duyn (2021: 213), illustrates how silence and secrecy can protect democracy in times of intimidation.
Through considering silent refugee protests in Finland, I have also defended the argument that silence remains indicative of an eroded democracy due to the marginalisation these refugees face, despite these protests occurring in a country typically considered a stable democracy. This, however, has implications for what constitutes a healthy democracy and the role that refugees may have. If only naturalised citizens can enjoy the ability to freely use their voices and be transparent while refugees remain consigned to silence and secrecy, to what extent is it truly a free and democratic country? This area could prove an interesting avenue for future theorisation utilising the lenses of silence and secrecy.
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