Chomsky

"It's close to a historical universal that dissidents are subject to ugly treatment, which takes various forms: vilification, defamation, slanders, lies in more free societies where the power to coerce is limited: imprisonment or exile in the old Soviet Union; in a US dependency, like El Salvador, having your brains blown out by an elite battalion armed and trained by Washington. Nov. 17 was the anniversary of the brutal execution of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, in El Salvador in 1989, by the Atlacatl brigade, which had already compiled a vicious record of slaughter of the usual victims, bringing to a symbolic close the hideous decade in Central America that opened with the assassination of an Archbishop who was a "voice for the voiceless" while saying Mass, by similar hands. Since we are the agents, it passed in silence. Imagine if something remotely similar had happened at the same time in, say, Czechoslovakia. That does really merit comment, to put it mildly. The full story is incomparably worse, and there are many others like it. Those, I think, are the topics that should concern us when we consider the modes of silencing dissent in Western societies".

Noam Chomsky