Silencing the whistle-blowers

Abstract

The word ‘silence’ can evoke a variety of different meanings and understandings: a sense of peace and quiet, solitude, escape; ‘far from the madding crowd’ of unwelcome chitter-chatter, the vagaries of everyday life. Alternatively it can be looked upon as a verb, to silence or to be silenced. Quite different concepts depend on whether you are the one being silenced, choose to keep silent, or indeed, are the one doing the silencing, though I very much doubt whether perpetrators of such silencing would ‘frame’ it in quite the same way: truth and justice often reside at very opposite ends of a continuum.