There’s a second misuse of silence, and that is silent betrayal. Failing to respond to cries for help. Failure to defend those who are wrongly convicted or excluded.

If the silent treatment is the active weaponizing of silence, betrayal is the sloth of silence. It’s silence that occurs when there should be speaking, our speaking. And in the absence of our speaking, in fact because of our silent negligence, someone gets harmed.

I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it this way, but Judas, Cassius & Brutus all killed their targets through a silent act of betrayal. Judas kissed Jesus on the cheek. Cassius & Brutus led the group that assassinated Julius Caesar. It’s not their words we remember from that scene, because they were evidently speaking only with knives. It’s Caesar’s words that have survived as a result— “You too, Brutus?” When Dante Alighieri created his masterful Divine Comedy, and its vision of hell with its 9 levels, each worse than the last, he placed these three on the most extreme level. The silent betrayers. Yet they’re not alone. The three are clenched in the mouth of Satan himself, who is frozen from the neck up in ice. A permanent silencing to match their destructive, silent betrayal.[1]

But these examples are old. Our version of hell needs updating—or at least, our awareness that silent betrayal is a crime we continue to nurture today.

When we give hell to other people

Over the last centuries and decades, for instance, silent betrayal has accumulated in the church—both Catholic and Protestant, yet more evidence of Paul Simon’s insight that silence like a cancer grows (in the unseen places).[2] After thousands of clergy sexually abused those under their spiritual care, thousands of their other superiors covered it up. In performing this silent betrayal, organized religion did more than just seek to hide the damage; they also hoped by their silence that the victims would never be heard, believed, or supported. They hoped, through their betrayal, that the victims would be without hope. They were (and many still are) silent betrayers.

Thousands of pastors were also infamously silent during the Holocaust in Germany. Instead of speaking out against Hitler, against fascism, against arrest without trial, against eugenics, against a racism that led to genocide, they kept quiet.[3] As a result, millions of human beings were isolated, imprisoned, and extinguished. These pastors, alongside so many Germans of other vocations, were silent betrayers. They watched others consigned to the sunken place, considered rescuing them, and decided against it.

On a far different scale, and much more recently, Mark Zuckerberg was silent for weeks after allegations emerged that Facebook had leaked its users’ information, perhaps knowingly. It was offensive enough that Wired magazine published an article on the subject, titling it “The Irreversible Damage of Mark Zuckerberg’s Silence.”[4] He is a silent betrayer.

Suu Kyi, who famously won the Nobel Prize in 1991 for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights in Myanmar, was discovered in 2017 to be complicit in the silencing of the Rohingya people native to her country, silencing that happened militarily through displacement, rape, and murder. She is unrepentant. She is a silent betrayer.[5]

When the genocide in Rwanda exploded in the 1990s, the Tutsis being massacred were convinced that video footage of the atrocities would surely call the world to help them. But in Hotel Rwanda, a cinematic retelling based on real characters, here’s how the American journalist breaks the news to the hotel manager:

“I think that, if people see this footage, they’ll say, ‘Oh my God, that’s horrible.’ And then go on eating their dinners.”[6]

I know for a fact that this describes my own reaction in 1994: I saw the Rwandan atrocities on the evening news, I cringed, and I moved on. I was a silent betrayer. Maybe you were too.

As we now know, we are even more likely to ignore cries for help when we’re not alone; when there are others around us. Why? Because we assume even more strongly that surely someone else will help; and then, if no one does, we continue in our denial. It’s called “bystander apathy,” a term that emerged from a famous (if misunderstood) case in 1964 when dozens of people watched a young woman get stabbed to death in Queens: not a single person called for help.[7]

As we saw in the last chapter, silencing can happen across a wide range: subtly in cocktail party snubbing, or more drastically through genocide. Similarly, silent betrayal is the realm of history’s worst villains but, at moments, we too join them.

Our children, for instance, expect us to follow through on our promises. But do we? How easily do we shrug off their insistence when we’ve simply changed our mind about the day’s plans, and let the chips fall where they may—right on their broken expectations?

Our coworkers and customers for good reason expect the same kind of respect: they expect our word to be our bond. So what happens when it’s not, and we simply ignore their phone calls, or try to explain away their continued and increasingly angry calls for help?

The homeless and beggars of our city, who know they shouldn’t be begging, also don’t expect us to completely ignore them, as if they were objects in the street instead of people.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote eloquently in several places about this kind of silence that does nothing to respond to cries for aid. “There comes a time,” he says, “when silence is betrayal.” “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” And “in the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”[8]

The stakes of silent betrayal are high, even if they make no sound. This reality too can lead us to fear silence, to imagine that all silence may have betrayal lurking in its darkest corners. Betrayal also leads to a culture where we are more likely to be victims ourselves.

Even if you don’t know the name Martin Niemöller, you’ve probably heard his most famous poem that argues against silent betrayal for this very reason. Niemöller was a pastor and theologian in Germany during Hitler’s regime, one of the few pastors who did speak out at the time. He writes keenly about what it feels like to carry out a life of betraying others silently, only to find that very betrayal returning like a boomerang to your own doorstep:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.