All Along the Watchtower: I Hear the Whistles Blow

His watchmen are blind, they are all ignorant;
they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark;
sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber.
(Isaiah 56:10)

Following Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest in July, the sex-trafficking trial of the century was just gathering momentum. Outside plush law offices and inside dingy government halls, an outraged, #MeToo-weary, but incensed public are banging at the barbican, clamoring for justice. Hungry gators swimming round and round in the pools of social media are beside themselves with joy guessing who will be the next victim to fall screaming into the moat.

There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief
(All Along the Watchtower)

Yet, as foretold in Bob Dylan’s 1967 protest song, “All Along the Watchtower,” the confrontation never comes. The stage is set for a duel – maybe even a showdown – but the satisfying thwack of a gavel proclaiming justice has not sounded. Leaving us hanging, Epstein was found dead in his cell. A cruel twist of bedsheet fate has denied us the chance to pry the secrets out of the villain’s mouth, like so many yellowing, rotten teeth.

No reason to get excited, the thief he kindly spoke,
There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
(All Along the Watchtower)

Shocked by the turn of events, we search for logical explanations while court jesters run amok, mocking the establishment and hawking conspiracies. But one thing is clear: The watchtower, a symbol since biblical times of wisdom, strength and protection from enemies, has failed us. The bastions of power are soundproofed, the guards deaf and dumb, and moral turpitude has managed to creep its way up the pristine stone walls like poison ivy. The ruling princes in the tower of your choice (government, corporate, nonprofit) can continue moving freely with impunity like bats in the belfry, because no one is watching (them).

If the enemies are already within the ramparts, is there anything in our arsenal to pierce the corrupt parapets of power?

Yes, my friend: It is a long, piercing collective whistle against wrongdoing, and it is growing more audible by the minute. Keep your ears open to the sound; whether it’s 500 miles away or 50 years back, we can hear the whistle blowing. Let’s see when it started, where it is going and how we can harness it to affect some real behavioral and cultural change.

The Answer, My Friend, is Singing in the Wind

But you and I, we’ve been through that and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late
(All Along the Watchtower)

It was 1967, and the streets of American cities were rocked by the shifting tectonic plates of social change. Despite promises of answers by popular folk song lyrics, the only thing blowing in the wind was the ashes from the protest riots. The growing presence of American television pulled the shades up on a brutal view of mangled rice fields in Vietnam and mushrooming political unrest closer to home. Buoyed by the civil rights movement before them, American youth – not old enough to vote, but old enough to die – began to raise their voices in collective dissent. Unknowingly, the media became a friend of the people below.

The melody of discontent topped the pop music charts and jarred the American consciousness. The people spoke up, sang out and broke the sounds of silence against the established order. These notes of collective whistleblowing proved acidic enough to permeate the steel barriers of the White House watchtowers and bring our boys home. It seemed the answer, my friend, was not blowing in the wind, but singing in it.

Against this backdrop, a young Bob Dylan emerged on the scene to pen “All Along the Watchtower,” one of the most famous and dissected songs of all time. Considered a work of lyrical brilliance, the song encapsulates the timeless dialogue of outcasts mired in the despair of social class injustices. His cryptic narrative hints at the cyclical nature of this confrontation between the people and the “princes” in the towers. The cry of trickery echoes once again as we realize that the very institutions created to keep us safe have put us and others in harm’s way.

Just a Pawn in Their Game: UN Sex Trafficking Scandal, 1990s – Today

All along the watchtower princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too
(All Along the Watchtower)

One of the most outrageous and pitiful watchtower scandals involves the United Nations peacekeeping forces in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina in the late 1990s. Their initial mission, to ensure security and international cooperation in a war-torn region, morphed into international “cooperation” of a different kind, in which UN police monitors, Bosnian police, government officials and very high-level UN and state department officials participated in an extensive sex-trafficking ring involving children and young women.

Unfortunately for the UN, a former Nebraskan policewoman, Kathryn Bolkovac was employed there as part of an outsourced peacekeeping police force. Having contact with the local population, she soon uncovered a network of bars and brothels where kidnapped young women were enslaved to “peacekeepers” on the traffickers’ payroll. Incensed by blatant UN criminal involvement in this nightmare, Kathryn amassed documented evidence and blew the whistle so hard it reached the top of the tower, where Jacques Paul Klein presided as the head of the UN Mission in Bosnia. Needless to say, Kathryn’s life was threatened, she was fired from her job and no charges were filed.

Undaunted, Kathryn sued her employer for wrongful termination and won, thus opening up a slow drip of damming evidence in the buttressed bastions of UN. Cries for heads to roll grew louder and prompted Secretary-General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, to get off his throne and set up a few ineffective, but PR-friendly measures, like a conduct and discipline unit in 2007 that lacked any real authority.

Later, under pressure, Ban Ki-moon finally got it right by commissioning an investigative inquiry into rampant UN sexual abuse in Central Africa, but suspended another UN whistleblower, Anders Kompass, for passing on internal documents to the French authorities (Kompass was eventually exonerated). The UNethical were called out by the whistleblowers and were under scrutiny from watchdog organization Code Blue. (“Tangled Up in Blue” it is!)

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall: Oxfam Sexual Abuse in Haiti

There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief
(All Along the Watchtower)

In 2010, Haiti was destroyed by a major earthquake. Oxfam, a huge U.K. emergency relief organization, rushed to the scene to help to get the victims back on their feet. Well, maybe not on their feet, but off the floor and into bed. It soon emerged that aid workers were involved in widespread sexual exploitation of underage earthquake victims in exchange for those victims receiving aid. When The Times broke the story wide open in 2018, Oxfam dismissed the claims that there had been a coverup in 2011 stating that they had investigated back then and had issued a “corporate failure,” holding no one individual responsible. Be real, people; these champions of the destitute had to keep the donations pouring into their Watchtower coffers, so London Bridge wasn’t falling yet…

But Helen Evans, former Global Head of Safeguarding at Oxfam, took advantage of the national attention focused on the 2018 Times article. Having quit Oxfam in 2015 after being refused more safeguarding investment, she found her voice and went public. Opening up, she shared the results of confidential internal surveys that revealed an entrenched culture of powerful men targeting women who were least likely to speak out (not to mention allocating five times more staff to investigate fraud than to safeguarding).

Her disclosure of the aid sector guilt led to two public inquiries and serious ongoing investigations into charity operations abuses and their blatant lack of safeguarding measures. The widespread innocent belief that doers-of-good would never misuse their power or money has been shattered for good (pun intended), and her whistleblowing efforts spawned a litter of watchdogs to guard against abuses in the charity sector.

The Times They Are A-Changin’: Fighting to Change a Culture of Impunity to One of Accountability

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl
(All Along the Watchtower)

Although we only touched the tip of the tower with these turbid tales, a Hard Rain of scandals is about to fall. Cascading down to the people and flooding the already sodden pages of social media, we can only hope forthcoming stories of injustice will weigh the readers/tweeters down with the burden of guilt until they cry out for real change. It’s time the Machiavellian princes, hanging on by their claws in their towers of power, be blown off their perches. But only until the watchtower walls rattle with the force of a collective wind, whistling and wailing for integrity, will they fall.

…

Now, “if I had a hammer…”

The battle outside ragin’ will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’
(The Times They Are A-Changin’)