E-Pluribus | May 20, 2024

Lessons on censorship from the USSR; how Hamas became cool; and playing the devil's advocate in public schools - literally.

May 20, 2024

A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

Izabella Tabarovsky: What My Soviet Life Taught Me About Censorship

Quillette has republished an Areo Magazine essay by Izabella Tabarovsky, who grew up in the Soviet Union and writes extensively about the defunct totalitarian state. Current censorship trends concern Tabarovsky; she experienced firsthand where this culture of silencing dissent leads, and warns the left not to fall into the trap of benevolent censorship.

America has always had its share of people who call for censorship of what they see as offensive content, but until last year it was still possible for me to believe that such people were generally considered marginal, and certainly that they were over there, on the other side of the aisle—perhaps driven by extreme religious, political, and social conservatism. People on my side of the spectrum—liberals like me—were not afraid to encounter ideas that challenged their prior assumptions. But that changed last year. As a new, dogmatic, far-left ideology poured rapidly into our cultural mainstream, calls for censorship were now coming from my end of the spectrum. Academics who failed to align with the most radical far-left ideas suddenly feared for their academic freedom. Newsrooms found themselves in upheaval as previously legitimate, if provocative, opinions now became unpublishable. The liberal media establishment went full Pravda on some of the crucial stories of the year, such as electoral politics, the handling of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests—to the point where David Satter and Matt Taibbi, long-time observers of the Soviet Union, drew parallels with that country’s ideologically captured, propagandistic press.
I watch these developments in disbelief. As a member of the last Soviet generation, having come of age in the era of perestroika, I remember what it was like when censorship began to lift. Literary journals competed to publish Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago—books written decades earlier that were only now reaching us, their intended readers. Soviet rock music emerged from underground with songs that we hadn’t known we needed to hear, songs that nailed the state of our souls. Truth was perestroika’s drug, and we were getting high on it.
But this drug caused painful side effects, too. The extensive information bans had left us unprepared to fully absorb the reality of our history and current events. Suddenly, we were having to face the consequences of our country’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, and of the nine-year war it had waged there: zinc-lined coffins bringing back teenage boys who had been sent to defend a foreign communist coup that no one we knew had understood or cared about; crippled 20-year-old veterans coming home with psychic wounds and poignant songs that none of us could relate to. Decades of platitudes about socialist internationalism had left us unable to mentally and emotionally process the ethnic violence that was currently exploding at the edges of the Soviet empire. One couldn’t help but ask oneself: How could I not have known? How could they have hidden all this from me? In the harsh light of truth, whatever shreds of faith in the system that were still there vanished. And the Soviet Union soon vanished too.
It feels weird to be explaining the perils of censorship to Americans. It was they who taught me about the absolute value of free speech. It was their readiness—so cool, so confident—to entertain the most heterodox ideas that had made me understand why the Soviet Union never stood a chance against their country. Do I really need to be telling Americans that censorship makes us dumb? That it limits our ability to assess reality and to make the decisions that are best for us, both as individuals and as a society? Do I really need to be telling progressives that progress is impossible without the freedom to think, speak and argue? And do I really need to be telling social justice warriors that social justice is a mere pipe dream in any society that hews to a single, rigid ideological narrative—or that unfreedom of expression oppresses the oppressed and empowers the powerful?
[. . .]
A culture of censorship does more than bury certain facts and opinions and prohibit some forms of speech: it often also requires people to accept particular ideas as true, hold particular opinions and engage in particular forms of speech.

Read the whole thing.

Jacob Howland: How Hamas became radical chic

While some pro-Palestinian protesters explicitly reject and condemn Hamas, too many mute their criticism of the terrorist organization and some actively excuse or support Hamas in its “struggle.” The University of Austin’s Jacob Howland explores how this came about for UnHerd.

While the maligned figure of the Jew has historically been an all-purpose scapegoat, one thing seems clear enough. Western antisemitism is now primarily fuelled by identity politics, a cultural version of Marxism that analyses injustice not in terms of class, but of race, sex, ethnicity and religion. For the radical avant-garde of 2024, the revolutionary agent of global justice is not the proletariat — the united workers of the world that Marx expected to overthrow capitalism and birth the Communist utopia — but Hamas. And yet, today’s cultural Marxists nevertheless recapitulate the moral and intellectual deficiencies of the master’s philosophy. They, too, reject the central teachings of the Bible, twist and debase its narrative of salvation, and embody the fratricidal spitefulness against which it repeatedly inveighs.
Start with the perverse elevation of brutal terrorists with roots in Nazism. Most people recognise evil when they see it. Marx muddies the waters by locating evil not in individuals, but in society. While he disdains capitalists and Jews (two groups he regards as virtually identical), he rejects the pre-modern consensus of Hebrews and Christians that man is by nature a depraved animal. In this, he follows Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Comparing miserable 18th-century Europeans with the “noble savage” of his imagination, a happy and compassionate being whose existence he inferred from reading anthropological accounts of native Americans and Africans, Rousseau concluded that men and women are by nature as good as Adam and Eve on the day of creation. But institutions like the division of labour and private property, cornerstones of Western civilisation, have made them servile and vicious.
In suggesting that civilisation is a source of withering illness, Rousseau sowed the seeds of late-modern revolutionary nihilism. For if civilisation makes us sick, why not just tear it down? More immediately, his gauzy idealisation of human nature greatly encouraged the French revolutionaries, who struck directly at what they took to be the roots of the sickness. Seeking to wipe away the old ways so that they might reconstruct society according to abstract principles, they slaughtered priests, peasants, nobles, and royalty, watering the soil of liberté, égalité, and fraternité with rivers of blood. It was DEI with guillotines.
Marx framed Rousseau’s seminal ideas in economic terms, producing a sweeping material history to rival the Bible’s sacred one. He argued that evolving modes of production determine nothing less than the systemic organisation of societies and the form and content of their predominant opinions. His apocalyptic vision of salvation through revolutionary liberation from injustice is a secular adaptation of the book of Revelation. Here, too, the faithful are saved, but fundamental values are transposed... The seeds of radical chic, epitomised in Che Guevara T-shirts, were planted in the Communist Manifesto.
[. . .]
With calls to “globalise the intifada” echoing on the campuses of the West, it’s become clear that today’s cultural Marxists are playacting in the only drama they’ve been taught by their radicalised professors. Unburdened by knowledge of the past, unfamiliar with the sacrifices laid by so many on the altar of freedom and ordered liberty, unacquainted with any but anti-heroes, these anarchists, schooled in the likes of Herbert Marcuse, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon, have learned to regard civilisation as little more than a set of unreasonable constraints on their appetites. Their feverish imaginations transform perpetrators of unspeakable evil, washed not in the blood of the lamb but that of slaughtered Jews, into innocent martyrs in the cause of human liberation.
And it’s not just Hamas that benefits from this demonic alchemy. Marx’s knowledge that he belonged to the “small section of the ruling class [that] cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class”, and that he effectively called the proletariat into being as a revolutionary agent by endowing it with class consciousness, must have considerably assuaged his bourgeois guilt. Hamas’s supporters, including many students and faculty at expensive, elite universities, are buoyed by a similar knowledge as they attempt to launch the “intifada revolution”.

Read it all here.

Tyler Kingkade: As conservatives put religion in schools, Satanists want in, too

In a news article that reads more like a press release, Tyler Kingkade of NBC News says the Satanic Temple has just as much right to be in public schools as any religious organization. So far, the courts have tended to agree, much to the frustration of religious conservatives.

When conservative lawmakers in Florida and Texas won the fight to allow religious chaplains in public schools, they swung open the door to ministers from other faiths — including the Satanic Temple.
The demonic-sounding group, which describes itself as “nontheistic,” is using this debate and others like it to make a point about the growing encroachment of religion on public life.
[. . .]
“If they pass these bills, they’re going to have to contend with ministers of Satan acting as chaplains within their school districts,” said Lucien Greaves, a co-founder of the Satanic Temple, who uses a pseudonym to protect him against threats. “We think the public should know in advance that that’s what the outcome of these bills can be.”The Satanic Temple, founded in 2013 and recognized as a religion by the IRS, is known for trolling the religious right by taking advantage of Christian campaigns. When Arkansas installed a statue of the Ten Commandments outside the State Capitol, the Temple unveiled its own statue of Baphomet, a goat-headed figure, there, too. It offered the Hellions Academy as an alternative to Christian studies during school hours and named a telehealth abortion clinic after Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s mom.
[. . .]
The Temple believes in reason, empathy and the pursuit of knowledge, its website FAQ helpfully explains. And it doesn’t worship Satan. “Satan is a symbol of the Eternal Rebel in opposition to arbitrary authority,” it states. But it’s not just a joke, supporters say. And opponents seem to agree.
[. . .]
“It definitely started with a kind of humorous or satirical element to it, but this is a movement with hundreds of people that’s been going for 10 years now — they’re quite serious about it,” said Joseph Laycock, a religious studies professor at Texas State University who wrote a book-length study about the group. “They’re willing to put up with death threats. They’re willing to wear bulletproof vests because Neo-Nazis have threatened to kill them if they give a public speech. People don’t normally take those kinds of risks for a joke.”
[. . .]
“The real fear of Christian nationalism is driving people into the arms of groups like the Satanic Temple,” Laycock said. “And then the fact that there are now Satanists taking to the streets of America is causing the Christian nationalists to double down, too, and making them even more determined to cling to power for as long as they can.”
[. . .]
[L]egal experts warn that conservatives disregard the Satanic Temple at their own peril, because the group’s strategy of stepping into spaces intended for other religions is often effective. In 2016, the Temple began running After School Satan Clubs, seeking to start them in schools that already had Christian-based groups on campus. A federal court sided with the Temple in a legal challenge last year, and there are currently seven clubs nationwide, where children make arts and crafts, learn about animals and do science experiments.

Read it all.