Conor here: The following post places the current crackdown on speech across the “Collective West” in a broader historical context.
By Jorge Majfud, an Uruguayan-American writer and an associate professor at Jacksonville University. Originally published at Common Dreams.
On January 1, 1831, The Liberator, the country’s first abolitionist newspaper and, later, a defender of women’s suffrage, appeared in Massachusetts. At that time, Georgia slavers offered a reward of $5,000 (more than $160,000 in 2024 value) for the capture of its founder, William Lloyd Garrison. Naturally, this is how power reacts to freedom and the fight for the rights of others, but this attempt at violent censorship was not the legal norm at that time. The freedom of speech established by the First Amendment applied to white men, and no one wanted to break the law in broad daylight. To correct these errors there was always the mafia, paramilitarism and, later, secret agencies that are beyond the law―if not legal harassment under other excuses.
In his first article, Garrison already reveals the tone of a dispute that is announced as something long-standing: “I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen…”
The Liberator, exercising its right to freedom of the press, began sending copies to the southern states. The response of the southern governments and the slave owners was not to prohibit the publication, since it was against the law―a law that was made so that some rich white men could protect themselves from other rich white men who never imagined that this freedom could in some way threaten the existence of the political power of all rich white men. Actually, that is what “the land of the free” meant when the poet and slaveowner Francis Scott Key wrote it in 1814: the land of the white men―the “free race.”
Instead of breaking the law, an old method was resorted to. There’s no need to break the rules when you can change them. This is how a democracy works. Of course, not everyone has, nor does they have, the same possibilities of operating such a democratic miracle. Those who cannot change the laws usually break them and that is why they are criminals. Those who can change them are the first interested in ensuring that they are fulfilled. Except when the urgency of their own interests does not allow for bureaucratic delay or, for some reason, an inconvenient majority has been established, which those in power accuse of being irresponsible, childish or dangerous.
In principle, since the First Amendment could not be directly abolished, losses were limited. North Carolina passed laws prohibiting literacy for slaves. The prohibitions continued and spread throughout the 1830s to other slave states, almost always justified by the disorders, protests and even violent riots that abolitionists had inoculated among blacks with subversive literature.
Slavery propaganda was immediate. Posters and pamphlets were distributed warning of subversive elements among the decent people of the South and the dangers of the few conferences on the taboo subject. Harassment of freedom of expression, without actually prohibiting it, also occurred in the largest cities of the North. One of the pro-slavery pamphlets dated February 27, 1837 (a year after Texas was taken from Mexico to reestablish slavery) invited the population to gather in front of a church on Cannon Street in New York, where an abolitionist was going. to give a talk at seven at night. The advertisement warned about “An abolitionist of the most revolting character is among you… A seditious Lecture is to be delivered this evening” and called to “unite in putting down and silencing by peaceable means this tool of evil and fanaticism. Let the right of the States guaranteed by the constitution be protected.”
Abolitionist publications and conferences did not stop. For a time, the way to counteract them was not the prohibition of freedom of expression but the increase in slavery propaganda and the demonization of anti-slavery people as dangerous subversives. Later, when the resource of propaganda was not enough, all Southern states began to adopt laws that limited the freedom of expression of revisionist ideas. Only when free speech (freedom of dissident whites) got out of control did they turn to more aggressive laws, this time limiting free speech with selective bans or taxes on abolitionists. For example, in 1837, Missouri banned publications that went against the dominant discourse, that is, against slavery. Rarely did they go so far as to imprison dissidents. They were discredited, censored, or lynched for some good reason such as self-defense or the defense of God, civilization, and freedom.
After the Civil War broke out, the slaveholding South wrote its own constitution. As the Anglo-Saxon Texans did, just about separated from Mexico, and for the same reasons, the constitution of the Confederacy established the protection of the “Peculiar Institution” (slavery) while including a clause in favor of freedom of expression. This passage did not prevent laws that limited it to one side or the paramilitarism of the slave (well-regulated) militias, origin of the southern police, from acting as they pleased. As in “We the people” of the Constitution, as originally the First Amendment of 1791, this “freedom of speech” did not include people who were neither “the people” nor were they full and responsible humans. It was referring to the free race. In fact, the constitution of the new slave country established in 1861, in its section 12, almost like a copy of the original amendment of 1791: “(12) Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances. (13). A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
More equitable and democratic, impossible… The secret was that, again, like almost a century before, that of “the people” did not include the majority of the population. If anyone had observed that then, he would be accused of being crazy, unpatriotic, or a dangerous subversive. That is, something that, at its root, has not changed much in the 21st century.
By the time the slave system was legally outlawed in 1865, thanks to the circumstances of a nearly lost war, The Liberator had already published 1,820 issues. Aside from supporting the abolitionist cause, it also supported the women’s equal rights movement. The first woman candidate for the presidency (although not recognized by law), Victoria Woodhull, was arrested days before the 1872 elections on charges of having published an article classified as obscene―opinions against good customs, such as the law of the women to decide about their sexuality. As has been the norm for centuries in the Free World, Woodhull was not arrested for exercising her freedom of speech in a free country, but under the guise of breaking other laws.
However, this is not an exclusive characteristic of the slaveholding South or of the United States as a whole. The British Empire always proceeded in the same way, not very different from the “Athenian democracy” twenty-five centuries ago: “we are civilized because we tolerate different opinions and protect diversity and freedom of expression.” Of course, as long as they don’t cross certain limits. As long as they do not become a real danger to our incontestable power.
In this sense, let us remember just one more example. In 1902, economist John Atkinson Hobson published his classic Imperialism: A Study in which he explained Britain’s vampire nature over its colonies. Hobson was marginalized by critics, discredited by academia and the mainstream press of the time. He was not arrested or imprisoned. While the empire that he himself denounced continued to kill dozens of millions of human beings in Asia and Africa, neither the government nor the British crown took the trouble to directly censure the professor. Many, as is the case today, pointed to him as an example of the virtues of British democracy. Something similar to what happens today with those critics of US imperialism, especially if they live in the United States: “look, he criticizes the country in which he lives…” In other words, if someone points out the crimes against humanity in the multiple imperial wars and does so in the country that allows freedom of expression, that is proof of the moral and democratic goodness of the country that massacres millions of people and tolerates that someone dare to mention it.
How do you explain all these apparent contradictions? It’s not that complicated. An imperial power, dominant, unanswerable, without fear of the real loss of its privileges, does not need direct censorship. What’s more, the acceptance of marginal criticism would prove its benefits. It is tolerated, as long as they do not cross the limit of true questioning. As long as the hegemonic domain is not in decline and in danger of being replaced by something else.
Now let’s look at those counterexamples of hegemonic power and its stewards. “Why don’t you go to Cuba where people do not have freedom of expression, where plurality of political parties does not exist?”
To begin, it would be necessary to point out that all political systems are exclusive. In Cuba, liberal parties are not allowed to participate in their elections, which are called a farce by liberal democracies. In countries with liberal democratic systems, such as the United States, elections are basically elections of a single party called Democratic-Republican. There is no possibility that a third party can seriously challenge the Single Party because this is the party of the corporations, which are the elite that have the real power in the country. Communist parties here were prohibited and now, after FBI and CIA persecution of suspected sympathizers, it has been reduced to a virtual inexistence. On the other hand, if, for example, in a country like Chile a Marxist like the current president Gabriel Boric wins the elections, no one would even think of imagining that this president is going to leave the constitutional framework, which prohibits the establishment of a communist system in the country. The same thing happens in Cuba, but it must be said that it is not the same.
Now, let’s return to the logic of freedom of expression in different systems of global power. To summarize it, I think it is necessary to say that freedom of expression is a luxury that, historically, those colonies or republics that struggled to become independent from the freedom of empires (the “free race”) have not been able to afford. It would be enough to remember of dozens of examples like the Guatemalan democracy, destroyed by the Great Democracy of the United States in 1954 because its democratically elected government decided to apply the sovereign laws of its own country, which did not suit the megacorporation United Fruit Company. The Great Democracy did not hesitate to install another brutal military dictatorship, which left hundreds of thousands of dead over decades.
What was the main problem of Guatemalan democracy in the 1950s? It was his freedom of the press, his freedom of expression. Through this, the Northern Empire and the UFCo managed to manipulate public opinion in that country through a propaganda campaign deliberately planned and recognized by its own perpetuators―not by its Creole butlers, it goes without saying.
When this happens, the young Argentine doctor Ernesto Guevara was in Guatemala and had to flee into exile in Mexico, where he met other exiles, the Cubans Fidel and Raúl Castro. When the Cuban Revolution triumphed, Ernesto Guevara, by then El Che, summed it up remarkably: “Cuba will not be another Guatemala.” What did he mean by this? Cuba will not allow itself to be inoculated like Guatemala through the “free press.” History proved him right: When in 1961 Washington invaded Cuba based on the CIA plan that assured that “Cuba will be another Guatemala,” it failed miserably. Because? Because its population did not join the “liberating invasion,” since it could not be inoculated by the massive propaganda that the “free press” allows. Kennedy found out and reproached the CIA, which he threatened to dissolve and ended up dissolving.
Freedom of expression is typical of those systems that cannot be threatened by freedom of expression, but quite the opposite: when popular opinion has been crystallized, by tradition or by mass propaganda, the opinion of the majority is the best form of legitimation. Which is why these systems, always dominant, always imperial, do not allow their colonies the same rights that they grant to their citizens.
When the United States was in its infancy and fighting for its survival, its government did not hesitate to approve a law that prohibited any criticism of the government under the excuse of propagating false ideas and information―seven years after approving the famous First Amendment. Naturally, that law of 1798 was called The Sedition Act, which made it a crime to “print, utter, or publish any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government.
These resources of the champion of freedom of expression were repeated other times throughout their history, always when the decisions and interests of a government dominated by the big corporations in power felt its interests were seriously threatened. This was the case of another law also called the Sedition Act, that of 1918, when there was popular resistance against the propaganda organized by public opinion manipulators like Edward Bernays and George Creel (“the white hot mass of patriotism”) in favor of intervening in the First World War―and thus ensuring the collection of European debts.
Until a few years before, the harsh anti-imperialist criticisms of writers and activists like Mark Twain were demonized, but there was no need to tarnish the reputation of a free society by putting a renowned intellectual in jail, as they had done in 1846 with David Thoreau for his criticism to the aggression and dispossession of Mexico to expand slavery, under the perfect excuse of not paying taxes. Neither Twain nor the majority of public critics managed to change any policy or reverse any imperialist aggression in the West, as they were read by a minority outside of economic and financial power. In that aspect, modern propaganda had no competition, therefore direct censorship of these critics would have hindered their efforts to sell aggression in the name of freedom and democracy. On the contrary, critics served to support that idea, whereby the largest and most brutal empires of the Modern Era were proud democracies, not discredited dictatorships.
Only when public opinion was too hesitant, as during the Cold War, did McCarthyism emerge with its direct persecutions and later the (indirect) assassination of civil rights leaders, violent repression with arrested and deaths in universities when criticism against the Vietnam War threatened to translate into effective political change―in fact, the Congress of the 1970s was the most progressive in history, making possible the investigation of the Pike and Church Committee against the CIA’s secret regime of propaganda and assassinations. When three decades later the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq occurred, the criticism and public demonstrations had become timid, but the new magnitude of imperial aggression after 2001 made it necessary to take new legal measures, as in 1798.
History rhymed again in 2003. Instead of the Sedition Act it was called the Patriot Act, and it not only established direct censorship but something much worse: the indirect and often invisible censorship of self-censorship. More recently, when criticism of racism, patriotic history and too many rights for sexual minorities began to expand beyond control, the resort to prohibition by law returned. Case in point with Florida’s latest laws, promoted by Governor Ron DeSantis directly banning revisionist books and regulating language in public schools and universities. The creation of a demon called Woke to replace the loss of the previous demon called Muslims―who replaced Communists, who replaced N-people.
Meanwhile, the butlers, especially the sepoys of the colonies, continue to repeat clichés created generations before: “how come you live in the United States and dare to criticize that country, you should move to Cuba, which is where freedom of expression is not respected.” After their clichés they feel so happy and so patriotic that it is a shame to make them uncomfortable with reality.
On May 5, 2023, the coronation ceremony of King Charles III of England took place. The journalist Julián Assange, imprisoned for more than a decade for the crime of having published a minor part of the atrocities committed by Washington in Iraq, wrote a letter to the new king inviting him to visit the depressing Belmarsh prison in London, where hundreds of prisoners are dying, some of whom were recognized dissidents. Assange was allowed the sacred right of freedom of expression generously granted by the Free World. His letter was published by different Western media, which proves the benefits of the West and the childish contradictions of those who criticize the Free World from the Free World. But Assange continues to serve as an example of lynching. Same, during slavery and segregation a few thousand blacks were lynched in public. The idea was to show an example of what can happen to a truly free society, not to destroy the oppressive order itself by eliminating all slaves, poor, workers, critics, and other inferior people.
I continue to marvel that the woke left insists on undermining the legitimacy of Enlightenment idealism with ritualistic repetition of claims such as “a law that was made so that some rich white men could protect themselves from other rich white men”.
This is not going to end well.
Man, I expect a little more from comments posted on NC. You should define your words, and actually give an argument as to why the statement is somehow factually incorrect. Because you know, it isn’t? If you want to know what the “Founding Fathers” thought about the non-rich whites, check the Whiskey Rebellion for a good summary; as for non-whites, I think the ethnically cleansed natives and enslaved blacks didn’t seem to get many rights. But what do I know.
I did end up writing a longer comment. You probably won’t like that either. Jorge Majfud had a narrative more than an argument. People fall in love with narratives. Not always a wise move.
There is a basic saying “a free press is great if you own one”. That is not a “woke” statement but one going back over a century. Go away and look up the ownership of the “free press” and you will find how incredibly concentrated it is.
I’ve been on the receiving end of the DEI crowds ire for failing to accept their ideology. I’ve got no problem with Mr. Wilder’s comment. I do however object to your comment which provides a perfect example of the Motte and Bailey fallacy. To wit there is a big difference between being against slavery and segregation, and swallowing the claptrap spread by the DEI programs that all white people are racist (Ibrahim Kendi), that if you object to anything in the DEI program that your objection is base not on logic or argument but “white fragility” (Di’Angelo), or that cleanliness and the 9 to 5 workday are racist (Tema Okun). If you want to defend those positions please do so explicitly.
Don’t think you’ve read Ibrahim Kendi; he says no such thing. He’s not even radical, only another historian chronicling the ugly, asking for better. A lot of that ugly–the fact that the Puritans had legalized slavery within just a few decades of their arrival, that fashionable Boston ministers all had their own young Black slave for valet, are quite helpful to learn, esp. for naive liberal Northerners who somehow think that the evil of slavery (let alone its benefits) were or are now still, confined to the South.
When white people grown uncomfortable in the presence of people of color who are enumerating their grievances, and become hysterical, that’s what’s sometimes called white fragility. It does require a person to climb out of the liberal individualist bag and look at history, see how it’s operating on us now. Middle class people in general suffer from it (a lot of better off young Black kids are, at this point, little different in many ways from other middle class peers); psychologists sometimes also call it “stress intolerance.”
Certain cultures of cleanliness and, indeed, the length of the workday, do have some of their roots in white working peoples’ attempts to distinguish themselves from their Black brethren. All this is, again, quite well documented. Referencing these issues in a distorted way–as if they were nutty (when the dull way you reference them is the problem) where can that possibly get you in a forum like this?
“climb out of the liberal individualist bag”
The only legitimate function of big systems like government, economies, etc is to secure the rights of actual people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I’d be the first to admit that our current systems don’t do a very good job of that. But your solution of making everyone a slave to some grand abstraction is a cure that is worse than the disease. Rather we should be working together to help each other secure the rights to lead our lives as we see fit.
“your solution of making everyone a slave to some grand abstraction”
????
The chasm between liberals and progressives/the left grows and grows. But anyone who hasn’t had at least a glimpse of how corrosive consumer individualism is. . . the degree to which neoliberal Democrats have facilitated it here. . . is probably pretty far from this particular writer/reader ideologically.
Here in the U.S. we have a system where a few people pile up huge amounts of wealth while many struggle for the basics of a decent life. Fix that first, then worry about whether one person’s notion of a decent life includes opera while another’s is football, or whether it means a farm in the country or an apartment in the city, i.e. “liberal/consumer individualism”. Better yet, don’t worry about it.
“kosher” was specifically designed to exclude non-jewish cultures… exclude being the operative word.
“Don’t think you’ve read Ibrahim Kendi; he says no such thing.”
I read him very carefully, thank you. Your response sounds a lot like a “white fragility” type deflection. I’ll say this the whole effect of the DEI/woke crowd (and I suspect the intent as well) is to sow racial division and prevent material change.
It’s why Kendi is promoted by corporate america and Adolph Reed is obscure. Consider that.
Can you actually point to where Kendi says all white people are racist? I’ve got the book, I’m also puzzled, I don’t think he says any such thing as “all white people are racist”.
Instead, even in the opening chapters he highlights how even HE, a black man, can be racist, and develops the thesis that racism is systemic and ingrained in society. He argues people, white or not, can perpetuate and hold racist ideas without being aware of it. And this is factually correct, we do perpetuate all sorts of isms without being aware.
The “woke” thing is about becoming aware, waking up, to how these systemic and ingrained demarcations (e.g. intersections) affect you as an individual. If you’re disabled, wokeness is realizing when your boss is grading your performance on ableist ideas. If you’re black, it’s noticing that you’re getting pulled over a lot more than your best friend who is white, or realizing that your parents and grandparents didn’t get mortgages because they were in red zones, etc.
Awareness, knowledge, helps curb the systemic biases.
So, the Enlightenment, a movement which its promulgators insisted was not bounded by time or space, promoted the idea that humans use their powers of intellect and reasoning to figure out the world, their place in it, their way forward. That they not be bounded by intellectual restraints of ‘faith,’ ‘tradition,’ ‘superstition,’ or ‘myth.’ Or even by documents written centuries ago by small groups of men (almost always) who had, as do most of us, an ‘agenda.’
Following the ideals of the ‘Enlightenment,’ a breaking into the light or dawn, one rises from slumber and becomes …. woke.
Thank you, Sir.
Not sure what you mean by “woke” in your last sentence. I do know that what is referred as “wokism” is solidly against free-speech. For example, in Scotland saying that you believe only biological women are actually women is considered “hate speech” and punishable by prison time. In any event we are, in my opinion, long into an post-rational historical moment where logical arguments based on clearly testable propositions are frowned upon by all sides (except my side of course).
I was hoping someone could enlighten me as to what ‘woke’ is.
Is it a term one hurls at people whose point of view, mostly on gender-related matters, one disagrees with? Is it a counter-revolution term, labelling those who have progressed from homophobic, sexist, anti-gay, anti-lesbian, anti-‘two spirit’ views on the world, to a perhaps more ‘enlightened’ stance. But who have gone ‘too far?’ And maybe disturbed the status quo?
Is it pure name-calling, like labelling some one a ‘heretic,’ or a ‘blasphemer,’ or a ‘pinko-commie,’ or a ‘fascist,’ or a ‘terrorist?’ Terms used when it is difficult or impossible to counter someone’s argument with a rational counter argument. Or facts. I could go on.
Labels like these work nicely when can’t demonize a person based on his/her skin color (n***r,) sexual orientation (f*g,) biological sex (sl*t, b***ch,) nation of origin (beaner,) i.e., aspects we can’t change.
We might want to read the actual Hate Crime and Public Order Act (Scotland) 2021. Looks like one would have to make these statements with ‘malice and ill-will’ towards an individual or group for persecution to occur. Kinda like hollering ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre? Inflammatory and all that. But, I am not a Scottish advocate.
It was five or six years ago that I first saw the term on the Black idpol website The Root, in the form of the phrase (and apparent shibboleth) “Stay woke.”
~I was hoping someone could enlighten me as to what ‘woke’ is.
The phrase stay woke, as in stay woke out there, originated with Afro-Americans in the early twentieth century as a caution to their community to stay constantly aware of the dire perils of living while black. Or perhaps, as dying while trying to live while black.
It has morphed and been appropriated by other groups who find their own perils, real or suspected. And finally, losing all meaning except as a slur. My 2¢.
“Wokeness” could be described broadly as a variety of leftism which focuses on identitarianism. Skepticism of/hostility to American free speech principles and civil libertarianism is also a core attribute of this ideology. Wokeness is usually implemented in institutions with large bureaucracies which already have a mandate to address identitarian issues on a regular basis (HR departments, Title IX offices, etc). There is a jargon associated with wokeness which is constantly shifting and has to be propagated through style guides at media organizations; ironically, “woke” is not itself part of the woke lexicon because those who espouse wokeness present their belief system as a continuation of the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century.
Hope this helps you with your efforts to understand what guys like Eclair are talking about.
“Stay woke” is a phrase with a long history among Blacks in the US. It means to be alert to those who have intent to harm Blacks. It was first recorded being said in a 1938 Folkways session by legendary folk-blues singer Lead Belly (real name Huddie Ledbetter) when he is talking about his song “Scottsboro Boys”. Lead Belly warns Blacks to “Stay woke. Keep their eyes open.” The person interviewing him in 1938 seems to be Elizabeth Harold, the first wife of folklorist Alan Lomax. The recording was reissued by the Smithsonian in 2015 as part of “Lead Belly – The Smithsonian Folkways Collection”.
“Stay woke” is a phrase with a long history among Blacks in the US…”
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/408/408-h/408-h.htm#chap01
April 25, 1903
The Souls of Black Folk
By W.E.B. Du Bois
Of Our Spiritual Strivings
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost…
CA, I appreciate your comments but when you include another author’s text, it would be helpful (to me at least) to use a blockquote. That way it is easier to distinguish your text from theirs. At least that seems to be a common practice.
The term “woke” comes from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) to describe people who are educated and aware of social and political issues.
Possibly an early instance being a 1962 article in the NYT “If You’re Woke You Dig It”, describing people in Harlem using the term to refer to those with awareness and engagement with social or ethical issues. (Edited to nod to CA’s even earlier re: W.E.B. Du Bois.)
And now……it seems to have been co-opted and morphed into a way to slack off people who engage in social issues. “Oh no, we’re going to anger the woke crowd with our joke about rounding them up in cattle cars and putting them in ovens.”
Thanks to great NC commenters for the history of ‘woke.’ Lessons to be learned here.
The Enlightenment also pur human and human reason above everything else. There was science and reason before the Enlightenment, and I would argue that humans losing their fear of God or Gods (which in many cultures represent our natural world) has led directly to the destruction of our biosphere.
We are not humble enough to admit that we are part of nature and not above it. Not humble enough to admit our ignorance.
Claiming that 100% of everything in liberal democracy is due to “rich white men” erases the enormous role played by working class people, including Black working class people, and even women, in the those liberal revolutions, especially in Massachusetts where the American Revolution started.
Those who speak out against power are often in the pay of that power.
CONtrolled opposition.
Their job is that of the Judas goat. To lead the sheep who might be dangerous into harm’s way. To ensure that the opposition goes too far and create revulsion against the opposition.
PIRA was ineffective and that suited their power opponents. When PIRA lost control of a unit that then destroyed property Ireland got the Good Friday Agreement.
The Caesar of all the Russias had security doing the same thing, but they also protected the most dangerous of the opponents of the Czar.
The way of peaceful opposition involves freedom of expression and that is why the power always tries to limit that, “to protect the public”.
When I was in Cuba years ago, people whispered a theory of how Castro had deliberately eliminated Che Guevara as a potential rival by setting him loose in an effective exile and where he couldn’t survive and then used his martyrdom for propaganda.
Even in absolutist regimes, opposition to incumbent power sometimes finds limited shelter in some unassailable institution, as when the young and ambitious gather around the court of the Crown Prince. In the run-up to the French Revolution, the shopping arcade of the Palais-Royal, seat of the Duke of Orleans and opposite the Louvre, gave protection from police and censors to its cafes, bookshops and prostitutes.
The invention of the concepts of “loyal opposition” and constitutional monarchy by the original uni-Party of Whigs and Tories was a brilliant innovation. It was more brilliant, not less, because it allowed the slow working of the reformism of “liberal progress” which achieved, among other objectives, (southern) Irish independence from England.
My problem with Jorge Majfud’s essay is that despite an abundance of historical fact and a smoothly articulated, morally-charged narrative to string them together, at bottom, I do not understand or trust his implicit theory of politics and political institutions. What exactly is the agenda behind the insistence that the idols of Enlightenment idealism, like “free speech”, were born in the original sin of the alleged hypocrisy of “white men”? I don’t know the answer but I am sickened by the possibilities that occur to me.
The theory that enactments like the American Constitution’s Bill of Rights or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man were intended to function exclusively as the privileges and immunities of an already privileged race and sex isn’t even historically accurate, if that matters to anyone, even if they were not always immediately operational in any kind of coherent political practice. Parsing how practice was reformed over long periods of time isn’t the point either, nor are the various ways, say, the reconstruction of political society and political economy in the aftermath of, say, the French, Russian or Cuban Revolutions went into blind alleys and on prolonged detours. The declaration of universal Rights was a political gambit to enlist support from the social classes below, to mobilize the working classes in support of a new regime being organized in the chaos of rivalry among elite factions.
At a time when political polarization is being nurtured and alienation from populist unrest is worn as a badge of honor, we ought to be suspicious.
Words are always cheap, and the proof is in the actual pudding. The French Revolution, high on the rights of Men, went on to try to squash the same desire for liberty of the Haitian slaves. After the Haitians won (malaria and yellow fever really helped), their recognition by the French was a hefty sum which Haiti managed to finish paying off about 160 years later…
And the English Revolution, the French Revolution, while high on their rethoric, knew immediately how to organize, who to allow to and how to count votes, such that the interests of those privileged were never questioned. The Overtone window so to speak. The diggers and the levelers and their counterparts in the French Revolution were thoroughly squashed.
This is why the Bolsheviks and Lenin gave no quarters, because they knew, from history and character, that no quarters will be given to them.
As for Che, he was a bit like trotski, wanting to spread the revolution, while Fidel became like Stalin, trying to assuage the neighbours while preserving the gains. But US gave no quarters, of course.
The French Revolution, high on the rights of Men, went on to try to squash the same desire for liberty of the Haitian slaves.
Not quite.
After the Haitian revolution in 1791, the French granted citizenship to metis and freed slaves in 1792, and sent commissioners to re-establish order in their colony. But in 1793, the colons — royalists — allied to the Spanish and British to overthrow the revolutionaries in the Caribbean colonies. The commissioners decreed the abolition of slavery in Haiti so as to have the population on their side, and sent a (multi-racial) delegation to Paris to have their decision endorsed by the Convention. Whereupon the Convention not only confirmed the abolition of slavery in Haiti, but also extended it to all French colonies, and arrested the slave-holders expelled from Haiti by the commissioners.
Things went sour when Napoleon came to power, re-established slavery, and attempted to subject Haiti by force. By then, the Convention was gone and the French Revolution was over — the Consulate and then the Empire had taken over.
Sorry, thanks.
Here, you’re telling us, first, that you don’t trust a theory you don’t understand, while also claiming that, whatever it is, it is implied in the author’s writing. Then you tell us that you are sickened by what you imagine that theory and the author’s “agenda” might mean.
Mistaking inference for implication and indulging in alarming fantasy based on that inference makes for a poor foundation for criticism.
My criticism *is* that Jorge Majfud is not making his theory of politics explicit.
He’s deliberately undermining the legitimacy of “free speech” as a salient for political coordination.
Am I not supposed to ask, “to what end?” Why aren’t you asking?
Three-fifths.
that part of the “woke” thing that wants to abandon the Enlightenment bothers #metoo.
im with Habermas, on this…what we need is More Enlightenment…not less.
of course, i see the entire “Woke” movement as an artificial construct intended to hijack and undemine whatever was left of the Actual Left…which it has largely succeeded at doing.
the iconoclasm really gives away the game.
i remember…years ago, now…a woman telling me on FB that Jefferson had to be excised because he slept with a woman he owned…and that Gandhi had to be erased because he sometimes tested his celibacy by sharing a bed with nubile young women.
both instances are of questionable ethics, of course….but to toss out, because of some very human failings the large positive contributions to Humanity…well, that is just stupid….unless the real agenda is to divide and conquer your enemies on the sly.
hell…as ive said a million times…i’ll even quote hitler when it suits me…like right now:” what luck for the rulers that men do not think”.
i am not…nor will i ever be…”Woke”.
but i strive for fairness to all…and dont give a rats ass what they look like, nor whom they love.
i think it was a mistake to kill off the Humanities.
for us humans, at least.
its been a boon for our reptilian overlords in their human suits, of course.
(and…as i’m reading all this, the thought keeps running in my mind:”i got me some red paint, and a headache rack on my truck…maybe the word “Subversive” needs to go there, very subtly…”…ive gone to ground politically since 2018 or so…and have been reluctant to call attention to myself, preferring the current state, where so many folks think im dead,lol)
“that part of the “woke” thing that wants to abandon the Enlightenment bothers #metoo.”
I’ve got to differ here, amfortas. While rejecting an ideology or worldview because its initial adherents were imperfect is silly, but the problem is deeper than that. Emblematic of the Enlightenment’s attitude toward Nature was Bacon’s advocacy for “torturing” Nature to “get Her secrets.” This hubristic total alienation from the world that gave birth to us and formed us was quickly married to what I call the Conquistador worldview to torture literally not only Nature but those humans who still lived in harmony with her from one end of the globe to the other. Now add in the Enlightenment’s exaltation of technology and you get a world that humans are destroying.
At the bottom of the Enlightenment is human hubris thinking it can turn the universe into its little plaything. More curse than true enlightenment.
Amen, Henry MP! I would push that alienation of man from the nature back even further. One male God who ‘gives’ humans dominion over .. well … everything:
“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” [Gen 1:26–28].
If I want gods, they will be naiads and dryads, pixies and gnomes, Trickster Coyote, the four winds, and the spirits of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. And, maybe, one amorphous non-binary Creator.
The creators of that god were striving to create a mini-clone of the empire that had dispatched them to rebuild a temple and revive the worship of the god of the Hebrews, YHWH. It’s all about dominion of a few over everything.
Perhaps, but the Enlightenment was also an attempt to peacefully manage disagreements and active conflicts without the church or the absolute rule kings along with the whole war, torture, and death thing of the Thirty Years War and its aftermath. Free speech, equality under the law, and the primacy of the individual are all essential parts of it.
What I do not respect in Jorge Majfud article is that it was partly a screed of hatred against many of the same people fighting and often dying against slavery. He takes the sins of the relative few to smear the whole regardless of class or personal responsibility.
It is much like any racist or bigot, which I think Identitarianism and its child DEI has become, finding or even creating flaws or sins in some to degrade with inferiority or at least stain with guilt the whole. It is akin to the deliberate creation by European slavers of racism against Africans to protect their business of the buying and selling of human beings against the then nascent antislavery movement.
If nothing else, such unending assault against the humanity of others because of their skin color weakens whatever the message being given, unless of course the message is of some guilt or inferiority due to ancestry or skin color?
Great piece, thanks for sharing. A good reminder that there is nothing unusual, historically speaking, about the protesters being brutalized. Though I am genuinely impressed that the powers that be think that overwhelming violence is the right call here, and that it won’t inflame the protests that much more. Having all those young radicals mingling with the old guard of the 60’s… who knows what might come out of that.
Yes, really great piece. I’ve always thought there needs to be a “Power Studies” curriculum – something like this article would form the basis of the class on freedom of speech.
Brilliant. Everything “good” we’ve managed to attain seems to derive only from surplus in its various forms. Anything less than surplus and we backslide very quickly and harshly.
If free speech changed anything, they would ban it….
Or at least demonize it and savage the speakers.
Or label it misinformation.
“More recently, when criticism of racism, patriotic history and too many rights for sexual minorities began to expand beyond control, the resort to prohibition by law returned.”
I take issue with this part. The DEI crowd are the absolute worst in terms of censorship. This was my own experience at a former workplace in 2021, where I got pushed out for criticizing the Kendi-based program and I furiating a DEI instructor who could not defend his theories when I challenged them. The DEI crowd are not the poor victims of wannabe patriots like DeSantis, they are wannabe hegemons with an ideology that is rejected by the majority.
Having been on the receiving end of the DEI crowd’s hatred and attempt to destroy my livelihood, DeSantis is the lesser of evils in this on specific case. I say this with the knowledge that he would be just as bad when the DEI crowd in finally put out of the power they have.
“The DEI crowd are the absolute worst in terms of censorship.” Well, that’s a sweeping statement; any studies, statistics, etc., to back it up? However, you have my sympathy for being forced out of a job.
Might I suggest that the problem is not with the push for diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplaces of what is a racially, ethnically, and sexually diverse nation, one of whose main boasts is that ‘we are a nation of immigrants,’ (who just happened to genocide the Indigenous inhabitants for their land, but that’s a discussion for another day)?
This cack-handedness is what happens to almost any decent idea when it is given over to corporate bureaucracy to implement. My spouse, whose career was spent as an engineer in one of our premier military-industrial corporations, would bring home missives from management. A team of monkeys, working 24 hours a day for a year could have produced a less-jargon laden document. Plus, these memos were ‘edicts;’ no discussion, no recourse. The corporation has all the power.
Plus, we have to consider Change: what happens to the ‘old order’ when the implementation of a new order, consisting, horrors, of people who are ‘not like us,’ takes place? Hereditary nobility replaced by ‘sans culottes’ trouser-clad commoners, or white men replaced by a Black men and Latina women. Someone loses, someone is resentful, someone lashes out.
“Someone loses, someone is resentful, someone lashes out.”
So it’s the same old car with a new paint job, running over a different bunch of people. But better thee than me, right?
With all due respect, you are describing another planet. The DEI crowd are mostly PMC white people (mostly straight BTW) coopting the cause of civil rights and in the process silencing people of color and LGBT people in the process.
If there was one thing I noticed in the DEI sessions it was that a small set of white PMC zealots did all of the talking while people of color hung back. So please, let’s talk about what is going on as opposed to a romanticized version of what you think ought to be going on.
Christopher, your experience of DEI is quite different from mine, so much so that I’m struggling to believe your experience.
Mine comes from working in the finance and tech world where corporations have required mandatory DEI training for the past 20 years. In my experience executives with “Equity” and “Inclusion” in their titles are almost always not white and tend not to be heterosexual, as these corporations do try to fill the roles with those who are representative of the historically disadvantaged groups.
DEI training simply highlights all the typical ways bias manifests in the workplace. Bias is belief, often culturally or socially received, not grounded in fact, and often a result of generalizations. So anti-bias training typically questions common assumptions and beliefs which have tended to create friction, mess up the corporate culture and create lawsuits and reputational damage for the corporation. The trainings often highlight how to deal with difficult and inappropriate situations and colleagues, e.g. someone made a racist comment in a meeting about how “those gypsies are always stealing”, or a sexist comment about how women are emotion-based, not thinkers…
And, actually, I do think it’s an incredible achievement, providing people with the tools to constructively and tactfully handle uncomfortable situations like blatant racism, and meanwhile also showing examples of bias that aren’t always obvious especially to those who have the beliefs, permitting them to safely question and correct their own assumptions, understand the damage done by misplaced comments or actions.
What would be a situation where examining racist, sexist, ableist, bias, assumption and generalization is not a good thing? Even if a white middle aged hetero male is teaching about such, the teaching of it is a good thing, right? Often those of us in disadvantaged circles complain that it’s always up to us to fight these things, it would be nice if the advantaged folks took some of the load, took leadership and ownership.
DEI, regardless of any merit or problem, has become a tool used for power and for grifting, the suppression of others and stealing from them.
I think that DEI is pernicious bullpucky, but it could be ambrosia from the gods and in the current United States, it would be remade into a poison; this is part of the problem as some
thoughtful people honestly want to make society better while others are either unthinking zealots or canny grifters. How does one know ahead which of the three kinds he has to deal with?
It has been noted that after Obama broke up the Occupy Wall Street camps – which were all about the 1% against the 99% – that people have been diverted into all sorts of rat-holes the past decade. It did not matter if it was about Trump, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQIA+, MeToo, Wokeness or anything else, so long as it was not about class anymore. I am not denying that there was a lot of organic growth to these movements but I am willing to bet that the State sent a lot of resources encouraging these movements and making sure that they did not vear into the subject of class. Such talk is verboten. To tell you the truth, when I see a video of a cat chasing a laser do, I know how that cat feels.
The only way to defeat a mass movement is to divert it into another mass movement or smth like that said Eric Hoffer.
This happened when the democrats went on payroll of the rich and had to abandon fighting for worker rights.
They invented minority rights and racism and created the woke movement we have today conveniently abandoning the fight for the workers.
As for free speech no society can survive it for long that is why never in the history of humanity have we had true free speech, and by it I mean the right of people to say what others dont want to hear on big distribution channels of communication.
Good point, the MassMedia dictate public discourse: they tell the plebs what to think about, and how to think about it. The discourse is very narrowly framed. NewSpeak words like “woke left” “cultural Marxism” and other such nonsense are inventions of the Ministry of Truth – they are neither “woke” or “left”. It is an obvious distraction, diversion and divisive tactic straight outta the Langley playbook. The plebs are busy tilting at windmills while the oligarchy rapes and pillages. History surely does rhyme, but one could argue that the TechnoFeudal overlords have become more expert at creating illusions and narrative management.
So what we are left with politically, based on how I view the logic of this article, is power vs. power or us vs. them or workers vs bourgeoise or even friend vs. enemy, as the brilliant Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt used to argue.
What follows is quite abstract but I believe it begins to get at the type of foundational ideas that apply to both left and right thinking and that also seem to culminate in the inevitability of power divisions.
For example, a fundamental assumption behind Schmitt’s perspective was that the split between subject and object is caused by the very nature of human consciousness which requires an alienation from the object as that which results from the goals of individual human subjectivity. Schmitt then argues that from this supposed beginning of inherent consciousness ( the split between self and other) that even the earth is viewed as something opposed to the human and also that the human is therefore eternally defined through political division (the forever power game).
Seems to come down to the nature of human consciousness, whether it is mostly inherent or largely constructed, and the extent to which we have the courage to recognize our individual vulnerability or to be satisfied with promoting our individual invulnerability.
Schmitt was right especially about the power of exception as it unfolded during covid. We can’t have a society of laws unfortunately.
Then, the question is what is human consciousness?
I see nothing but words in what we call consciousness.
Today’s coverage appears to be employing the powerful “Outside Agitators” blame cannon.
Makes me think I want to get some T-Shirts printed “Outside Agitator”
A few years ago white South Africans were invited to wear T-shirts bearing the slogan “I benefited from apartheid”.
Didn’t catch on, alas. I’d have paid good money for one.
My first introduction to the Outside Agitator was my grandma’s EASY wringer washer (non-electric) on the back porch.
Great reading however essence of freedom of speech exemplified by those great historical examples is not too easy to extract from the text so let me concisely formulate it.
Free speech is not only about protecting what is being said. It contains three equally important components. First content and intend, second format and third access to audience.
If all those three elements are equal for everyone within society only then we may speak of upholding free speech. If not the very idea of free speech is undermined and corrupted despite of appearances that are often used as proof of free speech actually allowed and happening.
To judge veracity of free speech of course protection of content is what most identify as critical. However fewer people consider criticality of protecting intend of speech. As record indicates general educational talks were often allowed but political speeches based on the same material were often banned. Good example of that was Copernicus famous work from field and spherical geometry called “De revolutionibus” which won approval of the Pope only to be banned in 1545 as it was renamed “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium” added unauthorized preface and used in anti Papacy political speech during reformation and German peasants wars. It is clear that intend must be protected as well if we ever are allowed to criticize government based of its own data.
But that’s not enough a format of speech is also critical as illiterate workers could not read for example The Capital that was published page by page legally in workers dailies. While government allowed publication they were fast to eradicate workers social clubs, aMarx’s creation, where not only Marxists gave speeches but most of all they were places of learning reading and writing for free. In US suppression of free speech also included propaganda of prohibition as wives of workers were upset that their husband were neglecting home while supposedly “wasting” time in pubs drinking beer while in fact it were places of political education.
The third critical element of free speech is equal access to an audience. One cannot exercise fully free speech, for example responding to ad hominem attacks published in large medial outlets with millions readers on some obscure blog pages with few subscribers.
All peer reviewed scientific journals require responses to be published in the same journal with the same circulation. Why other daily publications should be exempted. As free speech has capability to form people’s opinions then access to the same audience is critical.
Author did tremendous job to show that fee speech can be easily undermined by manipulating one or more of its critical elements while still pretending reverence to it reducing for example First Amendment freedom of press into license to lie with impunity.
Thank you, Kalen!
“If you want to know who rules over you, just look for who you are not allowed to criticize.”
Hint: it is not white men, nor a patriarchy, and it is certainly not any form of Ism.
Maybe it is better said who you are expected or ordered to criticize. I rarely hear criticism of people in the upper class regardless of their race, but of the poor, I hear vicious verbal abuse of Whites by the Democratic elites and of Blacks by the Republican elites.
In the end, removing all the fiddly bits of ideology and the distractions, it remains truly about class.