Banning stuff absolutely works. Censorship is not the refuge of he who has lost the argument or, even more laughably, he who has no power. It is the action of he who has the power to shut you up. How this is difficult to understand does little to restore my rapidly dwindling faith in humanity.
If censorship and banning stuff, pushing it underground, truly made it more popular because it’s “transgressive,” we’d see, for example, Ye West experiencing an explosion of popularity. That hasn’t happened despite him being canceled by almost everyone. I guess saying that you “Looooooove Hitler” is not a good idea if you want your ideas to be taken seriously. Who knew? There is a laundry list of people who have been censored, and guess what: they have less influence and less reach and less ability to get their message out to people than before they were censored. Censorship works! Who knew?
There are reasons people get censored, and it’s not always because “We are afraid of them,” though that is certainly a factor. Other times, it’s because what is being censored is so repugnant that almost everyone finds it better to just not have the person, thing, or idea percolating in the zeitgeist (how’s that for a turn of phrase)? Other times, it’s because the people with power just don’t like a thing.
There’s that key word again: power. If one has no power, how can one censor? Ye West went from being one of the single most identifiably popular celebrities on the planet to persona non grata in like a week. I’ll repeat myself for those in the back: censorship works.
“What about Soviet Russia?” What about it? The USSR officially lasted from 1922 to 1991. That’s 69 years. That’s a pretty long time! Dissenters were censored very harshly. The fact that dissenters were censored didn’t make them more popular. It made it harder for the dissent to get out. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a personal hero of mine, was thrown into a Gulag for mildly criticizing the actions of a superior officer in a letter to a friend of his on the other front during World War II. Then he got out, made his way to the U.S., and wrote three books about the Soviet prison system. The first volume of The Gulag Archipelago was published in 1973. Historians point to 1929 as the birth of the Gulag. That’s 44 years between the Gulag system’s inception and anybody outside of the Soviet Union learning that it even existed. Why? Because censorship works.
The Soviet Union collapsed, in part, because then-premier Mikhail Gorbachev relaxed the rules. There was slightly less repression, which led to greater division and cracks forming as people got more information about the outside world and their own government. There were other factors, sure, but this aspect of the USSR’s final days doesn’t support the idea that censorship doesn’t work. It reinforces the idea that it does. Without censorship and repression, do you think the USSR would’ve lasted as long as it did? Without glasnost and perestroika, don’t you think the USSR would’ve lasted longer?
There are people in China today who don’t even know what happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989. It’s almost as if censorship and repression work.
Now, for the special boys and girls reading this, the binary thinkers, me saying that “censorship and repression works” is not the same as saying “I think censorship and repression are de facto good things.” No, my take is more nuanced than that. I do believe that certain things should be censored and banned. “But but but you’ll just get more of it!” Explain cigarette smoking then. If that was true, more people would be smoking tobacco now than when smoking bans and other anti-smoking measures were put into place. Here’s another example: has the total ban on the Nazi party in Germany–to the point that swastikas are illegal–resulted in more or fewer Nazis in Germany?
Censorship works.
It’s not an iron-clad rule. It’s not going to work in every single situation. It may even cause more problems than it solves—people may start to ask questions about why certain things are censored or banned or prohibited when directed at Group A, but allowed or indeed actively encouraged when directed at Group B. As an individual of a certain chromatic disposition here in these United States it’s impossible not to notice these things. But I digress.
The point of this post is to, albeit unscientifically, disabuse anybody reading it of the myth that “Censorship is for LOSERS.” This idea couldn’t be more wrong. If one has the power to censor, then they have already won.
Freedom of speech was always a Trojan horse to get decent people to lower their guard until the proponents of free speech got into power. Once firmly ensconced in the halls of said powers, they set about systematically removing your freedom of speech and enshrining theirs into law, both de facto and de jure. I may have gone to a third-tier law school, but I know the difference between these two Latin concepts better than one of our wisest jurists.
My advice to anybody in positions of power is to punish your enemies and reward your friends. In electoral politics, “enemy” typically means “the fifty-percent-plus-one of the population that didn’t vote for you,” but I take a broader, more holistic, some may say more spiritual view of things. I view “friends” as “those people or things which help inculcate, foster, and promote virtue,” and “enemies” as “those people or things which do not help inculcate, foster, and promote virtue, and actively inculcate, foster, and promote vice.”
It’s a different shift in mindset, but at the end of the day every single system legislates morality. The big question, as always, is “Whose morality?” An equally big question is, “To what end is said morality directed?”
I do not like the USSR or the Chinese Communist Party. I don’t even particularly like the United States Government and its allies in industry and media. But all three entities, past and present, know how to wield power to make sure that their morality stays dominant. I’d love it of people who actually are good could learn this lesson to help stamp out that which is bad.
No solution is 100 percent effective, but it doesn’t mean you should just throw up your hands and do nothing at all. That’s crazy.
– Alexander
My books are not banned or censored because they are awesome. Enjoy The Last Ancestor, part one of my exciting sword-and-planet trilogy.
Well played sir, and true on all accounts.
Our side needs to shed a lot of illusions forged in the mythology of the 20th century.