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archerships"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 myself—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?"