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🌊 Our Response to Your Censorship Criticism
People say we didn’t experience censorship. We, and George Orwell, disagree
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By Max Frost
Saturday’s article detailed our experience of censorship last summer, when we went to the UK to do a story on Dewsbury, an English town that has seen tensions between its Muslim and non-Muslim halves. When we first wanted to publish the story, threats from within the city’s Muslim community led us not to. When we tried to publish it later, the UK government’s crackdown on “hate” speech led our interview subjects to plead with us not to. They were worried about consequences to them and us if the British government perceived the story as enabling hate (you can read the full story here).
Many readers responded to express their appreciation for us telling this story and to share their own stories of censorship.
Greg, for example, wrote the following:
What a brilliant, calm, balanced, rational way to bring to life true censorship for your readers who have not spent time in the UK or other countries where just saying something these days can get you arrested and even jail time.
As someone who has lived and worked in the UK on-and-off for over forty years (I am US-based), the change in the level of personal freedom, particularly in England, over the past decade has been shocking. Even when holding business meetings or dinners, the slightest comment (even something seemingly innocuous to the vast majority of people) requires thought before speaking, as it could shut down a meeting instantly, be grounds for an HR claim, and even involve a police report if someone in the group is offended and motivated to disrupt. Heaven help you if you're foolish enough to speak your mind on social media or publish something that is against the current government narrative (esp. local).
To be clear, I'm not talking about egregious comments (on whatever topic) or "zero tolerance" subjects (e.g., harassment, bullying, etc.) that the vast majority of reasonable people would believe should be addressed. It's the suppression of legitimate, even if controversial, concerns of citizens who are otherwise members in good standing in British society that is worrying.
But numerous other readers voiced a sentiment like Stephanie, who wrote:
It doesn’t sound like censorship. No one threatened you with judicial, financial, or physical consequences for telling the story. The people you interviewed asked you to keep it quiet for fear of what would happen to their reputation, and you agreed. That means you censored what you knew to help those in power. I am not saying I necessarily disagree with the choice you made, but it’s not the same as censorship.
We understand that sentiment, but it’s one we disagree with and would like to address.
Censorship is not done by the government alone. As Greg Lukianoff, head of free speech group FIRE and author of The Coddling of the American Mind and The Canceling of the American Mind, has written, free expression requires a “culture of free speech.”
Only the most repressive governments coerce, or directly restrict, speech. Most don’t because they know they don’t have to. All they have to do is erode the culture of free speech, and the rest of the work is done for them. If someone starts to second-guess their ability to speak freely, the battle is halfway lost already.
This can happen with laws: China has over 100 journalists in prison, for example, chilling speech across the country. Or it can happen through financial pain, for example, by getting advertisers to boycott an outlet that reports the “wrong” thing.
Often, though, it’s society itself that does this. In other words: If you say, think, or report the “wrong” thing, society, not the state, will impose consequences. The political philosopher John Stuart Mill called this “social tyranny.”
He explained:
Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape
In other words: You may be able to escape the courts, but you can’t escape the society you live in.
Or as George Orwell wrote in his 1945 essay The Freedom of the Press:
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary
He continued:
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it…Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals
So, yes – neither the UK government nor the Dewsbury mosque threatened us with financial ruin if we published a story about our experience in the town. But they induced voluntary censorship, which is just as effective.
We experienced censorship in Britain last summer and in the US during the pandemic. But we’re not native, a lot of people have it much worse.
A few weeks ago we returned from Pakistan. The open secret in Pakistan is that its “democracy” is a sham and that generals and intelligence officers control all that happens. Across the country, people refer to this shadowy group as “the establishment,” “the powers,” or even “Voldemort.”
People are genuinely afraid to speak the truth. Numerous people asked us to delete quotes they had given us, lest they receive a “knock on the door.” One journalist we met told us that a friend of his “had been disappeared” several years prior after reporting an unfavorable story. He was never seen again.
This is censorship in its rawest, most blatant form. Yet to quote Orwell once more:
Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.
Editor’s Note
As always, please send us your feedback, thoughts, and criticisms.
We hope you had nice weekends and are glad you read today’s installment. Thanks for the positive feedback on yesterday’s story (about how the gold standard ended, enabling our debt explosion). It seems like the Sunday morning history deep-dives are a hit, so we’ll make sure to keep those coming.
In case you missed that or our other most recent articles, here they are:
And a couple of responses to yesterday’s story:
Steve wrote:
Excellent, Excellent article!
I turned 10 years old the year Nixon ended the gold standard. That was the final straw for my dad and he made the decision to go off the grid - and by 1973 we were living on an acre of land without running water or electricity. A bit of an over-reaction from the perspective of over 50 years of growth.
My point is- the world has been ending for a long time, and I'm never sure when it will actually happen. It surely will happen, nothing lasts forever. There are now in the US multiple generations weened on the notion that our world will always look like it does now (or better), yet the underpinnings of US financial stability have been eroding since the "Nixon shock".
What to do now? I have no idea...
Thank you for your commitment to balanced reporting and fact-based articles, keep up the good work!
And O wrote:
Wow, really good, useful journalism. Thank you so much for all the research you processed delivered concisely with proper spelling and grammar and no opinion-laden verbiage. Phenomenal job!
We appreciate the kind words. Thank you and see you tomorrow!
—Max and Max