After graduating from college in 1990, I set off, as one does, on a backtracking trip around Europe. It was a strange time. The Berlin Wall had just fallen and most of Eastern Europe had separated from the Soviet Union. On a visit to Prague I found a city and country overwhelmed with it's reintroduction to the West. Prices were astonishingly cheap: a cab ride was a dollar, our two bedroom flat cost us five bucks a night, multi-course dinners were just a few dollars. Newly opened nightclubs had lines of Czech youth waiting outside of them but as Westerners, we were beckoned straight to the front. There was great excitement but also great resentment. The money pouring in caused out-of-control inflation. Locals didn't want us in their bars and it was difficult to argue with them. After a day or two of living like a king, I grew guilty and donated most of the money I'd changed to a local charity.
Before that though, there was something that I wanted for myself: a copy of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the original Czech. No, I couldn't read it, but the English translation had been an important book for me in college and I thought a Czech version would look sophisticated on my bookshelf. I stopped by three or four bookshops and asked if they had a copy. They didn't. Of course they didn't. Kundera had been exiled in the 70s under Soviet totalitarian rule and his books had been banned since then. I would have had an easier time finding what I was looking for in the USA. It would be another eighteen years before a Czech language edition of Kundera's most famous work would be widely available in his native country.
This is the effect of real censorship. It approaches total erasure.
But Ann Coulter, because she can't speak in a prime location at a convenient time at UC Berkeley, is not being censored. Not really. You can verify this by entering a bookstore and asking for a copy of one of her books. They'll have some on the shelf and if they don't they'll order any or all of them for you. Or you can go to Amazon and order them yourself. Or you can Google YouTube videos. By the same test, Milo Yiannopoulos, despite what he says, isn't really being censored either. Nor is Charles Murray.
Overstating censorship is not a purely right wing tactic either. In fact, it's more often, though more innocently, employed by the left. Despite what you hear during Banned Books Week, Harry Potter isn't really censored because some church groups disapprove of it. And Huckleberry Finn isn't really censored because some school boards fear a book that contains the "n" word. The books are at the bookstore, on Amazon, and in the library, even if some of them have been moved to the adult section. Note the head-scratching irony of every library's banned books display: the books that have been "banned" are all stacked up, ready to be checked out.
Now don't get me wrong. I don't condone the violence on the UC Berkley or Middlebury campuses, and I believe that Berkeley should have found a way to let Coulter speak when and where her sponsors wanted. And I think we should expose our kids at home and in their classrooms to all sorts of ideas even if it makes them uncomfortable and no one should be allowed to get in the way of that or even make it inconvenient. We should not fear words or ideas. Period. We should combat ugly words with beautiful ones. We should combat lies with truth, bad ideas with better ideas.
And that's why we should be careful of overusing the label "censored" or even the vaguer term "banned." Our language is muddied enough. Real censorship comes from a central power, it's enforced through law and threat and exile and raids and violence. Thanks to tireless and heroic work, for the moment--and who knows how long that moment will last--real censorship is largely non-existent in the US today.
Yet now our President declares that CNN is censoring him because it won't run his propagandist ad. This is not censorship. CNN, of course, has the freedom to air or reject any ads that come its way. It would, on the contrary, be unconstitutional to simply force the network to use it's air time to broadcast the President's views. If you are worried that the President is in fact being censored, you can put your fears to rest by watching his ad on YouTube right here.
By claiming fake censorship is real censorship, we are undermining the very concept of censorship. This is especially dangerous right now as the nation faces a real threat of authoritarianism and with it, real censorship. Just as Trump undermines the concept of real news by calling everything he doesn't like "fake news," he wants to undermine the very meaning of censorship, claiming to be one of its victims even as he moves forward with plans to impose real censorship on the American people.
Trump has already proposed rewriting libel laws so that he can silence his critics. His Justice Department is prosecuting a woman for doing nothing more than laughing at Jeff Sessions. The White House's immigration policies create implicit denials of free speech to those who appear Hispanic or Muslim. After all, if simply taking your children to school can get you detained or deported, why would a parent make herself more visible by attending a rally or speaking loudly against the government?
These are acts and policies of real censorship that must be denied, resisted and legally challenged. And we can't do that if we don't even know what censorship means.
Let's not let Coulter or Trump get away with co-opting the term and let's restrain the use of it ourselves. I propose, for instance, changing Banned Books Week to Not-Quite-Banned Books Week which will even better highlight and celebrate the diligent work of activists and lawyers who have throughout modern American history stood up to would-be-authoritarians and kept our words and ideas available and free.
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