Worth reading the entire article:
https://quillette.com/2024/05/17/what-m ... ensorship/
A couple of weeks into last summer’s protests, I got a message on Twitter from someone I followed but had never interacted with. She summarised her (incorrect) assumptions about my political beliefs, then told me that she had scrolled through several weeks of my Twitter feed and noticed that I had failed “to voice outrage about police brutality or the death of yet another unarmed Black individual.” (“Please correct me if I’m wrong,” she added.) She concluded with a brief lecture on the politics of the moment and exhorted me to join her in condemning white supremacy.
This message stunned me. It was the first time since I’d left the USSR that someone had demanded that I engage in ritualistic political expression. In its author’s brash and invasive tone, I heard the voice of Soviet communist league activists who believed they had a right to demand that everyone around them march to the same tune. But there was more to it than that. The message felt intimidating. All around me, people were losing jobs, careers and reputations for what was characterised as voicing wrong opinions, sharing wrong content, or failing to convey enough enthusiasm for the new, still nameless ideology that was now sweeping through our lives. A long-forgotten fear crept up my spine. My great-grandfather had been murdered by the NKVD in 1941 because of four short phrases he’d used over the course of eight months, which a friend reported to the police. I knew how easy it was to weave together a destructive narrative about a person using disparate pieces of information.
...
It takes a long time, and a lot of effort, to go from intellectual slavery to freedom. So, it is on all of us to do what we can to resist this culture, no matter how pervasive and intimidating it feels.
https://quillette.com/2024/05/17/what-m ... ensorship/
This message stunned me. It was the first time since I’d left the USSR that someone had demanded that I engage in ritualistic political expression. In its author’s brash and invasive tone, I heard the voice of Soviet communist league activists who believed they had a right to demand that everyone around them march to the same tune. But there was more to it than that. The message felt intimidating. All around me, people were losing jobs, careers and reputations for what was characterised as voicing wrong opinions, sharing wrong content, or failing to convey enough enthusiasm for the new, still nameless ideology that was now sweeping through our lives. A long-forgotten fear crept up my spine. My great-grandfather had been murdered by the NKVD in 1941 because of four short phrases he’d used over the course of eight months, which a friend reported to the police. I knew how easy it was to weave together a destructive narrative about a person using disparate pieces of information.
...
It takes a long time, and a lot of effort, to go from intellectual slavery to freedom. So, it is on all of us to do what we can to resist this culture, no matter how pervasive and intimidating it feels.
Statistics: Posted by Margaret — 5/18/2024, 1:24 pm — Replies 0 — Views 171