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Expression suppression, here at Daily Kos [1]

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Date: 2023-10-23  

I’ve been writing a long time. My first artform was rapping, pieces I had to memorize because I was terrible at freestyle. This quickly transitioned into poetry, and I devoted a great portion of my life to reading and writing poetry, as well as judging other people’s work for publication. As you might imagine, writing and the freedom of expression is quite dear to me.

In college, I launched my own little literary magazine, despite being on the boards of two of the official literary magazines. I wanted to have free editorial judgment. To solicit work from folks on campus, I put up signs all across campus. These signs were provocative—not for what they said, per se, but for what they included.

See, I was also in my strident feminist phase, quite sex-positive to the point of advocating for the right of pornography, both to read and to pose. (I’m rather diametrically opposed to many third-wave feminists.) So I thought it would be a fun play on words to use images that illustrated submission. I wanted lit submissions. Get it?

Well, it wasn’t a full day before nearly all of the signs were torn from the bulletin boards and windows in which they’d been affixed. Now, I knew people weren’t against my magazine. They took offense at the images. And, instead of contacting me to have a back and forth about them, whoever was offended simply tore the signs down.

The removal protected no one, as the images were readily found on the Internet (which is where I found them). Tearing down the signs did, however, limit how many people even heard of the little magazine I’d hoped to launch. More to the point, it stifled expression.

That stuck with me, even though I’ve never written about it until now. It was stunning to me, considering that my campus was one where the lacrosse team had an annual tradition of streaking. It was a very liberal campus.

In my post-college years, I continued with poetry for quite some time, and then I hit what I suppose others would call writer’s block. It was a long period where no writing was even really on the table. I started coming out of this barren period around three years ago, and I discovered that my format had changed. I was writing essays now. That was around the time I resumed my activity here at Daily Kos and began posting in earnest.

I write all sorts of stuff, mainly about MAGA and various offshoots of the danger of that movement, but some stuff is just sidebar type of material. Some of my topics are off the beaten path. I recognize that and I know that some of my diaries here will have a limited audience. And that’s fine! I accept that.

But I’ve never felt stifled in what I could actually talk about until the last two weeks.

The terrorist attacks in Israel happened October 7, and I, knowing that I had a very rudimentary understanding of that longstanding conflict, did not participate in any of the diaries that were written that first week, despite the fact that the topic dominated the vast number of diaries during that time. Indeed, I spent a lot of time devoted to offline study. The few Israel / Palestine diaries I did visit I merely skimmed, because a lot of them had the tendency to devolve into intensity, sniping and outright attacks.

Tensions were running high. I figured people needed time.

Over the span of that first week, though, I saw behavior that alarmed me, as it was a broad and widening effort to shut down dissenting voices. It was quite war-friendly in here, which was surprising in itself; but the tendency that I saw was near-browbeating to keep people who were beginning to express concern about stateless Palestinians bearing the brunt of the strikes that Israel was launching in response to the terrorist attacks.

I wrote a diary that following Saturday. It got a good response, and I appreciated the back and forth I had with people. Many people commented that they appreciated that there was an anti-war voice here and that they didn’t feel that they had had an outlet to express that sentiment. Again—utterly striking to me! This is a progressive blog! Surely we have room for anti-war voices.

Now, my viewpoint includes criticism of the state of Israel as a state power. Again, situating this in the context and parallel of American power and Western power, in general, against minority populations (especially those deemed despised or deserving of contempt), informs my perspective. But there are people here who take criticism of the state of Israel as equivalent to criticizing Jewish people in general, and then those who take that further and see those critiques as attacks.

Even further are those who see those “attacks” as targeting the background of those criticized—thus, criticism of the state of Israel suddenly becomes attacks on Jewish people as Jewish people, and those critiques are characterized as being anti-Semitic.

This construction surely has some use when it comes to trying to understand someone’s argument—you can see if someone’s argument fits a template, deconstruct the argument, walk it backwards, try to find first principles. Right? That part makes sense. You want to have a double-checking system, so that people aren’t just spouting whatever.

But that’s not what’s going on here.

The sudden suffocation of a blanket ban of dissenting viewpoints mirrors what’s going on in the wider world. Most people here probably have already heard about the Harvard students who were doxxed after they had supported a letter that criticized the level of response to which Israel had committed after the terrorist attack. These students, as I understand it, have had their faces put on billboards. They’ve lost jobs that had already been extended to them.

France flatly forbade rallies that had a pro-Palestinian bent to them. Just outlawed. Now, forgive me: I thought France was a democracy.

Activists in Israel advocating for Palestinians have suffered a similar crackdown, the Guardian reports.

“We’re seeing a tsunami of police investigations,” [human rights lawyer Michael] Sfard said. “People who are targeted go through a very frightening experience and even if it ends with no indictments, it’s still horrendous. “There is a wave of silencing of any type of, not only criticism, but also just compassion.” Protests in sympathy with Gaza have been dispersed with force and Israel’s chief of police, Yaakov Shabtai, said last week: “Anyone who wants to identify with Gaza is welcome. I will put them on buses now that are headed there and I will help him get there.” At the beginning of last week, Israel’s attorney general’s office also announced that it had instructed universities and colleges to forward cases to the police of students who had posted “words of praise for terrorism”.

The near-no-name platform X, in addition to serving as a hub of mis- and disinformation during this conflict between the state of Israel and stateless Palestinians, have moved to banning or suspending accounts that have expressed pro-Palestinian sentiments.

Al-Jazeera just today had a segment on this international phenomenon:

And here, at liberal Daily Kos, we’ve had people cowed into silence from expressing views that go against the prevailing mood of supporting the state of Israel’s return strike. How do I know? Because they’ve said so.

In addition, I’ve come across diaries that have engaged in criticism and that criticism has been shouted down or garnered flags that, in a less contentious atmosphere, would have been accurately challenged as flag abuse—that is, used merely to limit speech. I say that not as someone who’s had flags thrown at my comments but as someone who has taken to reading the Hiddens every day as a barometer to see where things stand on the site at that moment.

What I have had happen is someone coming into one of my diaries—one I’d spent hours on, a diary long and technical, with many academic points—to accuse me of being anti-Semitic.

Now, this was news to me, not only considering my history of examining race as a social construct and being devoted to social justice in general but also my own personal history, with people in my own life. So this charge 1) threw me for a loop but 2) angered me in a way that I felt constrained in expressing, because obviously that person wanted that reaction but also because it’s not possible to prove a negative.

This accusation was lobbed even though I was careful to state that I was not excusing homicidal actions. I am an advocate of nonviolence. I am a pacifist. None of what I said was to ignore any terrorist activity but rather to explore what could be first causes as to a person’s vulnerability to the joining of such a group. I looked at that from a sociological and social psychological perspective, because groups are a social phenomenon.

I’m not saying that my examination was groundbreaking—I’m sure others have made similar examinations in the past. But I certainly thought I had the space to make the examination here, in a public forum, without my intent being misattributed.

I don’t want to spend too much time belaboring the point. I will say that I’m still surprised, because the person felt comfortable enough to go on and on for hours, even coming back the next day to continue. Later, I went through that person’s comment history and saw that they had lobbed the same invective at two other Kossacks, at least. The same charge. The same language. And those Kossacks had similar, taken-aback responses as I had had.

What happens when you’re in that position? You feel you have to defend yourself. Or, alternatively, you feel you must withdraw from further conversation, because obviously any real substantive back-and-forth has come to an abrupt end. Either way, the person using that type of intemperate language emerges triumphant. They get what they want, which is to cow people into silence. Worse, they probably feel their comment was justified.

The person with whom I interacted is not the only one doing this right now.

This really concerns me, on a much broader scale than what is being displayed here. What I’m seeing in other corners indicates that what’s showing up here is simply a microcosm of what’s playing out far more broadly. People, not just here but in the media, even everyday people, are confusing or conflating either Israel and Jewish people, Hamas and Palestinian people, or both, and then reducing arguments so as to fold things into a simple us-versus-them, black-and-white view of the world. “You’re either with us or against us.” No nuance allowed.

I’d previously noted one episode of Rep. George Santos’s antics, where he streamed through the halls of Congress, attracting cameras and press attention by yelling that someone had accosted him while he had a child in his arms, and called the supposed offender “an animal… a fucking terrorist sympathizer.” This was just in the wake of the October 7 attack, and it reminded me of McCarthyism, that while Santos is obviously a clown that maybe this heralded that maybe we were entering another period as repressive and as conformist as what existed seventy years ago.

I think we’re still in danger of that, despite the fact that, as Sam Seder said on a recent segment of his show The Majority Report, that we’ve far more room for dissent now than we did during the Iraq War era. I would append that to say, I would hope so, considering that the United States is not directly involved! Indeed, the fact that we’re a second-party to the conflict should afford us more room as citizens to voice our concerns. But the descent of this suffocating blanket has been swift and it has been stunning in its severity.

What I want to encourage people here to do is assume positive intent. We’re here to learn from each other. We’re here to interact. If someone says something that you think needs to be checked, first, try checking in with them. Ask questions. Get clarifications. Be curious. Understand that real people are at that other keyboard. This is an anonymous or pseudonymous environment, but real people are behind our handles here.

This isn’t a wild west. This is a community.

I won’t belabor the point any further. I just hope that we can have patience with each other. I’m not saying be fake. I am saying do a double- and triple-check. Slow down. Think before you hit submit. Consider what kind of community you’re trying to foster here, that we’re trying to foster here.

From all indicators, the conflict between the state of Israel and Palestinians looks to extend into the indefinite future. We’re due to have disagreements, but surely we can learn how to disagree agreeably.

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