Censorship, Omission and Suppression: A Cold War Example

How censorship stifles, backfires and degrades us all

It has come to my attention that Substack is (apparently) full of Nazis? Having never at any point encountered even a single Nazi in the ‘stack’s hallowed halls, I am unable to verify this claim, though logic dictates that on a platform with thousands upon thousands of users there must be a few out there somewhere. Certainly the proposed solution to this alleged problem is a curious one; the Nazis I have not seen must, those claiming to have seen them say, be regulated and/or expelled from the platform under vaguely defined rules regarding “harmful” content. There’s been no shortage of Substackers standing up for free speech and open discussion as a matter of principle. We at His Excellency’s Car of course fully endorse a strong free speech position. That having been established, I will turn instead to a more pragmatic analysis. The fate of institutions that censor is not an inscrutable mystery; we can look to history for answers, and it will provide. For those not persuaded by arguments for free speech as a good in itself, I offer the following brief look at two different censorious responses to the same issue in two rival nations near the close of the Cold War.

In the 1980s, the quest for propaganda victories continued apace in both the United States and the Soviet Union. While less prominent than other vectors of this superpower information war, the question of the condition of women in each society was one such recurring argument. In both nations, many held beliefs on this subject that were not supported by facts. In the Soviet case, the natural inclination for anyone familiar with the way the Soviet government dealt with public information (for most of its history, at least) would be to assume that these inaccurate beliefs were the result of censorship and/or suppression. This assumption is correct, although perhaps not in the way most would think.

The position of women in the professions and in government differed considerably between the US and the USSR. While the Soviet Union was behind the United States in most measures of standard of living and wealth, women’s employment and social position was one of the few areas in which it was ahead. In the Soviet Union during the 1980s, 40% of lawyers were women (14% US), 33% of judges (7% US), 33% of Supreme Soviet Delegates (5% US Congress), 50% of engineers (6% US) and so on.¹ In addition, Soviet women also enjoyed much more widely available (and affordable) childcare and healthcare, though the quality of these services was spotty by US standards of the time.² Given the Soviet lead in women’s success in the professions and greater social support, one would think that the Soviet government would have been happy to tout this advantage to their own population. If anything, Soviet citizens, including many academics who studied these issues, generally assumed American women were doing better. Tatiana Zaslavskaia, a renowned sociologist whose work would form the basis for many of the Perestroika reforms, once remarked on the progress Soviet women needed to make to catch up to the US. Why? In short, because the Soviet government, before Glasnost, had maintained its dumb reflex to suppress information about the west due to exaggerated security concerns (in fairness to the Kremlin, these concerns probably were not exaggerated in earlier decades). This caused the Soviet government to shoot itself in the foot by losing what could have been a propaganda victory. Because information about the US was not widely available, even many Soviet academics, fully aware of the position of women in the Soviet Union, assumed that the USSR was lagging behind. Meanwhile, those who did locate the information, which was not outlawed, only hard to find, frequently assumed the figures they were seeing were cooked or otherwise not real. Knowing their government’s history of controlling information, they assumed American women were doing even better.

The Soviet practice of limiting the availability of information about the west, as it had done to an even greater extent in prior decades, resulted in a jaded population primed to assume the suppressed information was not favorable to the USSR. The US media, not facing a jaded population, behaved differently. The American public was not generally aware of the position of Soviet women in the professions - US media didn’t go out of its way to highlight this topic. Ms. Magazine, a publication one would expect to take an interest in this issue, did report on some aspects of the condition of Soviet women. It offered reports regarding the alleged sexism of Soviet men and the difficulties Soviet women had finding taxis and hair stylists.³ Other mainstream outlets followed suit. Despite the superficial and shallow topics chosen, the US public got the message that women had it better in the US. Granted, a US woman of the middle class or above did have it better, taking into account US advantages in household wealth and standard of living overall, but a working class woman might not have and likely would have appreciated the information. In any case, the US public, much like the Soviet public, did not get the full story. Unlike the people of the late Soviet Union, the American public did not harbor a deep distrust of the media. The reasons for this are not complicated - in the USSR, the authorities were known to censor and to limit the availability of information. In the United States, a free press that had not yet so thoroughly discredited itself offered, or at least appeared to offer, the prospect of an open society in which publicly available information could be trusted. What has unfolded since the 1980s shows that each abuse of that trust, even in an issue less in the spotlight, accumulates over time until we reach the point we are at now, in which legacy media, crumbling from the exposure of its own sycophancy, tries to reach beyond itself to impose its flaws on the rest of us.

A long history of censorship, suppression of information and the distrust associated with them led to false beliefs in the Soviet public in this particular case not because the state had encouraged a false belief, but because it was no longer able to encourage any type of belief, even a true one. It took an attempt at drastic reform (Perestroika and Glasnost, beginning in the mid 80s) to provoke any trust again. The price attached to those reforms due to a multitude of missteps and hesitations proved severe, to say the least. Meanwhile, in the United States a decentralized media also engaged in censorship by omission, successfully fostering a false belief in the US public by exploiting the trust it had as a free press! Outlets such as Ms. Magazine weren’t subject to centralized control, but did have their own reasons for concerning themselves with taxis and hair over professions and childcare, reasons likely linked to their position as a mouthpiece for a mainstream, affluent feminist movement that wasn’t seriously interested in working women’s problems and perhaps didn’t want working women realizing that. The end result was the same - neither nation’s people had access to all the information. Both of these approaches had built in consequences - for the Soviet Union, a population that could no longer be persuaded even by the truth; for the United States, a free press that led a more trusting population astray while simultaneously accelerating its own transformation into an institution as distrusted as the more openly authoritarian Soviet government.

Authorities both public and private in the western world no longer enjoy the degree of trust they had in the 1980s. We are today closer to the situation of the late Soviet Union - accumulated distrust means attempts to censor, suppress or moderate content are more likely to be perceived as signs that those being suppressed are feared by the censors and therefore might be right than as any sort of honest defense of any group or any set of values. In addition, repeated omissions and manipulations from previously trusted institutions may be “successful” in the short term, but erode trust in that institution over time. A free press that abuses its trust eventually becomes a controlled press in the eyes of the public. Alternatively, one could say a controlled press claiming to be free will eventually be correctly identified as controlled. Every Ms. Magazine can become a Pravda if it squanders the trust it is given. There are a lot of disgraced Ms. Magazines this side of the Atlantic, if you take my meaning. Imagine now the amplification of distrust by the internet. Rather than decades of omissions and manipulations gradually building to a crescendo, we can now achieve total disillusionment at unprecedented speed. Nazis on Substack! A claim some are now trying to parlay into the general dismissal of principled defenders of free speech on the grounds that they are “protecting Nazis,” without even a coherent definition of Nazi. Should anyone reading this reject the value of free speech in and of itself, take a moment to consider that the future of censorship is either the amplification of whatever position is contrary to the censor’s, regardless of truth (the Soviet example) or short term propaganda success at the price of the collapse of institutional trust in the long run (the US example). Which path you are embarking upon is dependent on where we are right now. I believe we are much closer to the Soviet position - our media has already burned whatever good will it had left. Even if you take the naive view that the institutions represented by the leaders of this censorship push are still at all trusted, why be in such a rush to help them degrade themselves through censorship? Why grace Nazis with the romantic mantle of the outlaw while invoking the well known Streisand Effect in their favor? Even if you don’t accept the inherent value of freedom of speech (which you should!), at least consider the well documented downward spiral the censor sets in motion against his own house. Censorship, omission and suppression appear to be weapons against your “enemies;” in the end they are always weapons against yourself.

1. Kingston-Mann, Esther, “Soviet Women, Soviet Reform, and Media Secrets,” Sojourner: The Women’s Forum, May 1990, p.19

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.