Black Lives Matter and freedom of speech in the USA on the Palestinian question
To those who believe that I spend all my time watching news broadcasts and talk shows on Russian state television, let me open this essay by correcting that misperception. I also do keep an eye on major national broadcasters in Western Europe, including Euronews and the BBC. And, in spare moments, when I am not doing something more intellectual like reading and writing, I flip on CNN.
All of which leads me to a conclusion that is likely to shock readers of these notes in Europe and America: just as on the subject of the Ukraine war, so on the subject of the Hamas-Israel war, there is far more diversity of opinion aired on the American broadcaster than on its Continental counterparts. And that is exactly as it should be, because there is much more freedom of _expression_ in the United States today than anywhere in Europe and Britain.
I have several answers to the “why” that this assertion certainly will raise. The biggest reason is the one most readers will least suspect: Donald Trump During the presidential race of 2016, candidate Trump said things in his public appearances which normal folks like you or me would never have said for fear of inviting a knock on the door from the FBI under charges of subversion. He got away with it as a candidate, he thereby liberated all of us, and then he continued speaking the unspeakable as President, with the net result that society was split down the middle and there was room for every political view to be published. In my own field of Russian affairs, the daily digest of our leading disseminator of writings by analysts and pundits, Johnson’s Russia List, went from being deadly boring for having content only supplied by Russia haters to being a garden of a thousand blooms.
Europe had no Trump. Europe was in 2016 and remains today a cemetery of the intellect. I have in mind not just peer group pressures for creative spirits to just shut up and not rock the boat. No, there are laws in Germany, France and elsewhere that push a fist down your throat if you go public with opinions on Putin, on sanctions and now on Palestine that are not in conformity with the local government line.
For the above reasons, European broadcasters today crop the news on Gaza to say only that Israel has a right to self-defense. Meanwhile, CNN is devoting a lot of air time to the suffering of the Gaza Palestinians under the ongoing hourly bombardments by Israeli ground and air forces that are grinding all residential areas of Gaza City into dust and that have uprooted at least 700,000 Palestinians in a forced move to nowhere in the southern half of the enclave.
Let me add another factor to explain the more serious journalism that subscribers to CNN are receiving compared to your average European television viewer: Black Lives Matter.
It is not in the least surprising that BLM have come out in support of the Gaza Palestinians, for reasons that go back to the Black Panthers. What they are calling for is an immediate cease-fire, urgent delivery of medical supplies, water, fuel, food into Gaza ramped up to at least the pre-October 7th rate of 200 trucks per day. American authorities are forced to accept the demonstrations of BLM in favor of the Palestinians lest all hell break loose in cities across the country. Good!
I think of yesterday’s comments to the The Financial Times by the leading candidate to replace Mark Rutte as prime minister of The Netherlands, the current justice minister Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, on the dangers that the Hamas-Israel war poses for Europe, namely that cleavages in our society will open up. Regrettably, that is the mindset of an authoritarian if not purely fascist politician. When everyone is perfectly aligned and there are no nay-sayers tolerated, then freedom is dead.
The problem of conformism in Europe is not something new. In the past, democracy busting conformism was most common, perhaps, in Scandinavia, as I saw as a frequent business visitor to Sweden in the 1980s. My job required that I meet periodically with the factory management of our subsidiary there to coordinate marketing efforts. We talked about the target markets I was serving, Yugoslavia in particular, where my interlocutors went to promote product sales and also to pick up cheap eyeglasses and other personal and household necessities at a fraction of their cost in Sweden. We never talked politics, only about the pleasures of good raki. But then prime minister Olaf Palme was assassinated and over a lunch in the company cafeteria, my main contact told me “Thank goodness they’ve killed the s.o.b.” I was shocked, since I had never heard a word of criticism in Sweden directed at their politically correct, almost angelic leader. However, my talking partner, like most other managers at the plant was an engineer and he hated Palme for having destroyed the engineering and other departments of Swedish universities.
It is this destructive silence that I see around me in Europe. And so I say, three cheers for healthy cleavages in society that give life to representative democracy, and, at the present moment, three cheers for Black Lives Matter.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023