The Self-Own of Censorship

 The New York Times ran a story yesterday about some inside drama at their long-time peer in legacy media, The Washington Post. Reportedly, one of the Post's cartoonists just quit due to concerns about editorial interference. Specifically, she alleged that one of her recent cartoons was killed for being overly critical of the paper's billionaire owner (and newly-minted Trump brownnoser) Jeff Bezos. (The paper disputes this narrative of events, and says the cartoon was axed for other reasons.)

If true, this story is interesting because it illustrates quite well the self-defeating nature of censorship. After all, the satirical point of the cartoon was that Bezos, Disney, and other big corporations and billionaire CEOs are enabling Trump's authoritarian rise (the cartoon also implicitly references Disney's recent decision to settle a lawsuit with Trump). So, by practicing censorship against the cartoon, the paper isn't exactly allaying the artist's concerns that it is abetting an autocratic turn in U.S. politics. 

I had the same thought about a year ago, after J.D. Vance sent a letter to the Justice Department calling for the criminal investigation of Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan. What was Kagan's alleged crime? It was nothing more than calling Trump a would-be authoritarian. The irony could not be richer. I mean, seriously—who could ask for a more perfect self-own? Vance was desperate to disprove that Trump was an aspiring autocrat. So—he calls for autocratic abuses of power to silence the allegation? 

This, we might say, is the dictator's dilemma. They wish to silence all criticism—including, most obviously, the criticism that they are behaving as a dictator. But, in order to do so, they have to resort to dictatorial and authortiarian methods—such as censorship and legal intimidation. And by doing so, they merely prove the validity of the original critique. They demonstrate that they are indeed exactly the sort of thin-skinned autocrat that their critics accused them of being. Way to go, guys!

I am reminded of an epigram by the great Salvadoran poet-revolutionary Roque Dalton (whom I was reading a great deal of in 2016-7 or so, back when all liberals were rediscovering their youthful radicalism, in the full flower of Trump 1.0–era "Resistance"). I've quoted the line before, but it still stands as the perfect indictment of the self-inflicted wound of censorship—whereby dictators and their enablers, in the very act of trying to silence their critics, merely end up proving their point for them. 

After all, if they have nothing to hide from their critics, why are they so desperate to silence them? If there is no truth to their critics' allegations—why can the dictators never tolerate their expression? As Dalton puts it:

One can judge the moral character of any regime

By the degree of danger it attaches

To being observed through the eyes of a satirical poet. 

Or—as the case may be—a satirical cartoonist...