How do protest techniques adapt to changing laws, international public opinion, and online mobs?
Blank Paper
In an earlier essay on Pandemic Protests I shared an example of a “blank paper” protest from Kazakhstan. Police arrested a man holding a piece of blank paper on charges of “we’ll sort that out later.”
Kazakhstan is not a country associated with free speech. Neither was the former USSR. As the old joke goes (translated from Protest Folklore, by Andrey Moroz):
“A man throws leaflets on Red Square, they grab him and see that he is handing out blank papers. They ask: “Why empty?” – “So everything is clear.”
If many (or most) forms of protest are themselves prohibited, surely a safe approach for those who want to continue is to hold up a sheet of blank paper?
Recently, protesters from another location have used blank paper in their protests and in groups. As a highly photographed place, we have a different perspective.
In Hong Kong, as the new National Security Law took effect on July 1st, the pro-democracy Demosisto political party disbanded, people active in the protest movement deleted their social media accounts, and restaurants removed signs of support to avoid being charged with subversion, sedition, or collusion.
As images, they tell the story well. Probably better than placards with words. But apparently, the blank paper is still in conflict with the law. (I wrote about the Hong Kong protests last year also.)
Paper, Blank
Meanwhile, a recent letter published in Harper’s Magazine (A Letter on Justice and Open Debate), caused exactly the type of outrage it protested against. Around 150 writers, academics, artists, journalists, and others, many with international followings, signed on to a letter condemning… public condemnation, or “cancel culture.”
“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.”
But why write a letter at all? Writing a letter like this is one of the weakest things that signatories of this level can do. It’s like sending a memo (when people sent memos). It’s top-down, easily ignored, and minimally effective at gaining the change the authors want.
The authors did add one unnecessary, out-of-place sentence. “The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. ” Why list just this one political leader when you might also add Putin, Xi, and many more?
I can only read that sentence as an appeal that the authors might deserve to be treated lightly by the very people most likely to push back on the letter itself. It didn’t work. If anything it ensured that more conservative signatories didn’t sign on, and it made the resulting problem felt more by Democrats.
Do I think the content of letter is reasonable? Yes. Does the letter make a real difference? No.
A good critique of whether the letter was really necessary is that if these same signatories and others had just walked the walk, cancel culture itself would be defeated. Like this tweet.
Seems to me if leading intellectuals once or twice in four years had praised Trump or once or twice attacked the leading ideas that would do much more to dissolve the chill effect of cancel culture and uniformity than signing a letter with general principles. Practice not theory
— Bruno Maçães (@MacaesBruno) July 7, 2020
So while a reader might agree with the content, once they see the list of names, they will find one or two they dislike (Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling being one target), and then disavow the entire letter and all signatories. Several of the less well known signers became pressured to the point that they publicly apologized within a day.
Types of critics: those who dislike or disagree with one or more of the signatories, those who didn’t read it but see the furor and pile on, those taking issue with other issues the signatories support, those who wish that they had been asked to sign.
The whole commotion reminded me of a 1992 New York Times Op-ed by Doris Lessing. She wrote shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the USSR, but the comparisons seem apt today. Here are some quotes.
“Communist papers were written in a language that seemed designed to fill up as much space as possible without actually saying anything. Because, of course, it was dangerous to take up positions that might have to be defended.”
Seems like this is every day.
“All writers are asked this question by interviewers: ‘Do you think a writer should…?’ ‘Ought writers to…?’ The question always has to do with a political stance, and note that the assumption behind the words is that all writers should do the same thing, whatever it is…. Another [phrase] is ‘commitment,’ so much in vogue not long ago…. A successor to ‘commitment’ is ‘raising consciousness…’ ‘Raising consciousness,’ like ‘commitment,’ like ‘political correctness,’ is a continuation of that old bully, the party line.”
Written 28 years ago but it seems like the present day, too. And also this paragraph.
“The phrase ‘political correctness’ was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think that was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it.”
Consider
- Is can be politically easier to pressure people into apologizing than to persuade them that your side is the better one.
- How often do you disagree with your “side”?
- The system of cancel culture also gives those threatened by it a gift. The attacks are overwhelmingly online. If you don’t wish to apologize, going offline and not answering your phone (or doorbell) for a few days and then never looking at what came in can save you a lot of headache.