Is There More Censorship Nowadays Than in the Former Soviet Union?

I rarely agree with Noam Chomsky yet he made a bold statement in an interview with Russell Brand that caught my attention. He claimed that we are now living in a kind of totalitarian system that is worse than the former Soviet Union. Chomsky cites the coverage of the war in Ukraine as an example. Not a word can be said that deviates from the dominant narrative or the person who utters it is smeared and canceled. But the dominant story about that war regularly is seriously incorrect. (Do we still believe that Russia blew up the Nord Stream gas pipeline? Maybe not anymore. But it will surely turn out to be true that Russia destroyed the Kachovka dam.)

It might not be such a bad thing to hear dissenting voices about Ukraine. Not because I want people to support Putin. But because there would be few wars if everyone made the effort to periodically listen to the supposed enemy. That is exactly what is made impossible by the current censorship. For example, Chomsky has said that it was easier to listen to Western channels in the Soviet Union under communism than it is now to listen to Russian channels today in the United States.

Chomsky knows a thing or two about censorship. He has written a very sophisticated theory about it. Censorship arises through a multitude of psychological, economic and sociological mechanisms. Being able to see the complexity in the rise of censorship is important. This is how you avoid the paranoid belief that all censorship comes about through a single centrally-controlled grand conspiracy. And it’s also how you avoid the reverse: the radical denial of centrally-controlled censorship. Psychologically, the two are connected. As long as there are people who don't see conspiracy anywhere, there will be people who see conspiracy everywhere.

Censorship appears primarily as self-censorship. Man is a self-censoring creature. He wants to be loved, admired and desired; he weighs his words because he shivers and trembles at the thought of rejection and abandonment. That fear alone sews his mouth shut.

However, “real” censorship is also rampant in our society. The CEO of the Flemish public broadcaster imposed a gag order at the beginning of this year—staff may no longer publicly criticize the broadcaster, under penalty of dismissal. And a few months later, the prime minister of Belgium imposed a similar gag order: ministers who publicly criticize the government will be forced to resign.

Global institutions lead national institutions by example. In addition to an army of fact-checkers, the UN appointed more than 100,000 digital first responders. Their job: to swiftly counter dissident voices on social media with “accurate and reliable information.” And they also do not hide their cooperation with the social media platforms. During the corona crisis, Facebook paid as many as 35,000 people who, together with Artificial Intelligence, censored more than 12 million messages that distributed so-called “misinformation” about COVID-19 and vaccines. Also the American government engages in active censorship. Biden administration officials and government agencies cooperate with big tech firms to censor messages on social media. Fortunately a federal judge recently put a stop this cooperation. Remark: this shows that there is still a limit to totalitarian tendencies in our society.

Among the censored were world-class biomedical experts, such as Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Aseem Malhotra. As a recent opinion article in the Wall Street Journal argues, it becomes increasingly obvious that these censored experts were overwhelmingly correct in their criticisms of the pandemic response and that allowing their voices to be heard would have dramatically reduced unnecessary devastation, suffering, and the public’s loss of trust in public institutions. But that hasn’t stopped the UN and other global institutions from doubling down on censorship.

Politicians are sucked into this too. In the Netherlands, there are efforts underway to ban the political party Forum for Democracy; videos of the American presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are being removed from YouTube as “fake news”; and the Biden administration wants Trump behind bars—by any means necessary. Is that drive to imprison Trump purely due to suspicion of criminal offenses? If that’s the case, why are the Obamas and Clintons not under equal scrutiny for their involvement with Jeffrey Epstein? And why was there never any investigation when George W. Bush provoked a devastating war with his claim about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?

It is essentially simple. Intolerance does not target those who break the law. Intolerance targets those who contradict the dominant ideology. And it’s increasing throughout system- at the level of global and national institutions, and also at the level of individuals.

Chomsky bluntly states that, in the West today, we live in a totalitarian system. That is quite something. Herbert Marcuse suggested the same thing in his 1964 book The One-Dimensional Man. He said while Nazi Germany may have fallen, Europe was essentially still a totalitarian society. The CIA subsequently created a 500-page file on him. Writing books in which you warn against totalitarianism is not always well received. Trust me, I know.

The newly emerging totalitarianism is not so much fascist or communist in nature. It is technocratic. What is emerging is a totalitarianism led by “experts” and enforced with technological tools, the likes of which the world has never seen—until now.

Initially, this concerns a sort of “velvet glove” totalitarianism, which attempts to rob the population of its (mental) freedom by means of more or less non-violent influence techniques such as nudging, hiring influencers and journalists to plant and promote preferred narratives, suppressing critical messages on social media through algorithm, and so on. To think that such techniques are harmless is psychologically naive. They always come down to forms of manipulative communication. He who perverts speech perverts human relationships; he who perverts human relationships perverts existence. First in word, then in deed.

I’m more careful than Chomsky and Marcuse. I warn that we are at risk of ending up in a totalitarian society—not that we are there yet. But nuance is sometimes to no avail. A fellow professor recently described me as “the ideologue of anti-government extremism” during a study day on right-wing extremism. Normally, I would burst out laughing. But my smile faltered a bit. I can’t rule out the possibility that my colleague earnestly believes it.