The "Right-On" Left and the "Woke" Left

The hatred, and then the love, for censorship

In the 1990s, a common argument against censorship of sex and violence in media was:

The censor doesn’t trust the public to make up their own minds. The censor has contempt for the public. To oppose censorship is to believe in the intelligence and goodness of people. It is to be a good person who respects others while also having the intelligence not to fear change and not to be swayed into irrational behaviour merely by seeing something on a screen! Maybe the censor fears himself, and projects that weakness onto the rest of us…?

Being open-minded, caring and “respectful of others” while also kicking down social barriers, this argument was irresistible to the adolescent me. But of course it is nonsense. In truth the Left are far more full of both slow, calculated loathing and frenzied, violent hatred than the right-wingers who are the target of those emotions. The real motivations behind the argument are self-aggrandisement and “moral undermining” of the conservative as self-deluded, insecure, fearful, incurious, controlling and pompous.

I recently stumbled upon a TV discussion show from 1985 regarding the film Rambo: First Blood Part II which had just been released. There is participation from the audience. At one point, there is a brief appearance by a guy of about 40, certainly liberal, probably gay, and definitely cool, hip and trendy.

Rings, but not on the ring finger: almost certainly gay

It is perhaps irresponsible of me to focus on this one particular man, speaking only briefly, unscripted and in the nerve-racking situation of a TV broadcast. Maybe he isn’t alive any more? Maybe he has changed his views? If he was 40 then, he will be double that age now, an old and tired man. But his ideas live on, and have mutated in monstrous ways. If anybody recognises him and wants to connect us for a reasonable discussion, please do so. Otherwise, please bear in mind that my humorous comments about him are intended only as light relief amidst what is a rather depressing topic.

The reason he made such an impression on me in so brief an appearance is that I can remember admiring people exactly like him when I was an adolescent. I would have loved this guy. He would have impressed me. His argument and attitude would have made me smile with naive (yet smug) agreement.

In his few seconds on screen, he gives a perfect template of the anti-censorship argument that was to become ubiquitous in the 1990s:

The most important fact is that if you want to ban a film, it’s because you haven’t got any respect for the intelligence, the acumen and the brightness that audiences bring along to the cinema.

Demonstrating his “down with the yoof” credentials, he then exclaims:

Young people know this!

“Young people KNOW this!” (note the total absence of a bicep)

He gets a round of applause for that, of course. But what is he actually saying? Young people know that they’re intelligent and bright? Well thank you, Prof. Polytechnic, for complimenting us. Yes, you can join us at our spliff party on the college’s front lawn and discuss blasting Tories through the hole in the O-zone layer while flirting with the more nubile among us. Or is he saying: young people know that, when adults censor their media, it’s because they disrespect young people and want to oppress them? Well how interesting, Professor, please tell us more, and yes we find you kind of sexy even though you listen to ELO.

Then, interestingly, he switches the social concern from violence (pfft!) to racism. The switch is seamlessly done; he doesn’t even introduce the new topic of racism, but just behaves as if it is the real topic under discussion so of course nobody will be surprised by it finally being mentioned. This switch from “violence” to “racism” perfectly reflects the change in social concerns across the course of the 20th Century, from Christian decency to progressive equality.

If anything, the one thing to do about the racism of Rambo and some of the other ugly factors of it, is to increase education around the media.

Ah, the old chestnut “what we need is better education” to deal with social issues. What he misses is that the social issues he wants to eliminate (racism) are in-born in people, whereas those his conservative adversaries want to eliminate (degenerate media) are artificially created by a corrupt society. The Left, of course, would claim the very opposite - that racism is not in-born, but degeneracy is - as usual, the inversion of reality that is characteristic of the Left.

“What we all need to do is listen to REASON…!”

Then he reiterates that violence in media does not change people’s behaviour, and says we shouldn’t believe that “one small range of biased reporting by men like Eysenck of very dubious intellectual standing are going to give all the truth”.

This is where it gets interesting. Note that he confines his condemnation of Eysenck to saying that he doesn’t give “all the truth”, not that Eysenck is an outright liar who gives none of the truth. He concedes that there could be, or even is, some truth in what Eysenck says. Similarly, he says that Eysenck is “of very dubious intellectual standing” but not that Eysenck is evil. It is 1985, and we are seeing the Left “being reasonable”, because they know they don’t yet have enough hold on society that they can afford to appear vicious or, God forbid, intolerant.

Contrast this with how the Left of the 2020s handles its opponents: it describes them as liars, frauds, haters, bigots, conspiracy theorists, extremists, criminals, and all manner of absolutely damning labels. It grants zero credibility to their arguments and zero moral standing to them as people. None whatsoever. The business of the Left today, is the business of disabling, eliminating and discrediting their opponents - not by any means necessary, but by every means available. They want total dominance, and they have given up on argumentation. They do not debate their opponents, in fact they pride themselves on rejecting all requests from their opponents for reasonable debate, and seek to remove them from the discourse entirely, even to remove them from public life entirely.

This is ironic because of the change in tone, of course, but even more ironic is that it is the polar opposite of what the Left were advocating in 1985. Then, they wanted openness and freedom of expression, inquiry and speech. Today, they want censorship - of ideas, of people, of organisations, even of ethnic groups.

“I can do you a part-exchange on a Cortina, or 3 kilos of Post-Structuralism.”

I dare say that our audience participant would never dream, at least in 1985, of saying that his opponents should be censored, deplatformed, defunded or hounded down at their homes to be humiliated in national media. On the contrary, he would boast about how he wants to debate them, because their arguments are facile and easily defeated. Today, the Left either says that you should not dignify “fascists” by conversing with them, or that their arguments are too involved to defeat succinctly and too dangerous to lend any oxygen to even if it is possible to defeat them.

Also, consider the radical change in the Left’s perception of the general public. In 1985, this guy was saying that they are bright and intelligent and have the acumen to resist being conditioned or persuaded against their will. Today, leftists see the public as a dumb mass that is constantly in danger of being “taken in” by the far right, “radicalised” and inveigled into terrible ways of thinking, terrible beliefs, and terrible behaviours. The Left today never accords the public any intelligence or discernment, but rather treats them as so stupid and gullible that they must be protected from themselves, with systematic censorship the like of which has never been seen before in history.

Moreover, the Left doesn’t just want to prevent the public from receiving non-Left ideas, it also wants to drown them in Left ideas, as often as possible, even in art and media that, once upon a time, the Left would have claimed were (and should be) completely apolitical. The obvious hypocrisy aside, this also shows the lie in the Left’s claim that the public are too intelligent and discerning to be persuaded in such insidious ways, when the Left is constantly aiming to do exactly that.

What explains this incredible change? Some possibilities:

1. Having achieved ascendancy, the Left has succumbed to irrational paranoia (eg. “from here, the only way is down”)

2. Having achieved ascendancy, the Left has pushed things to such an extreme (eg. Drag Queen Story Hour) that it knows the public, once amenable to its ideas in milquetoast form, are opposed to them in their current extreme form, so must not be allowed to talk about them

3. The Left is preparing for the liquidation of a subset of the population, so has to prepare the ground for that by denying them any legitimacy in the public discourse

4. The Left hasn’t actually changed. Before and after achieving ascendancy, it was always pursuing absolute goals - from the very beginning.

The only answer I can give, I’m afraid, is the rather pedestrian one that “it’s a mix”. There would be some leftists who genuinely thought it was a glorious struggle for freedom, and others who were quietly thinking “if we keep getting our way, eventually we’re going to have enough power that we can put the boot in to all of the people who disagree with us”. Within that group still, there would be further differentiation, between those who relished such a prospect, and those who dreaded being cruel, and dreaded having the power to be cruel.

To look at any particular leftist is to face the question: is this one of the ones who led kulaks to their execution, or who pleaded with those ones to be merciful, or who pulled the trigger, or who wrote the media lies justifying each liquidation, or who avoided all of that unpleasantness by having a job in the nomenklatura, spending every day busying himself with abstractions?

His eyes tell me he was hateful, even here when he was “being reasonable”. He looks like a washer-woman scolding her much-resented infant son for soiling the floor (with racism).

To return to our “man in the audience” back in 1985… I find myself wondering about him. Is he still around? Was he as I have imagined him, here in this essay, to be? Was he always hateful, really, or was he actually a nice guy who would be horrified by how censorious and doctrinaire the Left has become? Is he alive? Is he dead? Did I even get his age right?

And what about me? As an adolescent, I found adults like him cool and admirable. Obviously I changed and my worldview transformed and we should be very merciful about the embryonic thoughts of 13 year-olds… but I wonder if it says something about me that I was impressed by people like this. I told myself it was their open-mindedness that I liked, and the courage I imagined they must have to “oppose convention”… but it was also their blasé destructiveness. So… did I admire that trait in them because it was also in me? And if it was, then did it get deadened by time, or by my experiences, or by the world these very people had created, or did it never die, and does it sit dormant in me, even now?