Global War and the Assault on Freedom of Expression
Press and Academic Freedoms, Civil Liberties, and More Are Increasingly Under Attack
In recent weeks in this space, I have penned two columns on the period of the first American Red Scare when freedom of speech, protest, assembly, and even belief were under vicious assault both by the government and extralegal organizations bent on crushing any dissent whether it be to World War I, corporate power, or the legalized racism and anti-immigrant sentiment of that historical moment. During the late teens and early twenties, militant labor was systematically undermined, civil rights leaders demonized and assailed, anti-war voices silenced, immigrant activists deported, and basic freedoms and individual rights suppressed.
It is hard not to look back to that time as well as to the McCarthy era and the shameful American tradition of repression of the freedoms we like to brag about when we see the crackdowns on protests at college campuses. In many cases it is not just the right-wing but many American liberals who have been all too happy to join hands with Republicans in attacking voices calling for a ceasefire or offering criticism of American or Israeli policy and actions, even as the bodies of innocent civilians continue to pile up.
Of course, for any of us who remember the early days of the American “War on Terror,” none of this is new. In our not too distant past we were led to war in Iraq based on lies and propaganda where an ill-informed public had few voices offering an alternative narrative to the pro-war chorus. Dissenting views were marginalized and demonized. A couple decades and billions of dollars of treasure and rivers of blood later, we all know how that turned out—the death and terror, state-funded or otherwise, just keeps rolling on.
In the wake of horrific terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 where 2,977 innocent Americans were massacred, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq resulted in 7,557 U.S military casualties and 30,177 suicides of U.S. service members and veterans in their aftermath. 117,000 uniformed coalition partners also died during those conflicts.
Moving beyond the costs of the 9/11 attack and subsequent wars on Americans and allied forces to the bigger picture, the total cost of the response to the 9/11 terror attacks is a staggering 4.5 million human beings according to The Washington Post:
Brown University researchers, in a report released Monday, draw on U.N. data and expert analyses to attempt to calculate the minimum number of excess deaths attributable to the war on terrorism, across conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen — impacts “so vast and complex that” ultimately, “they are unquantifiable,” the researchers acknowledge.
The accounting, so far as it can be measured, puts the toll at 4.5 million to 4.6 million — a figure that continues to mount as the effects of conflict reverberate. Of those fatalities, the report estimates, some 3.6 million to 3.7 million were “indirect deaths” caused by the deterioration of economic, environmental, psychological and health conditions.
None of this made anyone safer or freer.
As for the latest chapter in the war and terror cycle that never ends, 1,200 innocent Israelis were butchered by Hamas on October 7, 2023 in an episode of barbarous, calculated mass-murder with 250 more taken as hostages. The Israeli response to this horror has been a brutal, unrelenting assault on Gaza that has, as of this writing, killed 37,084 Palestinians, 40% of whom have been Hamas fighters, according to the Israeli military. Palestinian and some international sources, on the other hand, put the number of women and children killed at close to 70%.
In any event, despite Israeli military counts and more conservative reassessed casualty counts that show that the number of women and children killed decreased from over 60% early in the conflict to around 40% in the most recent figures, it is indisputable that disproportionately more innocents have died in Gaza than in the initial Hamas assault on Israel. As Time Magazine reported before the most recent Israeli attacks, “The new figures were 7,797 children and 4,959 women killed and subsequently identified.” An even larger death toll looms as the displacement of the vast majority of the population in Gaza threatens more collateral damage and mass famine which is already underway.
As Kurt Vonnegut would have said, “So it goes.”
But what about all those college kids and their tent encampments calling for a ceasefire? What is to be done? What, asks the prowar chorus in the Congress and the corporate media, is wrong with our elite universities?
In response to protests calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, we have seen the weaponization of claims of antisemitism, billionaire funders and corporate interests threatening campuses that refuse to silence dissent, and a wholesale propaganda campaign demonizing all protest as either ill-informed or bigoted with very little corroborating evidence. All the while, actual coverage of the war in Gaza is sparce, and international criticism from recognized human rights groups and international bodies are quickly dismissed or ignored.
Whatever your views with regard to the conflict in Gaza, the larger point is that freedom of expression is a basic right and should be the bedrock of any healthy democracy. Shutting down dissent or views you disagree with should never be acceptable in a truly free society.
But here we are again, watching a very similar movie unfold before our eyes. As Robin Anderson, Nolan Higdon, and Steve Macek outline in their book Censorship, Digital Media and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expressionand in a recent Project Censored article, the global crackdown on freedom of expression has intensified in recent years. As they note in their Project Censored piece, “a rising tide of political tyranny coupled with the expansion of corporate power is stifling dissent, online expression, news reporting, political debate, and academic freedom from the United States and Europe to the Global South.”
And the sources of this censorship are, unfortunately, bipartisan in nature as the authors write:
Censorship is being driven not only by governments but also by an array of political and corporate actors across the ideological spectrum, from right-wing autocrats and MAGA activists to Big Tech oligarchs and self-professed liberals. Indeed, when it comes to censorship, a focus on any one country’s ideology, set of practices, or justifications for restricting expression risks missing the forest for the trees. The global community is best served when we collectively reject all attempts to suppress basic freedoms, regardless of where they emerge or how they are implemented.
Such is the case in the United States where we are caught between Democratic leaders cracking down on protest, migration, and freedom of expression in an effort to triangulate to defeat an American Right that would happily engage in even more draconian acts of repression that would surely echo the excess of the first Red Scare.
Welcome to 2024.
Anderson, Higdon, and Macek observe that the ground for the current wide-ranging efforts to limit freedom of expression has been building across the world for nearly a decade now:
According to a 2022 report by Article 19, an international organization that documents and champions freedom of expression, 80 percent of the world’s population lives with less freedom of expression today than did ten years ago. The eradication of basic freedoms and rights is partly due to the pervasive normalization of censorship. Across media platforms, news outlets, schools, universities, libraries, museums, and public and private spaces, governments, powerful corporations, and influential pressure groups are suppressing freedom of expression and censoring viewpoints deemed to be unpopular or dangerous. Unfortunately, physical assaults, legal restrictions, and retaliation against journalists, students, and faculty alike have become all too common, resulting in the suppression of dissenting voices and, more broadly, the muffling and disappearance of critical information, controversial topics, and alternative narratives from public discourse.
These global trends have not been averted here in America where press and academic freedom have eroded as corporate power and Big Tech censorship have marched on alongside the concentration of wealth and political power. Thus, the authors remind us, “the United States as ‘the leader of the free world’ . . . now ranks 55th in the world on the Reporters without Borders 2024 World Press Freedom Index.”
When it comes to academic freedom, it is no better. Hence, “the latest Academic Freedom Index found that more than 45 percent of the world’s population now lives in countries with an almost complete lack of academic freedom (more than at any time since the 1970s).” So whether it is Ron DeSantis doing everything he can to put a straight-jacket on academics in Florida or Democratic governor Gavin Newsom and others trying to play the middle as protests are crushed at colleges in California, freedom of expression is under assault on American campuses from coast to coast.
Finally, as the Project Censored piece observes, “Censorship is nothing new, but the pervasive influence of the internet and the development of so-called artificial intelligence (AI) have created new, more nefarious opportunities to crack down on freedoms around the globe.” Thus many of the fancy new toys sold to us wrapped in a utopian patina of technophilia are becoming tools of repression. Every time you pick up a cellphone or go onto social media you have entered a virtual public square that is heavily policed:
So-called smart platforms and tools have created new forms of Big Tech control and content moderation, such as shadowbanning and algorithmic bias. In the United States, tech companies depend on large government contracts and, as a result, often work with government officials directly and indirectly to censor content.
Anderson, Higdon, and Macek argue that we can counter this through a variety of measures that include everything from “aggressive antitrust enforcement” to legislation that protects freedom of the press and limits online surveillance. In addition to this, they insist that we need more education in how to be critical consumers of information so we can all have the skills to be “capable of understanding and evaluating the media we depend on to construct our cognitive maps of the world.”
Of course, all these solutions necessitate that we defeat the dark forces of censorship and repression in the political arena. That will require, as historian of the first Red Scare, Adam Hochschild puts it, “a vigilant respect for civil rights and constitutional safeguards, to save ourselves from ever slipping back into the darkness again.”
What makes all of this evermore daunting is the fact that the power of those bent on stifling freedom of expression is built on a foundation of historic economic inequality and the concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of the economic elite. Like those fighting for basic civil liberties and inclusive democracy before the dawn of the New Deal, we need to muster the wisdom and courage to fight the robber barons of our era.
Will we do so or will we sit and watch the democratic rights we won over generations be swept away in the service of making life more comfortable and profitable for the new lords of the global economy?