This week's featured article is "Will Russia Ever Be Free?" by Cathy Young.
This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.
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The post <I>The Best of Reason</I>: Will Russia Ever Be Free? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Eager though we all are to learn how the Ukraine war ends for Ukraine, there is another great unanswered question about the invasion: How will the war end for Russia?
Will it revert to a quasi-Soviet totalitarian past, this time with a simulacrum of capitalism and an ideology of religious nationalism instead of communism? When Vladimir Putin's death or downfall comes, will that bring a new liberal "thaw"? Or will the country slide into violent strife between warlords like the late Yevgeny Prigozhin—leading, perhaps, to an even more belligerent fascist dictatorship? Or will the Russian Federation disintegrate as the Soviet Union did 32 years ago, with some of its constituent entities breaking off into independent states? And would that reduce Russia to a shrunken, humbled, impoverished, and increasingly irrelevant country?
Russia still commands a vast nuclear arsenal, and there is no realistic scenario where that's going to change soon. Russia's sheer size, its cultural influence, its place at the intersection of Europe and Asia, and its vast network of international connections give it, like it or not, a pivotal role in global politics and development. Whether Russia moves in a liberal or anti-liberal direction, whether it embraces markets or militarism, tolerance or tyranny, will influence social trends in many other countries.
For the past decade or so, under Putin's authoritarian rule, Russia has been a superspreader of global anti-liberalism. Now the war in Ukraine has dramatically reduced Moscow's influence by severely damaging its image, its international standing, and (thanks to Western sanctions) its economic reach.
But what next? Is the idea of a free, prosperous, peaceful Russia a serious possibility or a pipe dream?
Russia, of course, might win the war. Here's a possible scenario after a Russian victory.
By the start of 2024, the Ukrainian offensive (or counteroffensive) fails or at least is perceived as a failure, and the West pressures Ukraine to make territorial concessions in exchange for continued aid. The peace accords allow Russia to keep Crimea and at least some of the territories annexed last year, including the land bridge to Crimea and perhaps Mariupol, which Putin appears to view as an especially valuable prize. It's enough of a victory for Putin to position himself as a winner, especially if some or all of the economic sanctions on Russia are lifted (perhaps in exchange for limited reparations to Ukraine, which Kremlin propaganda could spin as generous fraternal aid).
It is certainly possible that, as Ukraine fears, Putin and the war hawks in his entourage would view such a peace deal as a breather for a new military buildup and a new effort to bring all of Ukraine under Russian control by installing a Moscow-friendly regime in Kyiv. Some Russian propagandists talk about Ukraine as a stepping stone toward rebuilding a Russian/Soviet empire, and even some Russian military men have echoed such themes; an interview from July shows Andrey Mordvichev (who commanded Russian Army divisions at the battle for Mariupol and was recently promoted to the rank of colonel-general) talking about the alleged need to attack Eastern Europe.
But given the current state of Russian armed forces and the population's lack of appetite for war (when the Russian government tried partial mobilization in 2022, the result was a mass exodus of men), such fantasies are likely to remain fantasies. Ukraine is only likely to agree to such concessions on the condition of NATO membership, which would essentially preclude another Russian invasion, perhaps with face-saving assurances to Russia that no NATO bases will be placed in Ukraine.
In this scenario, Russia's current neo-totalitarian cocoon will only harden. Political prisoners will remain in prison (unless, perhaps, they are traded for some valuable Russian prisoners of war), and there will be new prosecutions for sharing "fake"—i.e., accurate—information about the war or about Russian war crimes. Access to truthful reporting on these topics will remain severely restricted; the Kremlin will almost certainly further tighten restrictions on the internet.
Since the myth of the righteous war will be the foundation of the regime's survival, authoritarian, anti-Western, and anti-liberal propaganda will likely intensify. A cohort of Russian children will be raised on history textbooks (already introduced at the start of this school year) that portray Russia as both the indomitable bastion of all virtues and the eternal victim of nefarious Western intrigue, that discuss the mass-murdering tyrant Josef Stalin in positive terms, that treat Soviet-era dissidents and defectors as selfish and disloyal, and that glorify the "special operation" in Ukraine as part of Russia's historical mission to vanquish Nazism.
How long would such a hardline regime survive? At least as long as Putin does—and that could be a while.
It's a broad consensus among Russian dissidents of all stripes—not counting hawks who "dissent" in the sense that they think Putin isn't waging war ruthlessly enough—that undoing Russia's dictatorship will be impossible unless Ukraine wins the war. As chess grandmaster and opposition activist Garry Kasparov said in February at the Munich Security Conference, "Liberation from Putin's fascism runs through Ukraine." A joint "Declaration of Russian Democratic Forces," spearheaded by Kasparov and a fellow opposition leader, former businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, unequivocally called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from all territories recognized as Ukrainian under international law (which would include Crimea, annexed in 2014) as well as war crimes prosecutions and compensation for "the victims of aggression."
Such an outcome would indeed be a resounding and humiliating defeat.
The idea is not that disgruntled Russians will vote out Putin and his United Russia party, which currently controls the Duma (Russia's so-called parliament) and most local governments. In September, appearing on a YouTube channel created by former staffers of an independent radio station that had been shut down days after the start of the war, Khodorkovsky argued that peaceful transition at the ballot box is currently impossible in Russia: The entire system is designed to leave no chance of that happening. Khodorkovsky thinks the peaceful protest the Russian opposition has traditionally practiced is also futile: He is outspoken in insisting the opposition must be prepared to participate in violent action.
What Khodorkovsky has in mind is not a pro-freedom, anti-Putin uprising—the level of repression and surveillance in Russia today makes organizing dissent extremely difficult—but simply chaos, which, to paraphrase Game of Thrones' Littlefinger, the opposition can use as a ladder. The most likely scenario is an "elite coup": Some people within Russia's political elites get sufficiently fed up with Putin to remove him from power one way or another. Many Russian pundits have sarcastically mentioned "the tobacco-box option," a euphemism for regime change by assassination: In March 1801, Czar Paul I was attacked in his bedchamber by a group of high-level conspirators and knocked unconscious with a tobacco box before being strangled to death with a scarf. A less drastic way of removal would be to either officially place Putin under arrest or force him to announce a sudden retirement for health reasons.
It's almost impossible to intelligently assess the probability of any of those outcomes. But massive discontent with the war and with Putin is rife among Russia's business elites. This class once accepted a deal under which they got guarantees of stability in exchange for not seeking influence as independent players in Russian politics. That "stability" worked, for better or worse, given Western countries' willingness to do business with resource-rich Russia. But the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 spectacularly blew up that stability.
While Russian markets haven't tanked completely, thanks to continuing oil and gas purchases by non-Western partners, the rich and powerful have certainly taken a hit: Russian billionaires lost a combined $80 billion in the first week of the war. What's more, much of Russia's post-Soviet privileged class now finds itself cut off from access to its vast assets in the West. Bank accounts and investments have been frozen; luxury homes, villas, and yachts are out of reach.
Public expressions of discontent have been extremely rare, which is not surprising given how dangerous such expressions are in today's Russia. But on two occasions in the past year, leaked recordings of cellphone conversations showed B-list Russian businessmen lamenting the war, describing Putin as a "retard" who keeps saying that "everyone is an enemy, but we're going to win," and predicting that the current regime would eventually turn Russia into a "scorched desert."
Are there people with such views sufficiently high up in the Russian power structures—and with enough loyal armed men under their command—to carry out a coup, whether lethal or nonlethal? There is no way to be sure. For years, a great deal of talk has circulated about rival factions or "clans" within the regime, but all such information comes from supposed insiders or ex-insiders whose accounts cannot be confirmed. (It is alleged, for instance, that the June mutiny of Prigozhin's Wagner mercenary group was coordinated with one such faction.) But a successful coup certainly cannot be ruled out. The Prigozhin mutiny clearly showed that the Russian populace will not take to the streets to support Putin despite his nominally high approval ratings. (There was no outpouring of popular support for Putin either during or after the 24-hour rebellion, and many people in Rostov-on-Don, the city where Prigozhin's private army briefly made its headquarters, cheered for the mutinous mercenaries.)
The liberal opposition is extremely unlikely to seize power after Putin's ouster. But there is a more likely (and more morally gray) liberalization scenario. If the architects of an anti-Putin coup are people who want to rebuild good relations with liberal democracies and start reintegrating Russia into global markets and communications, they will have to demonstrate that the new regime is committed to liberal reforms. This will require holding elections with legitimacy in the eyes of the world, giving pro-freedom, pro-democracy parties and candidates meaningful opportunities to get their share of political power. A post-Putin regime might also bring at least some liberal opposition figures into the government, or into a power-sharing coalition, making them the human face of the new Russia.
Such a scenario might just mean a new crony-capitalist regime willing to use opposition leaders who are popular abroad, such as Khodorkovsky or the jailed Putin opponent Alexei Navalny, as a front for a corrupt political establishment. But any post-Putin government creates a window for meaningful change.
A Russian Spring—a fresh opportunity for political pluralism, the rule of law, civil society, and a market economy—may not seem very likely now. The liberal opposition is too small and fractured; Khodorkovsky's Open Russia movement, for instance, has been feuding with Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation. Support for liberal ideas after almost a quarter-century of Putinism is fairly low even among young people (though measuring public opinion in a fear-ridden authoritarian country is no easy task), and most of the population seems to be mired in a passivity that analysts have described as collective learned helplessness.
Still, it's the most optimistic scenario, and it has at least a chance.
A Russian coup could also lead to a far darker outcome: open armed conflict between rival political factions—some of it based on ideology, some on raw competition for power and wealth—and the emergence of multiple regional centers of power. This scenario looks especially plausible given the expansion of so-called private military companies (a misnomer, since they are typically entangled with the state) since the start of the Ukraine war.
These companies have existed in Russia for years; Gazprom, the majority state-owned oil and gas giant, has had several as a security service. During the war, these paramilitary units gained a new visibility when Prigozhin's Wagner Group, its ranks padded with convicts recruited from penal colonies, played a pivotal role on the frontline and was elevated in official propaganda to the status of legendary heroes.
In summer 2023, as Prigozhin grew increasingly defiant, Putin took steps to bring the Wagner Group to heel by requiring all "volunteers," i.e., mercenaries, serving in the "special operation" in Ukraine to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense. It was the Wagner Group's refusal to comply that led to Prigozhin's mutiny—a saga that ended with the Wagner Group being dismantled and with Prigozhin apparently blown up aboard his business jet.
But private military companies that do not answer to the Ministry of Defense can still legally function as long as they're not fighting in Ukraine. A month after the Prigozhin mutiny, new legislation was passed allowing regional governors to start such quasi-armies. Putin may think that they're a way to prevent or put down future rebellions, but they could easily have the opposite effect.
In other words, Russia has a lot of armed groups in the pay of corporate behemoths and government officials. It's not hard to imagine how this could go if the Putin regime collapses and the government fractures.
A protracted civil war seems unlikely, since most of the Russian population is too cowed and passive to mobilize for one side or another. But conflicts between armed groups controlled by a new breed of warlords may well lead to actual warfare, with disgruntled veterans (some of them violent ex-convicts) contributing to the turmoil. Post-Putin Russia could be an impoverished wasteland with well-protected islands of affluence, virtually autonomous cities run like medieval principalities, and roving gangs and militias. Depending on how impoverished it becomes, conflicts over resources could become frequent and brutal.
All that could lead to another frequently mentioned scenario: the dissolution of the Russian Federation.
The Russian Federation currently has 89 distinct areas known as "federal subjects," 83 of them internationally recognized. (The other six are territories annexed from Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, portions of which Russia currently doesn't control.) That includes 21 non-Slavic "autonomous republics" such as Chechnya, Dagestan, Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, and Tatarstan, and six non-Slavic "autonomous districts," some with a population larger than some republics.
Some of these entities have previously tried to secede—most notably Chechnya (pacified through two brutal wars and a deal that allows its current president to rule it as a de facto principality) and Tatarstan (whose 1991 declaration of sovereignty was approved in a referendum but invalidated by Russia's Constitutional Court).
A May report from the Association of Accredited Public Policy Advocates to the European Union indicates that separatist movements exist in 36 of the federation's constituent entities, but they are mostly small and weak. Even in republics extensively used by the Kremlin as a source of cannon fodder for the war in Ukraine, such as Buryatia and Dagestan, there has been no clamor for liberation.
Obviously, that could change quickly if the Putin regime collapsed, the economy tanked, and the country descended into chaos. Even in regions with an ethnic Russian majority, a group of determined activists could generate a serious push for independence.
The possibility of Russia's dissolution has been extensively discussed, with vigorous disagreement on both the plausibility and the desirability of such a scenario. Some anti-Putin, pro-Ukraine pundits believe that the West's reluctance to give Ukraine enough support for a decisive victory is due in large part to fears that the collapse of the Putin regime will lead to the collapse of the Russian Federation and the proliferation of dangerous rogue statelets in its place. Warlords with nukes are the ultimate nightmare.
Many Russian opposition figures, including Khodorkovsky, believe that Russia's disintegration is extremely unlikely and would be a disaster if it happened. On the other hand, politicians, activists, and commentators from countries historically subjugated by the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union—be it Ukraine, Estonia, or Poland—often argue that Russia will remain an imperialistic menace unless it's literally cut down to size, and that its peaceful dissolution via separatism is the best chance to do that. Writing in Politico last January, Janusz Bugajski of the Jamestown Foundation even suggested that Western democracies should encourage Russia's disintegration by supporting local separatist movements.
A more dispassionate analysis of the federation's possible breakup is offered by French scholar Bruno Tertrais, deputy director of the Foundation for Strategic Research, in a March paper for the Montaigne Institute. Tetrais warns that the disintegration of the Russian Federation, which he believes is entirely possible, would not be a relatively orderly event like the breakup of the USSR into 15 constituent republics. He instead expects a prolonged and chaotic process, very possibly accompanied by bloodbaths. What's more, the conflict would likely reverberate beyond Russia's borders—Tetrais bluntly writes that "the lockdown of Russia in the pandemic-related sense of the word" would be a necessary response—and the end result could be Russia's reunification under a new totalitarian regime.
The only good news, Tetrais argues, is that nuclear proliferation is unlikely, since Russia's nuclear forces today are almost entirely located "in the heart of the Federation," in areas under Moscow's secure control. But "severe disruption" could reach even those regions.
There's also the China factor. While Bugajski's Politico piece speculated that Russia's disintegration would weaken China because Beijing would lose a valuable ally, it is entirely possible to imagine a different outcome—one where China turns Russia's battered remnants into a resource-rich de facto colony, or even annexes portions of Russian territory in the Far East. (In September, China ruffled some feathers in Moscow by publishing a "national map" that includes some disputed land which is currently Russian.) While the Chinese regime almost certainly doesn't want Russia's collapse, since it favors stability, it would also be in a position to take advantage of such a collapse if it happened.
With the outcome of the war still uncertain, predicting the fate of the Putin regime and of Russia is necessarily speculative. Many other scenarios besides the ones outlined above may come to pass, most of which we cannot even envision today. (Who could have predicted the Prigozhin mutiny in early 2023, when the official Russian media were hailing the Wagner Group men as a heroic force fighting at Bakhmut?)
But there is a very strong chance that in a few years the United States and other liberal democracies will find themselves in a replay of the 1990s, making difficult decisions about how to respond to sweeping, uncertain changes in Russia. We may have to decide how much to trust and help a new liberalization, whether to respond with humanitarian aid or "lockdown" to chaos and collapse, whether to lend our support to breakaway republics.
After the evil that Russia has visited on the world in 2022–2023, reviving ghosts of World War I and World War II in the heart of Europe, it is tempting for many—especially those victimized by Russian imperialism—to write off the entire country as hopelessly toxic and fit only for a cordon sanitaire. But the exiled journalist and staunch Kremlin critic Igor Yakovenko has warned emphatically against such an approach.
"The idea that you can build a mile-high fence and dig a moat filled with crocodiles…and the rest of the world can breathe a sigh of relief—this is a mistake," Yakovenko said on his YouTube channel earlier this year. "Russia isn't going to fall into a deep hole, it's not going anywhere." An authoritarian Russia will pose a threat even if temporarily weakened; a Mad Max–like Russia of chaos, desperation, and private armies will pose a different kind of threat; and the replacement of Russia with a dozen or two dozen smaller states could create an entirely new set of problems.
Optimism about Russia's future, at this point, looks absurdly naive. But forever pessimism is not only bleak but ugly; it almost invariably involves borderline-racist notions of collective guilt and inherent national character. Better to adopt a cautious realism that adapts to developments within Russia and seeks to identify genuinely liberal forces. But nothing good is apt to come from Russia unless it is defeated in the Ukraine war and Putin's regime falls.
The post Will Russia Ever Be Free? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Affirmative: Cathy Young
The Biden administration announced a $2.2 billion aid package for Ukraine in February. It includes, among other things, longer-range bombs than the ones Ukraine has received until now.
In a sense, the question of whether the U.S. should be giving Ukraine more money is moot: Even among Republicans, pushed by circumstance into the more dovish position in this conflict, support for military aid remains strong. But does aid to Ukraine, broadly, make the world more free?
This question goes to a fundamental tension in the liberty movement. There is the impulse to adamantly oppose interventionism (particularly of an overtly military nature) as fundamentally connected to outsized government, and there is the impulse to support liberty not only in the United States but all over the world. The disastrous outcome of the war in Iraq, which initially had some support in the liberty camp, turned out to be a death knell for pro-liberty interventionism.
But Ukraine differs from Iraq in a number of key ways. No U.S. troops are directly involved in fighting. (Their most direct participation is training Ukrainian soldiers.) The indirect U.S. and NATO involvement is in response to foreign aggression against Ukraine. And while the cause of "democracy promotion" in Iraq always rested on dubious speculation about the country's potential to become a model democracy in the Middle East, Ukraine has already paid its dues as a would-be liberal democracy. Unless one buys into Kremlin narratives about the 2014 "U.S.-sponsored coup," which reduce mass protest to puppetry, it is clear Ukrainians have collectively cast their lot with liberty.
Obviously, this doesn't mean that Ukraine—which was the target of eight years of low-level warfare by Russia before full-scale war began—is a perfect liberal democracy. For that matter, most liberal democracies today are nowhere near "perfect" free societies. But the choice Ukraine made in 2014 was to join the (imperfectly) free world, even if some of the people who fought for its revolution were far-right nationalists.
What's happening in Ukraine right now is simple: An aggressive authoritarian state—one whose leadership, whether for ideological or opportunistic reasons, has been actively seeking to promote authoritarianism beyond its borders—is trying to crush an aspiring liberal democracy. Russia's "security interests" amount to the claim that it cannot be secure unless it can impose its diktat on its neighbors. And its claim of rescuing ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine from persecution is preposterous, considering that Russia and its proxy "insurgents" are the ones who have consistently put that population in danger.
Does it matter to liberty-loving Americans whether there is more liberty and human dignity around the world, or more authoritarianism and brutality? I would argue that it does. In a world made small by instant long-distance communication and shrinking travel time, the creep—or march—of illiberalism around the world affects us. That doesn't mean we should actively "export democracy." But when other countries are exporting autocracy and barbarism, we can step in at least to the extent of helping their victims. It is telling that so many opponents of military aid, even those who profess principled noninterventionism, so often end up recycling anti-Ukraine slanders (the neo-Nazi menace, for example) to undercut Ukraine's claim to sympathy. When it's just the facts, Ukraine looks eminently deserving.
Yes, other allies need to pitch in more. But we, too, need to give enough—and fast enough—to allow Ukraine a meaningful victory, not just an endless slog. And while we're at it, to send the strong message that nuclear blackmail doesn't work.
Negative: William Ruger
The United States should not increase its funding to Ukraine. Doing so is unnecessary to meet our vital national interests, would require spending further taxpayer dollars disconnected from the purpose of just government, and could seriously harm our security.
America's national interests are minimally implicated by the war. The most serious threat posed is that the U.S. and Russia would find themselves in an escalatory spiral leading to a nuclear exchange. While the odds of that may seem low, risk is probability multiplied by consequences. We are talking about huge risks and thus should be cautious about supporting Ukraine in a way that could get the U.S. into such a spiral. Increased funding heightens that danger, especially if it helps Ukraine threaten Russian territory.
The increased risk might be justified if the stakes of the war were high. That is just not the case for the U.S., even if it is existential for Ukrainians. Outside of the nuclear realm, Russia is not much of a threat to us. We are a superpower and dwarf Russia economically and militarily. The U.S. enjoys a robust nuclear deterrent, which practically guarantees our territorial integrity. We also have powerful conventional capabilities, and our allies in Europe could alone balance Russian power. Russia has clearly shown its relative weakness, performing poorly on the battlefield and being unable to defeat a much smaller country on its doorstep. We don't need to worry about it marching across a more powerful Europe.
Right now, Ukraine's existence isn't at grave risk. But even if Russia could conquer its neighbor, we lived with and even won the Cold War when Ukraine was part of the much more powerful Soviet Union. For Russia, a victory would entail a high cost and the spoils would be a wrecked Ukraine. Forgive me if I don't accept the argument that Ukraine is fighting for our freedom, even as I am impressed by the bravery and fighting skill of its citizens.
That leaves three possible rationales for increasing our funding: that it is a reasonable cost to pay to bleed the Russians, that it would help support a valuable sovereignty norm, or that it could help a more liberal Ukraine to win back its territory.
The first isn't compelling because we'd be spending billions more of coerced taxpayer dollars to marginally harm a Russia that isn't a grand threat outside the nuclear realm, while increasing the risk of nuclear war. A strategy to bleed a rival in a proxy war isn't the worst approach, especially to turn around an unfavorable balance of power. But trends favor us, not Russia. Those who actually care about Ukrainians might also find this too cynical an argument since we'd be effectively bleeding Ukraine to undermine Russia in the process.
The second we could take more seriously if the U.S. actually upheld this norm consistently, or if we could entrust to the norm our future security. But is it worth the risks involved as opposed to relying primarily on our own hard power?
The third also fails for true liberals, because the proper role of a just state is to protect the rights of the members of its political community. It does so legitimately in foreign affairs when it secures and advances the national interests: our territorial integrity, the conditions of our economic prosperity, and our constitutional order. Trying to protect the rights of others, disconnected from what is required for our interests, is beyond the scope of what a just state entails.
This is especially bad for political justice when such actions significantly increase the risk that we will be dragged into a nuclear or conventional war while requiring greater taxation. Even assuming Ukraine is a paragon of liberalism (which it isn't), that isn't enough to warrant sending more American tax dollars overseas and increasing the risk to our vital interests.
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]]>Explanations for Russia's 2022 war in Ukraine often go back to 2014, when the Revolution of Dignity replaced Kremlin ally Viktor Yanukovych with a pro-Western government and Vladimir Putin responded by annexing Crimea and sponsoring separatist enclaves in Eastern Ukraine. Others focus on 2005, when the Orange Revolution first brought a Western-oriented leadership to power in Kyiv. Some analysts look further back to the messy history of Ukrainian nationalism in the 1930s and '40s, including the anti-Soviet fighters who collaborated with the Nazis.
But the history of Russia and Ukraine goes all the way back to the Middle Ages. It raises fascinating questions about the role that different visions of liberty and the state played in their development.
Russian and Ukrainian medieval and early modern history is sufficiently relevant that last summer, Putin produced an essay titled "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians," which was posted on the Kremlin website in Russian, Ukrainian, and English. Putin's main thesis was that Russians and Ukrainians are part of the same family, united by language and religion but separated in the 13th century, when the northeastern part of Kievan Rus was conquered by Batu Khan's Golden Horde, while most of its southwest became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In later centuries, Putin wrote, the northeastern Russians freed themselves from the Horde's yoke, while their southwestern Orthodox Christian brethren found themselves increasingly subjugated to Polish-Lithuanian Catholic rule, which eventually pushed them to seek the Russian czar's patronage.
After that, in Putin's narrative, everything was basically fine until the czarist empire ended with the Russian Revolution. In 1921, the Soviet Union was born, and Ukraine became one of its republics after a brief period of independence, its territory padded with lands that had previously belonged to Russia. Seventy years later, the Soviet Union broke up, and Ukraine went off on its own, taking rightfully Russian lands with it.
The gist of this supposedly learned treatise, ridiculed by Russian and Ukrainian scholars outside Putin's court, was threefold: 1) Ukrainians can fulfill their national identity only in an alliance with Russia, 2) Ukrainians were never oppressed by the czarist empire or by the Bolsheviks, and 3) Russia was robbed of land (although Ukraine actually lost more land than it gained when the Bolsheviks drew the republic's borders). The real point of the essay seems especially clear in retrospect: to justify Russian aggression against Ukraine.
In a July 2021 discussion on the Russian-language BBC News website, historian Andrei Zubov—who was booted from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 2014 after criticizing the annexation of Crimea—agreed that the separation of Golden Horde–occupied eastern Russia and the proto-Ukrainian west was the beginning of the Ukrainians' development as a distinct people with far stronger "Western" values than Russia. (Ukraine, which originally meant "borderlands," became a name for that specific region in the 17th century.) Its European imports included university education, self-organizing artisans' guilds, and "Magdeburg rights" of self-government for cities and towns.
In a March 2022 essay published by Novaya Gazeta, an independent outlet that has since gone on hiatus due to censorship, Moscow State University historian Yuri Pivovarov offered a more extensive analysis of this history. Pivovarov writes that the collapse of Kievan Rus after the Mongol invasion eventually led to the emergence of two major states: the Grand Duchy of Muscovy and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, whose sovereigns were sometimes styled grand duke of Lithuania and Ruthenia. Ruthenians, or Rusyns, was a term for the Western populations of Rus, who would later become Ukrainians and Belarussians. These two duchies vied for political and cultural supremacy as the dominant Eastern Slavonic state—essentially, the "real" Rus—from the late 14th century until the late 16th century, when Muscovy won.
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Pivovarov says, was in many ways a typical European feudal state, featuring "division of power among aristocratic landowners" and a hierarchy of vassalage with the grand duke as the supreme suzerain. In some ways, it was more "liberal" than most of Western Europe in that era: Instead of a hereditary monarch, it had a hospodar (sovereign) chosen by an assembly of nobles. By contrast, the Grand Duchy of Muscovy was highly centralized, with the grand duke—later the czar—not just at the pinnacle of the aristocratic hierarchy but "soaring above it like an earthly god."
With time, the czars' power became even more concentrated, culminating in the 16th century reign of Ivan IV, whose bloody terror against the boyar nobility relied on a special guard—the roughly 6,000-strong oprichnina—drawn primarily from the lower orders and given broad license to stamp out "treason." While the oprichnina (which Pivovarov sees as replicating Horde rule with a domestic oppressor) was the product of Ivan's paranoia, it also served to equalize all of his subjects as the czar's de facto slaves. Meanwhile, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, moved toward more regional autonomy and more limitations on the powers of the monarchy.
A binary framing of Ukrainian and Russian history as "liberty vs. autocracy/slavery" would be too simplistic. The franchise in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was limited to nobles. Moscow State University historian Fyodor Gaida, who has defended Putin's treatise, argues that the privileges of townsfolk were enjoyed by about one-tenth of the population, while the peasantry on lands that fell to Poland was subjected to a serfdom that was in some ways harsher than Russia's. In the 16th and 17th centuries, for example, enserfed peasants in Russia—but not in Poland—could petition the sovereign about mistreatment by their masters. The Orthodox suffered repression under Polish-Lithuanian Catholic rule, although Pivovarov notes that, from the start of the 17th century, Ukrainians pushed back by creating their own Orthodox institutions: schools and seminaries, charities, hospitals, printing shops, etc.
Eastern Ukraine's unification with Russia is a complicated story. The Cossack warlord who spearheaded it, Bohdan Khmelnitsky, was not so much seeking brotherly union as craftily playing the czar, the king of Poland, and the Ottoman sultan against one another for a better deal. But Pivovarov argues that Ukraine—officially known from the late 18th century on as Malorossiya or Little Russia—remained a thorn in the side of the czarist empire because of its freedom-loving culture. This culture likely was not limited to elites: It is notable that, while Catherine the Great enserfed Ukrainian peasants in 1783, subsequent edicts (which did not apply in Russia) severely curbed landowners' ability to sell them.
The events of 2022 can be seen as another chapter in a very long story: Ukraine looking westward and seeking freedom while Russia slides deeper into autocracy. Some predict this conflict could lead to the end of Russia's existence as a unified central state. But even without such a drastic turn, a victory for Ukraine will be, in a sense, a triumph for the Slavic heritage of freedom.
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]]>Reason's December special issue marks the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This story is part of our exploration of the global legacy of that evil empire, and our effort to be certain that the dire consequences of communism are not forgotten.
It was the summer of 1983, and I, a Soviet émigré and an American in the making, was chatting with the pleasant middle-aged woman sitting next to me on a bus from Asbury Park, New Jersey, to Cherry Hill. Eventually our conversation got to the fact that I was from the Soviet Union, having arrived in the U.S. with my family three years earlier at age 17. "Oh, really?" said my seatmate. "You must have been pretty offended when our president called the Soviet Union an 'evil empire'! Wasn't that ridiculous?" But her merriment at the supposed absurdity of President Ronald Reagan's recent speech was cut short when I somewhat sheepishly informed her that I thought he was entirely on point.
In 1983, the 61-year-old empire looked like it would be eternal. My next memorable conversation about the Soviet Union with a fellow passenger, in December 1991, proved otherwise. I was aboard a flight from Moscow to Newark, New Jersey, after a two-week visit, waiting for takeoff. "Do you know that the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore?" the man next to me said. I stared. He showed me that day's International Herald Tribune with a headline about the Belovezha Accords, an agreement by which the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus agreed to dissolve the USSR.
The evil empire was over.
The woman on the bus in 1983 did not surprise me. By then, I had already met many Americans for whom "anti-Soviet" was almost as much of a pejorative as it had been in the pages of Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party. My favorite was a man in the café at the Rutgers Student Center who shrugged off the victims of the gulag camps by pointing out that capitalism kills people too—with cigarettes, for example. When I recovered from shock, I told him that smoking was far more ubiquitous in the Soviet Union, and anti-smoking campaigns far less developed. That momentarily stumped him.
My mother was also at Rutgers at the time as a piano instructor. She once got into a heated argument over lunch with a colleague and friend after he lamented America's appalling treatment of the old and the sick. She ventured that, from her ex-Soviet vantage point, it didn't seem that bad. "Are you telling me that it's just as bad in the Soviet Union?" her colleague retorted, only to be dumbstruck when my mother clarified that, actually, she meant it was much worse. She tried to illustrate her point by telling him about my grandmother's sojourn in an overcrowded Soviet hospital ward: More than once, when the woman in the next bed rolled over in her sleep, her arm flopped across my grandma's body. Half-decent care required bribing a nurse, and half-decent food had to be brought from home. My mother's normally warm and gracious colleague shocked her by replying, "I'm sorry, but I don't believe you." Her perceptions, he told her, were obviously colored by antipathy toward the Soviet regime. Eventually, he relented enough to allow that perhaps my grandmother did have a very bad experience in a Soviet hospital—but surely projecting it onto all of Soviet medicine was uncalled for.
It wasn't just the campus lefties. The Twitter generation may believe that mainstream American culture at the time was in the grip of Reaganite anti-communism, but some of us remember differently. Media coverage of Soviet human rights abuses, for instance, was frequently accompanied by reminders that the United States and the Soviet Union simply had "fundamentally different perceptions of human rights," as U.S. News & World Report put it in 1985: "To the Kremlin, human rights are associated primarily with the conditions of physical survival." A 1982 guide for high school study of human rights issued by the National Council for Social Studies even suggested that it was "ethnocentric" to regard "our" definition of human rights as superior to "theirs."
As Soviet society began to open up under Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost (a term that means something like "openness and transparency," and that one Soviet dissident defined as "a tortoise crawling towards freedom of speech"), more information began to come out in the Soviet press that cast serious doubt on the Soviet Union's supposed gains on the social welfare side of "human rights." There were stories about the dismal state of Soviet medicine, about crime, about millions condemned to appalling living conditions, about Dickensian orphanages sheltering abused and malnourished children, and about homeless people who suddenly turned out to exist, despite prior reports to the contrary. (The weekly newspaper Argumenty i Fakty reported that 174,000 vagrants were picked up in 1984 alone.) Meanwhile, the regime was crumbling; as satirist Victor Shenderovich put it later, "the country still had Soviet power but the food had already run out."
In just a few years, Soviet communism was relegated, just as Reagan had predicted to much ridicule, to "the ash heap of history." The leaders of the new Russia that emerged in its place themselves echoed the language of "evil empire" when they spoke of the Soviet past: During the 1996 elections, President Boris Yeltsin told supporters at a campaign rally they had to win "so that Russia can never be called an evil empire again."
For leftists who still saw communism as a noble dream, this was a devastating defeat. In 1999, at the close of what was, in a very real sense, the Soviet century, the Polish-American socialist journalist Daniel Singer—himself the son of a gulag survivor—wrote in The Nation that a reckoning with communist atrocities was necessary; but he also rejected the "corpse-counting" of The Black Book of Communism, a collection of historical essays that sought to chronicle those atrocities. Singer took the authors to task for reducing communism's record to "crimes, terror and repression."
"The Soviet Union did not rest on the gulag alone. There was also enthusiasm, construction, the spread of education and social advancement for millions," Singer asserted, lamenting that the Black Book approach made it impossible to "comprehend why millions of the best and brightest rallied behind the red flag or…turned a blind eye to the crimes committed in its name." (It was apparently not satisfying to answer with the pithy phrase coined by statistician and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Because they were "intellectuals-yet-idiots.")
As the new century rolled onward, the Soviet Union was still dead, but it turned out to be an unquiet ghost. The new man at Russia's helm, career KGB officer Vladimir Putin, brought back the Soviet anthem (albeit with new lyrics about God and Russian greatness) and the red flag as the Russian Armed Forces banner, working to make Soviet nostalgia respectable—albeit in a weird blend with Russian nationalism, Orthodox Christianity, and reverence for the czars. An idealized image of Soviet communism also bubbled back up among progressives in the West, especially after the reputation of democratic capitalism was left tarnished by the war in Iraq and the Great Recession. "Neoliberalism" was out; "socialism" was in: From 2010 onward, 49 percent or larger portions of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents and of adults under 30 have said they have a positive view of socialism. By the end of the decade, even communism was surging in popularity: It was viewed favorably by 36 percent of millennials (up from 28 percent in 2018) and 28 percent of Generation Z.
Soviet-style communism is also getting favorable press in progressive venues—from the trollish Chapo Trap House podcast to Salon ("Why you're wrong about Communism") to radical chic playpen Teen Vogue, which hailed Karl Marx for his 200th birthday in 2018 as a thinker who "inspired social movements in Soviet Russia, China, Cuba." On the opinion pages of The New York Times, Kristen Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, dubiously declared that women had better sex under Soviet-style socialism, a thesis she then expanded into a slim book lauding communist strides toward gender equality. Even The New Republic, once a bastion of liberal anti-communism, jumped on the bandwagon in 2016 with "Who's Afraid of Communism?" by former Occupy Wall Street activist Malcolm Harris, who zinged Hillary Clinton for her old-fashioned Cold Warrior mentality and argued that communism was getting a bum rap, given the Soviet Union's heroic role in the victory over Nazism and the key contributions of communists to "liberation" struggles all over the world.
On social media today, "tankies" with hammer-and-sickle emojis in their usernames and Marx or Lenin profile headers are a loud and proud faction of lefty Twitter. These are overwhelmingly young people, in their 20s and sometimes late teens, steeped in the racial and sexual identity politics of their generation of activists, often sporting gender pronouns and rainbow flags in their bios along with the communist symbology. Many seem convinced that actual Soviet-style communism—not just the "hasn't been tried" utopian ideal—was an admirable vision. "The more I read about the Soviet Union the more obvious it becomes why the west had to demonize it," writes a "queer," "anti-imperialist" Twitter user with the colorful moniker "hezbolleninism." "The USSR's ideology was not only a threat to capitalism, it was a threat to white supremacy."
Not surprisingly, like the 20th century "political pilgrims" (as author Paul Hollander called them) who traveled to the Soviet Union or Cuba and came back with glowing reports, the 21st century communist nostalgics often have a tenuous connection with reality.
Hezbolleninism's tweet, for example, featured a screenshot from the 2018 book Politics and Pedagogy in the 'Post-Truth' Era: Insurgent Philosophy and Praxis (Bloomsbury Academic) by Derek R. Ford, a professor of education studies at DePauw University in Indiana, discussing anti-racism in the Soviet Union. Ford describes a 1930 incident involving "Robert Robertson, a Jamaican native and U.S. citizen" who came to work at a tractor factory in Stalingrad alongside a few hundred white American technicians. (The Soviets were strenuously recruiting foreign and especially American specialists, since Lenin's prediction that the new regime would quickly train its own cadre with proletarian backgrounds and impeccable Bolshevik convictions had proved a tad overconfident.) On his first day, the black worker was roughed up by two white Americans when he tried to eat in the American dining hall. The assault was widely publicized and denounced at factory meetings around the Soviet Union; the attackers were convicted of "white chauvinism" at a show trial and sentenced to two years of imprisonment (commuted to 10 years banishment from the Soviet Union). "Robertson remained in the Soviet Union, where he eventually gained citizenship," reports Ford, for whom this episode demonstrates "the seriousness with which the Soviet Union—its people and its state—took racism."
But Ford left out the end of the story. After becoming a Soviet citizen, Robinson (yes, Ford got the name wrong) spent decades trying to get out of the supposed anti-racist paradise. He finally managed it in 1974, when he obtained permission to travel to Uganda as a tourist and never returned. He eventually made it to the U.S., regained his citizenship in 1986, and wrote a scathingly anti-Soviet 1988 memoir titled Black on Red. Robinson conceded that the Soviet Union gave him professional opportunities he probably would not have had as a black American in that era. But he also described the ordeal of the Great Terror, when his friends and colleagues were disappearing one after another, as well as casual and not-so-casual encounters with racism.
Robinson's Soviet saga is richly illustrative of Soviet "anti-racism," deployed almost exclusively as a weapon with which to bludgeon the Americans (and more generally the West). Black people were useful insofar as they advanced the communist cause, but they were treated more as white-savior projects than as human beings in their own right.
Likewise, the African students who began to attend Soviet universities in the 1960s as part of the USSR's outreach to newly decolonized African countries tended to be viewed by their hosts as backward, needy, and often ungrateful recipients of Soviet largesse. In a fascinating 2014 article in the journal Diplomatic History, Russian studies scholar and podcaster Sean Guillory writes that the Africans were given insultingly easy entrance exams with elementary school–level math problems, while their complaints of racist harassment were generally shrugged off as hypersensitivity bred by colonialist oppression. Meanwhile, grassroots Soviet humor generated its share of extremely nasty jokes (which circulated freely at my school in the 1970s) depicting the Soviet Union's African guests as simple-minded savages, perpetually horny for white women and literally related to monkeys.
Anti-black racism was just part of a bigger picture of prejudice. As early as 1926, the Soviet regime began to plan the removal of ethnic Koreans living in the Soviet Far East, who were seen as a threat who might work with the Japanese to undermine the Soviet Union. Deportations began slowly, until 170,000 people were forcibly moved to Central Asia in 1937. While parallels to the internment of Japanese Americans in the United States are obvious, the Soviet version was far deadlier: estimates of the death toll from malnutrition, illness, and exposure (with the deportees transported in unheated cargo cars in cold weather and resettled in hastily constructed barracks or huts) range from 16,500 to 50,000. This ethnic cleansing was followed by others in the 1940s: Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, and other ethnicities were collectively branded as Nazi collaborators and brutally relocated. Some were allowed to return after Josef Stalin's death; others, such as the Crimean Tatars, were not.
Anti-Asian prejudice soared after the Sino-Soviet split, with rabid propaganda depicting the Chinese as the ultimate enemy and generating genuine paranoia about a Chinese invasion. As often happens, anyone who looked Chinese was fair game. My mother once heard a shopper at a Moscow farmers market shout to a vendor, "You! Chinaman! How much for your apples?" When the vendor defensively replied that he was Kazakh, the woman retorted, "Yeah, I know you're not a Chinaman. If I thought you were, I'd bash your head in."
And that's not to mention the anti-Semitism that culminated in the campaign against "cosmopolitans" and Zionists in Stalin's final years, but continued in more low-key ways for decades after that. Discrimination against Jews in college admissions was so common that it was reflected in numerous jokes (e.g., one in which an ethnic Russian taking a college entrance history exam is asked for the year of the sinking of the Titanic while a Jewish applicant is told to list all the casualties by name). The brother of one of my mother's piano students got a failing grade on the entrance exams despite a brilliant academic record; after his father got an influential professor to intervene, it turned out that the examiner thought he looked Jewish. In deference to the professor, the examiner agreed to change the failing grade but irritably remarked, "Just don't tell me he's not a Jew—I'm not stupid!"
On a more basic level, Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda trickled down into a casual anti-Semitism that regularly manifested itself in harassment and even violence. Thankfully, my own bad experiences were very minor (a boy in my building shouting "You miserable Jew-girl!" during a playground conflict; a drunk at a bus stop ranting about Jews). But my parents endured several years of abuse by a Jew-hating neighbor in a communal apartment before they were finally able to move out. Other people had harrowing stories of children being tormented at school by anti-Semitic bullies who acted with impunity. A fellow émigré I met in the U.S. told me her decision to leave was solidified when she learned that her teenaged son had started carrying a knife to school for self-defense.
Ironically for American leftists, the dominant Soviet attitude toward race and ethnicity was precisely the sort of see-no-evil faux colorblindness that progressives love to denounce in the U.S. context. In nine and a half years of Soviet schooling, I sat through numerous lectures on proper Soviet values and only ever heard racial or ethnic prejudice mentioned as an example of Bad Things Over There In America.
Even the enemy's racism could be downplayed if convenient: Witness the Soviet authorities' systematic erasure of the Jewish Holocaust in discussing Nazi atrocities. This adds an ironic asterisk to the praise often heaped on the Soviet Union for its role in defeating the Nazis. Yes, Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz, but the official Soviet report on its horrors described the victims as "citizens of the Soviet Union, Poland, France," and others, with just one specific mention of Jews—a passing reference to "a Jewish woman named Bella" in an excerpt from a survivor's statement. In 1961, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was briefly "canceled," as we would say nowadays, for "fomenting ethnic division" by explicitly focusing on a Nazi massacre of Jews in the famous poem "Babi Yar," and the Literary Gazette editor who greenlit the poem was sacked.
Class equality in the Soviet Union was just as phony as anti-racism. In Politics and Pedagogy in the 'Post-Truth' Era, Ford admiringly mentions that "wage disparities were relatively minor," with top officials of the economic ministries earning only three to four times as much as skilled workers. He adds that the earnings gap between the highest- and lowest-paid groups shrank in the 1960s and 1970s.
This comical analysis ("post-truth," indeed!) leaves out the fact, known to anyone with the remotest familiarity with Soviet life, that living standards in the Soviet Union were not determined primarily by official earnings. Party bosses and high-level government officials received almost everything for free, from palatial apartments and dachas (vacation homes) to chauffeured limousines and consumer goods. There was also a secret hierarchy of "special distribution shops" where even lower-rank members of the party and state bureaucracy could buy groceries—with variety and quality that ordinary citizens could not even dream of, no lines, and lower prices than in regular stores. (My father once got smuggled into such a place by a savvy friend who conned his way past the security guard by insinuating that he knew someone important on the staff, but no purchase could be made without a membership pass.) Shenderovich, the Russian satirist, recalled that at a conference in Irkutsk in the late 1980s, he and his colleagues subsisted on sparse, barely edible meals at a cafe near their hotel—until they learned that they had a pass for the cafeteria of the regional party committee, which offered a cheap five-course dinner featuring such elusive delicacies as tomato salad, venison soup, and baked whitefish.
And then there was the separate shadow economy of blat (favors) based on connections and access. ("It's not what you know, it's who you know" was never as true as in the Soviet Union.) For instance, if you could arrange a bed at an elite hospital or admission to a prestigious university—either through your own job or through someone you knew—that could be a ticket to a steady supply of quality food, coveted theater seats, a washing machine, or imported footwear. There was also real money to be made on the black market. If you worked for a store or a warehouse, you pretty much had it made—unless you got greedy and reckless enough to get arrested. People with nothing to steal (engineers, for example) were out of luck.
This fundamental lack of understanding of how the Soviet system of privilege worked is also evident in a hilarious 2018 article in Jacobin, summed up in a tweet that got a well-deserved drubbing: "For all the Soviet Union's many faults, by traversing its vast architectural landscape, we can get a glimpse of what a built environment for the many, not the few, could look like." The prime example of architecture "for the many" invoked by author Marianela D'Aprile, an activist with the Democratic Socialists of America, is an elegant writers union resort on Lake Sevan in Armenia that radiated a "quiet luxury." That is D'Aprile's "glimpse of [a] possible better world." Under capitalism, she writes, such a building would be owned by profit seekers and "reserved for those who can pay large sums"—but imagine "if unions could send their members to their lakeside resort."
One can only wonder whether D'Aprile is genuinely unaware that a writers union resort in the Soviet Union would have been reserved for the cream of the elite, or just willfully blind to facts that might get in the way of her fantasy. To be sure, union-run resorts for ordinary people did exist. In the Soviet Union's early decades, they provided heavily regimented vacations that stressed physical fitness and were spent with one's "labor collective," not with family; later, they became more relaxed and family-oriented. But the accommodations definitely did not exude "quiet luxury": they generally ranged from atrocious to decent-but-accessible-only-with-connections.
Another major aspect of how privilege operated in the Soviet Union could be summed up in the famous maxim about real estate: location, location, location. My family was immensely privileged simply by virtue of having been born in the capital. A Moscow propiska (the residency permit that each Soviet citizen was required to have) was one of the most coveted things in the country, an incentive to sham marriages, ingenious schemes, and elaborate deceptions. The city enjoyed a special status when it came to snabzheniye (supply of food and consumer goods), quality of services, housing, medicine, and so on. Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) was only a notch below. Other large cities were in the second tier, and it was a downward slope from there until you got to small towns mired in squalor, deprivation, and crime (especially drunken violence). There, you would find decrepit housing, grungy food stores with bare shelves, dismal transit, and worse roads. A bus trip could easily expand from one hour to three in bad weather.
My parents and I saw some of this firsthand in 1979 when, already waiting for an exit visa, we decided to visit Yaroslavl and Rostov, two towns notable for their medieval Russian architecture. The architecture was not in great shape, but everything else was truly grim. There was nothing but stacks of canned fish at one store, boxes of fudge candy at another. Want food? Be prepared to line up outside a couple of hours before opening, a saleswoman explained. The shelves emptied quickly.
On weekends, hordes of people from towns as far as a four- or five-hour ride away from Moscow would scramble aboard trains to go to the capital in search of food, braving not only the long trip but frequent open hostility from Muscovites. Once, when my mother was standing in line at a grocery store, some of her fellow shoppers turned viciously on a shabbily dressed old woman they felt was buying too much—and all the more when she explained it was for her grandson in some godforsaken Soviet Hicksville. An angry chorus erupted, blaming out-of-town interlopers for the food shortages ("You people come here and pick everything clean!"). When my mother tried to intervene, they turned their ire on her, saying she was no doubt an out-of-towner herself or she wouldn't be sticking up for the old woman.
All Soviet citizens were equal, of course. But there were so many ways in which some were very much more equal than others.
The most mystifying of resurgent left-wing myths about the Soviet Union, though, is that of Soviet sexual liberality and gender progressivism. I always wonder if the Twitter tankies with rainbow flags or "queer" and "pansexual" labels in their profiles are aware that sexual relations between men were a criminal offense in the Soviet Union for most of its existence. One could point out that the first criminal code of the Russian Soviet Republic in 1923 did not, in contrast to czarist Russia, criminalize sex between two males. But in a 1995 article in The Journal of Homosexuality, historian Laura Engelstein argues that the 1934 restoration of criminal penalties was not "a clear reversal of the seemingly enlightened legal practice of the 1920s"; in fact, "Soviet courts tried to repress sexual variation even when homosexuality was not a crime," as early as 1922.
At best, the early Bolshevik revolutionaries regarded homosexuality as a sickness and a perverted manifestation of bourgeois decadence. In later years, all it could take to send a man to prison was a neighbor's testimony that he often had male overnight visitors but no visible girlfriends. Unlike most American sodomy laws, the Soviet version required no evidence of specific sexual acts. Meanwhile, Soviet culture ruthlessly censored anything gay: Thus, the Soviet edition of the letters and diaries of Peter Tchaikovsky scrubbed numerous passages in which the composer discussed his same-sex attraction as well as encounters and relationships with young men.
Women's liberation fared only slightly better. True, the early days of the revolution saw an upsurge in female activism, and the Bolsheviks strongly advocated equality of the sexes. In a 1918 speech to a congress of female workers, Lenin declared that the Soviet republic must make it a top priority to ensure equal rights for women. But ultimately, women's rights were only a means to an end: As Lenin said in the same speech, equality was essential because "the experience of all liberation movements shows that the success of a revolution depends on the extent to which women participate in it."
The revolution won; women, not so much. While they joined the workforce en masse, aided by universally available (if poor quality) day care, Lenin's promise of liberation from "petty and mind-numbing" domestic drudgery didn't quite pan out. The Soviet woman's "second shift" was made much worse by scarcity, lack of conveniences, and a consumer sector in which the customer was always screwed. Shopping alone was practically a full-time job, between standing in line and going from store to store to find different items; once the shopping was done, you had to factor in some extra time for scraping dirt off the vegetables and throwing out the rotten ones, trying to find the edible parts of what the store laughingly called a steak, or salvaging the milk from a leaky carton. Add to this the fact that the scarcity of decent clothes often made sewing and knitting a necessity rather than a hobby.
Plenty of women could be found in nontraditional jobs, from road repair and other hard physical labor to medicine and engineering (both low-paid and relatively low-prestige), but they were virtually absent from high-level leadership posts. Especially in the post–World War II period, official Soviet culture vigorously reinforced traditional gender norms. Women were celebrated as mothers, men as warriors; in schools, girls had mandatory classes in housekeeping (mainly sewing and cooking) and boys in craft skills. Meanwhile, attempts to start a conversation on feminism in the early 1980s were treated as a subversive bourgeois activity—after all, according to official declarations, the "woman question" in the Soviet Union had been solved by 1930. When a group of women led by Leningrad writer Tatyana Mamonova published an underground feminist almanac in 1980, they were targeted by the KGB; Mamonova and two other contributors were expelled from the Soviet Union, while several others were imprisoned.
My own personal experience of the Soviet Union was far from the worst of it. My family lived well by Soviet standards. By the time I was growing up, Soviet totalitarianism had gone relatively soft; ideological diktat wasn't nearly as rigid or omnipresent as some Westerners imagine. Some of the most popular Soviet films and TV movies made in the 1970s were not particularly communist, for example: They were either period pieces (such as a four-part musical miniseries based on The Three Musketeers) or romantic comedies of the "boy meets girl," not "boy meets tractor," kind.
And yet it was still a totalitarian system—a system in which I knew at the age of 10 that if I told anyone at school about the things my parents said at home (for instance, that Lenin was not the greatest genius and humanist of all time and that Soviet children were not the happiest in all the world), "Papa will go to jail." It was a system in which closet dissidents like my parents had to "live by the lie" and regularly demonstrate feigned allegiance to the regime.
It was a system in which "they," the powers that be, could do anything and the individual could do nothing. When I was in ninth grade, about a year before my family's departure, word went around my school that everyone graduating at the end of 10th grade would have to spend a year in Siberia "volunteering" on the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline railroad. The rumor, generated by the hype in the Soviet press around the project and its enthusiasts in the Young Communist League, turned out to be false. But it was entirely believable, given that college students, some high schoolers, and young adults who already had jobs were routinely dispatched as "volunteers" to collective farms for a month to help with the fall harvest.
It was a system in which any manifestation of personal autonomy or unorthodox interests could make you an enemy of the state. Jazz fans who circulated clandestine copies of Western records were persecuted in the late 1950s. Karate, which became hugely popular in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, was abruptly banned in 1981, reportedly because the authorities were concerned that it was channeling attention away from more important Olympic sports and that it might enable people to fight back against the police in mass protests. Suddenly, teaching karate could earn you a five-year stint in the prison camps.
The Soviet Union's first few decades were the stuff of nightmares, from the Red Terror, which is believed to have killed over a million people after the Revolution, to the "Terror-Famine" in Ukraine (as well as Kazakhstan and parts of Southern Russia), whose death toll is estimated at 7 million, to Stalin's Great Terror, in which hundreds of thousands were shot and many more worked to death in the Siberian gulag camps. Among my parents' friends and coworkers, few did not have a story (if they were candid about it) of a family member or relative imprisoned in the Stalin era for some absurd reason: Someone's aunt was branded a subversive because a neighbor heard her playing a funeral march on the piano the day a notorious "enemy of the people" was executed; someone's father was charged with fomenting "defeatist attitudes" during the war for remarking that Stalin "sounded sad" in his radio address to the people.
By the end of its existence, the Soviet Union was an exhausted totalitarian regime trying to maintain its grip on a society that laughed at official pieties, craved consumer goods, was thrilled by the forbidden, and idolized the West. The woman on the bus who had thought it was ridiculous to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire" came to mind, seven or eight years later, when I saw a photo of a rally in Moscow. A sign was being held by someone who, like me, had lived under the reality of communism. It said: "THE USSR: YES, IT IS THE EVIL EMPIRE!"
The post Yes, It Was An 'Evil Empire' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last summer, when the short-lived "Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone" in Seattle renamed itself the "Capitol Hill Occupied Protest," one protester explained to a reporter that the acronym CHOP was a tribute to the Reign of Terror in France more than 200 years ago. "What happened to the people who did not get on board with the French Revolution?" he asked, to which the assembled crowd responded, "CHOPPED!"
This scene was just one manifestation of the guillotine fad that has been sweeping America's resurgent progressive left. #Guillotine2020 is an actual hashtag on lefty Twitter, mostly (if hyperbolically) dedicated to the malfeasance of Republicans, rich folks, and other baddies. DIY guillotines have been popping up at protests, including ones outside the White House and the Washington, D.C., mansion of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Jacobin magazine, one of the radical left's most prominent media outlets, has been selling a guillotine poster captioned "Some assembly required"—even though the publication claims its name is a reference to the Haitian Revolution and its "Black Jacobins," not the French revolutionary faction that perpetrated the Terror in 1793–94.
So far, this revolutionary playacting has been more annoying than terrifying: Much like far-right memes about "helicopter rides," a reference to extrajudicial executions via helicopter drop, it's about trolling, not killing, the enemy. But it still signals an embrace of bloodthirsty rhetoric—and of ideological homage to one of history's bloodier leftist dictatorships.
The new guillotine chic also speaks to the French Revolution's enduring hold over our cultural imagination. The five-year period from the fall of the Bastille in July 1789 to the fall of the Jacobins in July 1794 has shaped our political language in more ways than we realize. It gave us the terms right and left in their political sense, based simply on the seating of deputies in France's first National Assembly. It also gave us terror in its political sense, and with it the words terrorism and terrorist. It pioneered violent progressive utopianism and effectively birthed modern conservatism, via Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. It even influenced fashions, pioneering short haircuts on women in tribute to guillotine victims—who had their hair shorn before execution—in the Terror's aftermath. (Choker necklaces, apparently, have a similar origin.)
More important, the French Revolution has inspired radical movements for two centuries—notably Russia's Bolsheviks, who explicitly claimed the Jacobins as their forefathers. Now, a resurgent American left has revived its romance not only with Soviet Communism (even "Uncle Joe" Stalin has a Twitter fan club!) but with Jacobinism—not a good sign for where modern progressivism is headed.
From today's vantage point, the French Revolution may look like a distant costume drama mostly of interest to history buffs. But look closer, and its relevance to the current moment is striking—whether it's the paranoid style, the sentimental idealization of the downtrodden, the quest to remake human nature and reset history, or the view that morality is determined by rank in an oppressor/oppressed hierarchy. ("How tenderly oppressors and how severely the oppressed are treated!" scoffed Jacobin leader Maximilien de Robespierre in response to those who deplored the Terror's cruelty.) One can read a May 1793 letter to revolutionary legend Georges Danton from American citizen and French National Convention member Tom Paine deploring "the spirit of denunciation that now prevails" and think of parallels to current alarm about "cancel culture."
The stakes in 1790s France, of course, were much higher. Less than a year after that letter was written, the two men met in the Luxembourg prison in Paris—Danton on his way to ultimate cancellation, Paine awaiting the same fate, which he would narrowly escape. But the echoes are undeniable.
The French Revolution is often imagined as a broad, simple morality play: A decadent aristocracy and a tyrannical monarchy lord it over downtrodden peasants and commoners; Queen Marie Antoinette dismisses reports of the poor clamoring for bread with "Let them eat cake"; the people revolt and bring down the Bastille's grim dungeons; royals and aristocrats go to the guillotine; revolutionary leaders become the new tyrants; eventually, they too meet their downfall.
The reality was much more complicated. As Tocqueville later argued in The Old Regime and the French Revolution, revolutions generally happen not when things are at their worst but when there is tangible progress—enough to raise expectations for a better future but not enough to meet those expectations. Toward the end of the 18th century, France was rapidly liberalizing—economically, socially, and politically. The new era was symbolized by Voltaire's triumphant return to Paris in February 1778, shortly before his death, after 28 years of exile. Even the Bastille was already slated for demolition, and some of its former prisoners had published memoirs about their ordeal to celebrity acclaim. On the minus side, there was the constant crisis. The effects of droughts, poor harvests, and cattle disease were exacerbated by heavy taxes from which the aristocracy and the clergy were mostly exempt. The treasury was depleted not only by profligate spending and Louis XV's imperial adventurism but by Louis XVI's aid to America's rebel colonists. (One underappreciated historical irony is that French involvement in the American Revolution, motivated by the desire to kneecap the British monarchy, helped fuel France's own revolution—both by popularizing ideas of liberty and by driving the national debt through the roof.) The deregulation of markets spurred innovation but also increased economic insecurity, and fluctuations in the prices of basic goods were commonly blamed on the machinations of wicked speculators.
It's hardly a stretch to see parallels to America's present moment, in which turmoil follows several decades of unprecedented strides in civil rights for racial minorities, women, and gays—as well as the depressing reality of pandemic, debt (due in part to foreign wars), and widespread perception that ordinary people's economic problems stem from being screwed by evil elites.
The clamor for reform and the urgent desire to raise taxes led to the king in May 1789 calling on the Estates-General, an assembly representing the three estates—clergy, aristocracy, and commoners—to compile grievances and make proposals. In June, the delegates of the commoners rebelled, chafing at their inadequate representation compared to the other two estates, and declared themselves a National Assembly representing the entire people. When Louis XVI tried to rein them in by shutting down the assembly hall on the pretext of carpentry work, the mutineers moved to a tennis court near Versailles, joined by most of the clergy's deputies and by some of the nobles. The king caved.
The events of July 14, 1789—the "official" date of the revolution's start—began as another episode in this ongoing conflict. On July 11, Louis XVI had fired the popular liberal finance minister Jacques Necker; many worried this was a prelude to a shutdown of the Assembly. The alarm was magnified because, fearing riots, the king had ordered troops into Paris, most of them Swiss and German mercenaries. This sparked quick-spreading rumors that the foreign soldiers were planning a massacre.
The Assembly's armed supporters headed to the Bastille, wanting both to get their hands on the store of ammunition inside the fortress and to strike at a hated symbol of despotism. The rest is history. (In a weird historical footnote, those anti-Bastille passions may have been further inflamed by a troublesome inmate who was moved to an insane asylum a few days before the rebellion, but who until then had regularly shouted out the window, through an improvised megaphone, that the prisoners in the fortress were being slaughtered. It was the Marquis de Sade.)
In August, the Assembly abolished all feudal privileges, established full legal equality for all adult male citizens (the ladies would have to wait another century and a half), issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and set about writing a Constitution. The monarchy limped along for three more years of push and pull between the increasingly radicalized revolutionaries and the resistant royals. Finally, in August 1792, insurgents invaded the Tuileries Palace, where the royal family had been forced to move from Versailles. The king and queen were placed under arrest. Shortly afterward, the National Convention—having been elected to replace the Assembly—formally abolished the monarchy. (Louis the XVI, henceforth known as Citizen Louis Capet after the medieval French dynasty to which he actually wasn't related, would be guillotined for treason in January of the following year; Marie Antoinette, or "the widow Capet," in October.)
September 22, the birthday of the French Republic, would become the first day of Year One in the new revolutionary calendar, which also replaced the old months with new metric-based ones named after nature's cycles (Thermidor for heat, Germinal for germination, etc.). This dramatic move predated the "Year Zero" of the Khmer Rouge by nearly 200 years—and anticipated the mindset of many American progressives, who, though they may not want to literally reset time, do want to cancel America's slaveholding Founders.
It was not even Year Two before things got to the point summed up in a famous phrase, apparently first uttered in March 1793 by Convention member Pierre Vergniaud: "Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its own children." ("The left eating its own"—a phrase often applied these days to purges of alleged racists, misogynists, or transphobes—is a tradition that began as soon as there was a left.)
Two months after Vergniaud spoke those prophetic words, an angry mob organized by Jacobin radicals invaded the Convention to force his expulsion and that of his fellow Girondins, an informal bloc of moderates who mostly hailed from the southern Gironde region. Two years earlier, the Girondins had been the Assembly's center-left. Now they were the conservatives, hated by Paris militants for rejecting price controls amid a food shortage and for having waffled on the execution of the former king. Power was now in the hands of the hardcore Jacobins (named after their club's location in the Rue St. Jacques, or St. Jacob Street).
From late July, Robespierre and two close allies, Georges Couthon and Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, were in full control of the 12-member Committee of Public Safety. Twenty-two Girondins were executed in October 1793, among them the journalist Jacques Pierre Brissot, a onetime prisoner of the Bastille and founder of continental Europe's first anti-slavery society, Les Amis des Noirs ("The Friends of Blacks"). Other Girondins who had fled Paris were killed or committed suicide while on the run.
Casualties of the anti-Girondin purge included the pioneering feminist and abolitionist Olympe de Gouges, who had penned a bold Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. Paine, a Girondin ally who had argued for sparing the former king's life in recognition of his assistance to the American Revolution, was also arrested.
By the time the Girondins met their deaths, the revolution had reached its bloodiest phase, known as the Reign of Terror. The Law of Suspects, passed in September 1793, gave local revolutionary committees the power to arrest anyone who "by their conduct, relations or language spoken or written have shown themselves partisans of tyranny or federalism"—i.e., greater regional autonomy—"and enemies of liberty." At least 200,000 people were arrested around the country; some 17,000 were guillotined, and about 10,000 died in prison. That doesn't include the tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands massacred in rebellious provinces, especially the Vendée, where some historians believe reprisals were nothing short of a genocide—if that term can be applied to extermination directed at the population of a region, rather than an ethnicity or religion.
In Nantes, suspected counterrevolutionaries, many of them priests, monks, and nuns, were tied up and loaded on barges that were then sunk in the Loire River. In Lyon, the condemned were slaughtered first by cannon grapeshot blasts—which often left mangled, still-living bodies to be finished off with sabers or pistols—and then by more conventional firing squads. Even Robespierre thought that was a bit much and recalled the commissars in charge, Jean-Baptiste Carrier and Joseph Fouché. (Those two, sensing peril to their own necks, would eventually help engineer the anti-Robespierre coup that ended the Terror. Carrier still went to the guillotine. Fouché, the revolution's ultimate survivor, later served as chief of police under Napoleon and, briefly, under the restored Bourbon monarchy.)
In spring 1794, purges began within the Jacobin ranks. First fell the ultraradicals, known as les Enragés ("the Rabid"), and their ringleader, Jacques René Hébert, who wanted more terror, more de-Christianization, and more war on the rich. Robespierre despised the Hébertistes as amoral atheists with no respect for property or propriety. Their sworn enemies, "the Indulgents," led by Danton and Camille Desmoulins—onetime radical icons who now wanted a Committee of Clemency to review the cases of detainees—followed in less than two weeks. Desmoulins, whose fiery speech in a Paris café had helped launch the attack on the Bastille, shouted himself hoarse on his final journey, in the frantic hope that he could rouse the people to defend their tribunes. Danton, resigned to his fate, at one point reportedly bellowed, "You'll follow me soon, Robespierre!" (Narrator: He did.)
Desmoulins, whose famous September 1789 pamphlet, The Lamppost's Speech to Parisians, excused the summary mob executions of several "enemies" after the fall of the Bastille, was one of the many revolutionaries who discovered the hard way that cheerleading for violence has consequences. (To his credit, Desmoulins shrank back from those consequences before they affected him directly: He was shaken by the lynching of royalist pamphleteer François-Louis Suleau, his ideological adversary and ex–school friend, in August 1792 and was consumed by guilt after the execution of the Girondins, whom he had viciously trashed in a pamphlet.)
Hébert was another. A prototypical "dirtbag leftist" who had ridiculed Terror victims in obscene tirades spiced up with witty euphemisms like "the national razor," "playing the hot hand," and "looking through the republican window," he showed far less fortitude than his targets when it was his turn. ("We thought he'd have more courage, but he died like a fucker," observed one of the jeering spectators, according to a government agent's report.) In a Hollywood-worthy postscript, the two men's widows, Lucile Desmoulins and Marie Hébert, were promptly arrested for a nonexistent plot. They bonded in prison and went to the guillotine together a few days after Danton and Desmoulins.
As summer rolled around, the carnage accelerated—especially after the passage of the Prairial Law, which created a broad new range of vaguely defined counterrevolutionary crimes (such as "slandering patriotism" or seeking to "weaken the purity and energy of revolutionary principles"). Defendants before the Revolutionary Tribunal were no longer allowed to have counsel or call witnesses; jurors were to render verdicts based on their "moral sense," and the only options were death or acquittal. In about four out of five cases, they chose death.
The guillotine's toll in Paris spiked from an average of six people a day to an average of 27. The executions were becoming unpopular with the crowds, especially after an 18-year-old working-class girl's attempt to confront "the tyrant" Robespierre while allegedly carrying two small knives was blown up into an assassination plot for which 53 people were guillotined en masse. The purported conspirators killed that day included a wailing mother with her teenage son and daughter and a young housemaid who looked about 14.
Meanwhile, an actual plot against Robespierre was being hatched within the Convention, spurred by whispers of another big purge coming any day. (The Prairial Law had stripped deputies of immunity, allowing their arrest without impeachment by their colleagues. The Convention had tried to reverse this provision, but Robespierre and Couthon jammed it through.) On July 27—9 Thermidor in the new calendar—a pre-planned mutiny erupted in the Convention, with Robespierre denounced as a tyrant and a murderer. The session ended with the arrest of Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon.
Freed by their supporters and holed up at Paris City Hall, the Hôtel de Ville, Robespierre and his companions hoped that the masses would rise in their defense. But the masses were done with the Jacobins, not only because of the Terror but because of continuing privations: The price controls, or "maximum," had extended from bread to numerous other goods, leading to rampant shortages and wage freezes. (When the Robespierristes rode the tumbrils to their doom the next day, hecklers in the crowds shouted, "Foutu maximum!"—"Fucking maximum!")
Troops loyal to the Convention quickly retook the Hôtel de Ville. On 10 Thermidor, Robespierre—his bandaged jaw shattered by a bullet, perhaps from a botched suicide, perhaps from a soldier's shot—faced the Revolutionary Tribunal with Saint-Just, Couthon, and 19 others. The death sentence was swift.
The new rulers, most of whom were themselves radical Jacobins, had no intention of adopting a more moderate course. While the mass executions stopped, most political prisoners were not released until months later. But the backlash against Jacobin rule had acquired its own momentum. The Reign of Terror was over, and the exhausted Republic descended into a disarray from which, eventually, Napoleon would emerge.
Why did the French Revolution go so dramatically wrong?
Burke, who supported the American colonists but took an implacably negative view of the French Revolution early on, argued that while the American cause was rooted in the traditional liberties of Englishmen, the French one championed the abstract, universal, and therefore inherently unworkable "Rights of Man." But this is a dubious distinction: The Declaration of Independence is just as steeped in liberal universalism as is the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were hardly less radical in sweeping away traditional hierarchies.
But Burke's disapproval was also driven by the French revolutionaries' embrace of mob violence, and in that he was much closer to the mark. The revolution's first acts of barbarism happened on its very first official day. After the Bastille's surrender, its commandant, Bernard-René Jourdan de Launay, was hacked to death while being led to the Hôtel de Ville; the superintendent of the Paris markets, Jacques de Flesselles—accused of "treason" because the information he gave the insurrectionists about where to get weapons turned out to be wrong—was shot to death on the building's front steps; and the two men's severed heads were paraded around on pikes. A few days later, two other officials, Joseph Foullon and Louis Bertier de Sauvigny, accused by the Paris rumor mill of plotting to cause a famine, were dragged from their homes, viciously beaten, and hanged from lampposts.
Perhaps worse than the violence itself was many respectable revolutionaries' willingness to condone it or explain it away as justifiable anger. After some Assembly members voiced dismay at the lynchings, Antoine Barnave, a lawyer and orator, rebuked his "tender-hearted" colleagues: "Was this blood, then, so pure that one dare not spill it?" (Later, Barnave himself would join the ranks of the "tender-hearted." His story ends exactly the way one would guess.)
This creepy notion of "impure" enemy blood had a lot of currency. It even made it into the lyrics of "The Marseillaise," whose refrain ends: "March on, march on, that blood impure/Our fields may irrigate." From there, it's only a short step to viewing the counterrevolutionary as Untermensch.
From early on, some of the radicals were openly calling for large-scale bloodshed. In 1790, Jean-Paul Marat, later a Jacobin cult figure, wrote that at one point "five or six hundred heads would have been enough" to save the country, but because the enemy had been given time to plot it would now take five or six thousand. "But even if it need twenty thousand, there is no time for hesitation," he concluded. Later, Marat reportedly upped the score to 200,000. (He did not live to see the Terror's peak: In July 1793, a 24-year-old Girondin sympathizer named Charlotte Corday, armed with a large bread knife and with her own ideas of republican heroics, turned the same calculus on Marat himself—later telling her judges that she "killed one man to save 100,000.")
In Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, his 1989 history, Simon Schama claimed that "the Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count." That has been vigorously debated, but there is certainly a sense in which the revolution's logic led to what came next. The lynchings of 1789 escalated to mass murder in 1792, when some 1,500 prisoners held in the Paris jails were butchered over three days in the notorious September massacres. The Revolutionary Tribunal was founded in response to these events, ostensibly in the hope of making such extralegal excesses unnecessary by dealing swift and harsh justice—but with procedural safeguards—to the Revolution's enemies. We know how that worked out.
To some extent, the different fortunes of the American and French Revolutions were the product of the two countries' very different circumstances. For Americans, King George was across the ocean, and the royal administrators the rebellious colonists had denounced as corrupt usurpers of their liberties were as well. For the French, the monarch and his minions were right there in their midst—and hostile European monarchies were just across the border.
The paranoia that spurred revolutionary violence in France was often directly related either to the threat of war or to actual wartime conditions; thus, the frenzy driving the September massacres was whipped up by rumors that the prisoners were in cahoots with the invading forces of the Austrian-Prussian alliance. It should be noted that France was hardly the victim of one-sided foreign aggression: That invasion itself was a response to France's declaration of war on Austria in April 1792, a move the revolutionaries saw both as a preemptive strike and as a patriotic endeavor that would unify France and export la liberté to other countries. In one of the Revolution's many tragic ironies, the war's biggest cheerleaders were the Girondins, later victims of a radicalization partly driven by the war.
Obviously, American independence was forged in war, and there was no shortage of wartime paranoia on these shores, either. (There was also more violence between Loyalists and Patriots than our narratives often recognize.) But by the time Americans were building their system of government, the nascent republic faced no serious external threat—a very different situation from France.
Religion was another factor. America had a history of pluralism and had no dominant church; in France, the revolutionaries ostensibly embraced religious tolerance, but they were also taking on the Catholic Church as a powerful and oppressive institution. A law passed in 1790 on the "Civil Constitution of the Clergy" required priests to swear allegiance to the state and to be elected; it also banned monastic life. Priests refusing to take the oath were subject to increasingly brutal persecution, as were nuns who continued to wear the habits or to maintain secret religious communities (including the "Martyrs of Compiègne," 16 nuns and lay sisters guillotined in July 1794 and immortalized in Francis Poulenc's opera Dialogues of the Carmelites). The anti-Christian persecution, which included rampant pillaging and desecration of churches, exacerbated civil conflicts and alienated peasants. It also placed the revolution on the side of religious repression rather than religious liberty.
Add to this the anti-market animus. The Jacobins were not socialists; their ideal citizen was the self-employed artisan or vendor. But Schama convincingly argues that they were anti-capitalist, insofar as they saw wealth as morally suspect and commerce as corrupt; their confiscatory "revolutionary taxes" on the rich reflected not only wartime necessity but hatred of what modern-day revolutionaries would call "the 1 percent."
There was, finally, a fundamental difference between the French idea of liberty and the American one. In the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, power flows from the people to the state. In the Declaration of the Rights of Man, "the principle of any sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation," a superentity that figures prominently in French revolutionary rhetoric. (A few years later, one early political theorist of the Revolution, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, would argue that the sacralization of "popular sovereignty" was an essentially "royalist" idea, "a conception destructive of liberty.") The French Declaration also states that "the law is the expression of the general will," invoking the dangerously fuzzy, quasi-mystical, Rousseauist notion of a political hive mind.
Partly because of this outlook, French republicanism never developed a strong commitment to the separation of powers. The Declaration of the Rights of Man mentions it as essential to legitimate government (perhaps reflecting Thomas Jefferson's input). But once the old executive branch was quite literally decapitated, it was never replaced. And the Constitution of 1793 entrusted judicial review to a Court of Appeals whose members were to be appointed annually by the legislative body. The principle of checks and balances did not mesh with the ideal of national unity.
Rousseauist patriotic mysticism reached its height during the rule of the Jacobins, whose ideology was a mix of sentimentalism, puritanism, and death cult. The Terror may have started out as a practical (or paranoid) response to danger, or as an attempt to channel popular vengeance into a regulated outlet. But it eventually became its own raison d'être: an ideological/spiritual cleansing, a sacrificial shedding of "impure blood." It was, the Swiss historian Siegfried Weichlein writes in the 2011 book Terrorism and Narrative Practice, "part of a vision for a new society and a new man"—one founded on "virtue, which was to be achieved by terror."
No one exemplified this mentality more than Robespierre, the archetypal homicidal idealist who had started his career as a staunch opponent of capital punishment.*
Robespierre's grand vision was laid out in a February 1794 speech to the Convention titled "The Principles of Political Morality." The goal of the Republic, he declared, was to fulfill the true human potential that tyranny had warped: Selfishness, frivolity, greed, sensuality, vanity, and social graces would give way to magnanimity, wisdom, reason, and love of goodness, truth, and glory, ushering in "the dawn of the bright day of universal happiness." Until then, "the despotism of liberty against tyranny" would have to do: "If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror. Virtue without terror is fatal; terror without virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice: prompt, severe, inflexible. It is therefore an emanation of virtue." Talk of mercy, Robespierre stressed, was dangerously misguided: "To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty."
Meanwhile, Saint-Just made it clear that the reach of virtuous terror would be very wide: "There is no prosperity to hope for as long as the last enemy of liberty breathes. You have to punish not only the traitors, but even those who are indifferent; you have to punish whoever is passive in the republic, and who does nothing for it." And, chillingly: "What constitutes a republic is the total destruction of everything that stands opposed to it."
While the Reign of Terror certainly wasn't bloodier or more brutal than many earlier episodes of organized violence and repression in European history, it was the first in which people were systematically murdered in the name of a progressive vision, complete with Robespierre's Orwellian flourishes about the despotism of liberty and the cruelty of mercy. Assessing the French Revolution in 1955, the Israeli historian Jacob Talmon called Jacobinism an experiment in "totalitarian democracy." The term "totalitarianism" would not come into existence until the 1930s, but in 1795, on the heels of the Reign of Terror, Sieyès uncannily warned that a republic that demanded total devotion from its citizens was no longer a "re-publique" ("common matter") but a "re-totale."
The Soviets saw the Jacobins as their forerunners, despite the French rebels' attachment to deism and private property. Vladimir Lenin referred to Robespierre as a "Bolshevik avant la lettre"; the Russian's first decree on "monumental propaganda" in April 1918 included Robespierre on the list of 12 great revolutionaries whose statues were to be erected by the October Revolution's first anniversary. The monument was unveiled on November 3 in a major Moscow park, where a visiting French communist hailed Robespierre as an "honest and devoted revolutionary" slandered by the bourgeoisie.
Three days later, the concrete statue collapsed into a pile of rubble. Some blamed foul play, but the more likely explanation was shoddy construction.
While the Robespierre monument was never rebuilt and a proposed monument to Marat did not happen, the Soviets honored the Jacobins in plenty of other ways. There were Robespierre Streets and Marat Streets in several cities, including Leningrad and Gorky. Later, the Soviet biography series Fiery Revolutionaries, intended for a general audience and especially for young adults, featured the lives of Robespierre, Marat, Saint-Just, and even Danton, though the latter was chided for turning to "counterrevolution" at the end of his life.
In 20th century French historiography, debates about the French Revolution were often a battleground for clashes between pro-Jacobin Marxists such as Albert Soboul and anti-Jacobin liberals such as François Furet—who also argued that treating the Jacobins as a proxy for Bolsheviks was reductive and misleading.
It would certainly be misleading to treat the French Revolution as a mirror for 21st century American politics. Apparent similarities can be deceptive. For instance, when the revolutionaries of 1789 assailed "privileges," including ones many of them personally possessed, they were talking about very specific legal advantages that could be (and eventually were) abolished by the stroke of a pen. Today, the concept of "privilege" employed by progressives refers to a far more complex and elusive system of benefits.
And yet reading about those events of more than 200 years ago, one cannot help being struck by parallels. The 18th century was its own Information Age, with unprecedented access to media, thanks to strides in printing technology that enabled mass production of cheap newspapers and pamphlets. It was also an era of rapid shifts in social norms. Pre-revolutionary France was plagued by incompetent leadership and polarized between a deeply religious rural population and secularized urbanites. A large portion of its elites flaunted their egalitarian ideas without any intention of giving up their status.
A more disturbing shock of recognition is provided by the key role of paranoid rumors and conspiracy theories in the French Revolution's events (though, in fairness, paranoia in times of crisis is hardly unique to the French Revolution). In those pre-internet days, rumors—of impending massacres and assassinations, "famine plots," bandits sent to torch villages—took longer to travel, but a mass panic known as La Grande Peur, or "the Great Fear," still managed to go viral in the French countryside in July and August 1789, sparking unrest that hastened the abolition of landlord privileges. Social media may not have existed, but a bedraggled man who galloped down the road screaming that armed thugs were burning, raping, and slaughtering in the next village would do just as well—and who needs out-of-context videos when a herd of cows can be mistaken for bandits on the move?
Revolutionary Paris, too, always seemed to be lurching from panic to panic. "Then, the phantom enemy was on the right (those secret gangs waiting to cut the throats of supporters of the National Assembly)," Schama tells me. "The politics are reversed now, with the phantom Satanists, Antifa, etc., conjured up to arm the ultra-right." But today's left has its own paranoid tales, starring an assortment of Russians, bots, and missing mailboxes.
And even without guillotines, observers of the American left in 2020 will see themes reminiscent of the French radicals of the 1790s—from the romanticization of the violent mob to the sentimental belief in the fundamental innocence of the oppressed to the speed with which yesterday's heroes can become today's reactionaries. Substitute "progressive" for "republican," and Schama's description of the Jacobins rings true today: "They remained obsessed by the holy grail of republican purity. Since it would, by definition, remain forever out of reach, its paladins would constantly see themselves confronted by impure soldiers of darkness and crime who stood between them and their prize and who had to be cut down if the Reign of Virtue were ever to be realized." Saint-Just's declaration that indifference equals treason is echoed today in the rhetoric of activists like Ibram X. Kendi, who says that it's not enough to simply not be racist; if you're not actively anti-racist—an ally in their cause—then you're complicit in white supremacy.
This doesn't mean that social justice activists, or even the guillotine-toting revolutionary wannabes in Portland and D.C., are Saint-Justs and Robespierres in waiting. But the Jacobins' story should be a timely reminder of the dangers of romanticizing righteous violence, demonizing enemies, and fetishizing ideological purity.
CORRECTION: The original version of this article contained a quote from memoirist and Terror survivor Aimée de Coigny which was likely a forgery.
The post The Guillotine Mystique appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In September, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an American organization that monitors attacks on freedom of the press worldwide, issued a report on what it called a major threat to journalists—particularly female journalists—in the United States and Canada: online harassment. The report opened with an anecdote meant to illustrate the problem. A Texas-based freelancer suddenly found her inbox flooded with spam, from sale promotions to fake job offers, and realized that someone had subscribed her to dozens of email lists; she suspected that the culprit was a bigoted commenter previously banned from a website for which she wrote. It was, the report quoted her as saying, "kind of scary."
Given that CPJ deals with issues that range from censorship to beatings, kidnappings, and even murders of journalists, junk-mail bombing seems like the epitome of a First World Problem. (I say that as someone targeted by a similar prank a couple of years ago.) Yet such trivial annoyances show up quite frequently in accounts that treat online abuse as an extremely grave social problem.
CPJ is far from the only organization to address the issue. A 2018 report from Amnesty International, a globally revered human rights advocacy group, was titled Toxic Twitter and examined "violence and abuse against women online." The same year, PEN America, the nearly 100-year-old nonprofit that promotes freedom of speech, issued a statement describing online harassment as a "clear threat to free expression." The United Nations has also weighed in, holding its first hearing on the subject in 2015.
Some of the behavior that falls under the general umbrella of "online harassment" is not only noxious but genuinely frightening and even criminal. The article by journalist Amanda Hess that set off the current panic—"Why Women Aren't Welcome on the Internet," published by Pacific Standard in January 2014—discussed Hess' own experience of being cyberstalked by a man who progressed from tweets to emails to threatening phone calls. In other cases, harassment in cyberspace crosses over into real life via "swatting": prank emergency calls that dispatch law enforcement to handle a supposed dangerous situation. In 2017, police in Wichita, Kansas, shot and killed an unarmed 28-year-old man after one such fraudulent 911 call.
The rapid evolution of the internet has often outpaced the law's ability to deal with cybercrime, including stalking and threats. Unfortunately, as with many other issues, the discussion of online harassment easily lends itself to catastrophizing. Every "go jump off a cliff" tweet becomes virtual terrorism, grounds for social media banishment if not criminal investigation. The sense of urgency is amplified by shoddy analysis, politically driven double standards, and "do something!" calls to action—action that often involves speech suppression.
The great thing about the internet is that you can reach just about anyone, anywhere, in an instant. The awful thing about the internet is that just about anyone, from anywhere, can reach you in an instant. As a journalist, you can reach vast numbers of new readers, connect with fans, and find information that would once have been out of reach; you can also get nasty messages from hundreds of haters who no longer have to take the effort to mail a letter.
Online harassment is far from the first internet-related panic—remember sex fiends lurking in chat rooms? But while earlier alarmism about online horrors usually came from the right and was not overtly political, the panic about internet harassment has come primarily from the left and is transparently politicized in its selection of "deserving" victims.
Hess' Pacific Standard article came just two weeks after a woman named Justine Sacco watched her life fall apart because of an internet mob. On her way from London to Cape Town, Sacco tweeted a joke meant to mock the privileged "bubble" of affluent Americans: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!" The tweet went viral, and by the time Sacco landed she was not only jobless but so infamous some hotels canceled her bookings.
This was a textbook example of online harassment. Yet neither Hess' article nor the ensuing conversation mentioned Sacco's ordeal. When British journalist Jon Ronson wrote about it a year later in So You've Been Publicly Shamed (Riverhead Books), many faulted him for being too sympathetic. A Washington Post essay by academic and author Patrick Blanchfield chided those who would turn this "30-something, well-educated, relatively affluent white woman" into the "martyr of choice" for internet abuse. Blanchfield's own martyrs of choice included successful white feminists targeted by right-wing trolls.
"People are much more likely to view things done or said to their side as harassment and to view what happens to people they don't like as just something they should deal with, or not that bad, or maybe made up," says Ken White, a Los Angeles–based criminal defense attorney and First Amendment litigator who blogs and tweets under the handle "Popehat."
In the case of online harassment, narratives from the progressive tribe have dominated mainstream media coverage and advocacy. That means concerns about online harassment don't usually extend, for instance, to outrage cycles targeting alleged bigots, even when the outrage is misplaced.
In November 2018, a Portland, Oregon, woman nicknamed "Crosswalk Cathy" had to scrub her online presence after a viral video pilloried her for calling the cops on a black couple over a bad parking job. But subsequent reports revealed she called a parking hotline about a car partially blocking a crosswalk while the owners, who were getting takeout food nearby, were away from the car—meaning she had no idea they were black.
Nor do progressive concerns about harassment extend to victims of online vigilantism for ostensibly noble causes. A few years ago, in the wake of a teen girl's highly publicized sexual assault by two high school football players in Steubenville, Ohio, many locals experienced egregious harassment by members of the "hacktivist" group Anonymous. Emails were hacked and personal data posted online. Jim Parks, the webmaster of the football team's fan site, was accused of being the mastermind of a teen porn ring because of supposed photos of nude underage girls found in his email account. (The subjects all turned out to be adult women, and the principal hacker, Deric Lostutter, who was later identified and questioned by the FBI, issued a public apology to Parks for the "embarrassment" he had suffered.) Others—adults and teenagers—were smeared as accomplices to rape and barraged with threats. Yet when Lostutter faced possible criminal charges several months later, much progressive opinion treated him as a hero. Parks, who described Anonymous as "terrorists," would no doubt have disagreed.
In late 2014, a few months after Hess' influential article, the internet conflagration known as GamerGate—in which various members of the video game community battled over sexism in the gaming industry and press—broke out. Death threats eventually forced feminist video game critic Anita Sarkeesian to temporarily leave her home and cancel a lecture.
Yet progressive critics of GamerGate quickly began to conflate actual threats with mere disagreeable speech. Perspectives on Harmful Speech Online, published in 2017 by Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, includes a discussion of "sealioning," defined as "persistent questioning [combined] with a loudly-insisted-upon commitment to reasonable debate." (The term originates from a 2014 web comic in which a couple is pestered by a talking sea lion.) Testifying before a 2015 U.N. panel, Sarkeesian insisted that "cyberviolence" includes not only actual threats but "the day-to-day grind of, 'You're a liar,' 'You suck,'" as well as "hate videos" attacking her critiques of sexism in video games.
GamerGate spurred on anti-harassment measures by many big tech companies, usually developed in close collaboration with social justice activists. A roundtable discussion of Silicon Valley's efforts to curb online harassment, published in Wired in late 2015 and prominently featuring Twitter Vice President for Trust and Safety Del Harvey, was notable for its explicit assumption that solutions to harassment should focus on "marginalized" victims—"women, people of color, and LGBT people"—and should help progressive causes. In early 2016, Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency website was officially listed as part of Twitter's Trust and Safety Council—along with about 40 other organizations, many of which have a censorious bent.
Some anti-harassment measures by social media platforms have been uncontroversial. Twitter, for instance, has made it easier to ignore hostile messages by blocking and muting or receiving notifications only from known accounts. But other, more heavy-handed measures—account restrictions, suspensions, and bans—have resulted in pitched battles over double standards, political biases, and uneven enforcement.
In February 2016, Twitter abruptly perma-banned far-right blogger Robert Stacey McCain for "targeted abuse," without ever pointing to actual abusive tweets. McCain, who has peddled racist fare and posted rants against homosexuality, is not a sympathetic figure. But unlike, say, former Breitbart writer and professional troll Milo Yiannopoulos, who joined him in Twitter exile a few months later, McCain neither instigated nor participated in online attacks. Plenty of people who found his views abhorrent nonetheless felt that his banishment was a clear sign of biased enforcement; some wondered if it was related to his vitriolic polemics against Sarkeesian, newly elevated to Twitter's Trust and Safety Council.
McCain's ban boosted complaints on the right about the social media platforms' left-wing bias—a theme incessantly flogged by Breitbart but also echoed by more moderate conservatives. Around the same time, First Amendment attorney and blogger Marc Randazza reported an unscientific but plausible experiment in which he tracked both actual Twitter users and his own "decoy" handles and found that conservatives were disciplined for nasty tweets far more than social justice or feminist accounts.
The online wars have since escalated to an even higher pitch, with Donald Trump and the Trumpian right on one side and the "Resistance" and hyper-"woke" left on the other.
The alt-right's manic trolling, which included bombarding anti-Trump journalists with grotesque racist and anti-Semitic memes, has solidified the view that online harassment is something that comes predominantly from right-wingers and bigots. Meanwhile, on the left, new clashes over free speech and social media harassment have focused on the battles between transgender activists and radical feminists who believe that allowing trans women access to single-sex female spaces jeopardizes women's safety. In November 2018, shortly after Twitter amended its policy to prohibit "misgendering" as a form of "hateful conduct," Canadian feminist author and activist Megan Murphy was banned for using male pronouns to refer to Jessica Yaniv, the notorious litigant in British Columbia who (unsuccessfully) demanded that beauticians who wax women's pubic hair be forced to serve transgender women with intact male genitals.
Does biased enforcement on social media platforms pose a free speech problem? To free speech advocates such as White, the answer is a clear no: Twitter, Facebook, et al. are private entities with their own free association rights. "If they don't want Nazis, or they don't want vegans, that's them and that's part of their expression," White says. If social media companies restrict too much legitimate speech, he adds, "the best remedy is for people to create their own communities or vote with their feet."
White emphatically rejects the idea—advanced, for instance, by current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai—that speech policing by social media platforms weakens essential liberal values and norms. Pai, then an FCC commissioner, told The Washington Examiner in 2016 that "there are certain cultural values that undergird the [First A]mendment that are critical for its protections to have actual meaning." White sees it very differently: If anything, he says, voluntary speech moderation by social media companies is a "safety valve" that protects "a culture of legal free speech" by letting people have online spaces in which they don't have to deal with verbal abuse or overt bigotry.
At the other end, people as politically different as conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's William Budington believe that big social media companies should be regulated as public utilities. Facebook and Twitter, Budington writes by email, are "closed platforms with no socially viable alternatives." While he would much rather see them "exchange freely with newcomers" in a competitive environment, he says, the realistic option is to regulate them to ensure fair access.
Somewhere in the middle, legal scholar and author Nadine Strossen, a former head of the American Civil Liberties Union whose most recent book is Hate: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press), agrees that the internet giants are not obliged to abide by First Amendment speech protections and have the right to moderate content without government interference. But she also believes that powerful institutions have a moral responsibility to safeguard speech. "It would behoove them from a business perspective" as well, she says, since politically fraught speech restrictions will never satisfy everyone and will only invite attack from both sides. (And so they do.)
At worst, the policing of broadly defined internet harassment can cross the line into the suppression of speech by law—particularly in countries without First Amendment–type speech protections.
In England, where the Malicious Communications Act of 2003 prohibits electronic messages that cause "annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety," several people have faced criminal charges for alleged online harassment of transgender activists, based largely on "misgendering." One defendant was self-described transsexual Miranda Yardley, whose case was dismissed on the first day of trial. (Yardley was accused of outing an activist's transgender child, but evidence showed that the activist herself had frequently mentioned the child on Twitter.) Others, including prominent Irish comedian Graham Linehan, have been questioned and warned by the police for using the wrong pronouns.
In Canada, Toronto-based graphic artist Gregory Alan Elliott was prosecuted for criminal harassment over Twitter fights with two local feminists, Stephanie Guthrie and Heather Reilly—which started, ironically enough, when Elliott criticized Guthrie for proposing to "sic" internet mobs on the creator of a video game that allowed players to digitally "beat up" Sarkeesian. Elliott created a #FascistFeminists hashtag to denounce Guthrie and Reilly; they and their supporters monitored his tweets and repeatedly blasted him as a misogynistic creep. There was a lot of mutual sniping and name-calling, but even the police conceded that none of Elliott's tweets were threatening or sexually harassing.
When Elliott was finally acquitted in January 2016 after a three-year legal battle that destroyed his business, Canadian and American feminists deplored the verdict as a failure to take online harassment seriously. (Disclosure: I participated in a fundraiser for Elliott's defense in 2015.)
In the U.S., the First Amendment remains a strong bulwark against criminalizing speech in the war on internet harassment (despite a couple of cases in which misguided judges have issued unconstitutional restraining orders forbidding someone to "harass" a public figure by writing about him or her online). One potential weak spot, however, is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which rightly exempts internet platforms from liability for user-posted content.
"That's the thing that people are taking the most shots at, and I think people underestimate how important it is to how the internet works," White says.
As often happens, the pressure is coming from both directions. In 2015, left-wing commentator and self-styled "social justice stormtrooper" Arthur Chu wrote an article for TechCrunch urging the repeal of Section 230 to combat the scourge of online harassment. Four years later, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) introduced legislation to amend Section 230 by requiring large tech platforms to be "politically neutral" in moderating content, largely in response to conservative complaints about unfair enforcement of harassment policies.
How bad a problem is internet harassment? The Pew Research Center's most recent study, in 2017, found that over 40 percent of Americans had experienced online harassment and nearly one in five had been subjected to "severe" harassment, defined as physical threats, sexual harassment, sustained harassment, or stalking. Yet the Pew report also acknowledged that its conclusions were complicated by subjective definitions. Notably, even among people classified as victims of "severe" online harassment, 28 percent did not consider their experiences to be harassment and another 21 percent were not sure. Gender makes a difference: Only 31 percent of men who had experienced online harassment as defined in the report felt that the term applied to their most recent incident, but 42 percent of women did.
This gap points to the complex gender dynamics at play—and the trouble with framing the problem as a particular burden on women. "You would have to show pretty extensive evidence about disproportionate impact and intent," says Strossen, who cautions against the notion that "women are inherently more vulnerable to this kind of attack because of who we are."
In fact, studies consistently show fewer women than men saying they experience internet harassment of every kind, except for sexual harassment. Counterintuitively, even so-called revenge porn—nonconsensual exposure of intimate images—may happen to men more often, according to the 2017 Pew survey. And while women in the survey were considerably more likely than men to rate their online harassment experiences as extremely or very upsetting, they were no more likely to report negative consequences ranging from mental and emotional stress to problems at work or school. More women—70 percent vs. 54 percent of men—saw online harassment as a major problem, but only 36 percent of women (compared to a quarter of men) wanted stronger laws to deal with it.
There is no question that online harassment can be terrifying, or at least severely disruptive. In 2016, a Jewish real estate agent in Whitefish, Montana, was deluged with threatening calls after the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer targeted her—and posted her phone number—for supposedly trying to pressure the mother of white nationalist Richard Spencer into selling her home. Last November, a Honolulu man was arrested for using both online ads and the telephone to direct hundreds of unwanted service calls and food deliveries to the home of his former girlfriend over the course of a year.
Most of what is commonly labeled "online harassment" is far less extreme, though some of it, like other human conflict, can be extremely stressful and injurious. The internet makes both a negative and a positive difference: Malicious gossip can now spread much faster and wider than before, but its targets also have many more opportunities to learn about it and counter it.
Some supposed harassment is vaguely and subjectively defined: One person's "callout" is another's "cyberbullying." Even "doxing," or public disclosure of private information, turns out to be a flexible concept: A Twitter user once accused me of doxing her because I mentioned a job listed in her public Twitter profile. Ultimately, most so-called internet harassment is simply trash talk—a minor annoyance that we can learn to handle by, as Strossen puts it, "developing resilience."
The current panic has also made it possible to use accusations of harassment as a weapon to silence criticism—and even to harass one's critics. In February 2016, I watched a blow-up in which a male Twitter user repeatedly asked a fairly big-name progressive female journalist to correct a tweet containing erroneous information; the journalist responded by tweeting at the man's employer to accuse him of "hounding strange women on Twitter during work hours" (and by mobilizing her followers to dogpile him as a harasser).
At its core, the online harassment crusade is a push for political control over speech. It is happening in the midst of growing authoritarian sympathies on the right and growing hostility to First Amendment protections for "harmful" speech on the left. Legally, those protections remain as robust as ever—for now. But in these unpredictable times, it would be reckless to assume that the erosion of basic freedoms is something that can't happen here.
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]]>The official 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which birthed the world's first Communist state, came and went two years ago. But the revolution actually played out over five horrific years known as the Russian Civil War. A century ago this summer, the anti-Bolshevik White forces were running a fully functional government in northern Russia. Their "Supreme Ruler," Admiral Alexander Kolchak, was internationally recognized as the head of state, and their army was crushing the Bolsheviks in the South. By November 1919, the tide had turned. By the time the war was over, between 7 and 12 million were dead, and the Communists were victorious.
The Soviets' civil war mythology presented the conflict as a heroic story about workers and peasants defeating the combined forces of upper-class Russian reactionaries and Western interventionists. The Russian émigré mythology treated it as a heroic story of idealistic patriots crushed by the forces of darkness. But the real Russian Civil War was far more complicated than either of those narratives.
Besides the Reds and the Whites, there was the roughly 100,000-strong Black Army led by anarchist and Ukrainian independence fighter Nestor Makhno, who started out in the Bolshevik camp before going his own way. There were also the nationalist forces of the Ukrainian People's Republic and the little-known Green Armies—peasant and Cossack militias and guerrilla units that may have been more than 70,000 strong at their peak. The Greens, thought to have gotten the name either from living in the woods or from having green banners, despised all the other factions, and their machine-gun carts sported the motto "Beat the Whites till they turn red, beat the Reds till they turn white."
As befits a Hobbesian war of all against all, this one was marked by exceptional brutality. The Bolsheviks visited horrific reprisals on villages in rebellious regions: "The shooting of dozens, even hundreds, of peasants for every dead communist was often threatened and sometimes practiced," wrote Italian historian Andrea Graziosi in his 1996 book The Great Soviet Peasant War. They also requisitioned grain and other supplies under a policy of pillage known as "War Communism," using torture to extract hoarded food. Peasants were forcibly recruited into the Red Army; so were former Tsarist military officers, their families often held hostage to ensure compliance. This cohort made up as much as 75 percent of the Reds' officer corps, a detail omitted from Soviet narratives of Red heroics.
The White Army also practiced forced conscription and often carried out punitive measures such as mass floggings, though Bolsheviks led the field in wanton slaughter. In the 2004 monograph Population Losses in the 20th Century, Russian historian Vadim Ehrlichman estimates the toll of Red terror at 1.2 million. That compares to some 300,000 for White terror and about 500,000 combined for other factions and guerrilla units (many of which, Ehrlichman notes, were little more than bandit gangs). Anti-Semitic pogroms—mostly by Ukrainian nationalists, Greens, and parts of the White Army, but sometimes also by Reds who targeted the Jewish bourgeoisie—took as many as 150,000 lives.
While many of the White movement's leaders ostensibly espoused liberal ideas, it is safe to say that freedom had no real friends in the Russian Civil War. Still, it's a virtual certainty that Russia—and most likely the world—would have been better off if the Whites had won.
They didn't, for many reasons. They were just as unpopular as the Bolsheviks and more divided. Their leaders clung to Russia's "great power" status and were adamantly opposed to Ukrainian independence or autonomy for other regions, which forced them to fight both the Bolsheviks and the separatists. The Bolsheviks, meanwhile, were not only more unified but more unscrupulous in their strategic alliances: They joined forces with Makhno's anarchists only to turn on them the moment the White Army was no longer a threat.
A hundred years later, Russian Communism is gone; in its place is an authoritarian regime that promotes Soviet nostalgia—a sentiment shared by too many in the West—but also glorifies White Guard leaders such as Kolchak and Anton Denikin (whose remains were returned from the U.S. in 2005 and reburied at Vladimir Putin's personal expense) as true patriots. The most trenchant lesson for the modern age is one that also seems increasingly relevant to the West: When political adversaries are no longer fellow citizens to live with but rather enemies to be crushed, we all lose.
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]]>Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, by Kristen R. Ghodsee, Nation Books, 240 pages, $22.00
One of the most mercilessly mocked New York Times op-eds of recent memory was "Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism," a 2017 article by Kristen R. Ghodsee. Undeterred by a flood of snarky Twitter commentary ("Before or after their husbands were sent to the Gulag?"), Ghodsee has now expanded her article into a short book with an almost identical title—it is now in the present tense, presumably for a more forward-looking approach.
She gets points for persistence, but the thesis doesn't really fare better in book form.
Make no mistake: The "socialism" in Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism is not the "capitalism + welfare state" Western European model. It's the hardcore Warsaw Pact variety that was dispatched to the proverbial ash heap of history in 1991. The book's introduction opens with a photo of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who became the first woman to fly into space in July 1963; the caption earnestly states that she later "became a prominent politician and led the Soviet delegation to the 1975 United Nations Conference on Women."
Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, approvingly notes the rising popularity of socialism; she clearly intends her book as a contribution to ongoing debates over socialist systems. But there is no reason to think that American millennials who favor "socialism" are thinking of Soviet-style state socialism, as opposed to, say, Scandinavian social democracy. Surely one can advocate for the latter (wisely or not) without trying to rehabilitate the former. And yet Ghodsee, who accuses "conservative cold warriors" of trying to discredit alternatives to capitalism by "screaming about Stalin's famines and purges," tries to do just that: "Although it's important not to romanticize the state socialist past, the ugly realities should not make us completely oblivious to the ideals of the early socialists, to the various attempts to reform the system from within (such as the Prague Spring, glasnost, or perestroika).…Acknowledging the bad does not negate the good."
"The good" allegedly includes female empowerment in general and good sex for women in particular. Ghodsee's thesis is that capitalism inevitably commodifies sex, cheapens female labor (because women, thanks to childbearing and other factors, have less bargaining power in the market), and relegates women's caring tasks to unpaid drudgery while forcing them to depend on male earnings. By contrast, the socialist message included the promise of both economic and sexual liberation for women.
The operative word here is promise. Ghodsee ruefully admits that things turned out a bit differently in reality. "Many women suffered under a double burden of mandatory formal employment and domestic work," she acknowledges, while "discussions of sexual harassment, domestic violence, and rape" were suppressed. Meanwhile, abortion was less a choice than a necessity, serving "as a primary form of birth control" (except where it was banned, as in Stalin's Soviet Union after 1936 and under the Ceausescu regime in Romania after 1966). Nonetheless, Ghodsee insists that women's integration into the work force in the Soviet bloc was a trailblazing model of female employment, that institutional day care was a success, and that women's love lives benefited from not having to trade sex for material support.
The only actual evidence Ghodsee offers for the joys of socialist sex is some polls suggesting that East German women were having more and better sex than their Wessi sisters. (As the British social historian Josie McLennan demonstrates in her 2011 study, Love in a Time of Communism, the actual findings are complicated, contradictory, and often dubious. One such survey suggested that East German men were better endowed, which mostly seems to demonstrate that Communism breeds more prolific liars.) There's also some anecdotal stuff, such as a 40-something Soviet-born woman who hears Ghodsee discuss her op-ed on a radio show and emails to say that she "nailed it"—with no mention of other Soviet-born women whose reaction was, "You've got to be kidding."
As someone who lived in the Soviet Union until emigrating as a teen in 1980, I can say that Ghodsee must have a truly impressive pair of rose-colored glasses.
She does acknowledge that the Soviet revolutionaries' initial embrace of sexual freedom and liberation from traditional roles—notably championed by Alexandra Kollontai, the most prominent female Bolshevik—soon gave way to a far more conservative outlook. Childbearing became a national imperative, nonprocreative sex a bourgeois frivolity. The post-Stalin thaw ushered in a less repressive environment. But as the sexual revolution swept the West, Soviet culture remained remarkably puritanical well into the 1980s. One infamous moment that came to symbolize this prudery was when a woman in the Leningrad studio audience of a 1986 U.S.-Soviet satellite TV talk show seemed to declare, "In the Soviet Union, there is no sex." (She actually said "no sex on television," but the last two words were drowned out by laughter.)
Besides cultural attitudes, there were socialist practicalities—particularly a lack of privacy, to which Ghodsee only briefly alludes. Single young adults shared cramped apartments with parents, siblings, and often other relatives; so did most young marrieds. Many couples lacked even a private bedroom, which understandably put a damper on things; there were horror tales of conjugal moments ruined by a parent or in-law shouting, "Cut it out, I'm trying to sleep!" from behind a curtain. Add the lack of contraceptives and the barbarity of Soviet abortion (anesthesia required a bribe), and it's a wonder any sex happened at all.
Things were not quite as bleak in some Soviet satellite countries—East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia—that had higher living standards and more cultural freedom. (They even allowed bawdy films, a fact reflected in a Russian joke: Group sex Soviet-style is getting together with some Polish friends who tell you what they saw in a Swedish porno movie.) On the other hand, Ceausescu's Romania, where birth control was banned and fertile women's menstrual periods were monitored to combat illicit abortions, makes the USSR look like a sexual paradise.
Ghodsee's portrayal of women's public lives in Eastern Bloc countries is just as comically whitewashed. A handful of women who snagged high-level posts under regimes ruled by all-male elites are trotted out as evidence of "state socialist countries' commitment to the ideal of women's rights," though Ghodsee concedes that "actual practice did not live up to the rhetoric." You don't say.
A particularly odd section recounts Ghodsee's experience in a Model U.N. high school club, where she decided to become the Eastern bloc specialist because she "knew" the boys would nix a female United States or United Kingdom representative as too implausible. "The lesson I learned at fifteen was that while it was implausible that my own country would allow a woman to make crucial foreign policy decisions on the world stage, this was perfectly possible for the Soviet Union," Ghodsee writes. This was in 1986, when Jeane Kirkpatrick had just finished a four-year stint as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations—and no Warsaw Pact country had ever had a female U.N. envoy.
While Ghodsee is determined to see the best in the socialist East's Potemkin feminism, the capitalist West is judged by its anecdotal worst. A friend of Ghodsee's who becomes a full-time mother is reduced to begging her husband for a credit card for a night out and grimly resolves to accommodate his demands for more sex to earn her spending money. A male friend avoids too-intimidating ambitious women and marries a foreign gold digger who ditches him as soon as she gets her green card. (In Ghodsee's world, apparently, no one in the socialist bloc ever traded sex for material goods such as a better living situation.) Another friend, a tech executive, swears he'll never hire another woman after a star employee has a baby and quits. There is no acknowledgment in this book that, for all our remaining problems of gender inequality, Western capitalism has done a pretty impressive job of adapting to women's changing roles, or that a flexible market offers unique opportunities to craft career paths compatible with child rearing.
Work-family balance will remain a challenge for the foreseeable future. Generous family leave policies may make things easier for some, but they often end up pushing women onto a career-limiting mommy track, which suggests that tradeoffs are inevitable. We can certainly strive to ensure that both women and men have more opportunities to choose a life that suits them and their children best, though Ghodsee's obsession with numerical parity (such as equal numbers of male and female stay-at-home parents) seems counterproductive.
The main lesson of this volume seems to be that many left-wing critics of capitalism can't bring themselves to fully repudiate the legacy of 20th century Marxism-Leninism. Ghodsee concludes by claiming there "was a baby in all that bathwater." Not in this book, there isn't.
The post No, Sex Wasn't Better for Women Under Socialism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In October, a few days after Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice, The Washington Post published one woman's account of channeling her rage into half an hour of screaming at her husband. "I announced that I hate all men and wish all men were dead," wrote retired history professor Victoria Bissell Brown, entirely unapologetic despite conceding that her hapless spouse was "one of the good men."
While Brown's piece was more clickbait than commentary, it was an extreme expression of a larger cultural moment. 'Tis the season to be angry if you're a woman in America—or so we're told.
The storm of sexual assault allegations that nearly derailed Kavanaugh's confirmation was just the latest reported conflagration of female fury. The Kavanaugh drama coincided with the first anniversary of the downfall of the multiply accused Hollywood superpredator Harvey Weinstein. But this decade's wave of feminist anger had been building for several years before that—from the May 2014 #YesAllWomen Twitter hashtag, created to express women's vulnerability to male violence after woman hater Elliot Rodger went on a shooting and stabbing rampage in California, to the November 2016 election, in which the expected victory of America's first woman president was ignominiously thwarted by a man who casually discussed grabbing women's genitals.
While the "female rage" narrative does not represent all or even most women, there is little doubt that it taps into real problems and real frustrations. The quest for women's liberation from their traditional subjection is an essential part of the story of human freedom—and for all the tremendous strides made in the United States during the last half-century, lingering gender-based biases and obstacles remain an unfinished business. But is rage feminism (to coin a phrase) the way forward, or is it a dangerous detour?
The case for rage is made in two new books published almost simultaneously in the fall: Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger, by activist Soraya Chemaly, and Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger, by New York columnist Rebecca Traister.
Traister's book is, despite its forays into the history of American feminism, very much of the current moment. It is dominated by the 2016 presidential race, the Women's March, and the #MeToo movement. Traister believes that Donald Trump's election woke the "sleeping giant" of female rage at the patriarchy. (Along the way, she seems to suggest that pre-2016 feminism was a mostly "cheerful" kind, with a focus on girl power and sex positivity—an account that airbrushes not only #YesAllWomen but many other days of rage on feminist Twitter and on websites such as Jezebel.) She wants women to hold on to this anger and channel it into a struggle for "revolutionary change," rather than to move on and calm down in deference to social expectations. "Our job is to stay angry…perhaps for a very long time," Traister warns darkly.
Rage Becomes Her provides a broader context for this anger. Chemaly, the creator of that #YesAllWomen hashtag, sets out to count the ways sexist oppression continues, in her view, to permeate the lives of women and girls in America. Her indictment includes inequalities in school and at work, ever-present male violence, rampant and usually unpunished sexual assault, the sidelining of women in literature and film, male-centered sexual norms, subtle or overt hostility toward female power and ambition, and a variety of petty indignities, from "mansplaining" to catcalls to long bathroom lines. Like Traister, Chemaly sees women's long-suppressed anger as a necessary driver of change.
The themes that preoccupy Traister and Chemaly are also explored in an earlier book—Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, by the Cornell philosopher Kate Manne—which was published in late 2017 and has been widely hailed as a new feminist classic. Like Good and Mad, Down Girl views Trump's victory as the triumph of patriarchal backlash; like Rage Becomes Her, it treats Rodger's massacre as a defining moment in American male-female relations. Manne may not issue an explicit call for anger, but the logic of Down Girl is unmistakable: A deeply entrenched misogyny ruthlessly punishes women who refuse to defer to men, and female fury is a natural and salutary response.
You can debate the extent to which gender inequalities in 21st century liberal democracies stem from present-day sexism, from cultural baggage from the past, or from personal choices and innate sex differences at an individual level. But does the gallery of horrors in the literature of feminist rage really reflect women's lives in today's America?
In 1994, dissident feminist Christina Hoff Sommers published a controversial book, Who Stole Feminism?, that charged feminist activists and authors with using bogus facts and other "myth-information" to portray modern Western women as brutally oppressed. Much of this critique has held up—and, as the new crop of feminist books shows, has remained relevant.
Indeed, one pseudo-fact debunked by Sommers and mostly retracted by its authors, school equity crusaders David Sadker and the late Myra Sadker, makes a comeback in Chemaly's book: the claim that boys in class call out answers eight times as often as girls do, while girls who speak out of turn are usually rebuked. Manne not only recycles that "fictoid" (as Sommers called it) but garbles it.
These are no isolated lapses. A cursory fact check of Chemaly's lengthy endnotes reveals that many of her sources don't say what she claims they do. The claim that "when women speak 30 percent of the time in mixed-gender conversations, listeners think they dominate," for instance, is sourced to a 1990 study that shows only a slight tendency to overestimate the female portion of a male-female dialogue. (Chemaly's claim is apparently derived from a passing mention in the study of a 1979 article by Australian radical feminist scholar Dale Spender.) The purported source for another alleged fact—"domestic violence injures more American women annually than rapes, car accidents and muggings combined"—is a book appendix by journalist Philip Cook that debunks this very myth.
Three new books suggest that a deeply entrenched misogyny ruthlessly punishes women who refuse to defer to men, and that female fury is a natural and salutary response.
Chemaly's treatment of news stories is just as cavalier. For example, she claims that Michigan Circuit Court Judge Rosemarie Aquilina was criticized for showing "clear contempt" toward former sports doctor and confessed sexual abuser Larry Nassar at his sentencing, supposedly due to "deep unease with women passing judgment on men." In fact, Aquilina was widely praised as a champion for victims. The criticism had to do with her suggestion that Nassar deserved punishment by rape.
Beyond the fictoids, what is the bigger picture? Manne defines misogyny so broadly—as a "systemic" bias that threatens women with "hostile consequences" for violating patriarchal norms, especially the expectation that women will be "givers" who tend to male needs—that any antagonism toward any woman for almost any reason can fit the label.
According to Manne, "misogyny is killing women and girls, literally and metaphorically." Deadly misogyny is exemplified here by Rodger (a severely disturbed man who killed two women and four men and planned to cap a sorority massacre with indiscriminate slaughter in the streets), but also by more ordinary domestic killings. Manne also asserts that men who victimize women get disproportionate sympathy, a.k.a. "himpathy" (a word to join mansplaining on the list of atrocious feminist neologisms).
Down Girl never grapples with issues that complicate its narrative: the ways men have been traditionally expected to "give" and sacrifice for others' needs in war and breadwinning; the fact that the primary victims of male violence are other males; the reality of domestic abuse in same-sex couples and intimate violence by women; the evidence that violent crimes with female victims tend to be punished more severely while female perpetrators tend to be treated more leniently.
Nor is Manne a particularly reliable narrator. At one point, she quotes excerpts from a news story in which a woman's family refuses to blame the boyfriend who fatally stabbed her and was later shot dead by police. But she leaves out a key detail: The woman was apparently unstable and prone to violence, and the man had likely acted in self-defense.
In all three books, the 2016 election looms large as an odious testament to the enduring power of patriarchy and misogyny. Yet you can loathe Trump and still question the assumption that Hillary Clinton's loss was the result of sexism. Some anti-Clinton sentiment certainly had to do with her gender; then again, so did what enthusiasm her campaign managed to generate. Traister, Chemaly, and Manne lament the stereotypes and double standards faced by ambitious and powerful women. Yet they never mention recent research by scholars such as Deborah Jordan Brooks of Dartmouth College or Jennifer Lawless of American University, who looked at actual political campaigns in the last decade and concluded that female candidates were not held back by voter biases.
The central theme of the call to feminist rage is sexual victimhood: #MeToo and the crusade against American "rape culture" that began a few years earlier. Few would doubt the worthiness of the cause. The scandals that followed Weinstein's exposure included story after story in which powerful men seemed to regard the women in their professional orbit as a personal harem and in which women's attempts to complain were deep-sixed; many of these stories, backed by contemporaneous reports to colleagues, friends, or family, involved allegations of criminal conduct ranging from sexual assault to indecent exposure. Even critics of feminist sex panic, such as Sommers and Northwestern University film studies professor Laura Kipnis, were mostly on board with #MeToo.
But from the start, the anti-patriarchal revolt had its own complications. For one, while revelations of male victims (and, eventually, female abusers) do not negate the claim that sexual harassment is linked to male power over women, these incidents do suggest that sexism is not the only reason high-status predators have had license to abuse. What's more, some career-killing accusations involved clumsy but noncoercive come-ons, awkward compliments, off-color jokes, or even vaguer offenses. Veteran National Public Radio host Leonard Lopate was fired over "inappropriate" comments such as telling a female producer working on a cookbook segment that avocado was derived from the Aztec word for testicle. Vince Ingenito, former editor of the pop culture website IGN, was accused of harassing a female staffer and onetime friend by complimenting her looks, disparaging some men she dated, and once telling her that he wished he could "go all night" as he'd done at her age.
When comedian Aziz Ansari got #MeTooed for being a jerk on a date, many supporters of the movement felt it had gone too far. But not Chemaly, who insists that the resulting "conversation" was needed to challenge "the tremendous power…that men can wield over women" in intimate encounters, even when no institutional power is involved. For both Chemaly and Traister, sexuality in the workplace is virtually always a male imposition on women, and male-female sexual dynamics under any circumstances are steeped in male "entitlement" and privilege. In this paradigm, female agency is virtually nonexistent.
Perhaps the most revealing part of Good and Mad is Traister's elegy for the late radical feminist writer/activist Andrea Dworkin, whom she sees as a tragic, misunderstood, maligned prophet of #MeToo: She speaks of "the sorrow I felt that Dworkin was not here to see what was happening." While she admits that Dworkin's anti-porn crusade was misguided, Traister defends her larger vision and her relentless fury while sanitizing her more outré views. (Traister insists that "all sex is rape" is a misreading of Dworkin's Intercourse, even though the book clearly equates penetrative sex with female subjugation and violation: "There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse.…The thrusting is persistent invasion.…She is occupied—physically, internally, in her privacy.")
Traister's tribute to Dworkin is a whitewash, but she's not wrong about the current feminist revival as a Dworkin moment. Many of the ideas championed by Dworkin and her sister in arms, legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, since the 1970s—that the lives of modern Western women and girls are an everyday "atrocity" of male depredations; that feminism, in MacKinnon's words, "is built on believing women's accounts of sexual use and abuse by men"; that bad speech constitutes "harm"—are now mainstream feminist beliefs.
That does not bode well for feminism.
In many ways, 20th century American feminism was one of liberal democracy's great success stories. Overtly discriminatory laws and policies crumbled; cultural attitudes on a wide range of subjects underwent a dramatic shift. (By 2000, more than nine out of 10 Americans said they would vote for a female presidential candidate, up from about one in two in 1955.) For some, this means that feminism has won its battle. For others, that it must now fight subtler and more complicated obstacles.
Even in the generations raised with the norm of gender equality, it's still mostly men who occupy positions of power and mostly women who tend to home and children. Conservatives and many libertarians see this as the result of free choices and differing preferences; most feminists blame structural sexism and deep-seated, often unconscious prejudices. While feminist arguments often rely on far-reaching speculation, feminism's critics can be too dismissive of the role played by cultural biases, social pressures, and similar factors in hindering equal opportunity. For example, several studies of employee performance reviews, most recently by Harvard researcher Paola Cecchi Dimeglio, have found that women tend to get less constructive feedback and more personal criticism, especially for being "too aggressive."
Addressing these issues is a legitimate goal, and one that doesn't require state coercion. In recent years, social media have given activists highly effective tools allowing them to use public opinion and consumer power to work for change without getting the government involved—whether it's to hold corporations accountable for condoning sexual predation in the workplace, to call for children's products that don't treat adventure and invention as the sole preserve of boys, or to push for more gender balance in various projects from films to academic conferences.
Unfortunately, when grievances become wildly inflated and the default mode for activism is rage, advocacy can easily turn into a baneful hypervigilance (do women really gain when every conversation is zealously monitored for "microaggressions" or "manterruptions"?) and misfocused mob outrage. Take the trashing of renowned British biochemist Tim Hunt in 2015 over alleged sexist remarks about the trouble with "girls in the lab." Hunt was roundly reviled as a misogynist on social media and in the press, then stripped of several posts. That fate came despite objections from attendees who said his offense was a misreported self-deprecating joke—a claim later supported by a partial audio recording—and despite his undisputed record as a champion of women in science.
Modern feminism, with its framework of male privilege and female oppression, takes a simplistic and one-sided view of gender dynamics in modern Western societies. It ignores the possibility that some gender-based biases (such as the expectation that males will perform physically grueling and/or dangerous tasks, paid or not) may benefit women or disadvantage men. It disregards the vast diversity and flexibility of cultural norms. It refuses to recognize that there is no perfect solution to the problem of dispensing justice when someone alleges a crime with no witnesses and both parties tell a credible story.
Rage-driven activism can be particularly destructive when it targets and politicizes interpersonal relationships, an area in which the sexes are probably equal but different in bad behavior. Victoria Bissell Brown's verbal abuse of her husband is hardly a typical example, but even Traister sees nothing wrong with the fact that, at the height of #MeToo, her husband once marveled, "How can you even want to have sex with me at this point?"
Anger can be productive, usually as an impetus for short-term action. But rage feminism is a path of fear and hate. It traps women in victimhood and bitterness. It demonizes men, even turning empathy for a male into a fault, and dismisses dissenting women as man-pleasing collaborators. It short-circuits important conversation on gender issues.
Urging women to disregard warnings about the perils of rage, Traister writes, "Consider that the white men in the Rust Belt are rarely told that their anger is bad for them." But aren't they? The anger of "white men in the Rust Belt" is commonly portrayed as an unfocused, dangerous emotion that scapegoats innocents and empowers unprincipled demagogues like Trump. The anger of privileged women is not much of an improvement.
The post The Future Is Female. And She's Furious. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>One of the most mercilessly mocked New York Times op-eds of recent memory was "Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism," a 2017 piece by Kristen R. Ghodsee. Undeterred by a flood of snarky Twitter commentary ("Before or after their husbands were sent to the Gulag?"), Ghodsee has now expanded her article into a short book with an almost identical title—it is now in the present tense, presumably for a more forward-looking approach.
She gets points for persistence, but the thesis doesn't really fare better in book form.
Make no mistake: The "socialism" in Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism is not the "capitalism + welfare state" Western European model. It's the hardcore Warsaw Pact variety that was dispatched to the proverbial ash heap of history in 1991. Indeed, the book's introduction opens with a photo of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to fly into space in July 1963; the caption earnestly states that she later "became a prominent politician and led the Soviet delegation to the 1975 United Nations Conference on Women." Being a "prominent politician" in the USSR is a bit like being a prominent biologist in the Young Earth creationist community.
Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, approvingly notes the rising popularity of socialism; she clearly intends her book as a contribution to ongoing debates over socialist systems. But there is no reason to think that American millennials who favor "socialism" are thinking of Soviet-style state socialism, as opposed to, say, Scandinavian social democracy. Surely one can advocate for the latter (wisely or not) without trying to rehabilitate the former. And yet Ghodsee, who accuses "conservative cold warriors" of trying to discredit alternatives to capitalism by "screaming about Stalin's famines and purges," tries to do just that: "Although it's important not to romanticize the state socialist past, the ugly realities should not make us completely oblivious to the ideals of the early socialists, to the various attempts to reform the system from within (such as the Prague Spring, glasnost, or perestroika)….Acknowledging the bad does not negate the good."
"The good" allegedly includes female empowerment in general and good sex for women in particular. Ghodsee's thesis is that capitalism inevitably commodifies sex, cheapens female labor (because women, thanks to childbearing and other factors, have less bargaining power in the market), and relegates women's caring tasks to unpaid drudgery while forcing them to depend on male earnings. By contrast, the socialist message included the promise of both economic and sexual liberation for women.
The operative word here is promise. Ghodsee ruefully admits that things turned out a bit differently in reality. "Many women suffered under a double burden of mandatory formal employment and domestic work," she acknowledges, while "discussions of sexual harassment, domestic violence, and rape" were suppressed. Meanwhile, abortion was less a choice than a necessity, serving "as a primary form of birth control" (except where it was banned, as in Stalin's Soviet Union after 1936 and under the Ceausescu regime in Romania after 1966). Nonetheless, Ghodsee insists that women's integration into the workforce in the Soviet bloc was a trailblazing model of female employment, that institutional day care was a success, and that women's love lives benefited from not having to trade sex for material support.
The only actual evidence Ghodsee offers for the joys of socialist sex is some polls suggesting that East German women were having more and better sex than their Wessi sisters. (As the British social historian Josie McLennan demonstrates in her 2011 study, Love in a Time of Communism, the actual findings are complicated, contradictory, and often dubious. One such survey suggested that East German men were better endowed, which mostly seems to demonstrate that Communism breeds more prolific liars.) There's also some anecdotal stuff, such as a 40something Soviet-born woman who hears Ghodsee discuss her op-ed on a radio show and emails to say that she "nailed it"—with no mention of other Soviet-born women whose reaction was "You've got to be kidding."
As someone who lived in the Soviet Union until emigrating as a teen in 1980, I can say that Ghodsee must have a truly enormous pair of rose-colored glasses.
Ghodsee does acknowledge that the Soviet revolutionaries' initial embrace of sexual freedom and liberation from traditional family roles—notably championed by Alexandra Kollontai, the most prominent female Bolshevik—soon gave way to a far more conservative outlook. Childbearing became a national imperative; non-procreative sex, a bourgeois frivolity. The post-Stalin thaw ushered in a less repressive environment. But as the sexual revolution swept the West, Soviet culture remained remarkably puritanical well into the 1980s. One infamous moment that came to symbolize this prudery was when a woman in the Leningrad studio audience of a 1986 U.S.–Soviet satellite TV talk show seemed to declare, "In the Soviet Union, there is no sex." (She actually said "no sex on television," but the last two words were drowned out by laughter.)
Besides cultural attitudes, there were socialist practicalities—particularly a lack of privacy, to which Ghodsee only briefly alludes. Single young adults shared cramped apartments with parents, siblings, and often other relatives; so did most young marrieds. Many couples lacked even a private bedroom, which understandably put a damper on things; there were horror tales of conjugal moments ruined by a parent or in-law shouting "Cut it out, I'm trying to sleep!" from behind a curtain. Add the lack of contraceptives and the barbarity of Soviet abortion (anesthesia required a bribe), and it's a wonder any sex happened at all.
Things were not quite as bleak in some Soviet satellite countries—East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia—that had higher living standards and more cultural freedom. (They even allowed some bawdy films, a fact reflected in a Russian joke: Group sex Soviet-style is getting together with some Polish friends who tell you what they saw in a Swedish porno movie.) On the other hand, Ceausescu's Romania, where birth control was banned and fertile women's menstrual periods were monitored to combat illicit abortions, makes the USSR look like a sexual paradise.
Ghodsee's portrayal of women's public lives in Eastern Bloc countries is just as comically whitewashed. Thus, a handful of women who snagged high-level posts under regimes ruled by all-male elites are trotted out as evidence of "state socialist countries' commitment to the ideal of women's rights," though Ghodsee concedes that "actual practice did not live up to the rhetoric." You don't say.
A particularly odd section recounts Ghodsee's own experience in a Model U.N. high school club, where she decided to become the Eastern bloc specialist because she "knew" the boys would nix a female United States or United Kingdom representative as too implausible. "The lesson I learned at fifteen was that while it was implausible that my own country would allow a woman to make crucial foreign policy decision on the world stage, this was perfectly possible for the Soviet Union," Ghodsee writes. This was in 1986, when Jeane Kirkpatrick had just finished a four-year stint as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations—and no Warsaw Pact country had ever had a female U.N. envoy.
While Ghodsee is determined to see the best in the socialist East's Potemkin feminism, the capitalist West is judged by its anecdotal worst. A friend of Ghodsee's who becomes a full-time mother is reduced to begging her husband for a credit card for a night out and grimly resolves to accommodate his demands for more sex to earn her spending money. A male friend avoids too-intimidating ambitious women and marries a foreign gold-digger who ditches him as soon as she gets her green card. (In Ghodsee's world, apparently, no one in the socialist bloc ever traded sex for material goods such as a better living situation.) Another friend, a tech executive, swears he'll never hire another woman after a star employee has a baby and quits. There is no acknowledgment in this book that, for all our remaining problems of gender inequality, Western capitalism has done a pretty impressive job of adapting to women's changing roles, or that a flexible market offers unique opportunities to craft career paths compatible with child-rearing.
Work-family balance will remain a challenge for the foreseeable future. The generous family leave policies that Ghodsee admires may make things easier for some, but they often end up pushing women onto a career-limiting mommy track, which suggests that tradeoffs are inevitable. We can certainly strive to ensure that both women and men have more opportunities to choose a life that suits them and their children best, though Ghodsee's obsession with numerical parity (such as equal numbers of male and female stay-at-home parents) seems counterproductive.
The main lesson of this volume seems to be that many left-wing critics of capitalism can't bring themselves to fully repudiate the legacy of 20th-century Marxism-Leninism. Ghodsee concludes by claiming there "was a baby in all that bathwater." Not in this book, there isn't.
The post No, Sex Wasn't Better for Women Under Socialism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This year, with the start of a new presidential term that runs out in 2024, Vladimir Putin has achieved the dubious milestone of having been in power longer than Leonid Brezhnev, who led the country from 1964 to 1982. It is an apt comparison, since the age of Putin in Russia bears definite resemblances to the Brezhnev era in the Soviet Union.
Now, as then, large segments of the population enjoy mostly oil-enabled material comfort relative to previous generations (even if the 1970s version of comfort, in which a color television was the height of luxury, bananas were a rare delicacy, and a trip to Crimea was a dream vacation, looks like squalor in the 2010s). Now, as then, there is a relatively mild authoritarian regime with occasional spikes of repression (even if the level of freedom in modern-day Russia, where dissidents can sell books and virtually all content is accessible on the internet, would have been unthinkable in Brezhnev's USSR). Now, as then, there was a stagnant stability and a cynical national mood, with no visible alternatives to the existing system.
Of course, the Brezhnev era turned out to be a prelude to reform, upheaval, and ultimately the collapse of the Soviet Union. What comes after Putinism—and when?
The fall of Soviet Communism and the turn toward liberal values in the new Russia was a major victory for freedom, notwithstanding the massive flaws of both post-Soviet economic reform and Boris Yeltsin's leadership. Russia's authoritarian backsliding under Putin in the 21st century, and the rise of an amorphous but aggressive anti-liberal "Russian idea" composed of a mishmash of aggrieved nationalism, populism, and cultural traditionalism, is not the only factor in the worldwide rise of illiberalism in the 2010s. But it has made the world less safe for freedom and empowered freedom's enemies.
Today, resistance to authoritarianism in Russia is weak but very much alive. In the past year and a half, tens of thousands have turned out in cities across Russia to protest corruption, internet censorship, Putin's return for yet another presidential term, and most recently austerity measures; even Russia's Libertarian Party (yes, there is one) has managed to organize a fairly large rally in Moscow. Recent polls show declining approval ratings for the president, an upturn in pro-Western attitudes, and rising expectations of political protests. If Russian reformers can use this moment to get their message across to mass audiences and break Putinism's stranglehold on the largely apathetic majority, a rebirth of Russian liberalism may be possible—and would have far-reaching repercussions.
The 2018 presidential election in Russia was a particularly depressing one for anti-authoritarians, even by Russian standards. Putin received almost 77 percent of the popular vote, compared to 63 percent in 2012, with the turnout slightly up this time. Six years ago, there was at least one liberal candidate, businessman Mikhail Prokhorov, among the top runners-up; he came in third with about 8 percent of the vote. This year, the only two other candidates who received more than 2 percent were Pavel Grudinin, a millionaire Communist (11.8 percent), and perennial ultranationalist buffoon Vladimir Zhirinovsky (5.7 percent).
The only opposition figure with a sizable following, anti-corruption blogger and activist Alexei Navalny, was barred from running because of a 2017 fraud conviction widely considered to have been fabricated by his opponents in power. The liberal opposition candidate who did run—notorious TV personality Ksenia Sobchak, an ex-reality show host sometimes dubbed the "Russian Paris Hilton"—was almost certainly a Kremlin pick, intended not only to maintain the pretense of a "real" election but to add a bit of excitement to the suspenseless campaign.
Sobchak, whose father Anatoly Sobchak, the late mayor of St. Petersburg, was once Putin's boss and mentor, freely admitted that she told Putin about her intent to run, though she denied that her candidacy was coordinated with him. She was the only person during the campaign who openly criticized Putin on television and raised the issue of the lack of political freedom in the country. Still, Navalny blasted her as a stooge. After receiving more coverage from the Kremlin-controlled media than usual for the opposition, she pulled in just 1.7 percent of the vote and then essentially vanished from the political scene.
The weakness of the liberal Russian opposition is due to many factors. To some extent, "liberals get blamed for the economic disasters of the 1990s," says Moscow-based political scientist Lilia Shevtsova, an associate fellow at the Chatham House Institute, "even though those policies had nothing to do with liberalism." ("Pro-market" policies in 1990s Russia amounted largely to former Communist apparatchiks reinventing themselves as capitalists and "privatizing" former state properties; meanwhile, protections for private property remained weak and state intervention in the economy remained rampant.) But ultimately, the opposition has been marginalized by the systematic actions of the regime, not spontaneous consensus.
Putin's Western apologists believe that his electoral wins—no matter how unfree and unfair the elections—and his sky-high approval ratings reflect genuine popularity and gratitude for saving his country from chaos. The Weekly Standard's Christopher Caldwell has asserted that Russians "revere" Putin. But unless one counts reverential comments from politicians and pro-Kremlin pundits, the reality is considerably more complex.
Writing in Nezavisimaya Gazeta (The Independent Gazette) in July, political analyst Vitaly Shklyarov noted that public opinion polling in Russia runs up against a basic paradox: The message of official propaganda is that a good, well-adjusted citizen must regard Putin as "the national leader, a sacred figure who is above all institutions and all criticism and is identical to the state itself"; thus, to ask for someone's opinion of Putin is to probe his adherence to a key social norm. Shklyarov believes this skews poll results, not only because people feel pressured to give the "right" answer but because wrongthinkers may simply opt out. (Survey response rates in Russia range from 10 to 50 percent and tend to be especially low for political questions.) Pollsters, especially from state-run agencies, may also be seen as authority figures, so Russians may feel not only psychological pressure to conform but apprehension about the practical consequences of nonconformity.
Yet even in such a setting, polls that dig into Russians' opinion of Putin reveal ambivalence. In April, the Levada Center, Russia's only major independent polling firm, asked people about their president's successes and failures. (Participants were interviewed in person and could pick as many answers as they wanted from a list on a card.) The only item on which close to half of respondents—47 percent, to be exact—credited Putin with success was "reclaiming Russia's status as a great, respected power." By comparison, only 24 percent said he had been successful in "ensuring higher salaries, retirement pensions, stipends and benefits," while 32 percent saw this as one of his failures. Other items on which "failure" exceeded "success" included "securing law and order" (23–18 percent), "overcoming the economic crisis and boosting industry" (27–14 percent), and, especially dramatically, "ensuring fair distribution of income in the interests of common people" (45–5 percent).
Putin's Western apologists believe his electoral wins and sky-high approval ratings reflect genuine popularity. The reality is considerably more complex.
In another revealing Levada poll, taken in mid-July using a similar method, Putin's best quality turned out to be that he's an "experienced politician." (That answer was chosen by about half of the respondents.) Even "energetic, decisive, strong-willed" lagged far behind at 30 percent. "Stands for the country's interests" and "a real leader who can rally people behind him" were each mentioned by a paltry 17 percent, down from 23 and 25 percent three years ago. (While none of the reasons for disliking him were picked by more than 17 percent of the sample, the top three were "has ties to big business," "out of touch with the people," and "linked to corrupt politicians.")
All this suggests that Putin's popularity is superficial and potentially flimsy. Indeed, his legendary approval rating, which had long held steady between 78 and 83 percent, plunged to 64 percent during the summer, as calculated by the state-run Public Opinion Foundation. The same agency found that the share of Russians saying they had "absolute trust" in Putin fell from 46 percent in March to 27 percent in July.
Partly, this drop was a reaction to a government proposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 65 for men and from 55 to 63 for women over the next 15 years. In a country where male life expectancy in particular is low—currently 68 years, compared to 77 in the United States—the move was met with near-universal outrage. Polls showed 80 percent adamantly against it; protesters took to the streets in more than 150 cities across Russia, wielding signs outfitted with such slogans as "Work until you croak." While Putin kept his distance from the reform plans, it didn't help matters when his spokesman remarked that the president's 2005 pledge not to raise the retirement age was ancient history. After initially saying that he didn't like any proposal to hike the retirement age, Putin announced in late August that he would sign the legislation with a small adjustment: The hike would be the same for both sexes, raising women's pension eligibility age to 60 instead of 63.
The retirement-age controversy became the focus for a more general dissatisfaction with Putin and his policies, related to everything from the sluggish economy to military involvements abroad. In June, before the pension reform issue existed, 42 percent of Russians—up from 27 percent a few months earlier—were telling pollsters that the country was headed in the wrong direction.
In a fascinating parallel development, polls also found a marked drop in hostility toward the United States and the European Union. Favorable opinions of both reached 42 percent in July. (Since the Crimea annexation in 2014, positive views of the United States among Russians had hovered between 20 and 30 percent; the E.U. was viewed favorably by just 27 percent as recently as May.) The increase in pro-American attitudes could be attributed to the Russia-friendly presidency of Donald Trump, but the same does not apply to the E.U., and in any case the Kremlin's honeymoon with Trump has long been over.
A report on the pro-Western shift in opinion in the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti quoted several experts who thought the change in mood was largely a result of the World Cup soccer championship held in Moscow this summer. But Chatham House's Shevtsova believes there are deeper and more political roots. "It's obvious that many people are starting to realize that the anti-Western, anti-American propaganda is intended simply to distract them from their own problems," she says.
The pension reform plan revived the specter of mass protests in Russia this year.
The last time Russia saw a wave of big demonstrations was just before the 2012 presidential election. At the time, many were angered by Putin's announcement that he would run for president again, reclaiming the post from his handpicked successor Dmitry Medvedev—a de facto admission that the Medvedev "presidency" from 2008 to 2012 had been a charade enabling Putin to make an end run around the two-term limit. Reports of widespread and blatant voter fraud in the Duma elections in December 2011 were the last straw, causing tens of thousands to take to the streets demanding fair elections.
That momentum waned after Putin's election victory, not only because there was no clear goal to rally around, but also because the movement was brutally quashed. On May 6, 2012, a rally protesting Putin's inauguration on Moscow's Bolotnaya Square erupted into violent clashes with the riot police—almost certainly instigated by the latter—and ended in beatings and mass arrests of demonstrators and even passersby who got caught in the commotion. Dozens of people were prosecuted; a few spent years in prison. The message that going to anti-government protests was dangerous could not have been clearer.
Since then, repressive measures intended to nip protests in the bud have continued, says Moscow-based journalist Victor Davidoff, a former Soviet dissident who runs a website chronicling human rights abuses in Russia. Generally, Davidoff explains, "You can say pretty much anything you want on the internet—you can call Putin a dick, no one cares. But if you so much as mention that Navalny is asking people to come to this or that location for a rally at 5 p.m. tomorrow, you'll get hit with an 'extremism' charge."
Navalny is the name that inevitably comes up when discussing protests and the opposition in modern-day Russia. The 42-year-old blogger and lawyer, who heads a still-unregistered party called Future Russia, has managed to prevail against the state's repressive machinery to a remarkable degree, despite being hobbled by that criminal conviction. In spring 2017, he released a 50-minute YouTube documentary, Don't Call Him Dimon, that accused Medvedev, now Russia's prime minister, of massive embezzlement and catalogued his allegedly ill-gotten properties, including luxury apartments, mansions, villas, and yachts. (The title refers to a popular internet nickname for Medvedev, a slangy diminutive for Dmitry.) The film, whose charges have never been refuted, became a springboard for anti-corruption protests across Russia in March 2017—notable, among other things, for attracting large numbers of young people, including high school students. While the establishment media studiously ignored both the documentary and the demonstrations, a Levada poll found that over 60 percent of the population had heard about the rallies; opinions were evenly split on whether the protesters deserved sympathy or not.
This spring, Navalny organized another multicity day of protests—this time against Putin's inauguration and under the motto "He's not our czar." Police arrested more than 1,600 people in 23 cities, among them Navalny himself. (Detainees also included a 12-year-old boy in Saratov, whose father got a citation for failing to properly supervise his son.)
Navalny is widely viewed as unique among opposition activists in his ability both to mobilize young people and to organize an efficient national network ("Even the Communist Party doesn't have that," Shevtsova says). He also has impressive name recognition, despite being blacklisted from state-controlled television: Over half of all Russians know who he is.
The fiery anti-corruption crusader is a somewhat divisive figure among the Russian liberal opposition due to a history of nationalist (and some say xenophobic) rhetoric. He participated in the nationalist "Russian March" in 2007, 2008, and 2011; in 2013, he also campaigned against visa-free short-term travel for Central Asian workers into the country. His political persona is a curious blend of populism and liberalism. He is largely pro-market and pro–civil liberties; although an Orthodox Christian, he backed the feminist activists from Pussy Riot during their prosecution for holding an anti-Putin protest in a Moscow cathedral in 2013.
Shevtsova sees Navalny as particularly important because he is "a new face"—a politician of and for the next generation, "one who has no connection to the 1990s and to all those failures, mistakes, and conflicts." And he is a superb communicator—who "can speak to the people in their own language," Davidoff says, unlike most opposition leaders.
Navalny's current status attests both to the power and to the limitations of the internet in the country. Last spring, just over 10 percent of Russians said they would definitely or probably vote for him if he were a presidential candidate, but that figure might have been very different if he got regular coverage on TV, which remains most Russians' go-to source for information. Yet he still manages to reach large audiences through YouTube, Twitter, and his website. Close to 100 percent of Russia's young adults and more than 80 percent of those between the ages of 30 and 54 currently have internet access, and the online media and blogs are now mentioned as a frequent news source by more than 40 percent of the population.
The Kremlin currently has plenty of legal authority to curb online speech, using extremely broad and vague laws that criminalize "extremism" and "incitement of hatred or hostility" based on various demographic characteristics—i.e., "hate speech." Since protected categories under Russian law include "any social group," people have been charged with hate speech for posting mean things about cops or for sharing memes that mock vatniki—a Russian word for a plain cotton wool-padded jacket that has become a slang term for crude and mindless Kremlin loyalists. (These laws are so easily abused that even Russia's generally docile Presidential Council on Human Rights recently weighed in to suggest that they should cover only actual incitement to violence.) What's more, Russian law allows not only the prosecution of "extremist" or "hateful" online speech but the blocking of offending websites. Luckily, at least so far, the censors' technological capacity to enforce these laws has tended to come up short.
"In China, they built up the internet with the filters in place," Davidoff explains. "Putin missed the boat. It's something that could have been done 20 years ago; now, it's too late."
As an example, he points to the conflict in April between the authorities and the Telegram instant messenger service developed by (now-expatriate) Russian entrepreneurs, the brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov. When Telegram refused Russian security agencies' demand to give them access to decryption keys, a Russian court authorized censoring the app in the country. But when Roskomnadzor, the federal communications monitoring agency, tried to carry out the order by blocking IP addresses associated with the messenger, the results were rather farcical: Many Russian internet users lost access at various times to a wide range of services, including Google Search, Google Translate, ResearchGate, Twitter, and Facebook; numerous Russian sites, from online stores to airline booking systems to university websites, also became temporarily unavailable. Apparently, at one point, Roskomnadzor's clumsy effort even took down its own website. The agency was flooded with some 46,000 complaints in 10 days. Protests "in support of a free internet" flared up, with some 12,000 people turning out in Moscow alone. And through it all, Telegram for the most part continued to work just fine. Internet: 1; Putin: 0.
The practical difficulty of controlling the web may function as an informal check on Russian authoritarianism. So do clandestine conflicts among factions and cliques within Russia's political and crony capitalist elites, many observers believe. Some of these "clans" are more Western- and business-oriented. Others—the so-called siloviki, a hard-to-translate term perhaps best approximated by "enforcers"—are linked to security services and military institutions.
Navalny may be a case in point. Russian independent journalist Sergei Parkhomenko has argued that he is able to survive because he "skillfully balances atop the conflicting interests and ambitions of the different players in the Kremlin's ambit," allowing himself to be used as a vehicle for publishing kompromat, or damaging information about political actors. (This is not to say that Navalny's activism does not involve very real risks. In spring 2017, while campaigning, the blogger endured two attacks in which his face was splashed with zelyonka, a bright green antiseptic popular in Russia. After the second assault, he had to receive permission to travel to Spain for eye surgery.)
Still, this theory may explain the otherwise baffling fact that a man who is a major thorn in the Kremlin's side remains free despite his fraud conviction and several subsequent arrests related to his activism—none resulting in more than brief detention—as well as his impressive ability to obtain one bombshell document after another. Davidoff, too, believes Navalny has highly placed protectors. But he stresses that this in no way undercuts his authenticity as an opposition leader: "He's using the clans at least as much as they're using him," he says. Intriguingly, Davidoff thinks most members of the nominally independent Kremlin-critical media also stay alive thanks to protection from various Kremlin factions.
If "dissension in the clans" is likely to be a key factor in Putinism's eventual demise, Western sanctions also have a key role to play in this process—particularly since they are designed to target the elites themselves, with high-level Russian officials and Kremlin-connected business oligarchs denied access to their properties and financial holdings in the West.
"Of course internal political change in Russia must have domestic roots, and the biggest factor is the state of minds," says Shevtsova. "On the other hand, the package of sanctions imposed first and foremost by the United States, not Europe, has a huge impact on the mood of the ruling elites. It will affect the Russian economy, the availability of capital, Russia's ability to buy technology—so, in an indirect way, it will definitely be a huge factor."
"The sanctions—that's pure genius," Davidoff says. "It's a remake of the Reagan strategy that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The brilliant thing about this policy is that it's not aggression, it's not waging war. It's just saying, 'That's it, we're not going to deal with you.' It hurts Putin himself quite badly; he has lost tens of millions of dollars—his own money from his own pockets—because of the sanctions. And it promotes discontent with Putin," not only among the general population but among the elites.
A winter of discontent may be coming already. The drop in Putin's ratings doesn't necessarily signal a coming revolution, but it does show that Putin-era stability is not as solid as it seems.
In an interview with the Russian website The Village in late 2015, Levada Center Director Lev Gudkov noted that Putin's popularity began slipping soon after the 2012 election, until the events in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea generated a rush of patriotism and hysteria. (In 2014, record numbers of Russians—as many as 86 percent—said they felt proud of their country; the number of those who saw Russia as threatened by "numerous foreign and domestic enemies" spiked as well.) Gudkov predicted that the post-Crimea high would eventually wear off, and with it the Putin mystique. And what remained of the surge of support may indeed have ended with the pension reform announcement.
Beyond Putin himself, Russians' confidence in other government figures and institutions—always fairly anemic—has been plummeting. Last year, fewer than half thought the government was doing a good job; that figure has now dropped to 37 percent. Medvedev's unfavorable rating, which has been rising steadily since 2015, now exceeds his favorable rating by more than 2–1 (69–31 percent); the Duma fares almost as badly. Almost 90 percent agree that the country's leadership is a self-serving elite that doesn't care about the people's interests.
The reasons for dissatisfaction are many. There is no question that Russians today are better off economically than they were right after the USSR's fall (in 1994, 12 percent described their material situation as "pretty good" and 34 percent as "unbearably bad," while in recent years those proportions have been reversed), but surveys show that poverty is an urgent concern for a third of the population and the rising cost of living for two-thirds. Corruption is an epidemic. The state of the health care system remains deplorable, with chronic shortages of painkillers and other medicine. Horror stories of understaffed hospitals with crumbling walls and ceilings, dirty bedsheets, overflowing toilets, and rude or drunk personnel appear with depressing regularity and often go viral on the internet.
All this adds up to a pervasive sense that the country is mired in low-key disarray coexisting with spectacular wealth for some, and that no lives matter except those of the elites. In the Siberian town of Kemerovo last month, 60 people, 41 of them children, were killed in a fire in a shopping mall and entertainment center due at least in part to official negligence. Thousands, including relatives of the dead, gathered to demand the resignation of Gov. Aman Tuleyev; there were also shouts of "Putin must resign!" Meanwhile, at a televised event, Tuleyev (who did eventually step down, only to return as speaker of the regional legislature) publicly apologized to Putin but not to the grieving parents. When, while discussing the tragedy on national television, Sen. Elena Mizulina used the occasion for an ode to "our leader Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin" (lamenting the rally's "stab in the back" to a president who was "doing such incredible things for Russia" and urging people to give him "sympathy and support") the Russian internet exploded in anger and savage mockery.
Clandestine conflicts among factions within the political and crony capitalist elites may be a check on Russian authoritarianism.
Add to this the inevitable conflict between the Kremlin's empire-building, great-global-power ambitions and its commitments to social spending at home, and the potential for instability becomes obvious—with the retirement-age controversy just the first shoe to drop.
In July, more than 40 percent of Russians polled by the Levada Center said that mass protests "against the drop in living standards" were "quite possible" in their area in the near future, up from 17 percent in March; an impressive 28 percent said they would probably join such protests if they happened. Even more remarkably, one-third saw a fairly high likelihood of protests with political demands, and nearly one in four expressed a willingness to join in.
If dissatisfaction with the current regime continues to grow, it will not necessarily translate into support for freedom or liberal democracy. Russia is a society where paternalistic values remain strong. While some 60 percent of Russians in recent polls said human rights should take precedence over "the interests of the state," a similar majority agreed that "the state should take care of all citizens and ensure that they have a decent standard of living." When asked which human rights are important, they tended to emphasize "social rights," such as medical care and a safety net, far more than freedom of speech or even fair treatment in the legal system.
Given these attitudes, an anti-Putin backlash could end up empowering the far left rather than the country's liberals. But the Communist Party has little following beyond its core constituency of mostly older people. And Navalny, a savvy, charismatic, and ideologically flexible activist, is in a perfect position to capitalize on the revival of discontent. One of the biggest protests against the pension reform law so far, a July 29 rally in Moscow that reportedly drew nearly 6,000 people, was organized by the Libertarian Party and endorsed by Navalny.
While relatively few Russians today voice concerns over the lack of traditional civil liberties, the heavy-handed tactics of the security state inevitably result in some flare-ups of civil libertarian protest. The rallies for internet freedom in April were one recent example; another was the "Mothers' March," a rally in mid-August in Moscow that drew over a thousand people on behalf of several teenagers currently being held on charges of organizing an "extremist" anti-government group. Their actions were instigated by an undercover state security agent conducting a sting operation.
One can easily mine Russian polls for all sorts of confusing and contradictory findings, but overall, Shevtsova, who has been studying public opinion in the country since the 1980s, estimates that about 30 percent of the population broadly supports liberal values (Davidoff's estimate is 25 percent). That's a sizable-enough minority that, under the right circumstances, it could tip a majority in its favor and shape the course of far-reaching reform.
Last December, Kiev-based German political scientist Andreas Umland published an article on the startlingly optimistic topic of what the West should do to help along a democratic revival and prepare for a post-Putinist Russia. Umland was talking primarily about prospects for 2024, when Putin's last constitutionally permitted term ends (he will be 72 years old). Of course, many things could happen by then: A full-scale Russian war against Ukraine, which would radically alter the political landscape, remains a troubling possibility. On the other hand, reform—cosmetic, genuine, or some mixture of the two—could begin even before Putin leaves office. Unlike the Soviet Union, today's Russia has alternative institutions, however weak—from dissenting media and an almost-free internet to civic groups to opposition politicians in regional parliaments and city councils. These liberal islands can grow.
As for the U.S., its best bet is to maintain a commitment to the principles of liberty. Foreign-policy moralism can certainly be a dangerous path to start down. But a "realism" that ascribes permanence to Russia's deceptive status quo and treats the interests of the Putin regime as synonymous with the interests of the Russian people is, in the end, not very realistic at all.
The post Dissent and Disarray in Putin's Russia appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A case that helped jump-start a wave of campus sexual assault activism across America has ended in a big win for the complainants. Last week the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education released its findings on the federal complaint four students and an administrator filed against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in January 2013. The office concluded that the school had failed to establish "grievance procedures that provide for the prompt and equitable resolution of student, employee, and third-party complaints" of sex discrimination, including sexual misconduct. While the university has not admitted wrongdoing, it has agreed to review its procedures and to submit to federal monitoring.
Among those celebrating this outcome was former UNC student Andrea Pino, the co-founder of the national organization End Rape on Campus and the best-known of the five women behind the complaint. "I was 20 years old taking on a 200-year-old university and today I can say that I won," Pino told ABC11.
But that victory comes with an asterisk. While Pino's role in the UNC complaint propelled the 26-year-old Florida native to national visibility—she has met with politicians, was showcased in the 2015 campus rape documentary The Hunting Ground, has co-authored a book of survivor narratives, and speaks frequently on college campuses—there are also serious questions, unanswered and largely unasked, about the credibility of her own story of sexual assault.
The Campus Rape Frenzy, a 2017 book by the Brooklyn College historian K.C. Johnson and the National Journal writer Stuart Taylor, critically examines claims of a neglected epidemic of sexual violence on campus. It describes Pino's complaint against UNC as "the highest-profile questionable Title IX claim." (Title IX is the statute that requires colleges to investigate sexual harassment and assault.) Johnson and Taylor point out a number of implausibilities and inconsistencies in Pino's accounts both of her rape and of her alleged mistreatment by the university. While they stop short of calling Pino's story a hoax, they note that it has some startling parallels to that of Jackie, the faux victim in Rolling Stone's retracted story of a brutal fraternity rape at the University of Virginia.
My own skepticism of Pino's claims goes back to the controversy over The Hunting Ground, when I decided to look up some information on the women who appeared in the film. Some things in a 2014 Vogue feature on Pino and her comrade-in-arms Annie Clark, and in Pino's own blog posts at The Huffington Post, leaped out at me as decidedly odd. I did some background research for a possible article questioning about Pino's credibility. Then I put it on hold for several reasons, from a lack of leads to qualms about suggesting that someone who claimed to be the victim of a brutal crime was lying. (Pino never named a suspect, so this was not a question of a possible false accusation against an innocent person.)
Last year, The Campus Rape Frenzy revived my interest in pursuing the Pino story. Even with no accused, the issue of Pino's truthfulness is important given her status as a central figure in the narrative of a pervasive "rape culture" on American campuses—a narrative that has created a damaging climate of fear and presumption of guilt. It is also relevant to related problem: The media's tendency to suspend normal journalistic skepticism when it comes to allegations of sexual violence.
My story on Pino was published in May 2017 in Heat Street; several months later, that website folded and all its archives were taken down. With Pino and the UNC case back in the news, this story deserves to be brought back—particularly since, after the publication of the Heat Street article, I was contacted by a person deeply involved in campus sexual assault activism who not only shared my skepticism but gave me some striking new details. This article incorporates both material from the Heat Street story and new information. Pino did not respond to my requests for an interview or a comment, either in 2015 or last year.
* * *
Unlike many disputed accounts of campus sexual assault, Pino's story does not involve a murky situation of excessive alcohol consumption and fuzzy memories, or blurred lines between seduction and coercion. She says that in her sophomore year at UNC, in March 2012, she was the victim of a terrifying, extremely violent attack at an off-campus party she attended with a friend.
The assault began, Pino says, when a young man with whom she was dancing ("he was really attractive and a really, really great dancer," she says in The Hunting Ground) suddenly pulled her toward the bathroom and dragged her inside. In a 2013 Huffington Post blog post, Pino gives a dramatic description of what happened next:
My head was slammed hard against shiny white tile….The white shone with his bright eyes, and the drops of my blood that dripped to a puddle. He held my wrist against the walls as his hands slipped with scarlet sweat, and his eyes followed my buttons as he ripped them off my jeans. My mouth couldn't say "no," my eyes were blinded by the tiny red dots on my contact lenses. His fingers slipped through my hair, and I felt his fingernails digging into my head, pulling me in closer to his unzipped black Levis.
At some point, Pino has said, she "blacked out," then regained consciousness and returned to the party to try to find her friends; failing to do so, she returned to her dorm on her own, still in a state of shock. The next morning, she writes, she "woke up in a pool of blood," her body covered with "marks and blisters"; as the horrific memories came back, she realized that she had been raped. She considered reporting it, but hesitated because she had no name for her attacker and no witnesses: "Would the police make me take a lie-detector test? Would they think that I hurt myself?"
Pino writes that when she tried reaching out to friends to talk about the assault, "I quickly learned that it was 'my fault.'" The friend who had invited her to the party, she told Vogue, reacted by asking, "Maybe you just had a bad hookup?" And so, according to Pino, she suffered in silence for months while depression and anxiety took their toll on her coursework and university staffers treated her as a slacker.
This harrowing tale has many elements that are uncannily similar to Jackie's story in Rolling Stone: a Prince Charming who abruptly morphs into a monster; a brutal rape during a party; a victim who flees the house dazed and bleeding but never goes to the police or to the hospital; insensitive, victim-blaming friends and indifferent authority figures who shrug off the assault.
None of that, of course, proves that Pino is another Jackie. But while Pino's story does not have a smoking gun like Jackie's catfishing scheme to impersonate the nonexistent rapist "Haven Monahan," it still has plenty of red flags. For instance:
* Even assuming that one can occupy the bathroom during a crowded party for an extended period of time without attracting attention, did no one notice the blood on the tiles after the rape or the blood on Pino when she returned to the party? (In her Huffington Post piece, she says she left bloody tracks on the path when running back to the dorm.)
* Pino claims she bled so profusely that her light-blue bedsheets turned "burgundy" and blood dripped from the bed onto the wooden floor. Such heavy bleeding would have left her extremely weak, especially since she also claims she sustained a concussion. How plausible is it that no one at the dorm or the school would have noticed her condition, or that she recovered without medical help?
* How plausible is it that students at a liberal university in 2012 would tell a woman who was dragged into a bathroom, viciously battered, and raped that it was her fault, or dismiss this as "a bad hookup"?
* In the 2013 Huffington Post essay, Pino says that when she told an academic advisor she wanted to drop a course due to "difficult personal trauma," the advisor called her lazy and suggested she couldn't cut it at UNC. Yet in an interview two years later, she attributes these comments to a professor who she implies had been informed of her rape ("I explained…what was happening and how it was affecting my grades").
* During a question-and-answer session after a screening of The Hunting Ground in Los Angeles in March 2015, Pino introduced a dramatic new detail into her narrative: While making the point that women cannot prevent rape by taking precautions and citing her own example as a woman who was raped even though she "did everything right," she claimed that she "had a taser" (and was presumably carrying it on the night of the attack).
* In her Huffington Post piece, Pino says she didn't go to the police because she had no name and no witnesses. (In fact, her description of the assailant—dark-haired, blue-eyed, wearing black denim pants and a black shirt—should have made it easy to find him). Elsewhere, however, she has offered a very different reason: that she did not immediately recognize what happened as a sexual assault. Thus, a 2017 account of Pino's and Clark's appearance at Penn State in the student newspaper, The Daily Collegian, quotes Pino as saying, "I didn't know what to do….That's because my assault didn't look like what I thought sexual assault looked like it was (sic) in Law and Order SVU or what it was in movies….I didn't consider myself a victim, much less a survivor." This assertion not only contradicts Pino's earlier claims but is quite far-fetched, since what she describes—a violent attack by a stranger that leaves the victim badly injured—closely resembles the classic stereotype of "real rape." Pino seems to be channeling a standard trope of campus rape narratives: The victim who doesn't realize she has been raped. But that trope generally applies to far more ambiguous situations involving minimal physical coercion.
* Pino's claim that she initially did not recognize her experience as sexual assault is especially odd considering that—as the Collegian article notes—she was active in a bystander intervention program that focused on prevention of sexual assault and partner violence. (Most media accounts omit this detail.) According to Pino's LinkedIn résumé, from August 2011 onward she was a "peer educator" for One Act Carolina & Helping to Advocate for Violence Ending Now (HAVEN). Her involvement in this program also makes it all the more difficult to believe that she could find no one to talk to, or that no one encouraged her to seek help.
There is another startling part of Pino's story that has been almost completely overlooked. In the 2013 Huffington Post piece, Pino asserts that the rape in March 2012 was the second assault she suffered on campus. The only other reference I could find to this claim (unmentioned in The Hunting Ground) was in an obscure October 2014 blog post about a talk she gave at a conference, which says that "Pino was sexually assaulted twice" while at UNC.
The first incident, according to Pino, happened "a few weeks" into her first year on campus:
I found myself in a fraternity brother's room, pinned to a door, and given a drink that didn't taste right. Within minutes, my eyes shut, and the morning after, I woke up on my dorm floor, scratched and bruised, and with a note from a stranger that said "We found you by the road."
Pino writes that the experience left her "terrified" and so shaken that she had trouble passing her classes, but she eventually managed to move on. Later in the post, she notes that her memories of this assault "resurfaced" after she went public as a rape survivor and began to hear other students' stories. It's unclear whether she is claiming that she repressed the memory of her first assault or simply pushed it out of her mind.
If Pino's account of her rape and its aftermath has some improbable details, the first assault is even less plausible. Why did the mysterious strangers decide to take her home instead of calling the police? How did they get inside her residence hall, which requires an electronic key fob called a flex pass? Even if they had found Pino's flex pass and room key on her, how would they know where to take her? (Rick Bradley, the associate director of housing at UNC-Chapel Hill who has worked at the university since 2002, told me in an email last year that "none of our keys or flex passes show the building name or room number.") An alternative scenario is that Pino was brought to her room by her assailant and that he left the note as a diversion. But a sexual predator who tries to cover up his crime by dragging an unconscious woman around a university campus—and remains undetected—is even more improbable than good Samaritans who find an unconscious woman by the side of the road and somehow manage to drop her off inside her dorm room.
Additional questions about Pino's credibility are raised by her claims about being targeted for harassment in retaliation for the Title IX complaint. Her account of an incident that she has described as particularly threatening has major discrepancies with coverage in the local media.
An April 2013 Huffington Post story for which Pino was a principal source criticized UNC's inadequate response to "vandalism directed at [a] victim"; it said that Pino's door was defaced with offensive graffiti that and "a fake bloody knife was left at the scene." The 2014 Vogue feature makes this episode sound like even more like a direct threat: "Somebody broke into Pino's dorm on campus, leaving behind a fake bloody knife just outside her room."
But the same incident of dorm vandalism was reported quite differently in the UNC student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel. Someone who probably got inside the dorm by "tailgating" a student with a flex pass spray-painted graffiti on the building's first floor. The door of Pino's room was indeed spray-painted, but so were several hallway mirrors and other surfaces. Pino, who was the dorm's resident adviser, insisted that the vandalism was directed at her personally because of her anti-rape activism; at least one other student agreed. However, reports by the Tar Heel and the local news station WRAL say that graffiti vandals had also struck at other campus locations in the preceding weeks.
As for the knife: Yes, there was a (small) knife on the scene. But it was found on the stove in the dorm's communal kitchen, not by Pino's door—and there was no fake blood on it. A photo used in a report on WRAL shows a streak of red or hot pink spray paint on the stovetop that also runs across the blade of the small knife. (It's unclear whether the knife had already been there or was placed there by the intruder.)
This vandalism may or may not have been connected to Pino's activism, but it seems fair to say that her account portraying it as a personal, terrifying message of intimidation was considerably embellished.
* * *
Two days after my Heat Street article appeared, I received an unexpected email from a name I immediately recognized as someone who works closely with Title IX activists advocating for campus sexual assault survivors. This woman, who asked to remain anonymous—I'll call her Danielle—wrote that while she disagreed with me on some issues related to campus rape, she wanted to thank me for the article on Pino: "There have been some of us who have been frustrated for years by her web of lies." After an email exchange, Danielle volunteered to speak to me on the record, albeit anonymously (her current position precludes her from going public) if I ever revisited the subject. Shortly after the DOE decision on the UNC case, she answered a few questions by email.
Danielle, who has interacted personally with Pino on a number of occasions, told me that she began to suspect her of being untruthful shortly after the Title IX complaint was filed. "I noticed that her 'story' became more and more graphic each time she told it to the press," Danielle wrote. "She also loved being 'in the limelight' so much more than other survivors. And then other students began to tell me discrepancies in her story, such as the fact that the date she says it happened was when the dorms were closed for a break, so she could not have returned to her dorm room. Several students shared that her story was a 'mash-up' of three other students' stories."
While there was no single "gotcha" moment, and while Danielle knows that 100 percent certainty is impossible, over time she came to believe that Pino's story is most likely fake—something she found particularly troubling given Pino's role as one of the most visible spokeswomen for the movement against campus sexual assault. (It should be noted that, for various reasons, Danielle herself is not in contention for such a role, so her criticism of Pino cannot be dismissed as stemming from rivalry or resentment.)
Danielle believes there is a "conspiracy of silence" that shields Pino's credibility problems. "Many people in the movement are aware," she wrote, "as well as some in the press whom I've spoken with." She says that "there are powerful pressures to keep silent about potential hoaxers, and this hurts the movement in the long run."
* * *
Ultimately, no one knows what, if anything, actually happened to Pino in March 2012. If she was in fact raped at a party near the UNC campus, surely the real lesson of her story is that rape should be reported—not only for the victim's sake, but for the safety of other women who could be at risk from a violent sexual predator. Yet the only action Pino took was to drop an anonymous report in a box, a largely useless option created at a number of schools at activists' behest. (While there may have been problems with the handling of Title IX sexual assault complaints at UNC, it is hard to see how the school let down Pino since she never brought such a complaint.)
The Pino story is also a textbook example of shoddy journalism. Even after the collapse of the Rolling Stone story, the media are still failing at the most basic fact-checking when covering claims of sexual assault—even when those claims clearly call for critical scrutiny. Instead, the operating principle seems to be the title of Pino's co-authored book on sexual assault survivors: We Believe You.
One could argue that there is no harm in allowing a lie to go unchallenged in a case like this, while exposing it would make people less disposed to believe real victims. But no good cause can be advanced by a culture of dishonesty. "The ends don't justify the means," Danielle told me in our email conversation. "Ethics and truthfulness are important in all movements."
The post This UNC Rape Victim Became a Title IX Activist Leader. But Does Her Own Story Hold Up? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Some of our speakers don't live through the year because they're executed, or they're assassinated," Oslo Freedom Forum founder Thor Halvorssen told an audience at Alice Tully Hall in New York.
The conference—a smaller version of an eight-year-old international event variously described as "the Davos of dissidents" and "a bit like Comic-Con, only all the heroes are real"—coincided with the United Nations General Assembly session a short distance away. At a pre-conference reception, Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess master and opposition activist, took note of the meeting of tyrants on one side of Manhattan and the meeting of freedom champions on the other. Somehow, he quipped, freedom always seems to be in the West.
Halvorssen said that one goal of the one-day New York conference last week was to "humanize the struggle" of freedom fighters and freedom seekers; indeed, it brought together people with very different stories and struggles.
North Korean defector and human rights activist Ji Seong-ho, now in his early thirties, survived the famine of the 1990s. He lost his left hand and foot in 1996 after being run over by a train while scavenging for coal to trade for food, and endured grueling surgery without anesthesia.
A decade later, on wooden crutches, he and his brother made a 6,000-mile trek through China, Laos, Burma and Thailand to escape to South Korea. Ji's raw, emotional account in Korean, in a sometimes-breaking voice—aided by photos on a big screen, such as the schoolroom by emptied famine—told a powerful story even though I had forgotten to get a translation headset.
Ji's story ended in finding freedom and in being made whole by modern medicine and prosthetics. No translator was needed for his final triumphant gesture, holding up the crutches he no longer needed. But it is also a story of unfinished work: Ji's activism on behalf of those still trapped under North Korea's hellish regime.
The coexistence of the harrowing and the upbeat, of victory and never-ending battle at devastating cost was a central, if unspoken, theme of the Freedom Forum.
Iranian-born author Marina Nemat, now living in Canada, was arrested in 1982, at the age of 16, for criticizing the Islamic revolution in the school newspaper; she was tortured in prison and sentenced to death. (Her life was spared largely to the intercession of a guard to whom she was forcibly married.)
Russian democracy activist Vladimir Kara-Murza not only lost a close ally and friend, Boris Nemtsov, to assassination but was himself the target of two apparent poisonings that left him comatose and near death. Kara-Murza spoke in flawless, almost unaccented English of the yearning for freedom in Russia, a country often stereotyped as craving the whip. He spoke of the risks taken daily by critics of the Putin regime, of political prisoners—now numbering about a hundred, comparable to the late Soviet period—and Nemtsov's murder ("when smears and threats fail, they use bullets as their final argument").
Kara-Murza recalled his "first conscious political memory" at the age of ten: the Soviet hardliners' coup in August 1991, when Russians, including his father, "not armed with anything except their dignity and their determination to defend their freedom," were able to stop the coup leaders who had everything, from the mass media to tanks, at their disposal.
The activism of Somali-born Leyla Hussein, now a psychotherapist living in England, is driven by a much more gruesome childhood experience: the genital cutting she suffered at the age of seven, together with her younger sister. "I started to campaign against [female genital mutilation] not because I thought it was wrong; I wanted to protect my daughter," Hussein said. She is co-founder of the non-profit Daughters of Eve and author of a much-discussed television documentary on FGM in England, The Cruel Cut.
Hussein said she has been threatened and physically assaulted for her activism, which some see as offensive to religious and cultural values. Because of safety concerns, she has had to move twice with her young daughter and currently lives at an undisclosed address, with a panic alarm at home.
(Unfortunately, Hussein marred a compelling tale with a brief, but obnoxious detour into modern grievance feminism: a mini-rant about "systemic oppression" of women in the West by sales taxes on feminine hygiene products. Why not complaints about North Korean refugees in the West enduring the injustice of white cultural appropriation of Asian food?)
Wuilly Arteaga, a slightly built 23-year-old Venezuelan musician who became famous for playing the violin at the recent street protests in Caracas, wowed the audience with his music and his story, told in Spanish through an interpreter.
Raised in a poor family, Arteaga was self-taught before joining El Sistema, the government-funded music education system. State largesse did not buy his obedience. He was near tears recounting his ordeal at the hands of the chavista security forces: arrest, brutal beatings that left him deaf in one ear, his violin smashed. Yet he considers himself "fortunate" compared to fellow protesters who were killed or are still imprisoned.
Maria Toorpakai Wazir, a 26-year-old Pakistani squash player, grew up in a conservative tribal region, dressed as a boy to play sports, and then had to hide from the Taliban after she began to compete openly as a female. She told a remarkable tale with humor and love—especially for her father, who encouraged his wife and two daughters to be independent.
Harvard psychologist and author Stephen Pinker made an unapologetic plea for "Enlightenment values," for "reason, science, humanism, progress," the last of these a "gift" for embracing the first three. He illustrated the reality of 200 years of progress with graphs showing the astounding gains in human health and longevity as well as prosperity, freedom, safety and peace—despite two world wars, AIDS in Africa in the 1980s and the growth of modern authoritarianism in Russia and Turkey.
"Despite lamentations that democracy is in recession … the world has never been more democratic than it is today," Pinker said, noting that most of the world's population now lives under governments that are "more democratic than autocratic." For all the exceptions, he concluded, "we see that the arc of history bends toward justice—too slowly, but it is going in the right direction."
A few moments later, after Pinker had ended his speech, an Oslo Freedom Forum promotional video appeared on the screen with a cautionary note that "more than half of the world's population—52 percent—lives under authoritarianism."
It was not the forum's only moment of paradox. Wazir pointedly criticized Myanmar's de facto head of state, Aung San Suu Kyi, for indifference to the persecution and massacres of the country's Rohingya Muslim minority. She echoed calls for Suu Kiy's Nobel Peace Prize to be revoked. Yet only five years ago, Suu Kiy headlined the Oslo Freedom Forum's San Francisco conference—its first event in the U.S.—receiving the Human Rights Foundation's Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent.
Apparently, anti-liberal backsliding can affect a person and a country.
The New York forum—the organization's third event in the United States—was also shadowed by concerns that freedom in America itself is being set back. At the opening reception, Kasparov noted dryly that in Donald Trump, "Americans are now experiencing a very small taste" of the authoritarianism Russians and others have dealt with.
He quickly followed that there's a big difference between "someone who acts like an authoritarian on Twitter" and someone who is able to act like an autocrat in real life. Kasparov expressed confidence that the American political system was resilient enough to rein in Trump's dangerous tendencies. Still, he pointedly recalled Ronald Reagan's statement that "freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction."
This optimism steeled with vigilance perhaps best summed up the spirit of the Oslo Freedom Forum in New York.
The post Humanizing the Struggle at the Oslo Freedom Forum in New York appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>While the document proposed alternative ways to make the workplace at Google more female-friendly, it was widely labeled "anti-diversity" and "anti-woman." After 28-year-old Damore was identified as the author of the memo, he was fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes."
Since then, the controversy has raged unabated—perhaps unsurprisingly, since it touches on many hot-button, polarizing issues from gender equity in the workplace to freedom of speech. A few days ago, I wrote about the debate for USA Today. I interviewed Damore via Google Hangouts text chat on Friday. The transcript has been lightly edited for style, flow and clarity.
Cathy Young: All this must be a little overwhelming?
James Damore: Yes, especially since I tend to be pretty introverted.
CY: Did you think when you wrote the memo, that it could become public at all, let alone as such a huge story?
JD: No, definitely not, I was just trying to clarify my thoughts on Google's culture and use it to slowly change some of our internal practices.
CY: You've mentioned in other interviews that you decided to write this memo after attending a staff meeting on diversity at Google.
JD: Yes, I decided to write my thoughts down after attending a particular "Diversity and Inclusion Summit," although I had seen many of the problems in our culture for a while.
CY: Who was this summit for? All employees, or employees at a certain level?
JD: It was generally for high level employees in my organization that were interested in diversity efforts.
CY: Does Google have a lot of diversity events? Do any of them have mandatory attendance, or is it primarily for those interested in the issue?
JD: Google has many diversity events, including many during our weekly company-wide meeting (TGIF). They've also recently made "Unconscious Bias" training, which is ideologically similar, mandatory for those that want to evaluate promotions, all managers, and all new hires.
CY: You've mentioned that the summit that prompted the memo had some material that you found disturbing and offensive. I don't know how specific you can be, but any examples?
JD: They outlined some of the practices where employees were being treated differently based on their gender or ethnicity at Google and during the hiring process. For example, there's special treatment during the interviews (like more being given) and there are high priority queues for team matching after an employee gets hired. Also, there were calls to holding individual managers accountable for the "diversity" of their team, which would inevitably lead to managers using someone's protected status (e.g. gender or ethnicity) during critical employment situations.
CY: More interviews being given, as in women and underrepresented minorities being given a second chance?
JD: Yes, and I, of course, don't have anything against women and underrepresented minorities, but I think that we need to rethink these practices because they may be illegal and actually increase intergroup tensions, as we've seen in academia, which is exactly what we don't want.
CY: Do you think practices like that amount to "lowering the bar," as you suggested in the memo? Some would argue that it may be a good idea to give "diversity candidates" a second shot, since they may have been unfairly prejudged in the initial interview due to hidden biases.
JD: Yes, I do think that some of these may amount to "lowering the bar." Google's hiring practices are currently optimized to have a really low false positive rate [i.e. hiring someone who turns out to be underqualified or ill-suited for the job—CY] and high false negative rate (i.e. we reject many unlucky, highly qualified candidates). If someone only gets one chance, then their interviews have to be really good for us to be confident enough to hire them.
CY: You also mentioned the policing of "microaggressions." In the published responses to your memo in internal Google discussions, someone mentioned people being shamed for using the phrase "guys" for a mixed group. Was there a lot of that going on?
JD: Yes, "microaggressions" are being taught and compared to actual violence. There's also a weekly email that goes out to about 20,000 Googlers where people submit examples of these.
CY: I gather the "offenders" aren't identified, at least?
JD: Sometimes they are, and other times it's obvious to whoever reads it (which is a large portion of the company now).
CY: Any particularly egregious examples of innocuous things being blown out of proportion?
JD: I only really remember one, but that's because my memory is failing me. One was complaining about someone suggesting to use a picture of an attractive person on an ad to increase the number of clicks. Which is apparently a case of "lookism."
CY: By the way, backtracking a bit, when did you start working for Google?
JD: I interned in summer of 2013 and joined in December 2013.
CY: Were the diversity initiatives already in place when you joined, or did they begin (or intensify) sometime after?
JD: I think they intensified.
CY: Did you give a lot of thought to gender and diversity issues before that summit? Some of your citations suggest that you did a fair amount of reading on the subject.
JD: I had been thinking about it for a while, and had many personal discussions in addition to research.
CY: Who are some of the authors or commentators you've followed on gender issues?
JD: Sheryl Sandberg, Warren Farrell, Christina Hoff Sommers, Camille Paglia, Rebecca Solnit.
CY: Who do you think comes closes to your point of view?
JD: It's hard to say because I think they all have legitimate things to say and sometimes just talk about different areas. Maybe Christina Hoff Sommers, but obviously, I don't have 100% agreement with any of them.
CY: So, back to the memo: you wrote it and then you circulated it and edited it based on the feedback you received?
JD: Yeah, I started sending it out to the diversity programs and some select Googlers about a month ago and continuously edited it based on their feedback.
CY: I assume some of the people you sent it to were women?
JD: Yes, of course.
CY: What would you say was the gender ratio of the people who read it and gave feedback? And were there any noticeable differences of opinion between the men and the women?
JD: I don't know about the actual ratio, but there were positive and negative responses from both men and women. In my experience, it largely depended on how much the reader was in the "progressive echo chamber" that I described in the document.
CY: So, among the women who work at Google, there are many who don't agree with the standard progressive view of women in tech—i.e. that all disparities are due to sexism?
JD: Correct, and many of them are tired of being made to feel like victims by that narrative.
CY: What were the negative responses you received?
JD: Most were just name-calling or public shaming. I did get a few personal threats, though.
CY: Of violence, or retaliation within the workplace?
JD: There were some threats of violence and many public displays of retaliation within the workplace—i.e. internally public posts stating that they will never work with me and will sabotage my projects.
CY: Even before the memo went public?
JD: Right.
CY: Did anyone speak out in your support when those threats were made?
JD: Some brave souls did.
CY: Both men and women?
JD: Yes. But no one in upper management, because it would have been career suicide to defend me.
CY: Did you start feeling even then that your days with Google might be numbered?
JD: No, I was honestly surprised when they called to fire me. I thought that we had a right to discuss and try to improve the terms and conditions of working environment, especially when bringing up the possible illegality of some of our practices.
CY: I think you've mentioned that the management ostensibly had a stance encouraging discussion of company policy…
JD: Yes, that's what they would claim. By the way, I like Noam Chomsky's quote from The Common Good: "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
CY: A lot of the criticism has focused on charges that you were essentially telling the women in tech jobs at Google they're not as good or well-suited to those jobs as the men. What's your response?
JD: The purpose of my document was mainly to discuss the ideological echo chamber. As for the gender things, I was trying to explain why we might not expect 50/50 representation in tech largely due to differing interests, and I don't say anything about individual women, especially those in tech.
CY: Another part that I think a lot of people saw as incendiary was the reference to women being "higher in neuroticism," which once again was seen as a swipe at your female colleagues, or even a suggestion that Google shouldn't hire women because they're too neurotic. What does that research actually imply?
JD: The reaction seems to mostly be pointed at the negative connotation of the word "neuroticism," which is the technical term used in psychology. "Neuroticism" is in part a measure of how prone someone is to anxiety and how sensitive they can be to stress. I was mostly stating this as a possible reason why women report higher anxiety on our Googlegeist (internal company-wide survey) and why we should try to control for people's personality traits before assuming that this disparity means that women are mistreated at Google.
CY: It could also be a matter of women being more willing to verbalize anxiety because of social norms, no? It's ironic that many of your critics accuse you of ignoring the role of social norms in shaping people's self-reports, yet they ignore that factor here.
JD: I don't think it can be explained just by that because the gap widens in more gender-egalitarian societies.
CY: Were there any valid points that you think your critics made?
JD: Not that I'm aware of; I'd very much like to see a valid point, though! I had been working on the document for a while and took in feedback before it was leaked. There were some possible differences between men and women that could contribute to the differences in representation that I didn't include because I didn't think that had as much scientific evidence—for example, [mathematically gifted girls having more varied interests] and men having higher variance in traits.
CY: This is probably a cliché question, but would you have done anything differently if you could, and would you do it again?
JD: I guess I would avoid the term "neuroticism." But it's hard to regret anything major because I'm afraid that if I didn't speak up, then the echo chamber would have only gotten stronger with time.
CY: In terms of the responses, you've received quite a bit of support from the alt-right. You've also been criticized for going on an alt-right podcast—that of Stefan Molyneux. How do you navigate a situation like that where you obviously cannot control who supports you, but the controversy can draw some unsavory characters [including white nationalists]?
JD: Hmm, I guess I'm not an expert in controlling public opinion, but I only hope that people judge me by what I say and do. I don't think I've said or done anything that could be honestly classified as "white nationalist." [I hope people understand] that "one-way" endorsements are inevitable.
CY: How would you describe your politics?
JD: Generally centrist/"classical liberal"/libertarian in philosophy, although I think individual policies and decisions need to be looked at individually and not through the lens of one's party.
CY: Do you plan to continue speaking out on these issues, now that you have a very public platform?
JD: Yes.
The post An Interview With James Damore appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Emma Sulkowicz, the infamous "mattress girl," surfaced this week on National Public Radio talking about her efforts to get a serial predator, "a sadist in the truest meaning of that word," off the Columbia University campus.
Sulkowicz, referred to in the story as an "activist and survivor," mentioned that the subject of her efforts won a settlement from Columbia this month in a lawsuit charging that Sulkowicz's activism amounted to gender-based harassment.
When a disciplinary hearing in late 2013 cleared Paul Nungesser of charges that he raped Sulkowicz, she refused to accept the outcome. Her protest—which included carrying a mattress on campus for most of her senior year to represent the "weight" of her victimization—made her the heroine of a new feminist revolution. It also made him the campus pariah after she outed him as her alleged rapist.
While the terms of the settlement are unknown, Columbia issued a statement effectively reaffirming Nungesser's exoneration. This was an important victory not just for Nungesser and his family, but for those who have argued the war on campus rape, however worthy its goals, has often trampled on the innocent.
It is a timely victory, given the current controversy over possible shifts in federal policy to ensure more protections for the accused.
As the first journalist to fully report Nungesser's side of the story with important exculpatory evidence, I consider it something of a vindication as well—after such reactions as a piece on the feminist site Jezebel titled "How to Make an Accused Rapist Look Good."
When I first read the front-page story on Sulkowicz in the New York Times in May 2014, I actually believed—despite having criticized the excesses of the college rape crackdown—that she was probably a victim wronged by campus bureaucrats.
There were no "blurred lines" of consent here. Sulkowicz described a brutal assault by a (then-anonymous) friend and occasional sexual partner who, she said, suddenly turned violent during a consensual encounter, hitting her, choking her, and anally raping her while she screamed in pain.
According to Sulkowicz, the man was found "not responsible" after a botched investigation and remained enrolled at the university, even though he had been accused of sexual assault by two other female students as well.
The facts grew considerably murkier when I read an earlier report on the case in Bwog, Columbia's online student magazine.
The multiple complaints, it turned out, were not independent of each other, and the other two women were not alleging rape. One was an ex-girlfriend who had "felt emotionally and sexually exploited" by the accused, though she did not recognize it as abuse at the time; she and Sulkowicz both decided to file complaints after sharing their experiences. The other one said he grabbed her and tried to kiss her at a party when they went upstairs to get more beer—an incident that she admitted she didn't regard as assault until she learned about the other charges.
In late December 2014, long after "mattress girl" had become a national icon, The New York Times published a story that included an interview with Nungesser (who had been named by The Columbia Daily Spectator in May). What piqued my interest was his contention that "he was not allowed to bring up communications between himself and Ms. Sulkowicz after the night in question" in his defense. Oddly, nothing was said in the story about the content of those communications.
About a month later, I met with Nungesser for an interview on the Columbia campus in upper Manhattan. His parents, Karin Nungesser and Andreas Probosch, who live in Germany, had contacted me after reading my articles on campus rape controversies and after I mentioned my interest in the case on Twitter.
Among the materials he gave me were several pages of Facebook messages, which later figured extensively in the lawsuit. They show that for weeks after he supposedly raped her on August 27, 2012, Sulkowicz had affectionate chats with Nungesser, sending him such comments as "i feel like we need to have some real time where we can talk about life and thingz" (sic) and responding to his birthday greeting with "I love you Paul!"
After I wrote about this in the Daily Beast, Sulkowicz supporters argued that "survivors of trauma deal with their experiences in different ways" and that she was being faulted for not being a "perfect victim." "To anyone who has been close to a person who has been the victim of acquaintance rape, Emma's messages to Paul don't seem out of the ordinary," wrote Erin Gloria Ryan at Jezebel, which also published Sulkowicz's annotated copy of the messages.
Victims of violence can indeed respond to trauma in ways that seem irrational. But it's the specifics that strain credulity. Sulkowicz was not alleging a "gray area" situation that she could have excused as a misunderstanding; she claimed she was hit in the face and choked so hard that "he could have strangled me to death." Yet we are asked to believe that two days after this attack, both victim and rapist would banter as if nothing was wrong; that she would come to his party and respond to his request to bring more girls with "i'll be over w da females soon"; and that "I want to see yoyououoyou" means (as Sulkowicz claimed in her Jezebel annotations) she was "desperate" to talk about the rape.
The annotations also contained a surprising claim from Sulkowicz: that a few hours after the assault, she talked to a female friend "who explain[ed] it was rape." Would that really need explaining? And why was there no record of this friend being called as a corroborating witness?
Eventually, I got an answer which adds a minor but fascinating detail to the story, reported here for the first time. A source familiar with the case confirmed that in her original complaint, Sulkowicz mentioned talking to a friend, "Toni" (not her real name), the day after the incident.
Investigators interviewed Toni, but she was not called to testify, the source said; all she could say was that Sulkowicz had told her she felt weird about what had happened between her and Nungesser.
My attempts to reach Toni were unsuccessful. But I found out from her online profiles that during her time at Columbia she was both a social justice activist and a sexual assault peer counselor. It's entirely possible that Toni asked Sulkowicz whether her experience might have been nonconsensual. But if she is indeed the mystery friend, her activism makes it even more remarkable that she did not corroborate Sulkowicz's claim of rape or publicly support her.
Based on all the known facts, I think Sulkowicz's version of the events is extremely unlikely. Was she a vengeful scorned woman, as the Nungesser lawsuit suggests? I don't know. I think Sulkowicz genuinely believes Nungesser did something abusive to her that night, whether or not that belief has any relation to reality. But there is also strong evidence that "mattress girl" has been knowingly dishonest.
In a May 15, 2014, Time essay titled "My Rapist Is Still on Campus," Sulkowicz wrote, "Every day, I am afraid to leave my room." Yet a New York magazine web story on May 18 quotes her as knowing her alleged rapist "is out of the country." (Nungesser was spending a semester in Prague. He is now back in his native Germany, where he works in film.)
No one knows for certain whether Nungesser is innocent of all wrongdoing. But the multiple charges from multiple people add up to remarkably little. As I reported here two years ago, the conclusions of Columbia's internal investigation of another complaint, brought by a male student in late 2014, more or less openly suggested it may have been part of a collective vendetta by friends of Sulkowicz—indirectly validating Nungesser's claims of collusion.
Nungesser's lawsuit, particularly its second version filed last year after the first complaint was dismissed, makes a strong case that he experienced egregious harassment at Columbia, abetted by school officials who approved Sulkowicz's "mattress performance" as her senior art thesis.
In the summer of 2014, other students and a professor pressured Nungesser to drop out of a scholarship-paid class trip to Russia, Mongolia, and China. That October, on a "Day of Action" against sexual assault, several mattress-toting activists showed up in one of his classes, where they stared at him and took his picture. Keyboard warriors in the social media urged making his life "a living hell" and sometimes called for violent retaliation.
In a January interview, Sulkowicz denied engaging in "a bullying campaign" against Nungesser, saying that "no one knew his name until he put it out there." That is, to put it bluntly, a lie.
Months before Nungesser spoke to the media, Sulkowicz explicitly said that she had filed a police report mainly because "his name should be in the public record." She cited as her inspiration a Brown University student who named-and-shamed her alleged assailant out of school when he returned from a suspension. And she criticized Columbia administrators for removing the "rapist lists," with Nungesser's name at the top, that had appeared as bathroom graffiti in some dorms.
Throughout Sulkowicz's crusade, Columbia coddled her and acted as if Nungesser's exoneration was an embarrassing faux pas. His parents' pleas for a statement that the school stood by the results of its disciplinary process were ignored.
To have such a statement now is a satisfying outcome for the parents. Nonetheless, Karin Nungesser told me by email that they would have liked to see the lawsuit go forward, if only to get access to Columbia's records on the case. (She thinks, contrary to Sulkowicz's claims, the investigation was "very much designed to prove Paul guilty.")
A feminist journalist, Karin Nungesser also believes advocacy for the wrongly accused is part of the fight for gender justice. "In a way, this is similar to victims of sexual assault," she says. "The public has to understand that false accusations are not a triviality—they exist and they destroy the lives of those affected. It really doesn't matter whether 2% or 8% of sexual violence accusations are false. We have to accept that false accusations exist and learn how to deal with them. But this will only be possible if victims of false accusations are able to tell their story publicly."
Tell that to NPR, which still calls Sulkowicz a "survivor." Or to the campus sexual assault activists who still refer to Paul Nungesser as "Sulkowicz's rapist."
The post Discredited, the Legend of Mattress Girl Just Won't Go Away appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A new study released by the Pew Research Center supports what some of us have argued all along about online harassment: that it affects men as much as women and that the problem should not be framed as a gender issue—or defined so broadly as to chill legitimate criticism.
If anything, the study says, men tend to get more online abuse than women, including serious abuse such as physical threats (though women are, predictably, more likely to be sexually harassed). However, when people are asked about free speech vs. safety on the internet, women are more likely to come down on the side of the latter. Thus, it is very likely future efforts at speech regulation will continue to be cast as "feminist" initiatives.
Online harassment has become something of a cause célèbre in the last three years. It has been explored (and deplored) in numerous media reports; it has attracted the attention of politicians and even of the United Nations.
A basic premise of these discussions has been that women, especially outspoken women, are specifically and maliciously targeted for hate, abuse, and threats; many feminists have claimed internet misogyny is the civil rights issue of our time.
The Pew survey of over 4,000 American internet users over 18 conducted in January challenges those contentions. Forty four percent of the men and 37 percent of the women said that at some point, they had experienced at least one of the behaviors the study classified as harassment.
Most of this abuse involved offensive name-calling and being embarrassed on purpose. However, 12 percent of men and 8 percent of women said they'd been the target of a physical threat; 6 percent of men and 8 percent of women said they had been stalked; 8 percent of men and 7 percent of women they had experienced "sustained harassment"; and 4 percent of men and 8 percent of women said they had been sexually harassed.
Men and women under 30, who are the most likely to spend a lot of time online, are, unsurprisingly, the most likely to experience all kinds of online abuse, including its more severe forms.
It's true that women who been targets of online abuse were more than twice as likely as men to describe their last such experience as extremely or very upsetting (35 percent vs. 16 percent). But, interestingly, there was no gender gap in actual negative effects of online harassment, be it mental stress, problems with friends and family, romantic problems, reputational damage, or trouble at work. Twelve percent of both male and female victims—or about 5 percent of all respondents—said that online harassment had made them fear for their or their loved ones' safety. One percent, with no gender difference, had been victims of doxing—the unwanted disclosure of their personal data online, ranging from real names for those who post under pseudonyms to place of work or home address.
Few will be surprised to learn that women under 30 were substantially more likely than their male peers—53 percent vs. 37 percent—to report receiving unsolicited sexually explicit images. But in a more counterintuitive finding, men in that age group were more likely than women—14 percent vs. 10 percent—to say that explicit images of them had been shared online without their consent. (For those 30 and older, the figure was 5 percent for both sexes.)
This differs sharply from feminist scholars' claims that 90 percent of so-called "revenge porn" targets women, a figure based on a self-selected and mostly female sample. But it supports a 2013 study by McAfee Security in which men were more likely to report both being threatened with having intimate photos of them posted online and actually having such photos posted.
More women than men in the Pew Study, 11 percent vs. 5 percent, said they had experienced gender-based abuse online. But this gap may be partly due to differences in what men and women perceive as gender-based. A woman who is called fat and ugly on Twitter is likely to see the insult as sexist; a man who has a similar comment slung at him will likely see it simply as a personal insult.
And all the dramatic claims about the terrible hardship of being a woman on the internet with an opinion? Entirely wrong: men in the Pew survey were almost twice as likely as women (19 percent vs. 10 percent) to say they had been harassed online due to their political opinions. Part of the disparity is no doubt due to the fact that men are more likely to talk politics on the internet; in one recent study, 60 to 65 percent of Twitter users tweeting on political topics were men. But it certainly doesn't sound like men who talk politics have it any easier.
There is really no way to massage the Pew data to fit the women-as-victim narrative—but some tried. Gizmodo's Bryan Menegus simply misstated the findings, asserting that although men are targeted more overall, "women—especially young women—make up an outsized proportion of users who experience the most severe forms of harassment, like stalking and threats." Vox's Aja Romano wrote that "more severe harassment disproportionately affects younger internet users, women, and people of color."
But the dishonest reporting prize goes to Slate's Christina Cauterucci, who cherry-picked the few numbers showing worse harassment of women, ignored the ones showing equal or worse abuse of men, and finished by upbraiding males for not taking online harassment seriously. Headline: "Four in 10 People Get Harassed Online But Young Men Don't Think It's a Big Deal, Says New Survey."
As bad as it is, Cauterucci's article highlights the survey's real gender split on the issue of safety vs. freedom online. Asked whether offensive online content is taken too seriously or too often excused, women are evenly split; men come down, nearly 2:1, for "taken too seriously." Among women under 30, a small majority (54 percent) agree that offensives online content is taken too seriously; but three-quarters of young men agree.
The divide was even sharper on the question of whether it's more important for people to be able to "speak their minds freely" or "feel welcome and safe" online: 56 percent of men opted for more freedom, two-thirds of women for more safety. (Interestingly, despite millennials' reputation for wanting safe spaces, young adults of both sexes were more pro-free speech than their elders—but the gender gap was still large: speaking freely was a higher priority for nearly two-thirds of men under 30 and only four out of ten women.)
Before anyone rushes to declare women enemies of freedom, it should be noted that the sexes actually don't differ all that much in their view of what should be done about online harassment. Only slightly more women than men (35 percent vs. 29 percent) say that elected officials have a major role to play in combating it; while women are more likely than men to see a major role for law enforcement (54 vs. 43 percent), the age gap on this issue is far larger (58 percent of seniors vs. 37 percent of young adults).
Meanwhile, there is a broad consensus that social media platforms and other online services have a responsibility to stop harassing behavior by users: 82 percent of women and 75 percent of men agree. Clearly, both men and women believe that some curbs are necessary, but they tend to want the lines drawn in different places. It is also likely that women's views of the issue are influenced by the false perception that women are singled out for constant and vicious abuse on the internet.
The Pew report points out that online harassment is, to a large extent, a subjective concept. Even something as ostensibly straightforward as a physical threat can be a matter of interpretation: Is "I hope you get cancer" a threat? How about "Kill yourself"? The definition of sexual harassment is even blurrier: "Wow, you look hot" in response to a photo posted to Twitter or Facebook could be sexual harassment to an overzealous feminist but a perfectly acceptable compliment to someone else.
The Pew survey shows that a small number of people experience internet abuse severe enough to cause serious negative consequences, including problems at work (3 percent of all users and 7 percent of young adults), financial loss (2 percent), and trouble getting a job or housing (1 percent each). It's also troubling that more than one in ten internet users have feared for their safety due to online harassment, even if it's hard to tell how often those fears were based on a serious threat.
Is there a need for better law enforcement responses when online harassment escalates to the point of causing real harm or credible fear of harm? Probably. And, of course, service providers have every right to curb behavior that is not illegal but causes persistent aggravation to other users and even drives them away from online platforms.
Unfortunately, the social media's attempts to police harassment have been plagued by accusations of left-wing bias and political favoritism. And some feminists and other progressives have a disturbing tendency to equate criticism with abuse.
Just recently, culture and videogame critic Anita Sarkeesian, one of the most high-profile targets of online harassment, called YouTuber Carl Benjamin—a.k.a. "Sargon of Akkad"—"one of [her] biggest harassers." Yet Benjamin's videos critiquing her are well within the bounds of polemics; indeed, he has voiced support for the suspension of Twitter accounts that engage in harassment, though also suggesting that Sarkeesian is not particularly bothered by it. (Despite numerous accusations of harassment, the "Sargon of Akkad" account remains in good standing with YouTube; Patreon, the popular crowdfunding platform, also recently said that he was not in violation of its rules of conduct.)
There is no doubt that severe harassment can chill speech and debate on the internet. But accusations of harassment can also easily turn into a weapon for silencing and punishing legitimate speech that someone finds undesirable.
Efforts to find the right balance are not helped by peddling a false women-in-jeopardy narrative. It would be a good idea to remind everyone, including women, that annoying words on the internet can nearly always be safely ignored.
Ladies, woman up.
The post Men as Likely To Be Harassed Online as Women appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>One of the surreal twists of the past year in American politics has been the rapid realignment in attitudes toward Russia. Democrats, many of whom believe that Russian interference was key to Donald Trump's unexpected victory last November, are now the ones sounding the alarm about the Russian threat. Meanwhile, quite a few Republicans—previously the keepers of the anti-Kremlin Cold War flame—have taken to praising President Vladimir Putin as a strong leader and Moscow as an ally against radical Islam. A CNN/ORC poll in late April found that 56 percent of Republicans see Russia as either "friendly" or "an ally," up from 14 percent in 2014. Over the same period, Putin's favorable rating from Republicans in the Economist/YouGov poll went from 10 percent to a startling 37 percent.
The dominant narrative in the U.S. foreign policy establishment and mainstream media casts Putin as the implacable enemy of the Western liberal order—an autocratic leader at home who wants to weaken democracy abroad, using information warfare and covert activities to subvert liberal values and to promote Russia-friendly politicians and movements around the world.
In this narrative, President Donald Trump is like the French nationalist Marine Le Pen, whose failed presidential campaign this year relied heavily on loans from Russian banks with Kremlin ties: a witting or unwitting instrument of subversion, useful to Putin either as an ideological ally or as an incompetent who will strengthen Russia's hand by destabilizing American democracy.
At its extremes, the Russian subversion narrative relies on a great deal of conspiratorial thinking. It also far too easily absolves the Western political establishment of responsibility for its failures, from the defeat of European Union supporters in England's Brexit vote to Hillary Clinton's loss in last November's election. Putin makes a convenient boogeyman.
Nonetheless, there is a real Russian effort to counter American—plus NATO and E.U.—influence by supporting authoritarian nationalist movements and groups, such as Le Pen's National Front, Hungary's quasi-fascist Jobbik Party, and Greece's neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. Today's Russia is no longer just a moderately authoritarian corrupt regime trying to maintain its regional influence. Cloaked in the mantle of religious and nationalist values, the Kremlin positions itself as a defender of tradition and sovereignty against the godless progressivism and the migrant hordes overtaking the West. It has a global propaganda machine and a network of political operatives dedicated to cultivating far-right and sometimes far-left groups in Europe and elsewhere.
Tom Palmer, vice president for international programs at the Atlas Network, has been actively involved in projects promoting liberty in ex-Communist countries since the late 1980s; he has taken to warning against a new "global anti-libertarianism." Writing for the Cato Policy Report last December, Palmer noted that "Putin, the pioneer in the trend toward authoritarianism, has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting anti-libertarian populism across Europe and through a sophisticated global media empire, including RT and Sputnik News, as well as a network of internet troll factories and numerous made-to-order websites."
Slawomir Sierakowski of Warsaw's Institute for Advanced Study and Emma Ashford of the Cato Institute have also warned about the rise of an "Illiberal International" in which Russia plays a key role.
Of course, for many libertarians, the post–Cold War international order that Putin seeks to undo is itself of dubious value. For one thing, that order is based on America's role as GloboCop, which isn't very compatible with small government. For another, it enforces its own "progressive" brand of soft authoritarianism, from over-regulation of markets to restrictions on "hate speech" and other undesirable expression. Yet for all the valid criticisms of the Western liberal establishment and its foreign and domestic policies, there is little doubt that the ascendancy of hardcore far-right or far-left authoritarianism would lead to a less freedom-friendly world. And there is little doubt that right now, Russia is a driving force in this ascendancy.
One common view is that we've re-entered a Cold War–style ideological confrontation—but that this time, in a head-turning reversal from the Communist era, Russia sees itself as leading a global traditionalist resistance. The argument is superficially persuasive but tends to confuse rhetoric with motive.
Former National Security Agency analyst John R. Schindler, that rare pundit who is vehemently critical of Clinton but also strongly believes Russian interference was instrumental to Trump's win, goes so far as to call Putin a champion of "Orthodox Jihadism."
In a post-election New York Observer column titled "Why Vladimir Putin Hates Us," Schindler asserts that the Russian leader's holy-war ideology sees the West as "an implacable foe" of Russia and her Orthodox faith, and Russia as a country with a special spiritual mission to fight evil. Schindler anticipates the objection that Putin, a career KGB officer under the atheist Soviet state, is an unlikely Christian zealot. But in his view, it doesn't matter what Putin or other nominally Orthodox Russians may believe in their hearts. The important thing is that Putin acts like a champion of religious nationalism on a "spiritual-cum-ideological" crusade against the decadent West. As evidence, Schindler cites a 2013 speech in which Putin deplored the rejection of "Christian values" by "many Euro-Atlantic countries," defended Russia's right to protect traditional morality, and criticized attempts to export "extreme Western-style liberalism" worldwide. (The main example of Western decadence and liberal extremism was, of course, same-sex marriage.)
Schindler, like the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, believes that Putin takes his inspiration from the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, an émigré who died in Switzerland in 1954. Putin has quoted Ilyin on several occasions, including in an address to the Duma, and he assigned one of Ilyin's books to regional governors as winter holiday reading in 2014. Onetime Kremlin propaganda chief Vladislav Surkov is also a fan.
Ilyin was an authoritarian nationalist, though late in life this was tempered by a belief in the rule of law and limits on state power. (In the 1930s, by contrast, he was openly pro-fascist.) His vision for a post-Communist Russia featured a strong government rooted in patriotic values, Orthodoxy, and national unity, run by the "single will" of a near-dictatorial ruler periodically reconfirmed by an electoral assembly. In his later years, he also saw the West as innately hostile to Russia and likely to seek its destruction. While the Ilyin passages Putin has publicly quoted have been blandly patriotic or even liberal-sounding, the elevation of this particular figure as the Kremlin's favorite political philosopher is telling.
A much weirder contender for that role is the maverick ex-academic Alexander Dugin—sometimes dubbed "Putin's Rasputin," possibly because he has the shaggy beard and crazy eyes for the part. Dugin, now 55, spent the 1990s calling for a "red-and-brown" fascism and being active in a group called the National Bolshevik Party, which is every bit as bad as it sounds. In the Putin years he has rebranded himself as a "traditionalist," started an "International Eurasian Movement," and found patrons in high political and military circles; in the late 2000s, he served as an advisor to Duma chairman Sergei Naryshkin and had top officials of the ruling party, United Russia, on his movement's advisory board.
At the core of Dugin's theory—much of it cribbed from 20th century reactionaries and proto-fascists, with an added dose of mystical apocalyptics—is the conviction that "Eurasian" Russia must lead the resistance to "Atlanticism," viewed as literally demonic in its promotion of sin and secularism. Dugin argues that human rights-based liberalism is totalitarian, since it wants to impose itself everywhere and allows no alternatives, while his traditionalism is genuinely pluralistic, since it respects all cultures, political systems, and beliefs—as long as they make no claim to universalism.
Dugin's foreign policy views do dovetail with actual Kremlin policies of the last decade, from his intense hostility to Ukrainian independence to his call for an international anti-liberal alliance. Dugin envisions a common struggle of diverse forces—nationalist, conservative Christian, Islamist, leftist—against Western norms, globalism, and liberal capitalism. That's not so far off from Russia's support for European far-right and far-left parties (in addition to the likes of Le Pen, Russia has backed Germany's Die Linke and the socialist-communist-Green Syriza coalition in Greece), diehard communist dictatorships in Cuba and North Korea (the latter of which has been hailed by "Christian traditionalist" Dugin as a brave island of independence from Western hegemony), Venezuela's socialist government, Iran's Islamic Republic, the Assad regime in Syria, and the militantly jihadist Hezbollah.
Nonetheless, Dugin's actual political influence is debatable. In 2014, he was fired from his job running the international section of the sociology department at Moscow State University, apparently because of backlash against a Facebook post in which he urged the murder of Russians sympathetic to Ukraine's cause. The Kremlin also seemed to sideline him as it scaled back its active support for the pro-Russian insurgency in Eastern Ukraine, with which Dugin was in at least occasional contact.
Dugin may be making a comeback, though. He has carried out some unofficial diplomacy between Russia and Turkey, where his Eurasian movement has a following. He is also the editor in chief and co-founder of the Russian Orthodox cable channel Tsargrad-TV, a project of God-loving tycoon Konstantin Malofeev—a Kremlin insider and an active supporter of the Illiberal International.
Does Putin believe in Dugin's bizarre metaphysical geopolitics? That's doubtful. But Dugin's ideology "is a very useful virus to let loose," says Palmer. "It's useful to the idea of a Russian state led, as they say in Russia, with a strong hand—that hand being Mr. Putin's."
The same calculus almost certainly explains the Putin circle's interest in Ilyin, whose bowdlerized ideas provide a convenient, authentically Russian foundation for the Putin regime's style of government. Likewise, Russia's current blend of nationalism and Orthodox Christianity has been a useful quasi-official ideology to fill the post-Communist void.
Still, it's quite a leap from that to the conclusion that Putin—a man with a KGB past, a crony-capitalist present, and friends like the notoriously corrupt Italian ex–Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi—is a holy warrior at heart. Even his 2013 speech lamenting Western moral decline was delivered at the Valdai Club, Russia's Davos-style annual hangout for domestic and foreign intellectual and political elites. That's an odd venue for an "Orthodox Jihadist" diatribe. And even those remarks also praised secular patriotism and religious diversity, and called for openness to "the best ideas and practices of the East and the West."
For all the anti-Western and anti-globalist animus, for all the rhetoric about Russia's unique virtues, Moscow's elites crave the West's acceptance and respect. Putin was always an authoritarian, but he started his rule in 2000 as a pro-American authoritarian. His shift to anti-Western rhetoric didn't become evident until early 2007, with his Munich speech inveighing against the U.S.-dominated global order.
Some Russia watchers, including Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and Joshua Yaffa in a March 2017 article for The New Yorker, trace this change in attitude to the war in Iraq. But while Putin opposed the U.S.-led invasion, his criticism was restrained and sometimes balanced by statements favorable to the U.S. position (such as his claim in early 2004 that Russian intelligence had received and shared information about Saddam Hussein's regime plotting terror attacks against Americans). Putin's turn against the West is far more likely to have been precipitated by perceived infringements on Russia's sphere of influence—especially Ukraine's Orange Revolution, which began in November 2004.
After massive demonstrations challenged the fraud-riddled election victory of pro-Kremlin candidate Viktor Yanukovych and forced a recount, the pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko was declared the winner in January 2005. Putin, who had visited Kiev twice to show support for Yanukovych, blamed these events on Western meddling. The "Orange threat"—foreign subversion disguised as grassroots demands for change—became a staple of Russian official rhetoric.*
In a recent column for the independent Russian website Grani, the Ukrainian journalist and Radio Liberty commentator Vitaly Portnikov argued that Putin was pushed toward even more hardline anti-Western views by the Arab Spring, which he also attributed to Western subversion. (Putin, writes Portnikov, is "very typical of lower-rung chekists"—KGB agents—in his conviction that "all mass protests are always engineered and financed by someone.")
The Russian president certainly seems to have been rattled by the brutal death of the deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi in October 2011, which Putin publicly blamed on NATO. (Gaddafi was killed by insurgents, but their victory followed NATO's intervention in the country's civil war.) And in late March of this year, when protests broke out across Russia in response to a video accusing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of corruption, Putin warned in his remarks at an international forum in Arkhangelsk that the "instrument" of anti-corruption protests "was used at the beginning of the so-called 'Arab Spring' [with] bloody consequences."
In Putin's perfect world, Russia would have an authoritarian regime that secures his own hold on power and ill-gotten wealth and treats smaller nearby countries as vassal states—while also being recognized as a major player on the world stage and a member of the club of free nations. These somewhat incompatible goals are reflected in Russia's schizophrenic official rhetoric, where broadsides against Western perfidy mix with declarations of partnership with the West. For all the talk of Russia's unique spiritual virtues, the Kremlin's fallback defense of questionable practices, such as arresting protesters, is that Western countries do it too. In Palmer's words, "They don't claim that what Putin has created is the best. What they claim is that nothing is better than anything else."
The goal of protecting Putin's power at home while securing a respected position on the international scene would also explain much of Russia's activity targeting the West: The aim is to win friends by moving other countries in a more pro-Russian direction. A case in point is Kremlin support for Le Pen, a Putin admirer who not only endorses the annexation of Crimea but envisions Russia as an essential part of the alliance of sovereign European nations that she would like to see take the place of NATO and the E.U.
Russian interference in the West has become the subject of fevered speculation that borders on a post-Soviet version of reds-under-the-bed panic. But there are real reasons to worry about Putin's global outreach. Kremlin-sponsored activity abroad includes not just information warfare intended to undermine the very notion of facts—weaponized postmodernism, as it were—but more literal subversion.
Earlier this year, prosecutors in Montenegro charged that a thwarted violent coup in the fall of 2016 had been engineered by two Russian military intelligence officers with the help of paramilitary Russian and Serbian nationalists. The plot, they said, included a plan to assassinate the prime minister and was intended to keep the country from joining NATO. While the charges remain unproven so far, there is little doubt that Russia is extensively involved in the Balkans with the goal of undermining pro-Western forces.
In Macedonia, that involvement is on the side of the conservative populist supporters of former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, who have refused to accept a liberal and multi-ethnic parliamentary coalition following the results of last December's elections. Russian media outlets, such as Sputnik News, have been stoking the Slav majority's fears of empowering the country's Albanian minority by flogging conspiracy theories about NATO plans for "Greater Albania" and for Macedonia's dismemberment. The conflict turned bloody after the election of an Albanian speaker in late April, when about 200 right-wing protesters stormed the parliament; about 100 people, including nine lawmakers, were injured in the melee.
Less dramatic but baneful effects of Russian influence can be seen in Hungary, where the Kremlin has cultivated both the far-right Jobbik and the more moderately right-wing ruling party, Fidesz. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has an amicable relationship with Putin and is openly skeptical of the post-Crimea sanctions, says he favors an "illiberal democracy" in which the collective good takes precedence over individual rights.
In practice, this has meant reforms that weaken the separation of powers and strengthen state controls over the media. In April, Hungary passed a law requiring non-E.U. universities that issue diplomas in Hungary to have an active campus in their home country, a measure likely to force the closure of the country's top private school, Central European University, which is headquartered in New York but has no campus in the United States. Since it's funded by George Soros, the financier and controversial philanthropist at the center of many post-communist regimes' conspiracy theories, the government's critics charge that it is being targeted on purpose—perhaps taking a page from Russia, where the Soros-backed European University in St. Petersburg closed after having its license revoked in March.
Aside from the separatist fighting in Ukraine, neither ethnic nor political conflicts in Europe are created primarily by Russia. But the Putin regime has been adept at exploiting and stoking conflicts and tensions that already exist. Those conflicts range from ethnic and political divisions to anxieties about social disruption and violence by migrants—an area where Russian media can vie with Breitbart in fearmongering. Between April 2016 and May of this year, Sputnik News ran 127 articles tagged "Refugee and Migrant Crisis in Europe."
What should American policy be toward Putin's Russia? The answer to that question depends, above all, on your view of America's role in the world and of how broadly America's national interest should be defined. In the wake of the Iraq War, few would defend the vision of nearly untrammeled American hegemony that some neoconservatives espoused in the early 2000s. On the other hand, you need not embrace wide-ranging American adventurism abroad to believe that we're better off in a world with more freedom-friendly countries in it.
While "democracy promotion" in countries with no homegrown liberal tradition is a project likely to remain discredited for the foreseeable future, support for genuine grassroots pro-freedom aspirations in countries that look to America for leadership is a far more complicated matter. Ukraine, Georgia, and even the Baltic states may not be paragons of liberal capitalism today. Yet if they were bullied into a return to Russian vassalage, it would be a net loss for liberty and, arguably, for America as well.
Nonetheless, pro-Russian (or at least anti-anti-Russian) arguments have become fairly common not just among conservatives but among a contingent of libertarians, such as former Rep. Ron Paul and Antiwar.com Editorial Director Justin Raimondo. The new Republican affection for Russia is largely a matter of political polarization: Since Putin is the Democrats' boogeyman du jour, he can't be all bad. But quite a few conservatives also genuinely see Putin's Russia as a Christian ally against Islam, a perspective recently endorsed by Ann Coulter in a March column trollishly titled "Let's Make Russia Our Sister Country."
That view manages to ignore not only Russia's coziness with Iran but the fact that one of Putin's staunchest domestic allies, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, runs a de facto sharia state within the Russian Federation. This spring, Kadyrov was in the news for throwing gay men in prison camps and threatening a fatwa on Russian journalists who exposed the persecution.
Meanwhile, Ron Paul–style libertarians are inclined to see Russia as a check on U.S. foreign adventurism and Russia hawks as hardcore proponents of the American imperial leviathan. "Unfortunately, there is a small contingent who fall victim to the fallacy that 'the enemy of the enemy is my friend,' and if the Kremlin is the enemy of my enemy, then it must be my friend," Palmer says.
Still, most Republicans in Washington don't share the party base's newfound affection for the Russian president: A spending bill unveiled by the Republican-controlled Congress includes at least $100 million for a Countering Russian Influence Fund, intended to support "civil society organizations and other entities" in Europe and Central Asia.
Aside from a verbal commitment to liberal democracy and the rule of law, what can Western countries do to curb Russia's anti-liberal influence without risking military conflict? Economic sanctions—particularly when they target the Russian political elite and its properties abroad, as opposed to targeting ordinary Russian consumers—can be more effective than they are often believed to be. The desire to avoid further and harsher sanctions, for example, may have helped persuade the Putin regime to abandon its territorial ambitions in eastern Ukraine and to scale down its war in that region to a simmering conflict.
The threat of stronger sanctions could be used to push for genuine enforcement of the 2014–15 Minsk agreements, which were supposed to restore Ukraine's control over the territories currently ruled by the thuggish "people's republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk. Russia's backsliding toward open contempt for those agreements was signaled in February by a decision to "temporarily" recognize identity documents issued by the two gangster statelets.
Financial support for political forces favorable to liberal democracy—in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics, and Russia itself—is important as well, though private organizations have a more important role to play in this than the congressional purse. It's true that foreign funding makes political and civic organizations vulnerable to charges of disloyalty, but it is often their only feasible source of revenue in a system where most privately owned business is extensively entangled with the state and where backing dissent can bring retaliation.
Private organizations and media must also take the lead in countering Russia's information wars, since government measures against "fake news" raise inevitable and well-founded concerns about censorship.
Above all, it's important not to exaggerate the Putin regime's omnipotence. For one thing, it is running out of cash reserves, thanks not just to sanctions but to lower oil prices and other factors. That will weaken its ability to fund not only political intrigue abroad but the domestic programs that keep the population content at home.
The Kremlin's efforts to maintain its sphere of influence have been expensive: Besides the money pumped into Ukraine, Russia is saddled with massive subsidies to South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the Georgian breakaway republics it has sponsored since 2008. Its record of victories on the larger global stage has been mixed at best, with such defeats as Montenegro's admission to NATO and Le Pen's crushing loss in France. And if Russia did help elect Trump, it seems so far to have been a spectacularly bad investment. While political chaos in America may benefit Putin in some sense, the Kremlin goal of a more accommodating administration in Washington is probably more elusive than before: Very public concerns about Russian influence are likely to make the White House skittish about offering concessions to the Kremlin.
What lies ahead? Victor Davidoff, the Moscow-based founder of the human rights monitoring website IXTC.org, suspects that the Kremlin's financial difficulties will lead to less Russian influence in Eastern Europe over the next several years—including, he predicts, the electoral defeat of pro-Moscow leaders such as Hungary's Orbán.
Davidoff says he also sees new troubles for the Putin regime in the revival of the protest movement, signaled by the anti-corruption rallies in multiple cities starting March 26. Those troubles are compounded by the changing media landscape. The latest protests were sparked by a 50-minute online documentary that accused Russian prime minister and ex-president Dmitry Medvedev of large-scale graft and exposed his alleged "secret empire" of mansions, villas, vineyards, and yachts. The video garnered over 20 million views on YouTube alone in a little over a month.
"A high school student who was at a protest said, 'We don't even watch television,'" says Davidoff. "Do you see what that means? The main lever of thought control is television, but it turns out that it's bypassing the younger generation. So what are they going to do now? They've lost the internet. The trolling, none of that works. There are just too many sources of information." Even websites that have been officially banned in Russia, such as Grani, are easily accessible through mirror sites.
Meanwhile, an April survey by the Levada Center, a highly regarded independent polling firm, found that nearly four in 10 Russians approved of the protests. In May, only 48 percent said they would vote for Putin if the next presidential election—due in March 2018—were held now. Two years ago, that figure stood at 62 percent.
Protests and disaffected voters may not seem to pose much of a threat to Putin, given how thoroughly the Kremlin has neutralized independent political life. But disaffected business and political elites may be a force to reckon with if they feel that Putin's continued rule threatens their position. This is particularly true, argues Davidoff, if they manage to harness popular dissatisfaction to create pressure for Putin's removal.
That scenario may seem unlikely, but if recent experience has taught us anything, it is to not dismiss unlikely scenarios. Few expected Trump's victory in November; by the same token, even the more ardent Never Trumpers did not think the new administration would be so thoroughly and so quickly engulfed in Russia-related scandals.
At this point, the further development of U.S.-Russian relations is virtually impossible to predict. Trump seems to be trying to straddle a conventional Republican foreign policy (firm commitments to NATO, hawkishness in the Middle East) and friendly rapprochement with Russia (cooperation on the problems of ISIS and Syria). In actuality, he's lurching awkwardly between those two positions.
The Kremlin, for the moment, seems inclined to treat Trump as a well-intentioned hostage of the anti-Russian Washington foreign policy establishment, but it could easily adopt a more hostile stance. Meanwhile, if the Trump presidency remains a disaster zone, it could have the opposite of a domino effect elsewhere, deterring the populist uprisings Russia favors: The Trump factor probably helped defeat Le Pen in France.
For both Putin and the Illiberal International, the future is far from guaranteed.
*CORRECTION: The original text of this article misstated the name of the pro-Kremlin candidate in the 2004 election.
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]]>Since the script writers for the lowbrow comedy-drama called "2016" are fond of bizarre twists and turns, no one knows for sure whether Donald Trump's quest for the White House will be undone for good by the 11-year-old candid audio in which he brags about his sexual advances toward women. Nonetheless, it is clear that the so-called "pussy tape"—in which Trump tells then-Access Hollywood host Billy Bush that his star status allows him to "do anything" to pretty women, including "grab them by the pussy"—has dealt a serious blow to Teflon Donald, until then largely unscathed by unsavory incidents.
Is this a sign of changing attitudes toward sexual misconduct—specifically, feminist-driven refusal to tolerate behavior once brushed off as "boys will be boys" but now unequivocally seen as assaultive and misogynistic? The response to Trump's repulsive comments has been undoubtedly affected by the prominence of gender issues in this election and the fact that it follows a resurgence of feminist activism intensely focused on sexual violence. But as the experience of earlier generations shows, the cultural winds can shift in unpredictable ways.
Pussygate (who could have imagined the ways in which Trump would enrich our political vocabulary?) has inevitably elicited comparisons to the scandals surrounding Bill Clinton in the 1990s. That Hillary Clinton is now Trump's Democratic rival for the presidency just makes the parallels all the more relevant.
Bill Clinton survived the scandals—both the revelation of the affair with Gennifer Flowers during his 1992 campaign and the later claims of sexual harassment and assault as well as the disclosure of the affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Whether this attests to the benighted sexual politics of the 1990s, frequently portrayed these days as a pre-feminist Dark Ages, is another matter.
It's easy to forget that the early 1990s were another major feminist moment. That was when Anita Hill's testimony at the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings turned into a "national teach-in" on sexual harassment, the 1992 elections became the "Year of the Woman," moderate Republican Bob Packwood was undone as a serial harasser, and the trials of William Kennedy Smith, Mike Tyson, and O.J. Simpson generated intense discussions of acquaintance rape and domestic violence. Even the modern-day conversation about campus rape is large a replay of a 1990s debate that landed on the cover of Time magazine.
Clinton weathered the storm for several reasons. For one, his only proven improprieties involved consensual adultery. But no less importantly, feminists—including First Lady Hillary Clinton—stood by him. Women's movement veteran Gloria Steinem even claimed that an unwanted advance, however lewd and aggressive, was not sexual harassment if its initiator took "no" for an answer. (This was dubbed the "one free grope" defense, likely not available to Trump.) At the time, I wrote that feminist hypocrisy on the Clinton scandals was helping undo the excesses of ideological zeal which had sought to purge the workplace of all sexuality and treat accusations of sexual wrongdoing as proof of guilt.
Fast-forward to the Trump candidacy and Pussygate. Like Clinton, Trump has faced several allegations of sexual assault, none proven, and has a known history of adultery; unlike Clinton, he has also talked publicly about bedding married women. The "pussy tape" contains what can be read as a confession to sexual assault—though, in my view, it sounds more like sexual trash talk. (Trump's actual behavior to soap actress Arianne Zucker on the same tape is quite different from the aggressive moves he brags about). Even so, it's a fairly vile kind of trash talk. Had Clinton been caught on tape bragging that his status as a politician allows him to grope women with impunity, it would very likely have turned public opinion against him—and killed his chances if released pre-election.
Yet it also makes a difference that no feminists, progressives, or mainstream journalists are likely to defend Trump or minimize his actions; if anything, they will lean in the opposite direction of casting his words in the most literal and negative light possible. Indeed, much like the Thomas confirmation hearings almost exactly 25 years ago, Pussygate has become a consciousness-raising moment on sexual abuse, with the social media a powerful instant amplifier of women's stories.
There is no doubt that sexual predators in position of power—usually male—have far too often gotten away with victimizing the vulnerable, usually women or children. Curbing such abuses is an important step toward justice. Nonetheless, the heightened focus on sexual abuse has its dark side, now as in the early 1990s—including the stigmatization or even demonization of male sexual interest in women, the cult of female victimhood, the tendency to portray complex male-female sexual dynamics as a one-sided affair with abusive males and abused females, and the push to police sexuality.
Eventually, for one reason or another, the tide will probably turn back. But the irony of the present moment is that Trump, the man whose candidacy is fueled in large part by a revolt against political and sexual correctness, is giving the victim feminist narrative of America as a "rape culture" a boost. A feminist scriptwriter out to create a male chauvinist villain could have done no better.
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]]>Concerns that the crusade against "rape culture" is creating an accusation-equals-guilt mindset in sexual assault cases have been mostly aimed at colleges. It's campuses that employ extralegal tribunals to settle rape disputes—tribunals where the accused often do not have the right to an attorney, to cross-examine their accusers, or to examine the evidence against them. But the latest contentious rape case comes from a real court—albeit in Canada, where feminist activism has been much more successful in influencing the justice system than in the United States.
On July 21, Mustafa Ururyar, a 29-year-old York University graduate student, was found guilty of sexually assaulting fellow grad student Mandi Gray, 28. The verdict was handed down by Ontario Court Judge Marvin Zuker in a non-jury trial. The alleged rape—and I say "alleged," because after reading the 180-page judgment I see no grounds for a finding of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt—happened in the early morning hours of January 31, 2015.
The case is a classic he sad/she said. Ururyar and Gray, who had been casually involved for two weeks—he told her he was in an open long-distance relationship with his girlfriend—had spent the evening drinking with friends. It was Gray who had invited Ururyar to join them with a text that said, "Come drink and then we can have hot sex." When they were leaving the bar around 2:30 a.m., Ururyar asked another woman in their group to come with him and Gray to his apartment, but she refused and left in a taxicab.
At that point, Gray's and Ururyar's accounts sharply diverge. Gray claimed that Ururyar suddenly became angry and verbally abusive, blaming her for not helping persuade the woman to come over for a threesome. Though shocked and upset, Gray said that she still went with Ururyar to his apartment since she was drunk and feeling too "vulnerable" to take a cab home by herself. She said that he continued shouting and berating her during their walk and then at his apartment, finally telling her, "This is the last time ever that I'm going to fuck you and you're going to like it." Then, Gray said, he forced her to perform oral sex and raped her vaginally, and she was too scared and psychologically shattered to protest.
Ururyar's version was very different. He said that Gray flirted with him all evening and that he even told her to stop touching him when she groped his thigh, twice. He admitted wanting a threesome, supposedly because he had heard from a friend that Gray was interested, but denied insulting or berating Gray. He also said that back at his apartment after they got into bed, he told Gray he wanted to end their relationship and mentioned being annoyed by her behavior at the bar. He said that Gray began to cry and he comforted her, and that she then initiated sex.
There was no independent evidence to strongly support either account. Both Ururyar and Gray had sent ambiguous messages referring to the night's events. Gray texted Ururyar the next day saying, "Last night was really fucked up" and he replied, "Okay." She also texted a female friend asking, "If you don't consent to sex, but you don't not consent, I don't know what is that?" to which the friend replied, "That's rape." Five days later, Ururyar sent Gray an apology, unaware that she had already gone to the police. He wrote: "I am sorry things went as they did. I shouldn't have said and done some of the things I did. I was upset and felt wronged by you but that does not excuse my own mistakes."
Gray's story may well be substantively true. If so, ururyar's actions certainly amount to sexual assault. Submission out of fear is not consent, and even if Ururyar made no over threats, his behavior as described by Gray sounds threatening and coercive enough. Her earlier sexual offer is irrelevant to her state of mind at that point.
But ururyar's story, too, is entirely believable. You don't even have to think that Gray was lying out of vindictive spite, which is what the defense suggested. Gray might simply have reinterpreted the sex as coercive because she felt hurt and humiliated—especially with her memories clouded by alcohol and, perhaps, filtered through ideology. Gray had previously worked with the Elizabeth Fry Society, which advocates for female criminal defendants and espouses radical leftist-feminist perspectives on sexual violence.
Or the truth could be somewhere in between. Maybe Ururyar was more verbally abusive than he admitted. Maybe Gray had sex with him in an attempt at comfort because she felt demoralized and confused, not physically threatened.
There are several plausible scenarios—certainly enough for reasonable doubt.
Justice Zuker resolved this by choosing to accept Gray's account, dismissing all inconsistencies as due to trauma, and to reject Ururyar's testimony outright because it was "at total variance" with hers.
The judge repeatedly stated that various facts alleged by Ururyar "never happened." He declared that it was "incomprehensible" to paint Gray as a "seductive party animal," notwithstanding her seductive text messages (which she had deleted from her phone and never mentioned to the police). He asserted—incomprehensibly—that "we don't even know what the phrase 'hot sex' means." He mocked Ururyar's claim that he was embarrassed when Gray groped him at the bar, despite her admission that he asked her to stop touching him. He claimed to know for a fact that Ururyar's apology was for a sexual assault, not a bad breakup.
Moreover, Justice Zuker used his judgment to deliver a sermon that, in the words of National Post columnist Christie Blatchford, sounded "borrowed from a college course on feminist thinking." (As Canadian court reformer Lise LaSalle has documented on her blog, he is a veteran advocate for feminist jurisprudence.) He denounced "rape myths," spoke of "the interplay of power, gender, and sexuality," and cited several feminist texts such as Susan Brownmiller's 1975 book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape.
When Ururyar is sentenced on September 14, he could receive up to eighteen months in jail. Meanwhile, at a July 25 hearing, Justice Zuker not only revoked his bail and ordered him jailed immediately but berated him and jeered at the idea that he should be given a chance to complete schoolwork and spend time with his family. "He's not the victim here," Zuker said.
But there is a real possibility that Ururyar is indeed a victim—of a wrongful accusation and a biased judge.
While Canadian feminists have celebrated Zuker's ruling as a long-overdue victory—especially after former radio personality Jian Ghomeshi was acquitted of sexually assaulting three women in March—one court has already found that he went too far. On August 3, Ontario Superior Court Justice Michael Quigley reversed Zuker's decision to revoke bail and ordered Ururyar released pending sentencing. Quigley noted that the number of references to academic texts on gender-based violence in Zuker's judgment "raises questions of having a predisposed mind."
This swipe at Zuker's impartiality will no doubt help the defense in its appeal, which claims the trial judge "applied different standards of scrutiny to the evidence of the complainant and that of the appellant" and used "illogical and/or irrational reasoning" in his verdict.
Whatever its outcome, ururyar's case illustrates a genuine dilemma. Sometimes, rape happens in an intimate situation and involves intimidation but no violence. Proving such an assault beyond a reasonable doubt can be near-impossible. The presumption of innocence means that most of these crimes will probably go unpunished by the criminal justice system. Yet false accusations are also a non-trivial issue. It is particularly risky to convict solely on the accuser's word when young women are increasingly taught elastic and subjective definitions of consent—and when fact-finders are encouraged to explain away any contradictions in the accuser's story as evidence of trauma or "denial."
Back in 1977, at the dawn of rape law reform, pioneering feminist legal scholar Vivian Berger cautioned against "sacrificing legitimate rights of the accused person on the altar of Women's Liberation." That warning has never seemed so prescient.
An earlier version of this article appeared at Allthink.com.
The post Canadian University Student Convicted of Rape, But Was the Judge Biased Against Men? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There is a bitter irony in the fact that the final year in the life of legendary novelist Harper Lee, who died last week at 89, was marked by what many saw as her hero's inglorious downfall. Lee's second book, Go Set a Watchman—a sort-of-sequel, sort-of-first-draft to her 1960 classic, To Kill a Mockingbird—showed the revered Atticus Finch, a white lawyer who stood up to racial injustice in the 1930s South, as a cantankerous old bigot defending segregation twenty years later.
Many were appalled; but others applauded. That reaction was summed up in the title of a New York Times op-ed by University of Miami law professor Osamudia James: "Now We Can Finally Say Goodbye to the White Savior Myth of Atticus." On the feminist blog Jezebel, writer Catherine Nichols asserted that without the corrective of Watchman, Mockingbird is a "shameful" and "racist" book, and Atticus is a virtuous white patriarch who believes in being kind to blacks (and women) and keeping them in their place.
The campaign to knock Atticus off his pedestal started long before Watchman. Both Mockingbird and its hero have been criticized for naïve and simplistic moralism and for perpetuating the idea that a white man's individual goodness and benevolence is an adequate answer to pervasive racial oppression. But the naysayers are wrong. To Kill a Mockingbird will endure as Lee's legacy, and its morality is far less naïve and more complex than the critiques allow. Atticus, too, will endure, as a good, flawed—and yes, often heroic—man who does not always have the right answers but always tries to live by his conscience.
It is quite true that, as Malcolm Gladwell argued in a 2009 essay in The New Yorker, Atticus does not challenge the system that relegates blacks to second-class status; he simply tries to do his best to ensure that they are treated decently within that system. (Or, as Nichols puts it more scathingly, he believes in "powerful white people being very polite.") At times he minimizes societal bigotry; memorably, he waves off the Ku Klux Klan in Maycomb County as a basically harmless "political organization" whose members could be shamed into dispersing when the Jewish store owner they were harassing reminded them that "he'd sold 'em the very sheets on their backs." At times, he also seems to treat racism as lower-class vulgarity or a bizarre mental affliction: he chides the eight-year-old narrator, "Scout," for using a racial slur because "it's common" and expresses bafflement that "reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up."
But while this is Atticus's perspective, it's certainly not the novel's perspective—and it may not even be Atticus's perspective eventually. We see, for example, that many of Maycomb's "fine folk" are just as bigoted as the "white trash": the schoolteachers, the prosecutor, the Finches' next-door neighbor Mrs. Dubose, the ladies in the missionary circle of Scout's aunt Alexandra. What's more, toward the end of the book, after Tom Robinson, the black man Atticus defends on a charge of raping a white woman, is wrongly convicted, Atticus has a conversation with his children in which he makes it very clear that racism is deeply entrenched in their culture: "In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's, the white man always wins. They're ugly, but those are the facts of life." While he still goes on to frame the issue in terms of individual character—a white man is "trash," no matter what his background, if he mistreats a black man—he clearly sees the bigger picture: "Don't fool yourselves—it's all adding up and one of these days we're going to pay the bill for it." This is not a man who, as his detractors claim, is comfortable with white supremacy as long as he can be nice to black folk.
Later on, when Tom is shot dead during a doomed prison escape attempt while awaiting appeal, public opinion in Maycomb regards this as "typical" of how feckless and lawless blacks are. But Atticus, who believes there was a "good chance" of winning on appeal or securing a pardon, has this to say: "I guess Tom was tired of white men's chances and preferred to take his own." It is a quiet but powerful statement that, against "systemic oppression," the decency of the "good" white men (and women) can only accomplish so much. The limits of individual virtue are thus recognized within the novel itself. As a "white savior," Atticus fails—not because of his individual faults, but because the system is hopelessly stacked against the black man he is trying to save.
Would Atticus support the dismantling of this system and accept civil rights? It's hard to tell. In his closing argument at Tom's trial, he takes a swipe at "the Yankees" and Eleanor Roosevelt for haranguing the South over its failure to live up to the Jeffersonian principle of equality; while this is undoubtedly meant to show the jurors that he's a Southern patriot, the comment probably reflects, at least in part, his actual views. ("No matter how bitter things get … this is still our home," he tells Scout earlier.) Yet in the same speech, he also offers an impassioned defense not only of equality for all before the law, but of the equal moral worth of whites and blacks. And on a personal level, he treats blacks as equals, not objects of paternalistic condescension. When his sister upbraids him for saying that a prominent member of the community "despises Negroes" in front of Calpurnia, the black cook, Atticus replies tartly, "Anything fit to say at the table's fit to say in front of Calpurnia."
Could this Atticus have aged into the bigoted Atticus of Go Set a Watchman, perhaps seen with more clarity by the now-grown daughter who once idolized him? If it is, such a change requires more explanation than Watchman provides. Mockingbird was developed from Watchman's childhood flashbacks with encouragement from an editor who felt the manuscript required a total overhaul; while the characters' names are the same, it is clearly not quite the same story. (Notably, Watchman's Atticus "won acquittal" for a one-armed black man accused of rape, while Mockingbird's Tom Robinson has a crippled arm and gets convicted despite strong evidence of his innocence.)
One interesting possibility, suggested by Lee's biographer Charles J. Shields, is that the evolution of Atticus from Watchman to Mockingbird was due to the personal evolution of Lee's father, Amasa Coleman Lee, the Alabama lawyer, civic leader, and newspaper publisher on whom the character was based. Go Set a Watchman was inspired in large part by Lee's bitterness at her adored father's segregationist stance; but it seems that, while she was revising the manuscript, he was revising his views toward embracing civil rights. If true, this is a hopeful story—just as To Kill a Mockingbird is ultimately hopeful despite its tragic events. Personal values are no substitute for fundamental reforms; but change in the hearts and minds helped make reforms possible.
Harper Lee died in an America that had made vast strides toward equality and justice for all—and at a time when pessimistic and cynical views of race relations prevail, especially among progressives. In this age, Lee's message of universal empathy may seem hopelessly dated. But perhaps that makes it all the more important.
This piece originally appeared at RealClear Politics.
The post Defending Atticus Finch appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On January 22, a three-year legal drama that made few headlines but was closely watched by those with an interest in free-speech and online-harassment issues came to an end in a Toronto courtroom. Gregory Alan Elliott,* a 55-year-old graphic artist, was found not guilty of criminal harassment toward feminist activists Stephanie Guthrie and Heather Reilly. The trial judge took pains to stress that he felt the women were truthful and did feel harassed. But he also concluded that their perception of harassment was not reasonable, since it was based on the assumption that Elliott had no valid points to make or opinions to defend.
Breitbart News columnist Allum Bokhari called the case's outcome the "Stalingrad" of the online speech wars, a key victory in the resistance to would-be censors and authoritarians. Vice columnist Sarah Ratchford deplored it as sending the message that "harassing women online is not a crime" and making the Internet "an even uglier place for Canadian women."
There is no question in my mind that the real issue in this case is the dangerous drift toward criminalizing political speech, often in the name of protecting women. Elliott's defenders may have oversimplified the facts at times—claiming that he was facing charges merely for disagreeing with feminists on Twitter. But here was a man with no criminal record facing six months in jail for tweets which, by the admission of the police officer handling the case, were neither threatening nor sexually harassing—and were part of mutual sniping. One of Elliott's offending comments, "Heather's fat ass gets fatter," was a response to Reilly urging other women to block him and using the hashtag #GAEhole.
Elliott and Guthrie first became acquainted in April 2012, when he volunteered to design a logo and poster, for free, for Guthrie's Women in Toronto Politics (WiTopoli) project. Elliott says he was genuinely enthusiastic about this at the time. The pair met for dinner and got along fine, but after some email discussions Guthrie told Elliott that her group had decided to go with another artist.
Guthrie later told the police that Elliott was "very angry" about this, but in fact, he sent her a friendly note which expressed the hope for future collaboration and signed it, "Love, Greg." (On the stand, Guthrie testified that she thought the email had a "seething undertone.") She also said she'd gotten a "creepy" vibe from Elliott when they met, particularly because of his repeated offers to give her a ride. Nonetheless, the two interacted amicably by email and on Twitter until July, when Elliott took issue with Guthrie's Twitter witch-hunt against another man.
That man was 24-year-old Ontario resident Bendilin Spurr, creator of an infamous online game in which players could virtually punch feminist videogame critic Anita Sarkeesian until her face looked bruised and bloodied. (Spurr had previously made a similar game targeting Jack Thompson, a conservative Christian crusader against videogame violence.) Having tracked down Spurr's Twitter account, Guthrie decided to, in her words, "sic the Internet on him." She not only publicly attacked him but tweeted information about his game to his local newspaper and sent out a general warning addressed to employers in Spurr's area.
Elliott objected to Guthrie's antics, suggesting that the retaliation was as repulsive as the face-punch game itself, and got embroiled in a heated Twitter argument with Guthrie and her supporters. After he tweeted that Guthrie's campaign was simply "revenge" which could conceivably drive Spurr to suicide, Guthrie replied, "I've had it with you" and blocked Elliott. Her friend and fellow activist Reilly later did the same.
Four months later, Elliott was under arrest for criminal harassment. His detractors say that during those months, he relentlessly hounded Guthrie and Reilly on Twitter to the point where they feared for their safety. He made derogatory remarks about them, posted in hashtags they frequented—making it likely they would see his tweets despite the block—and started his own hashtag, #FascistFeminists. Guthrie claimed that she started to feel he was obsessed with her and her work. Reilly said she became "concerned" about in-person stalking when Elliott tweeted a snide reference to them and their friends meeting at a Toronto pub ("A whole lot of ugly at the Cadillac Lounge tonight"), though the women had themselves tweeted about being at that location.
The defense, and Elliott's supporters, have countered that what happened was not harassment but a back-and-forth in which the alleged victims gave as at least as good as they got. Indeed, a look at the record recounted in Judge Brent Knazan's 85-page decision makes it difficult to conclude otherwise. (Many materials from the case, including excerpts from the trial transcript and tweets entered into evidence, can also be found in an April 2015 defense brief available online, though the selection of those materials is obviously not unbiased.)
From July until November 2012, Elliott was repeatedly attacked and taunted by Guthrie, Reilly, and their supporters ("It was me against a hundred of them," he told me in an interview a few days after the verdict). He was reviled as an "MRA" (men's rights activist) who "disguises his feelings about women with a cloak of 'care' for their freedom." At one point, Guthrie tweeted her followers about a spoof account somebody had set up to mock Elliott, whom she described as her "least favourite creep on Twitter."
Guthrie, Reilly and their friends also took to monitoring Elliott's timeline and "calling out" what they regarded as his sexual harassment of other women, mainly in exchanges with his own online friends. There is no question that Elliott, who is divorced, sometimes made rather awkward romantic overtures toward women with whom he interacted on Twitter. He also posted tweets with ribald overtones that were not directed to anyone specific, a part of his general eccentric online persona. (Elliott, whose graphic art consists primarily of stenciled texts, says he "would use Twitter as an experimental artist.") And he engaged in banter which, while often innocuous or mutually bawdy, at times crossed the line and made its recipients uncomfortable. On those occasions, Elliott promptly backed off and apologized. Yet Guthrie and her supporters portrayed him as not only a "creep" but practically a sexual predator who "hates women" and needed to be exposed.
Perhaps most egregiously, not long before Elliott's arrest, Reilly and another member of Guthrie's coterie whipped up a mini-storm of outrage around the claim that he had been "hitting on" and "creeping on" a 13-year-old girl. This was based on an exchange in which Elliott made a mild flirtatious remark to a female user who responded by angrily accusing him of being a pedophile and claiming she was 13. (She was later confirmed to be a young adult.)
What's more, Guthrie and Reilly seemed to be of the opinion that Elliott essentially had no right to respond to their allegations. On cross-examination, Guthrie stated that Elliott was entitled to "defend himself to the world" but not to her; however, to her and Reilly, that right clearly did not include posting in "their" hashtags or reading and referencing their tweets. In Guthrie's view, Elliott was obligated to respect her demand to "stop smearing [her] work," but his demand to "stop libeling him" imposed no obligation on her because, in her mind, what she was doing wasn't libel.
The defense argued (fairly persuasively, in my view) that Guthrie and Reilly, at the very least, drastically exaggerated the degree to which they felt intimidated by Elliott's actions. Some of their statements, both at the time and later, suggest that they were annoyed rather than afraid. When another Twitter user, Globe and Mail columnist Denise Balkissoon, said that she would simply ignore Elliott, Guthrie replied:
It's what I'd like to do, but when he's attacking my work in feminism & women's safety it's hard to ignore.
In her trial testimony, Reilly said that she didn't feel Elliott was "picking on [her] per se" but she "didn't appreciate … randomly being dragged into Twitter fights," or having Elliott's derogatory remarks about her posted in hashtags where a wide audience could see them. At times, the complainants contradicted themselves; thus, Reilly suggested that she changed her Twitter avatar from a photo of herself to a cartoon image because she was concerned about harassment from Elliott, but then admitted that she had changed it at some earlier point out of general concerns about being harassed.
"Ms. Guthrie's unreasonable premise that Mr. Elliott was irrational and had nothing valid to say meant that she never put his tweets into any context," wrote Judge Knazan. "The very fact of his tweeting any hashtag she followed or any tweet about her or with her handle harassed her. She would not even allow for the possibility that he had any reason apart from the obsession with her that [s]he perceived to tweet about her. Given that she had a leadership role in the campaign to denounce him, that is not reasonable." (Emphasis added)
Slate columnist Amanda Hess has lamented that Judge Knazan's ruling tells women they have no legal recourse against online harassers if they fight back by using ridicule and public shaming. But the line between attacking and fighting back can get fuzzy, on the Internet as in real life. It is notable, for instance, that Elliott did not attack or even mention Guthrie or Reilly on Twitter for over two months, from early September until mid-November 2012, except for one passing remark in a reply to another user. This truce was broken when Guthrie, Reilly and their friends decided to "call out" Elliott's alleged pedophilic advances to a minor. At that point, one could reasonably say that he was the one "fighting back"—which is certainly how he perceives the overall situation.
"I don't mind a good fight, but [if] I have a choice, how do I deal with it?" he says. "I would block, I would do what I could, I would ignore. But when you see your name come up and slanderous things, you have to respond." (Elliott also denies that he was obsessed with his online battles with the "fascist feminists," pointing out that his tweets to or about them made up less than 0.5 percent of his prolific overall tweeting.)
Both Hess and Vice's Ratchford questioned Judge Knazan's knowledge and competence when it comes to the Internet and the social media—ironically citing as evidence an error in the prosecution's favor, namely the fact that the judge attributed to Elliott a nasty homophobic tweet that had been sent from the parody account. Hess even suggested that an Internet-savvy "smart teen" could have done a better job. But it's very doubtful that a smart teen would have been particularly sympathetic to an attempt to throw someone in jail over a Twitter war.
Ultimately, this is a case about political speech. As the defense brief put it, "A politician (Ms. Guthrie) who transmits her political opinions to the world on Twitter cannot reasonably be fearful when another politically engaged Twitter user (Mr. Elliott) comments on her politics on the same social media platform."
Elliott's son Clayton Elliott, 31, who has been actively involved in his father's defense, says that he believes Guthrie's real fear was "brand damage," her feminist activism being the "brand" in question. One might also say that her fear was losing control of the discourse in feminist spaces, where opinions such as Elliott's—for instance, that "blaming the majority of normal men for rape is wrong"—are seen as beyond the pale.
Thankfully, both common sense and liberal values have prevailed for now, and Elliott is a free (if broke) man. But attacks on political speech in the guise of preventing "harassment" will no doubt continue. According to Vice, Ontario MP Cheri DeNovo is considering introducing "a new bill to address online harassment of and verbal violence toward women." Otherwise, DeNovo says, "You can say whatever you will about whatever woman you want, it's just freedom of expression."
Actually, yes, unless what you say fits into the narrow category of libel or explicit or implied threats, you can say whatever you will about whatever woman or man you want. That a politician in a democracy would have a problem with that is something that should cause us all reasonable fear.
Disclosure: I participated in a livestream fundraiser for Elliott's defense fund last November.
The post Common Sense and Liberal Values Prevail in Twitter Harassment Case appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The centennial of the great American playwright Arthur Miller, born in New York on October 17, 1915, has been noted in articles and recognized with commemorative events and editions. For all the tributes, Miller (who died ten years ago) seems more a relic than a living voice on today's cultural scene; his earnest old-style liberal leftism alienates both conservatives and modern-day progressives obsessed with racial and sexual identities. Yet one of his most famous works, The Crucible—a mostly fact-based dramatic account of the 17th century Salem witch trials—is startlingly relevant to today's culture wars, in ways that Miller himself might have recognized.
Everyone knows that Miller's 1952 play was his response to McCarthyism, with the witchcraft hysteria an allegory for the anti-communist panic. (The latter, unlike the former, was grounded in a real danger; but, contrary to some recent claims on the right, McCarthyite paranoia that swept up many innocent people in its wide net was quite real as well.) In 1996, when Miller wrote a screenplay adaptation for the film version of The Crucible, many saw a metaphor for the day-care sexual abuse panic that had swept the country a few years earlier, with men and women arrested on suspicion of lurid acts and Satanic rituals.
When I recently watched a webcast of the compelling 2014 production of The Crucible at London's Old Vic theater, I was struck by the parallels to another panic we are witnessing now: the one over "rape culture" and, in particular, the "campus rape epidemic."
"Believe the victim"—the mantra of today's feminist anti-rape movement—is a remarkably prominent theme in Miller's play. At one point, Deputy Governor Danforth, who presides over the trials, notes that unlike "an ordinary crime," witchcraft is by its nature invisible: "Therefore, who may possibly be witness to it? The witch and the victim. None other. Now we cannot hope the witch will accuse herself; granted? Therefore, we must rely upon her victims—and they do testify." Today, advocates for "survivors" of sexual violence argue that since such crimes virtually always take place in private, especially when victim and offender know each other, it is imperative to believe those who come forward with accusations.
Of course, "believe the children" was also the mantra of the child abuse trials of the 1980s and early 1990s. But in those cases, the children themselves were a somewhat passive presence, more victims of adult manipulation than active accusers. Not so the girls of The Crucible, whom Miller made older than their 10- and 11-year-old historical counterparts—more young women than children. (Danforth and other adult authority figures in the play often refer to them as "children"; but today's anti-rape advocates, too, often use language that infantilizes young people and young women in particular, sometimes explicitly insisting that college "kids" are not really adults.)
When the Salem girls' veracity is questioned and Danforth asks their ringleader, Abigail Williams, if her visions could be false, Abby responds with self-righteous outrage: "Why, this—this—is a base question, sir. I have been hurt, Mr. Danforth; I have seen my blood runnin' out! I have been near to murdered every day because I done my duty pointing out the Devil's people—and this is my reward? To be mistrusted, denied, questioned…" As Danforth backs down, assuring Abigail that he doesn't mistrust her, she warns, "Let you beware, Mr. Danforth. Think you to be so mighty that the power of Hell may not turn your wits?"
The McCarthy era has no direct parallels to this fetishizing of victimhood or this demand for absolute trust in accusations. But there are uncanny echoes here of today's crusading "survivors" who cry "victim-blaming" when questioned and lament that mistrust retraumatizes and silences victims of sexual assault. "If we use proof in rape cases, we fall into the patterns of rape deniers," Emma Sulkowicz, Columbia University's "mattress girl" and a leader in this crusade, said at Brown University last April.
In Miller's Salem, to question reports of witchcraft was to be suspected of doubting the Bible or even serving the devil. In American universities in 2015, accusations of "rape denialism" are almost as intimidating, even to high-level officials. ("Almost" because on today's campus, no one risks hanging—except maybe in effigy.) A modern-day Abigail would pointedly remind a modern-day Danforth of his "privilege" and warn him of the peril of perpetuating "rape culture."
The girls of The Crucible are a terrifying group, as Yael Farber's Old Vic production starkly conveys. They burn with icy conviction, whipping themselves into fits of agony supposedly inflicted by witches and spirits. (More parallels to the histrionics of the campus activists, so "triggered" by dissent that they have crippling flashbacks, flee to "therapy rooms," and become physically ill.) They easily overwhelm one girl who tries to break away.
There is the obvious caveat that witchcraft does not exist, while rape is all too real. None of the Salem girls were actual victims of witches—though, as the play suggests, many probably came to believe they were. Many anti-rape activists are undoubtedly actual victims of sexual assault. But a "rape culture" in 21st century America is no more real than the devil in the 17th century colonies. And some of today's most visible "survivors"—Sulkowicz, Lena Sclove, Laura Dunn, Lena Dunham—have stories that don't hold up well under scrutiny, or use absurd definitions of rape that equate repeated advances or drunken trysts with forced sex. Some, like the Salem girls, are probably fake victims so caught up in collective zealotry that they believe in their own stories.
To see The Crucible as a parable for the campus anti-rape crusade raises the touchy issue of false accusations as vengeance for sexual rejection. The play's Abby Williams is motivated largely by her past affair (entirely Miller's invention) with her ex-employer John Proctor, vengeance toward his wife Elizabeth, and then anger at Proctor himself for rejecting her. This has caused some feminist scholars to accuse Miller of covert misogyny.
The vindictive scorned woman is indeed a misogynist stereotype. But that doesn't negate the fact that some women, like some men, seek revenge when rejected—and that accusations of abhorrent crimes can be a form of revenge. (The wrong of stereotypes is in generalizing to an entire group.) It could have been true in Salem; it can also be true on today's campus, especially in a climate where women are often encouraged to reinterpret past sexual encounters as nonconsensual. In one recent case at Washington and Lee University, a student was expelled on a charge of sexual assault stemming from an encounter that his accuser admitted she initially saw as consensual and enjoyable. It was only after learning that the young man was seeing someone else—and after spending a summer working at a women's clinic which dealt with sexual violence—that she concluded she had been too drunk to consent.
In his 1996 essay on The Crucible and its themes, Miller wrote that, whatever the setting, "the play evokes a lethal brew of illicit sexuality, fear of the supernatural, and political manipulation." Replace "fear of the supernatural" with "fear of the hidden demons of patriarchal oppression," and you have today's American campus. Perhaps the Miller centennial, and The Crucible's return to Broadway next February, will hasten the much-needed rethinking of the modern witch-hunts.
The post <em>The Crucible</em>, Now at a Campus Near You appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The latest pitched battle in science fiction is not between space pirates and alien monsters but between fandom factions, with the Hugo Awards as the battlefield. Depending on where you stand, this fight pits either forces of progress against reactionary barbarians or the elitist establishment against anti-authoritarian rebels. The progressive elites have decisively won this round; but was it a pyrrhic victory? One thing is certain: this culture war is here to stay.
The Hugos are science fiction's Oscars, selected by fans—anyone who pays the $40 World Science Fiction Convention membership fee is eligible to nominate and vote—and presented at the annual WorldCon. Earlier this year, a large share of the nominations was captured by the so-called "Sad Puppies" slate, organized by a group of writers opposed to what they saw as a politically correct domination of the Hugos. It was the culmination of an effort that began in 2013. (The group's name is an in-joke born from a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Ad featuring dejected-looking doggies and a quip that "puppy-related sadness" was caused by "boring message-fic winning awards.")
When the nominations were unveiled in April, the science fiction fandom and much of the popular culture media had a meltdown. The Puppies were accused of "gaming the system" by voting as a bloc—and portrayed as a right-wing "white boys' club" reacting to the growing prominence of female, nonwhite, progressive voices in the field.
At the 73rd WorldCon on August 22, the empire struck back. Not one Puppy nominee won a Hugo. In five all-Puppy categories, the top choice was "No Award," just as progressive sci-fi bloggers had recommended. At the presentation, each "No Award" was met with applause and cheers, which Puppy supporters saw as unseemly gloating at sticking it to "WrongFans." Of course, the "Puppy Kickers" (as the Puppies called them) and their mainstream media backers saw it very differently: as a defeat for ballot-stuffing reactionaries and a victory for both quality and diversity.
So who are the Sad Puppies and what do they want? In a post-awards blog post, Puppy leader Larry Correia wrote that he started the campaign because he believed the Hugos had come to represent "tiny, insular, politically motivated cliques" that gave awards to their friends and rewarded "correct" identities and politics rather than talent.
Is this, as the Puppies' detractors suggest, all about straight white males trying to protect their turf from interlopers like the women who snagged nearly two-thirds of the Hugo nominations for fiction in 2012? The Puppies' fiction picks were indisputably male-dominated, with only three female authors out of 17; yet some of the group's most dedicated members are women such as writers Sarah Hoyt, Amanda Green, and Cedar Sanderson. (The latter two were Puppy nominees for Best Fan Writer, which recognizes sci-fi related nonfiction work for nonpaying or low-paying magazines or websites.) And Hoyt told me in our email interview last spring that her personal worst example of the Hugos' political corruption was a 2013 win for a white male: the Best Novel award to "Redshirts" by John Scalzi, a satirical riff on "Star Trek." Hoyt, who dismisses the novel as "bad fanfic," thought the award was blatant cronyism on behalf of Scalzi, a recent president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and one of the fandom's high priests of "social justice" ideology.
Then there are the politicized "message" stories. Thus, last year's Best Novel Hugo went to "Ancillary Justice" by Ann Leckie, whose protagonist belongs to a futuristic human civilization with no concept of gender distinctions and with "she" as the universal pronoun. The Best Story winner, "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" by John Chu, dealt with a Chinese-American man's struggles with coming out as gay. (The "fantasy" part was a clunky plot device: a mysterious phenomenon that causes anyone telling a lie to be instantly doused in water.) Also high on the gripe list is last year's nomination for "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" by Rachel Swirsky, a short story that even some of its fans concede is not really science fiction or fantasy. It is the internal monologue of a woman who daydreams about her comatose fiancé—the victim of a hate crime by men who apparently thought he was gay or transgendered—becoming a human-sized dinosaur.
Of course, quality is a somewhat subjective thing. Two of my friends who are avid readers of sci-fi and fantasy, disagreed sharply on "Dinosaur": one thought it was an piece of pretentious dreck whose nomination could only be explained by political correctness; another, who has little patience for PC, wasn't crazy about it but thought it was well-written and could be appreciated on merit. Yet another friend thought the Puppies had a legitimate complaint about the Hugos' cliquishness but undercut it with their own mediocre nominations.
Perhaps the real issue isn't the quality of any specific work, or even the prevalence of "message fiction" in the genre; it's that, as cautiously Puppy-sympathetic nonfiction writer and data scientist Nathaniel Givens has argued on his blog, "the message has never been so dogmatically uniform." What's more, Givens argues, the current crop of pro-"social justice" authors who dominate the field not only use their fiction as a vehicle for ideology but seek to enforce conformity throughout the fandom, posing a genuine threat to intellectual diversity. He points out that, by contrast, the Sad Puppies "went out of their way to put some authors on the slate who are liberal rather than conservative."
Givens's observations are echoed by Hoyt, who has written on her blog about the "state of fear" that has existed for a while in the speculative fiction community—the fear of being blacklisted for having the wrong politics. While Hoyt says that this fear has lost much of its grip now that independent publishing has allowed writers to make a living outside the "establishment" sci-fi presses, the elites still control recognition and legitimacy within the fandom. Hence, the Hugos rebellion.
One might think that "fear" is an exaggeration. But, actually, a much less-noticed controversy tangentially associated with the Hugos this year is a good illustration of the toxic climate in the sci-fi/fantasy community: the story behind the "Best Fan Writer" award to sci-fi writer and blogger Laura J. Mixon.
Mixon's prize-winning work was a long November 2014 blog post exposing Thai author Benjanun Sriduangkaew—one of that year's nominees for the John J. Campbell Award, given to the best new sci-fi/fantasy writer concurrently with the Hugos—as a prolific cyberbully and troll with multiple online identities. As a far-left "rageblogger" using the moniker Requires Hate, Sriduangkaew had terrorized the speculative fiction fandom for years, viciously assailing authors and fans on her blog and in other social media for various thoughtcrimes. Helped by her minions, she intimidated reviewers, sabotaged book promotions, and pressured event organizers to disinvite speakers. She even drove at least one person to a suicide attempt.
This reign of terror was made possible by fandom politics. Mixon noted that, as a self-identified lesbian of Asian background, Requires Hate enjoyed support from "progressives… who appreciate[d] that—despite her sometimes over-the-top rhetoric—she unapologetically sp[oke] up for people of color and queer/ LGBTQI people, calling out racist, homophobic, misogynist content in many popular SFF novels and stories." Never mind that her "calling-out" methods included gruesome calls for murder, torture and mutilation ("her hands should be cut off so she can never write another Asian character"; "flay him alive slowly, pour salt, pour acid, dismember and keep alive as long as possible").
Commenters on Mixon's post mentioned instances in which moderators of online groups condoned Required Hate's bullying because they worried about silencing a "marginalized" person. They also gave mind-boggling examples of the fear she was able to inspire. Canadian writer J.M. Frey, whose otherwise well-received first novel was savaged by Requires Hate, admitted that it nearly caused her to stop writing: "I second guess everything I write now… I try to be good at representation and gender and sexuality in my books, but nobody is perfect… I genuinely feared putting more books out into the world because I was scared."
It's also telling that Mixon bent over backwards to stress that she supports the righteous anger of the "oppressed" and that most of Requires Hate's victims were themselves female, gay, transgendered, and/or nonwhite. When a commenter argued that treating members of "dominant" groups as acceptable targets was precisely the mindset that enabled Requires Hate, Mixon insisted that "a case can be made for marginalized people's right to punch up."
Despite all these disclaimers, Mixon's exposé was too politically incorrect for some. Writer and blogger Deidre Saoirse Moen, who drafted the "Puppy-Free Hugo Awards Voting Guide," also opposed the award to Mixon, at least partly because "it just feels like a white woman elder putting the younger woman of color in her 'place.'" That Mixon ultimately got the award could be seen as repudiating the extremes of left-wing cultural politics. But in a way, it also affirms that criticism of such extremes is allowed only from within the true faith and from within the establishment (Mixon happens to be married to Steven Gould, SFWA president until July).
In this stifling atmosphere of "progressive" authoritarianism, the Sad Puppies' mutiny makes sense.
Those who revile the Puppies as bigots if not outright fascists point to the pseudonymous Vox Day, a.k.a. Theodore Beale, the leader of his own "Rabid Puppies" faction whose Hugos slate largely overlapped with Sad Puppies. A writer and indie publisher kicked out of the SFWA a few years ago, Beale is also a prolific blogger who urges a radical Christian takeover of America and espouses views that actually can be called racist and misogynist with no exaggeration. (Among other things, he maintains that blacks are inherently more violent and less civilized than whites, that female suffrage is bad because women will "vote for whomever they would rather f***", and that curtailing female education is rational because "a society that sends its women to college stops breeding").
It's hard to tell to what extent Vox Day's public persona is performance art played for shock. In any case, this year's Sad Puppy leaders, Correia and Brad Torgersen, repeatedly stated that they do not share Vox Day's views and regard him as an unpleasant tactical ally, the Stalin to their Roosevelt and Churchill. (Hoyt, in turn, has written that she find his views "repulsive.") They didn't quite disavow him; but Torgersen has told Wired magazine that even if they had, their detractors would have found some other reason to demonize the Puppies.
Given the tenor of anti-Puppy critiques, Torgersen is almost certainly right. Best Fan Writer nominee Sanderson, who considers herself a pro-equality, anti-misandry feminist, is far more representative of the Puppies' views than Vox Day. But she too got skewered as an "anti-feminist" for such offenses as suggesting that feminist writers who use their fiction as propaganda vehicles are doing a disservice to female authors and defending astrophysicist Matt Taylor's public appearance in a shirt with scantily clad women on it.
As for Vox Day, the Puppies say that the progressive guardians of the fandom and WorldCon voters played right into his hands by "no-awarding" the categories with only Puppy nominees. Vox had planned to instruct his followers to vote "no award" on everything, in the explicit hope that a large number of "no awards" would help him "burn down" the Hugos.
At this point, the Hugos are still standing, and the rules are being tweaked to make slate nominations more difficult (though the changes won't take effect for another two years). In the meantime, the Sad Puppies are still here, and while they may not have gone rabid they are certainly mad. To them, the Hugo results are overwhelming proof that their worst suspicions of bias and cronyism are correct: even Toni Weisskopf, a beloved editor at Baen Books whose merit was widely recognized even by many Puppy critics, was denied a Best Editor Hugo because she was on the Puppy slate.
The next Puppy campaign to bring in more rebel voters for 2016 is going to be led by Hoyt, Green, and Australian fantasy author Kate Paulk. Says Hoyt on her blog, "We're here, we're not giving up and we're prepared to fight like girls. May G-d have mercy on their souls."
Maybe they'll call themselves "the Mad Bitches." But, at the very least, no one gets to call them a boys' club.
The post Culture Warriors Invade Sci-Fi/Fantasy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>We're coming up on the first anniversary of GamerGate, the online phenomenon variously described as a consumer revolt against unethical videogame journalism, an Internet mob targeting women in technology, a white male hate and harassment group, and a resistance movement against authoritarian "social justice warriors." During this year, there has been a steady stream of articles announcing the end of #GamerGate—literally from day one, when the hashtag's first appearance was greeted with several stories on gaming and pop culture websites heralding the "death of gamers" as a culture. And yet last Saturday, both gamers and GamerGate were very much alive at a remarkable event held as part of the 2015 regional conference of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) in Miami: Airplay, a two-session panel presenting the pro-GamerGate side of the story to the media.
I was one of the Airplay panelists. (Transparency time: while I received no fee, money for my expenses was raised through crowdfunding, primarily by GamerGaters who agreed to help defray the costs of the panel.) There was insightful and interesting discussion. There were contentious moments. And it all ended, just like the GamerGate meetup in Washington, DC in May, with a bomb threat and an evacuation that cut the event short.
No one knows for sure who was behind the bomb threat. Responsibility has been publicly claimed by a member of an Internet troll nest that has been described as "aligned" with GamerGate by the movement's critics but that GamerGaters themselves generally regard as hostile. (The same shadowy group had previously harassed people on both sides of GamerGate, including a leading GamerGate blogger, "The Ralph Retort.")
But even assuming that GamerGate's ideological enemies had nothing to do with disrupting Airplay, they certainly tried hard to stop it. Airplay's organizer, SPJ regional chapter president Michael Koretzky—who had decided to host the event after engaging with GamerGate members on Twitter—detailed some of those efforts on his blog. Emails sent to SPJ accused Koretzky of providing a forum to people who had "a history of threatening people online" and even of endangering "support organizations for victims of abuse." Koretzky also says he received several emails with "vague threats" to his career.
Koretzky, a veteran journalist and ornery First Amendment champion, went ahead with Airplay—though his initial plans for a debate format were foiled by the fact that no GamerGate critics would agree to participate. Instead, the non-GamerGate side was represented by three "neutrals": journalists Lynn Walsh of NBC 7 San Diego and Ren LaForme of the Poynter Institute, and game developer Derek Smart. The pro-GamerGate lineup had dissident feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, Breitbart gadfly Milo Yiannopolous, Washington Examiner's Ashe Schow, Breitbart's token leftist (yes, really!) Allum Bokhari, and games writer Mark Ceb.
Mindful of the bomb threat in DC, Koretzky took numerous precautions to ensure that the premises—Koubek Center on the Miami-Dade College campus—were secure. The initial plan was that if a bomb threat were called in, it would clearly be a fake and the panel could continue—with the option for anyone to leave if they wanted to do so. The morning session proceeded without a glitch, other than several participants getting "doxxed" (i.e. having their home addresses and/or telephone numbers posted) in the comments on the livestream; as a result, the comments were disabled for the second session. As everyone returned from lunch, Koretzky announced that there had been a bomb threat and that the panel would proceed as planned. No one left and the two-hour session got underway; but about forty minutes before it was scheduled to end, the police arrived with orders to evacuate the entire building.
As we wandered out into the tropical heat, joined by perplexed journalists who had been attending the main SPJ conference in the adjoining building, we learned that this time the bomb threat had been sent to the Miami Police Department and The Miami Herald; it also mentioned the precise time of the promised explosion (2:45), which apparently lent it more credibility.
At first the attendees took this in stride, chatting cheerfully outside, giving interviews, and posing for photo ops while more police cars and fire trucks pulled up. But as we were told to move further away and the center was cordoned off with yellow tape—and a quick exploration made it clear that there was no café or other shelter within walking distance—things began to get frustrating. (Leaving was not an option for most people, who either had cars in the Center's parking garage or had left some of their possessions inside.) One woman from the GamerGate audience nearly passed out from the heat. Thankfully, a few helpful Gaters trekked to a nearby gas station and came back with a large supply of bottled water.
Remarkably, the GamerGaters also wanted to know if the interrupted panel was going to resume. After about two hours of sweltering with no end in sight, Koretzky came up with a bold solution, directing us to a fenced-off condemned building fence with a porch and an overhang that provided some shade—and a prominent no-trespassing sign. "The bomb threat was illegal, crashing a condemned house in front of a cop car is illegal—they cancel each other out," he quipped. And that was where we did the Q & A that had been cut off by the cops' arrival. (Some of the panelists had left in a cab earlier; their place was taken by writer and former games journalist Oliver Campbell, who had been slated as one of the speakers but had dropped out due to a conflict with Koretzky—who graciously encouraged him to step up and join the panel, to boisterous applause.)
Some of the regular SPJ attendees came up to listen as well; they knew nothing about GamerGate, but seemed genuinely impressed by the crowd's dedication. A middle-aged man later identified as Jack Pagano said that he has been working in Afghanistan for several years and has seen many a bomb scare—but this was the first time he'd seen people stay to conclude a discussion in the middle of one: "This is really an inspiration to see that people are staying. Usually a bomb threat cancels everything, but you've decided to stay here and continue because you're devoted to your mission and you're passionate about your craft." Of course, a bomb threat in Kabul carries a lot more weight than on a college campus in Miami. Nonetheless, it was a heartfelt compliment that provided some reward for the dehydration.
And other than that, how was the event? It's difficult for me to judge from the inside. Anti-GamerGate commentators like New York magazine's Jesse Singal tweeted during the morning session, which focused on issues of ethics in gaming journalism and GamerGate's specific complaints, that it was "a train wreck" and that the session's GamerGate panelists (Schow, Bokhari, and Ceb) clearly didn't understand the first thing about journalism. Yet the neutral panelists seemed to agree that GamerGate had legitimate grievances and that the main two examples cited—a Kotaku writer giving a rave review to a friend's game without disclosing the connection, and an extremely dubious rape allegation against Cards Against Humanity creator Max Temkin being treated as fact—were indeed examples of poor ethics. (While the article on Temkin was later amended to include a correction, Walsh seemed to agree it was inadequate.) There were also collective guffaws at the notion of the journalistic value of Gawker, which ranks high among GamerGate's enemies.
The afternoon panel, with Yiannopoulous, Sommers, and myself on the pro-GamerGate side, was somewhat more problematic because of a disconnect in expectations. Koretzky wanted to focus on the issue of how the mainstream media should cover leaderless online movements like GamerGate. Yiannopolous and Sommers wanted to talk about cultural and gender politics; I had planned to discuss the problems in media coverage of GamerGate (which, as I said on the panel, may well be the worst, most one-sided journalism I've seen in my entire career) as well as their intersection with larger narratives on gender, such as the claim that women are the primary targets of online harassment. Koretzky's attempts to steer the conversation into the direction he wanted led to some occasionally tense verbal sparring between him and the charismatic, showy Yiannopoulous and to some interruptions that annoyed the audience.
On his blog, Koretzky wrote that he felt the morning session was a success while the afternoon session (during which #shutupkoretzky was trending on Twitter) was such a disaster that the bomb threat was a "mercy killing." I, from my admittedly subjective perspective, thought we were finally starting to get somewhere when things came to an abrupt halt.
In an email exchange after the event, SPJ's Walsh gave the morning session high marks: "I think this may be my favorite panel I have ever been asked to speak on and be a part of." She felt that the afternoon event wasn't quite as productive. Developer and entrepreneur Elissa Shevinsky, CEO of Jekudo privacy company, who watched Airplay on livestream, thought the fault lay with Koretzky's moderation and his attempts to keep gender issues out. "It's impossible to talk about GamerGate without including gender in the discussion," Shevinsky told me.
Despite the rough patches (which led some "antis" on Twitter to suggest that GamerGaters called in the bomb threat on their own event to save face), the afternoon session had plenty of positives for GamerGate. Both Koretzky and the "neutrals" seemed impressed by the examples of skewed media coverage of GamerGate. While faulting Yiannopoulous for mixing too much opinion with his reporting, Koretzky also told him that a prominent GamerGate opponent had complimented the accuracy of his scathing reports on anti-GamerGate crusader Randi Harper. Walsh agreed that claims of harassment, and accusations leveled at GamerGate as the responsible party, needed to be fact-checked and critically examined. Everyone seemed to concede that the media needed to do a better job of reaching out to GamerGate members.
Shevinsky, who considers herself a GamerGate neutral—and is a prominent advocate for women in tech—thought that Airplay was an important step forward. "I believe that extremists on both sides of GamerGate have been hijacking what could otherwise be an important conversation about free speech, artistic expression and gender equality," she told me. "It says a lot that GamerGate took this opportunity for civil discourse so seriously. The panelists came a long way to have this conversation, and were thoughtful with their answers."
If nothing else, SPJAirplay showed that GamerGate is far from over. The hashtag #SPJAirplay was trending in the U.S., the UK, and Canada even before the bomb scare. The YouTube videos of Airplay got well over 100,000 combined views.
The aftermath of the event also provided a striking example of the media bias we discussed. Last October, The New York Times ran a front-page story of the cancellation of feminist videogame critic Anita Sarkeesian's scheduled talk at Utah State University after an email threatening a mass shooting—and insinuated, with no evidence, that the threat came from someone "allied" with the GamerGate movement. It did not see fit to run so much as a brief news item about a bomb threat disruption of a journalism conference that gave GamerGate supporters a chance to speak.
Correction: This piece originally identified Mark Ceb as a games developer. He is a games writer.
The post Bomb Threat Disrupts SPJ Airplay #GamerGate Debate appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Remember Tim Hunt, the Nobel Prize-winning British biochemist mocked and vilified on Twitter and in the media after he reportedly told a gathering of women scientists that "girls" in the lab are a nuisance because they are lovesick crybabies, and suggested sex-segregated labs as the solution? Remember how we were told that this shocking incident reveals still-entrenched sexism in the world of science? Well, now that the dust has cleared and the story has faded from the American press, there's a postscript that amounts to: Never mind. It turns out that, just as Hunt has claimed, the 72-year-old scientist's comments during a luncheon at a science journalism conference in Korea in June were an awkward self-deprecating joke—greeted with laughter (not the reported "stony silence") by a mostly female audience.
The "Tim Hunt, misogynist scientist" narrative has been falling apart piece by piece over the past month; last week, it was finished off by a snippet of audio recorded by a female attendee and made public by The Times. Attention should now tturn to the real scandal: irresponsible journalism magnified by social media frenzy.
It all started with a June 8 tweet from City University London journalism professor Connie St. Louis, lamenting that the luncheon at the World Conference of Science Journalists had been "ruined by sexist speaker Tim Hunt." According to St. Louis, Hunt announced that he had "a reputation as a male chauvinist" and continued, "Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticize them they cry." Then, she wrote, he compounded it by advocating "single-sex labs" but adding that "he doesn't want to stand in the way of women."
Twitter exploded in outrage, and the story quickly got picked up by major media around the world, with such headlines as, "Nobel winner: Women in labs 'fall in love with you … you criticize them, they cry'" and "Sir Tim Hunt's sexist remarks: With lab rats like him, is it any wonder there's a shortage of women in science?" St. Louis's account, corroborated by two prominent American science journalists—former New York Times columnist Deborah Blum and Retraction Watch blogger Ivan Oransky—was roundly treated as fact. To make it worse, Hunt was said to have stood by his comments in an interview to BBC Radio even as he apologized for causing offense. It was not long before the story was updated with news of Hunt's resignation from his honorary post at University College London and from several prestigious science boards and committees.
Even after The Guardian ran a sympathetic interview with Hunt and his scientist wife Mary Collins, who defended him against charges of sexism—as did several other female scientists—most of the coverage stuck to the party line. Blum stepped in to rebut Hunt's assertion that he had been "hung out to dry" over an unfortunate joke; she claimed that she asked him the day after the luncheon if he had been joking, and that he simply reiterated his point ("he did think it was hard to collaborate with women because they are too emotional") and told her he had been "trying to be honest about the problems." St. Louis penned an essay for The Guardian portraying the sympathy for Hunt as "an outcry from the establishment" in a "typical pattern of oppression" and telling his supporters, "mainly men," to stop defending him.
That narrative took a major hit on June 24 when The Times obtained information that a European Commission report on the conference, based on the notes of a European Union official who attended the luncheon, gave a very different account of what happened. The report summarized Hunt's remarks as follows:
It's strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls? Now seriously, I'm impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without doubt, an important role in it. Science needs women and you should do science despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.
A follow-up article revealed that the EU official also said Hunt's remarks were well-received, contradicting his accusers' claims of an uncomfortable silence (or even a "deathly silence," as St. Louis told BBC Radio 4), and that one of the luncheon's organizers, a woman from the Korean National Research Council of Science and Technology, told him "she was impressed that Sir Tim could improvise such a warm and funny speech."
In the days that followed, this account was corroborated by several people who attended the luncheon. One of them, Russian science journalist Natalia Demina, had challenged the accusations against Hunt from the very start on Twitter. Another, Malaysian science journalist Shiow Chin Tan, provided a new detail: she told The Times that after his facetious comments about segregating the sexes, Hunt added that "men would be worse off for it." While St. Louis has continued to insist that Hunt did not say "now seriously" or praise women in science, Blum has acknowledged that the purported transcript had "some of the right elements" and was a "polished version" of Hunt's "somewhat fumbling actual talk."
What about Hunt's alleged admission to BBC Radio (and to Blum) that he was "just being honest" about the problems with women in science? Hunt has told The Guardian that his BBC "interview" was a hasty, clumsy statement recorded over the phone on his way home, in response to a text message asking for comment on the controversy of which he had been previously unaware. British newspaper columnist and politician Louise Mensch, one of Hunt's staunchest advocates, makes a strong case that his comments were misleadingly edited to obscure the fact that he was not referring to women scientists in general but to his own personal experience with romance in the lab and the resulting "emotional entanglements." (He met his wife in the laboratory while she was married to another man.) It's plausible that he said something similar to Blum the day after the luncheon; Kathryn O'Hara, the photographer who took their photo during that conversation, confirmed to me that she recalls Hunt saying he was trying to be honest about his own experiences.
Regardless, the new revelations turned the tide. By mid-July, Paul Nurse, the head of Britain's chief scientific body, the Royal Society, defended Hunt on BBC radio and in a letter to The Telegraph and blamed the fiasco on "a Twitter and media storm." The Guardian ran a semi-apology for its tendentious coverage. A scathing Times editorial blasted the "betrayal" of Hunt:
Thirty-nine words were lifted wholesale from their context by a partisan witness of questionable credentials. Bracketed by kneejerk outrage these words were tweeted round the world and used to destroy the reputation of a distinguished scientist on no solid ground at all.
But it still wasn't quite over. On July 18, The Times published a new bombshell: a 12-second recording of the final moments of Hunt's remarks that Demina had discovered among her materials from the conference and turned over to the newspaper with Mensch's help. In the audio, Hunt says, "Congratulations, everybody, because I hope—I hope—I really hope that there won't be anything holding you back, especially not monsters like me." There is a hearty laugh from the audience, followed by the start of applause before the recording breaks off.
The recording clearly dovetails with the EU official's notes provided to the European Commission. One can also see how, in St. Louis's retelling, Hunt's final line would turn into "he doesn't want to stand in the way of women." But in her version, the comment sounds insufferably patronizing, a pat on the head that compounds the earlier insult; in the audio, Hunt sounds warm, gracious, genuinely supportive and self-deprecating, not mocking toward women. In other words, this is a resounding vindication for Hunt—one that, unfortunately, may not undo the damage.
While claims that Hunt's career has been ruined are somewhat exaggerated—he is retired, his position at UCL a non-paying honorary one, and he is still affiliated with the Crick Institute where he does actual research—there is no question that his reputation and his ability to work for science have suffered. Speaking to The Guardian in mid-June, Hunt said that the worst blow was being forced to resign from the science committee of the European Research Council, to which he had devoted years of effort. More recently, Hunt's invitation to speak at a conference of the Italian Society of Anatomy and Histology in Ferrara was withdrawn as a precautionary measure, apparently due to threats of disruption from activists.
This is particularly shameful given that Hunt is not only a great scientist but, by many accounts, a genuine friend to women in science. There are numerous testimonials from women describing him as a caring and inspirational mentor, one who never treated his female students and colleagues differently from their male peers and has aided in their advancement. European Research Council president Jean-Pierre Bourguignon is on record as saying that Hunt "actively supported" the Council's initiatives to support women in science. The only charge of sexism anyone has tried to pin on him beyond his ill-considered remarks in Seoul is a 2014 interview in which he dared to suggest that the numerical disparities between men and women in science are not necessarily a huge problem. But this hardly means, as fellow UCL scientist David Colquhoun has insinuated on his blog, that Hunt also seriously believes women shouldn't work in science alongside men. (Ironically, as Mensch has discovered, Colquhoun himself had to field accusations of sexism on Twitter only a few months ago after voicing the heretical opinions that the paucity of women in senior scientific positions was due to different family roles, not sexism in academe.)
A few days before the disclosure of the case-clinching audio, science ethicist Janet Stemwedel wrote a piece for Forbes.com titled "What If Tim Hunt Had Done It Differently?" (While the column was written after the leak of the European Commission report, Stemwedel still quotes only the portion of Hunt's remarks originally reported by St. Louis.) There is no question that Hunt made his share of mistakes; for instance, Stemwedel is correct that he should have waited to get home and assess the situation before giving a statement to the BBC. But it's hard to tell if that would have helped: the media storm was already raging in his absence, and it's unlikely that even a more measured statement would have calmed it down.
Stemwedel does briefly ponder the question of what would have happened if St. Louis, Blum, and Oransky had not gone public about Hunt's comments. She concludes that this might have set a bad precedent for journalists "doing public relations rather than reporting." But a better question is: What if they had reported the story accurately?
And here's the answer: There would have been no story to report. If an accurate account of the luncheon and of Hunt's remarks had appeared in a general report on the conference, his joke would probably have offended a few of the Sisters of Perpetual Grievance. But it's unlikely that the outrage would have spread far and wide.
In her latest blogpost on the Hunt scandal, Mensch catalogues numerous misleading, contradictory, and self-contradictory statements by Hunt's accusers, suggesting that they have been knowingly dishonest. This is an extremely serious charge that is difficult to prove or disprove—it is just as possible that they simply saw the events through the filter of their own biases. A deliberate conspiracy to frame an innocent scientist for misogyny seems far-fetched; more likely, St. Louis ad her allies were genuinely offended by Hunt's remark about his "trouble with girls," allowed their offended sensibilities to color their perception of the rest of his comments, and ran with what they thought was a bombshell of a story.
If nothing else, they demonstrated incredible sloppiness. For instance, St. Louis misinterpreted a tweet by Australian technology developer Scott Watkins as meaning that Hunt had also thanked the women who hosted the event for "making lunch." Watkins later corrected that misimpression, pointing out that it was a Korean female politician who had "thanked the ladies for the lunch." But St. Louis was on a roll in her interviews, transforming Hunt's nonexistent quote first into "I hope the women have prepared the lunch," then into "He stood up, declared that the woman had probably prepared the lunch 'cause that was their role…" One starts to wonder if St. Louis actually convinced herself she heard this remark; she reportedly insisted that Hunt thanked the women for lunch even after this claim was retracted by several publications. (It should be noted that St. Louis has been accused by The Daily Mail of inflating her accomplishments in the curriculum vitae posted on her faculty page. City University has stood by her, and her defenders say that the school simply "uploaded an outdated CV into its information system.")
Blum's conduct raises many questions as well. For instance, after repeatedly and strongly insisting that Hunt had confirmed he was serious about segregated labs—and even saying that she "was hoping he'd say it had been a joke" when she spoke to him the day after—she apparently shifted her position, tweeting and endorsing the view that even as a joke, his remarks were unacceptable and "awful." Moreover, while Blum has presented her next-day conversation with Hunt as an effort to give him a chance to explain himself, she did not approach him until after St. Louis had, by their mutual agreement, sent out her accusatory tweet. Nor did she record the conversation or take notes immediately after it.
Of course, the rest of the media and the commentariat did little better in their rush to judgment. No one bothered to ask how plausible it was that a scientist who had worked with women and was married to a prominent female scientist actually believed women should be relegated to their own all-girl labs—and would stand up and say that to a roomful of female scientists and journalists. The "sexist scientist" narrative was too good. As Guardian commentator Ann Perkins wrote with open glee, "The mask has not so much slipped as crashed to the floor. … Here at last is someone who has come out with it. Women at work are a nuisance." Jarringly, Perkins called this "a moment to savor"—not, as some thought, because of Hunt's humiliation, but because he had supposedly laid bare the pervasive hidden misogyny women face.
In a more recent Forbes column, science writer David Kroll wrote about a European Research Council grant recipient, Debra Laefer of University College Dublin, who presented her pioneering research on architectural restoration techniques at a session Hunt chaired at the Seoul conference. Kroll expressed regret that the Hunt scandal overshadowed Laefer's remarkable work. A shame, indeed. That's what happens when the feminist mainstream is less interested in celebrating real female achievement than in railing against imaginary male chauvinism.
The post 'Sexist' Scientist Tim Hunt: The Real Story appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Public shaming and professional retaliation, or even destruction, for unpopular speech seems to have become a regular feature of life—but also a subject of growing concern. Most notably, in the past month, scientists, politicians, and others have rallied to the defense of British biochemist and Nobel laureate Sir Tim Hunt, whose ill-conceived joke about women in science at a conference sparked a Twitter storm and ended his academic career. The pitfalls of social media shaming were recently explored by British journalist Jon Ronson in the acclaimed book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed," which examines such notorious incidents as the Twitter mobbing of public relations rep Justine Sacco in December 2013 over a racially insensitive joke.
But before Hunt, before Sacco, before the ouster of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich over his opposition to same-sex marriage, there was another drama of career-killing Internet outrage: the undoing of Business Insider Chief Technology Officer Pax Dickinson. It is a story that raises troubling questions about speech and consequences.
Unlike Sacco or Hunt, ruined by a single misinterpreted moment of levity—or Eich, penalized for what had been only recently a mainstream viewpoint—Dickinson had a long history of outrageous Twitter comments that were a mix of deliberate provocation and controversial opinions. His precipitous downfall began when those tweets caught the attention of a writer for Valleywag/Gawker, who described Dickinson as "your new tech bro nightmare."
I followed the Dickinson debacle in September 2013. While I shared his critical view of feminism in tech, which often seems to be less about advancing women than fostering grievance, dispatches from the field made Dickinson sound like a genuine male chauvinist. (One of his much-quoted tweets said, "Tech managers spend as much time worrying about how to hire talented female developers as they do worrying about how to hire a unicorn," which seems to imply that female talent is mythical.) While such opinions certainly shouldn't be punished or censored by the government, there are certainly good reasons for a company not to want a top executive who publicly voices them—from bad public relations to potential discrimination suits.
I was, therefore, somewhat wary at first when another journalist contacted me with an offer to speak to Dickinson for a possible feature on his professional exile. After several email exchanges, I ended up meeting with him for a long interview at his New Jersey home and speaking to several women who had worked with him in the past. I came away convinced that there was much more to this story than the mainstream media narrative of a sexist "tech bro" getting his comeuppance. Even if Dickinson was in part the victim of his own recklessness, what happened to him was another chapter in the annals of self-righteous online outrage that mobs first and asks questions later.
A lifelong computer geek who dropped out of college after one year to work for his father's business, taught himself Web development, and rose from help desk technician to highly sought-after tech industry executive, Dickinson, now 42, freely admits that he has always enjoyed being "somewhat trolly" in social media—both expressing strong opinions and being deliberately provocative. In part, this was also related to the fact that for a long time, his following was limited to a small circle of people who knew him and were familiar with his style.
Some of the comments that would later get Dickinson branded sexist and racist were clearly meant as provocative humor, and sometimes arguably as mockery of sexism and racism. One particularly infamous July 2010 tweet—"In Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of n*****s. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though"—was spoofing the infamous Mel Gibson phone rant in which he used similar language to tell his girlfriend it would be her fault if she were raped. (That context was forgotten more than three years later when the tweet was publicized.) "It didn't even get many retweets or make a splash," says Dickinson. "I had 50 followers. Was it edgy? Of course. But everyone knew what it was about."
Other tweets that came back to haunt Dickinson do reflect genuinely-held contrarian views—such as this one from June 2009, more than a year before the start of his time at Business Insider: "Women's suffrage and individual freedom are incompatible. How's that for an unpopular truth?" That's a reference to the argument, made by some conservatives and libertarians, that female voting leads to government expansion because women favor more activist government. Does Dickinson stand by this statement? Sort of—with a disclaimer: "Saying that I'm against women voting is kind of trolling, because I'm against anyone voting." (For the record, he says he doesn't vote.) Dickinson, who describes his views as "libertarianish" but thinks libertarians "venerate democracy a little too much," is of the opinion that democracy itself is probably incompatible with freedom since it allows majorities to vote themselves more benefits until the system breaks down. He does believe that the female vote is likely to make the problem worse because women tend to be more safety-minded than men; but he's not particularly keen on the male popular vote, either.
Whatever one may think of these views, they did not attract attention until the fall of 2013, when Dickinson found himself in a Twitter war over feminism in the tech industry. This was not, he stresses, about equal opportunity for women, but about a wave of censorious overreaction to real or perceived sexist slights. Earlier that year, Dickinson had been troubled by the scandal known as "Donglegate," in which tech specialist and blogger Adria Richards tweeted to complain about two men exchanging innocuous, slightly off-color jokes behind her at a conference—costing one of the culprits his job. In September 2013, he criticized the outrage over "Titstare," a mobile app presented as a joke at a San Francisco tech conference (its purpose was for men to take photos of themselves staring at cleavage). Dickinson argued that while the app was crass and inappropriate, to call it misogynist was to trivialize the term. Soon he found himself tangling with feminists and tweeting, "Feminism in tech remains the champion topic for my block list. My finger is getting tired." Soon enough, Valleywag's Nitasha Tiku was on his trail, going back through his Twitter timeline, and his fate was sealed.
Dickinson insists that he is no enemy of women in the tech industry: "Any tech manager I've ever known who's hiring people is so desperate for good talent—you do not care if that good talent is male or female or any color of the rainbow." That, he says, was the point of his "hiring a unicorn" tweet: not that talented female developers are mythical, but that a manager doesn't give any thought to gender because any good talent is rare enough. He also points out that he had no problem reporting to a woman—his boss at Business Insider was CEO Julie Hansen, with whom he got along just fine until the Twitter outrage machine caught up with him—and that many women had no problem working for him or with him.
These would be obviously self-serving claims if I had not spoken to several women who tell the same story. "I never saw him treat women any differently than men," says Dina Ledvina, formerly a quality assurance engineer at Business Insider—a company that she says always had a female-friendly environment. "Sophie," another female tech professional who asked to remain anonymous, says that Dickinson was not only supportive of her work but helpful and understanding when she needed flexible arrangements for family reasons. She wrote to me that she "felt bad for Pax" when watching the media storm: "It's hard to see your friend being misrepresented."
And then there's Elissa Shevinsky, Dickinson's former partner in a start-up called Glimpse, a project to build an app that protects the privacy of online conversations. Shevinsky had met Dickinson in 2012, about a year before his notoriety. "Despite his tweets, Pax evaluates everyone as an individual. He never took me less seriously because I was a woman," she told me in an email. "Pax isn't afraid of strong women. He believed in me so hard, and it was very easy to believe in what we could do together."
It is a somewhat unlikely testimonial—considering that the Titstare incident, which precipitated Dickinson's conflict with feminists online, also served as Shevinsky's feminist epiphany. After the scandal, she left Glimpse. Then, in the spring of 2014, she came back as CEO and agreed to partner with Dickinson once again; he agreed to write a public letter of apology.
The apology was enough for Shevinsky—but not for the industry, which still views Dickinson as too toxic to touch. Eventually, he chose to leave Glimpse after realizing that his presence was a major obstacle for Shevinsky in getting venture capital. To this day, he remains essentially unemployable. He says he has received about a dozen enthusiastic job offers that quickly fizzled after he informed his would-be employers of his 15 minutes of infamy. He has worked on several freelance projects that he cannot put on his resume because the companies that hired him don't want it known that he worked for them. He and his wife, Kelly, currently depend primarily on her small income from a home-based business selling fine china.
"Is it fair that Business Insider fired me? Sure," says Dickinson. "I made the company look bad. Having those libertarian sympathies, I don't think anyone should have to employ someone they don't want to employ. But I think being blacklisted and pressure being put on any company that might consider hiring me is a much different issue."
Some influential figures who champion progressive causes in the tech industry have openly encouraged the blacklisting. Shortly after Dickinson's downfall, technologist and blogger Anil Dash wrote, "If you're a venture capitalist, and you invest in Pax's startup without a profound, meaningful and years-long demonstration of responsibility from Pax beforehand, you're complicit in extending the tech industry's awful track record of exclusion, and it's unacceptable."
Shevinsky strongly disagrees. "I worry about efforts to ostracize people from the community," she wrote to me. "What does it mean if we try to take the right to work away from people with opinions that we find dangerous?"
Dickinson makes the same point in his own still-contrarian, bloodied-but-unbowed style. "I'm very used to working with people who have politics that I find reprehensible," he says. "I mean, I find everyone's politics reprehensible, and I don't mind working with them or being friends with them. I'm used to that. It seems other people aren't."
Ensuring that women and minority groups are not excluded from workplace opportunities is a worthy goal. But the exclusion of people guilty of holding unpopular views is still exclusion—and that's a trend now spreading to far more innocuous forms of thought-crime than Dickinson's provocative tweets. After linking to a piece about the Tim Hunt debacle, Dickinson says he received a message from a fellow software developer. It said, "You were the canary in the coal mine in so many ways."
This article originally appeared at RealClearPolitics.
The post The Social Media Shaming of Pax Dickinson appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This week's graduation at Columbia University caps the bizarre, often sordid saga involving the two most famous members of the Class of 2015: Emma Sulkowicz, the activist who protested the school's alleged mishandling of her alleged rape by carrying a mattress around campus, and Jean-Paul Nungesser, the German scholarship student she accuses of raping her. On Tuesday, Sulkowicz carried her mattress across the stage at Class Day, despite half-hearted attempts by Columbia officials to enforce a regulation against bringing "large objects" into the ceremonial area—and despite the fact that the "mattress performance" was for a senior visual arts thesis she had already completed. Her activism was also lauded (with no mention of her name) by two commencement speakers, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power.
This isn't quite the end of the story: Nungesser is suing Columbia, university president Lee Bollinger, and Sulkowicz's thesis supervisor for allowing him to be subjected to "gender-based harassment" which severely damaged his educational experience and future prospects, even though a campus panel found him not culpable on the sexual assault charge. Meanwhile, there is new information related to one of this story's many strange twists: another sexual assault complaint brought against Nungesser late last year by a male classmate. The charge was made public in February, on the heels of my article in The Daily Beast questioning the pro-Sulkowicz narrative.
Now, I have learned that after a hearing in late April, Nungesser was found "not responsible" in this latest case—altogether, the fourth time he has been cleared of a sexual assault charge at Columbia. When Sulkowicz first went public a year ago, the fact that her alleged attacker was still on campus and had never been subjected to any formal sanctions despite being accused of sexual assault by three different women helped fuel the outrage. Yet the latest investigation strongly supports Nungesser's claim, made in media interviews and in his lawsuit, that the multiple complaints were not independent of each other and may have been part of a vendetta stemming from the original charge by Sulkowicz.
Several days after my Daily Beast piece, which featured not only Nungesser's account of his relationship with Sulkowicz but social media messages tending to support his version, the feminist blog Jezebel ran a purported rebuttal titled "How to Make an Accused Rapist Look Good." Much of the story, by Jezebel editor Erin Gloria Ryan, dealt with Sulkowicz's not entirely convincing explanation of her friendly messages to Nungesser days after what she says was a terrifyingly violent rape. But the piece also contained a new revelation meant to bolster the claim that Nungesser was a serial sexual predator: the existence of a hitherto unknown male victim, identified by the pseudonym "Adam."
Adam, who also graduates this week, told Jezebel that "he was close friends with Paul during his freshman year in 2011" and that "one fall night, in the midst of an emotional conversation in Paul's dorm room…Paul pushed him onto his bed and sexually assaulted him." He claimed that after much self-doubt and internal struggle, he finally reported this incident, first to a student society to which both he and Nungesser belonged and then in a formal complaint to the university in the fall of 2014. Adam rather melodramatically lamented that my Daily Beast piece "invalidates and completely erases [his] experience." It should be noted that, as accuser and accused in a sexual misconduct case, both Adam and Nungesser had presumably received the usual instructions from the university to "make all reasonable efforts to maintain the confidentiality/privacy of the involved parties."
About three weeks prior to graduation, the hearing panel made its decision. It found for Nungesser. As is now the norm in campus sexual misconduct proceedings, the charge was considered under the "preponderance of the evidence" standard. Thus, Adam could not meet the very complainant-friendly burden of showing that it was even slightly more likely than not that the offense was committed. Since there was no appeal, the case is over, and as far as Nungesser's formal record at Columbia is concerned he is entirely in the clear.
Nungesser declined to be interviewed for this story, due to concerns that statements to the media might affect his lawsuit. However, through a source close to the case, I was able to review several documents related to Adam's complaint—including, crucially, the report prepared by a two-person Title IX investigative team.
The gist of the complaint was that in November 2011, Adam, who lived in the same dorm as Nungesser and was part of the same social circle, went to Nungesser's room to tell him he was upset about being "caught in the middle" of relationship drama between Nungesser and his then-girlfriend. (This girlfriend later became one of Nungesser's accusers, known in several media accounts under the pseudonym "Natalie"; she claimed that Nungesser had psychologically and sexually abused her throughout their relationship. The case was eventually closed after she stopped cooperating.)
According to Adam, during this conversation Nungesser asked him to sit on the bed, rubbed his shoulder and back, then "gently" pushed him down and proceeded to stroke his leg and finally massage his crotch "for approximately 2-3 minutes" while Adam froze in shock. He was finally able to muster the will to get up and leave.
Adam told investigators that he spoke to Nungesser's girlfriend about this; however, he didn't seem to remember when, or what her reaction was. At one point, he said that he "assumed" he had told her immediately afterward, and "it wasn't until months later that I realized that I had not and she was unaware." He also claimed that he avoided Nungesser after the alleged assault, and that Nungesser eventually texted him and then messaged him on Facebook; according to him, Nungesser was upset with him for telling Natalie about their sexual contact, but also suggested that they get together for coffee.
Nungesser's story was quite different. He said that he confided in Adam about his and Natalie's relationship troubles, that there was no sexual contact of any kind, and that later on he was dismayed to learn that Adam had recounted their conversation to Natalie.
The Facebook exchange, which Adam himself eventually found and turned over to the investigators, did not exactly help his story. Far from showing avoidance of Nungesser, it showed Adam seeking him out, complaining that "our friendship has been negatively affected" by Nungesser's relationship problems and that "we're less close/you're preferring it that way." It also showed Nungesser saying, "It was obviously pretty hard for me when I found out that you shared my entire conversation that I had with you with [Natalie], because I had assumed that it was confidential."
The investigators' report noted numerous contradictions in Adam's account, as well as its drastic discrepancy with the Facebook record. Nungesser's account, on the other hand, was not only consistent but matched by corroborative evidence. Adam's credibility was further sunk by his rather fanciful complaints of "retaliation" by Nungesser in a class they shared. These "deliberately aggressive acts" consisted of sitting too close to Adam or to his friends, which left Adam "distraught and traumatized," and complimenting some points Adam had made in a class discussion (which "felt like he was claiming a collective sense of power"). I am happy to report that, even on the trauma-happy modern campus, such claims of harassment are still recognized as, in the words of the report, "hyperbolic and illogical."
In the end, the investigators concluded that Adam was "unreliable" and that his story simply did not add up, and recommended that Nungesser be found "not responsible." But there is another fascinating wrinkle to the story.
Adam did have a corroborating witness of sorts: a woman who had held a governing position in a fraternity to which both he and Nungesser had belonged—Alpha Delta Phi, a coed Greek organization with an intellectual and literary bent. This woman confirmed that during the 2012/2013 academic year, she heard a rumor that Nungesser had "engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior" toward Adam; she said she had questioned Adam about it and written a report based on his verbal statement. The report, an undated Word document she had saved on her computer, added more inconsistencies to Adam's account; among other things, it placed the alleged misconduct in February 2012 rather than November 2011.
The record leaves virtually no doubt that this witness is the same ADP officer—I'll call her Leila—who played a fairly important supporting role in the case against Nungesser in the spring and fall of 2013. As I reported in The Daily Beast, after learning about the complaint brought by Sulkowicz in late April of that year, Leila sent out an email on the ADP listserv announcing that a male society member and house resident stood accused of raping a female member. In rather florid language, the email declared that the accused had "flagrantly violated his vows, disregarded his obligations as a Member, and…transgressed the rules of life," and that if he did not resign from ADP voluntarily the executive board would seek his immediate expulsion.
The next day, after Nungesser informed Leila that the university had assured him he could stay at the house while the case was pending, she sent a sheepish follow-up email noting that "all members deserve due process, as well as an opportunity to tell their side." Shortly after that, however, Nungesser found himself facing another accusation—this time from an ADP resident, identified as "Josie" in several media reports, who claimed he had grabbed her and tried to kiss her at a party over a year earlier. As a result, he was ordered to move out of ADP.
According to both Nungesser and a student advocate who attended the hearing on Josie's complaint, Leila testified at that hearing and acknowledged that she encouraged Josie to come forward. The record in Adam's case provides additional confirmation that she was actively collecting allegations against Nungesser. Interestingly, while the investigators' report stated that Adam didn't have an apparent motive to falsely accuse Nungesser, it took note of the fact that "at the time of the Complainant's initial disclosure, at least several of his close friends and co-fraternity members were engaged in a process intended to evict the Respondent from the fraternity house." For a university document, this comes startlingly close to an admission that Nungesser may have been the target of a group vendetta.
Nungesser's lawsuit, which briefly mentions Adam as "a fourth accuser," alleges that he is a "close friend" of Sulkowicz's, that she instigated his complaint after Nungesser began to tell his side of the story to the media, and even that she mentioned this new accusation to reporters before Nungesser was officially notified of it. At present, these are unproven charges. Nonetheless, the circumstances under which Adam told his story to the media certainly support the claim of an agenda to discredit Nungesser after he made some headway in the court of public opinion.
After my Daily Beast article, a number of people said that while they found some of the evidence in Nungesser's favor persuasive, they found it hard to believe that three women would collude for no apparent reason to accuse an innocent man of rape. Feminist pundit Amanda Marcotte, in her commentary on Nungesser's lawsuit, sneered that my article painted him as "a hapless victim of a coven-like conspiracy of wicked women who make false accusations" for no apparent reason except "misogynist stereotypes about the inherent wickedness of women."
But the collusion scenario in this case requires no irrational and groundless malevolence. If Nungesser is innocent, it is entirely plausible that Sulkowicz and Natalie, who met at a party and discussed their history with him shortly before they filed charges, may have genuinely goaded each other into the conviction that he abused them (or, as Sulkowicz put it to Jezebel, "Together, we [came] to a better understanding of our shared trauma"). It is also entirely plausible that Josie and Adam either reinterpreted their past encounters with him, or even fabricated stories in the sincere belief that they were helping eject a rapist from the house and supporting his victims. The problem is not female "wickedness"; it is a campus culture that fetishizes trauma and turns "survivorship" into a cult.
In time, Nungesser's lawsuit—assuming that he is in it for the long haul—will probably reveal more about the facts of this convoluted story. In the meantime, the new charge, originally hauled out as a counterattack to Nungesser's defense, seems instead to bolster his case.
The post As Another Accusation Bites the Dust, Columbia Rape Saga Takes New Turn appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Here's what I think about activist Pamela Geller's recent "Draw the Prophet" contest in Garland, Texas, where two wannabe jihadists were killed trying to carry out a terror attack: Geller had every right to organize that contest, and she should not be chided for supposedly abusing that right. When extremists use deadly violence against speech that offends them, tut-tutting "just because you can do it doesn't mean it's a good idea" is unseemly and misguided.
I also believe that, as I argued in The Daily Beast, Geller and her associate Robert Spencer are terrible poster children not only for free speech, but for combating Islamist extremism—because they routinely blur the lines not only between "anti-jihadism" and a war on Islam, but between criticism of Islam and Muslim-bashing. I don't believe Mohammed cartoons are an attack on Muslims, and I actually thought the contest winner made an excellent point. However, as I documented, Geller and Spencer have spent years stoking anti-Muslim hysteria. I'm not fond of the term "Islamophobia," which lumps together criticism of a religion and hatred toward its adherents; but "bigotry," in this case, is not too strong a term.
In their "rebuttal" on Breitbart.com, Geller and Spencer call my article "vicious and dishonest." Without turning this into a point-by-point exchange, some of their charges must be addressed.
I have no interest in polemics over whether, as Geller and Spencer claim, reformation in Islam is a quixotic project ruled out by Islamic doctrine and scripture. People who have deeply studied Islam and political Islamism, and can hardly be accused of naïveté—such as historian Bernard Lewis or Middle East analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht—disagree. Even as strong a critic of Islam as Ayaan Hirsi Ali has come to believe reform is possible. Geller and Spencer cite liberal Muslim Thomas Haidon, who back in 2005 agreed with Spencer that a reformist movement cannot succeed unless it offers "coherent and irrefutable evidence" that its version of Islam is "the 'correct Islam.'" They do not mention that in the next sentence, Haidon lists several Islamic scholars who he believes have done just that. Nor do they acknowledge his warning against "destructive commentary" that undermine reform "by attacking Muslim reformers as 'stupid,' naïve and useless"—the kind of commentary that is their stock in trade.
That aside, the Geller/Spencer piece offers a striking example of why Spencer, the duo's putative scholar, is simply not trustworthy as an expert.
Defending Spencer's claim that the relative tolerance toward Jews in medieval Islam (compared to Christian Europe) is a politically correct myth, Geller and Spencer quote the 12th Century Jewish philosopher Maimonides—who "lived for a time in Muslim Spain and then fled that supposedly tolerant and pluralistic land"—on the mistreatment of Jews by "the nation of Ishmael." The passage they cite, which refers to specific instances of persecution, is the subject of considerable debate among scholars as far as its context and interpretation. But what's not in dispute is that when Maimonides left Spain after a fanatical Muslim sect came to power, he headed to other Muslim countries: Morocco, present-day Israel, and finally Egypt, where he eventually became the Sultan's personal physician. His actual view of Christianity and Islam, and of the Jews' relationship to both, was complex and on the whole probably more favorable to Islam. These are, to say the least, misleading omissions.
Geller and Spencer accuse me of omissions of my own when it comes to Spencer's sympathetic statements about moderate Muslims. Yes, in more than a decade of blogposts on Spencer's site, JihadWatch, one can find such occasional lip service—nearly always in the context of stressing the isolation of moderate Muslims and the hopelessness of their cause. (For the record, the besieged "Moroccan cleric" Geller and Spencer credit Spencer for praising, Ahmed Assid, is actually a secularist intellectual and Berber nationalist.) But did I misrepresent Geller and Spencer's treatment of Muslim reformers, past and present? Two examples will suffice.
Meanwhile, here's what Spencer has said about moderate Muslims:
"I have maintained from the beginning of this site and before that that there is no reliable way to distinguish a 'moderate' Muslim who rejects the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism from a 'radical' Muslim who holds such ideas, even if he isn't acting upon them at the moment." (From a 2007 post on an Israeli Arab politician caught aiding Hezbollah; a correction notes that the culprit was a Christian, but Spencer clearly felt that his point still stood.)
"The first thing we would have to do is…understand that really, anybody who professes the Islamic faith, if he delves into the teachings of his own religion, is somebody who could end up being very dangerous to us." (From a 2010 debate at Thomas More College, where Spencer argued that "the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim"—one who doesn't follow and probably doesn't even know the tenets of his or her faith.)
And then there's this advice from Spencer's elusive ex-associate Hugh Fitzgerald:
"Understand how very useless is the concept of the 'moderate' Muslim—because it is impossible to know when someone's 'moderation' is real or feigned. Experience shows that Muslim dissimulation—whether called taqiyya, kitman, or simply dissimulation—comes naturally. Also, by his mere presence a 'moderate' Muslim can swell the ranks, and hence the perceived power, of Muslims… And also because even the 'moderate' can be transformed, sometimes very quickly, into the 'immoderate' Muslim, or can have children who themselves will turn out, in a seeking-your-roots or disaffected-from-the-West attitude, to become 'immoderate.'"
(So much for Geller and Spencer's charge that I can't "produce an actual damning quote" to support my claim that Fitzgerald—whom they describe as a "former writer" for JihadWatch, but who was vice president of its board of directors—describes even peaceful Muslims as a threat to the West.)
Geller and Spencer say that I wrongly accused them of opposing Muslims' First Amendment freedom to worship; the article I cited, they claim, merely shows Geller backing legitimate zoning concerns about the building of a mosque. In other words, we are to believe that when Geller posts a screed titled "Mosqueing the Neighborhood," she is concerned only about traffic congestion and noise, just as she would be if it were a megachurch. Unfortunately, there is ample evidence that the wave of opposition to mosques and Muslim centers following Geller's campaign against the "Ground Zero mosque" was steeped in overt religious animus. And there is Spencer's 2010 blogpost candidly stating that "it is entirely reasonable for free people to oppose the construction of new mosques in non-Muslim countries."
As it happens, the same blogpost offers additional evidence for another charge Geller and Spencer decry as unfair: that they routinely distort and mislead to whip up hysteria about "creeping sharia." One of Spencer's examples of the mosque menace is that here in the U.S., mosques have demanded that "non-Muslims conform to Islamic dietary restrictions." The link leads to another JihadWatch post about "stealth jihad in Knoxville," where a mosque was allegedly seeking to "impose Islamic restrictions on alcohol upon non-Muslims."
The mosque, it turns out, was objecting to the planned opening of a restaurant with beer, music and dancing less than 200 feet away. But is there anything uniquely Islamic about such objections? Knoxville has a city ordinance that prohibits selling alcohol within 300 feet of a house of worship (with a loophole for establishments that have a state liquor license). In Texas, that notorious sharia stronghold, such a prohibition is mandated by state law; twenty-four other states and numerous municipalities restrict the sale of alcohol near places of worship. In 2011, a Baptist church in Queens, New York tried to block a beer and wine license for a hookah lounge next door, arguing that alcoholic beverages were unacceptable "in God's sight." Somehow, Geller missed this shocking religious tyranny right in her backyard. But she reported the Knoxville dispute under the not-at-all-hysterical tags "AMERABIA: LOSING AMERICA" and "CREEPING SHARIA: AMERICAN DHIMMITUDE."
Geller and Spencer also devote much space to defending their debunked horror tales of jihad in our midst.
Geller and Spencer also try to rescue the "sharia judge" canard circulated in 2012 about Pennsylvania magistrate Mark Martin. As I wrote at the time, Martin had chided a complainant—atheist activist Ernest Perce, who was accusing a Muslim immigrant of harassment—for insulting Muslim sensibilities with a Halloween costume that lampooned Mohammed. For this, Judge Martin was rightly criticized. But the story also generated a firestorm based on reports that he told Perce, "I'm a Muslim, I find it offensive." The judge was quickly confirmed to be Lutheran, and even National Review's Andrew McCarthy, who had initially promoted the story, agreed that his remark had been misheard in the audio of the court session. Geller continued to insist that Martin said he was a Muslim and probably was one; she and Spencer still do.
(In a hilariously karmic postscript, Geller's Muslim-bashing atheist hero, Perce, is now a rabidly anti-Semitic preacher leading a fringe Christian ministry—just the kind of hero Geller deserves.)
On the subject of Geller's tendency to excuse or deny Serb war crimes against Bosnian Muslims, Geller and Spencer respond to the charge of "genocide denial" by claiming that the Bosnian Muslim genocide is a subject of legitimate debate. As proof, they cite a 2005 Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal article which questions the "genocide" classification of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 7,000-8,000 Bosnian males. But the passage they quote clearly shows that the debate is on whether the massacre qualifies as genocide or the somewhat lesser offense of "crime against humanity"—not on whether it happened, or whether the perpetrators were criminals or anti-jihad resisters. "War crime denier" may sound better than "genocide denier," but not by much.
Finally, Geller and Spencer defend a post by Spencer vilifying Kurdish fighter Arin Mirkan as a jihadist because she carried out a suicide bombing against ISIS troops in a besieged town. Their position seems to be that any suicide attack, even in combat, is morally unjustifiable. That's debatable (there were kamikaze-like suicide missions by Allied pilots during World War II). But, morality aside, Spencer's post was ludicrously ignorant: it labels Mirkan, a soldier in the military wing of the left-wing, secular Democratic Union Party, a "Kurdish Muslima."
Geller and Spencer end their screed with an absurd accusation: that I wrote my article because I see them, not Islamist terrorists, as the real enemy. Their social-media acolytes have suggested other motives: that I am afraid of Muslims and am trying to placate them, or that I am a "dhimmi" eager to please my Muslim overlords. (This uncannily echoes hostile responses to my critiques of gender-war feminism: I think false accusations are a bigger problem than rape; I'm trying to placate the patriarchy because I'm afraid of male violence; I'm a man-pleaser.)
In fact, I wrote my article mainly for two reasons:
Along with missives from Geller/Spencer fans urging me to buy a Muslim prayer rug or predicting my sexual enslavement by ISIS, two emails thanking me for the article are particularly relevant. One was from a man who asked not to use his name, a self-described secular Jew who said that he was a fan of Geller's until he started to find her behavior "very troubling"—though he still credits her for raising his awareness of radical Islam. In his view, "she will have ended up giving the 'counter-jihad' a very bad name, because she's given the institutional left, as Andrew Breitbart called it, a whole bunch of ammo with which to smear the entire 'movement.'"
The other was from Mohammed Al-Darsani, a Muslim U.S. army officer and veteran whom I first met several years ago while speaking at the law school where he was a student. Al-Darsani unequivocally condemned the attack on the Texas event and stressed that the rights of Geller and Spencer (and their supporters) "should be steadfastly protected." But he also added, "It would be nice to see them use their fifteen minutes of fame to issue a statement of unequivocal support for honest, hard-working Americans who happen to be Muslim [and] to thank Muslim United States Military Servicemembers for their service and sacrifices." Al-Darsani readily acknowledges that "there are significant problems concerning hatred and violence in many predominately Muslim communities and sects"; but he wishes Geller and Spencer would acknowledge that "that is not the whole story."
These messages go to the heart of why I wrote my article. I stand by every word.
The post Pamela Geller is a Terrible Poster Child for Free Speech—and Against Islamist Extremism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Ever since its birth eight months ago, GamerGate, the online gamers' movement that calls itself a revolt against corrupt journalism and oppressive political correctness, has been assailed as a misogynist mob out to terrorize female videogame developers and feminist critics—a narrative picked up by most of the mainstream media and even dramatized on Law & Order: SVU. The "Gaters," meanwhile, have always claimed that they were being unfairly painted as harassers when they themselves were frequent targets of harassment and threats in the culture war over gaming. And now, GamerGate's first American meetup in Washington, DC this past weekend has ended in a bomb scare—after an attempt to bully the venue into canceling the event.
As one of the few journalists who gave GamerGate positive coverage last year, I had been invited to attend the Friday night gathering, organized by scholar and dissident feminist Christina Hoff Sommers and Breitbart columnist Milo Yiannopoulos. That afternoon, Sommers emailed me to say that Local 16, the restaurant hosting #GGinDC, was being bombarded—as it were—with angry messages via phone, email, and Twitter.
At the center of this kerfuffle was Arthur Chu, the controversial former Jeopardy! champion, writer, and self-styled GamerGate nemesis. (When not warring against GamerGate, Chu can be found smearing Charlie Hebdo as a racist rag, inveighing against the debunking of fake statistics that help righteous causes, or musing that as a feminism-loving dude, he sometimes wants to "join all men arm-in-arm & then run off a cliff and drag the whole gender into the sea.") Shortly after noon on Friday, Chu tweeted at Local 16 about an "Internet hate speech movement" meeting on its premises; then, he sent an email, later publicized by Yiannopoulos, haranguing the owners about hosting a "right wing hate group" and "letting anti-feminists gather to celebrate the harassment and intimidation of women in tech." When the management didn't budge and Sommers's tweet about Chu's efforts sparked a backlash, Chu posted a petulant response: "Whatever, it's ending tonight with them meeting up there." Some GamerGaters took this as a bizarre threat, though I assume he meant simply that the issue would be over.
On my way to Local 16 shortly after the gathering's official 9:30 starting time, I braced myself for a protest; but the scene was remarkably peaceful. That is, until a little after midnight, when the revelry was interrupted by a sudden announcement from a staffer that everyone was being asked to evacuate the building. The guests were reassured that this was simply a "fire drill"; but the explanation seemed rather fishy, especially when I was not allowed to retrieve my jacket from the meeting's second-floor main room before heading downstairs. (Fortunately, a friendly gamer rescued it for me.) There were police officers outside, but no sign of firefighters.
When I got back to my hotel room and checked Twitter, there was chatter about a bomb scare; apparently, there had been a tweet threatening to detonate "multiple bombs" if the #GGinDC meeting was not evacuated. On Sunday, Washington, DC's Metropolitan Police Department confirmed that it had received information from the FBI about the Twitter threat and had contacted the management, which made the decision to to have the premises cleared and checked for hazardous materials (none were found). According to the MPD, "the incident remains under investigation."
Yiannopoulos has described the incident as a "bomb threat from feminists," which certainly sounds like a rush to judgment; meanwhile, Chu has been lamenting the unfair blowback against him. There is a definite element of poetic justice here, since GamerGaters have repeatedly insisted that they were being wrongly blamed for acts of harassment perpetrated by unknown trolls and have had a hard time getting the media to listen (despite actually tracking down and identifying one prolific online harasser of feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian).
Sorting out the rights and wrongs of Internet wars is a thankless task; particularly with a leaderless, unstructured hashtag group such as GamerGate, it is near-impossible to determine for sure whether a particular instance of harassment is connected to the movement or is the work of outside trolls. Are there actual GamerGate supporters who have engaged in abusive behavior online? Very likely so. But there are many documented instances of anti-GamerGaters using startlingly violent language and making presumably non-literal threats toward "Gaters"; some of them have been compiled by British left-libertarian journalist Alum Bokhari, also a guest at the DC meetup. Ironically, as Bokhari demonstrates, last February GamerGate archfoe developer Brianna Wu expressed alarm over tweets jocularly threatening a sarin gas attack at the Penny Arcade Expo under the mistaken impression that it was a threat from GamerGate; after realizing that was a threat against pro-GamerGate "idiots," Wu deleted her post.
In another instance of unintended irony, GamerGate opponents have urged the Steam Community entertainment platform not to fund a project by pro-GamerGate female game developer Jennifer Dawe.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media have continued to recycle the "misogynist hate mob" narrative of GamerGate—most recently, with a long article by Zachary Jason in Boston Magazine melodramatically titled "Game of Fear." Jason focuses mainly on the story of game developer Zoe Quinn and her ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni, whose long blogpost about Quinn's liaisons with people in the gaming industry and the gaming media was the spark that eventually ignited GamerGate. It's an incredibly convoluted saga in which the charges and countercharges would short-circuit the brain of Sherlock Holmes. (Gjoni offers his rebuttal to Jason's reporting on his blog.) But in at least one instance, Jason cites an example of alleged GamerGate harassment that has already been disproved: a YouTube video in which a hammer-wielding man in a skull mask calls for "the death of Brianna Wu." More than two months ago, BuzzFeed, no friend to GamerGate, revealed that this video was the work of a "trolling sketch comedian," Jan Rankowski, whose intent was to satirize GamerGate.
As it happens, Jason contacted me for comment while working on his article; in early February, he emailed me a list of questions and a reminder a few days later. On February 14, I sent back a two-page email answering his questions but also noting that I thought many of them were based on a wrong premise: that GamerGate is an anti-woman harassment campaign. I mentioned instances in which people involved in GamerGate—including women such as Lizzy Finnegan, who is no longer directly involved with GamerGate but is still sympathetic to the movement and who now writes for the gaming culture magazine The Escapist—were not only subjected to severe verbal abuse in the social media but had their personal information disclosed online. I also suggested that he talk to two other female journalists who have written fairly, though not uncritically, about GamerGate—TechRaptor's Georgina Young and Canadian feminist TV host and author Liana Kerzner. That was the last I heard from Jason; he never contacted Young or Kerzner, and did not quote a single word from my email. He did, however, quote Chu.
Will the #GGinDC meetup affect the mainstream narrative? Perhaps; the gaming site Polygon, which generally embraces a "social justice" agenda in culture and entertainment and has been virulently negative toward GamerGate, ran a surprisingly unbiased account of the event. Bomb threats and harassment aside, it was difficult not to be impressed with the genuine diversity of the GamerGate crowd at the meetup. And yes, there were quite a few women in attendance—including at least one lesbian couple—who were definitely not animatronic sockpuppets. Some of these women may identify as "anti-feminist"; but clearly, what they oppose is the illiberal feminism of people like Sarkeesian who sneer at "hyper individualism," dismiss personal choice, and treat Western women as helpless puppets of patriarchy.
GamerGate is certainly not above criticism. For my taste, it has not been willing enough to disavow the creepier denizens of the "manosphere" who have been riding its coattails, from acolytes of pick-up artist guru Roosh V to weirdo ultra-reactionary blogger Vox Day. Unfortunately, any movement that takes on feminism—even feminism in its extreme forms—is likely to be a magnet for genuine misogynists. But the "social justice warriors" on the anti-GamerGate side, who regularly get a pass from the media, are quite toxic themselves.
If I had any doubts about defending GamerGate from its detractors, #GGinDC put them to rest. The men I saw were not creeps, and the women I saw were definitely not doormats. And while the bomb threat was fake, the meetup was a blast.
Top photo: Lizzy Finnegan, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Cathy Young.
Bottom photo: Lizzy Finnegan, Lauren, and Cathy Young.
The post Bomb Threat Targets GamerGate Meetup (Hear From Somebody Who Was There) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The inglorious saga of Rolling Stone's article on "rape culture" at the University of Virginia, "A Rape on Campus," published to great acclaim last November and mostly debunked less than three weeks later, has seen its (hopefully) final chapter: the Columbia Journalism Review postmortem dissecting the story and its origins. The report documents egregious failings by journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely and multiple editors, including perfunctory fact-checking and reliance on a single source—the alleged victim, Jackie—for the central narrative of a brutal fraternity gang rape.
Rolling Stone, which commissioned and published the report, has come under fire for treating the fiasco as an isolated error rather than an institutional problem in need of a fix. The magazine's leadership has also been lambasted for not only shifting much of the blame to Jackie herself, but blaming the editorial decision to skip basic fact-checking on excessive deference to a young woman believed to be the victim of a horrific assault. It is quite true that the explanation smacks of a self-serving excuse and that the shoddy journalism in the UVA rape story was part of a larger problem. But this problem is not confined to Rolling Stone. It is pervasive in media coverage of campus rape—and is very much connected to the belief, held by many anti-rape activists, that personal accounts of (alleged) sexual violence should be treated as sacrosanct.
Before the Rolling Stone story imploded but when Erdely was already being criticized for failing to seek comment from the alleged rapists, the left-of-center media monitoring site Media Matters pointed to several articles on campus rape in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Slate which also failed to meet that standard. But this is less a defense of Erdely—whose reporting, we now know, was indefensible—than an indictment of her colleagues.
Take the coverage of Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz, the internationally famous activist who carries her mattress on campus to protest the school's failure to expel the man she accuses of rape. When Sulkowicz was featured in a New York Times cover story last May, with a troubling story of a violent attack by a fellow student and a botched university investigation that ended with a ruling in the man's favor—despite two other accusations of sexual assault against him—her alleged assailant remained a nameless, faceless shadow menace. (One of the story's authors, Richard Pérez-Peña, later said he did not know the man's identity at the time.)
It was more than seven months later, in December—perhaps not coincidentally, after the collapse of the Rolling Stone story—that the Times gave Paul Nungesser, who had been identified by The Columbia Spectator several months earlier, a chance to tell his side. That was also the first time the paper disclosed that the multiple charges against him may not have been independently made: Sulkowicz and the other two women had been in contact and had talked to each other about their history with Nungesser prior to filing charges.
In February, a story I reported for The Daily Beast raised further questions, revealing that Sulkowicz had remained in close and friendly contact with Nungesser for three months after the alleged rape (as confirmed by Facebook messages). Advocates have countered that victims of sexual trauma may act in ways that seem irrational. Sulkowicz's messages don't necessarily exonerate Nungesser; but the new details certainly paint a far more complex picture than the early coverage suggested.
The willingness to treat uncorroborated narratives of victimization as fact may be partly due to sensationalism. But it also reflects a climate in which any suggestion that a woman who says she was raped may be lying is often treated as "victim-blaming" or "rape apology." Let's not forget that skeptics who questioned the Rolling Stone story before its unraveling were widely and viciously attacked as prejudiced against rape victims. Today, the feminist party line is that Rolling Stone let down sexual assault victims by not fact-checking Jackie's account; but back in December, it was that insisting on more scrutiny and corroboration of accounts of sexual assault would silence victims' voices.
Given the very real history of widespread ugly biases against women who reported sexual violence, the reluctance to accuse women of "crying rape" is understandable. But the assumption that "women don't lie" leads to an equally ugly bias. Yet the CJR report itself downplays the problem of false allegations, making the familiar claim that only 2 to 8 percent of rape reports are false. Using the same statistics, New York University professor Clay Shirky writes in The New Republic that Jackie is a rare aberration: "If someone says she was raped, she is almost certainly telling the truth."
In fact, this estimate is based on studies in which some eight percent of rape reports are proven to be groundless or fabricated—but the majority remain unresolved. If every sexual assault complaint that that can be neither substantiated nor disproved is treated as presumptively true, that is a textbook case of "presumed guilty" (at least when specific defendants are involved).
Despite its efforts to preserve the "rape culture" narrative, the CJR report is a valuable reminder of the dangers of allowing this narrative to shape reporting and override skepticism. So far, at least, the media have yet to learn these lessons from the Rolling Stone debacle. Just a few weeks ago, The Hunting Ground, a documentary on campus rape co-produced by CNN, was hailed as a "must-watch work of cine-activism," as "diligently researched," and (in Rolling Stone) "an energizing call to action." Yet, as Emily Yoffe persuasively argues in Slate, the film relies not only on debatable statistics but on moving personal testimonies with no hint of fact-checking. Its treatment of the charges against former Florida State quarterback Jamies Winston has been devastatingly critiqued by legal journalist Stuart Taylor Jr.
In a Monday press conference, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism dean Steve Coll urged the media to "have a conversation" on better reporting on sexual violence—while dean of academic affairs Sheila Coronel called the Rolling Stone story a "useful case on how to report, with sensitivity, about victims of sexual assault while also verifying and corroborating the information they provide." This is sound advice. But the conversation must start with the uncomfortable fact that, as this story illustrates, those who tell such stories are not always victims.
This article originally appeared at RealClearPolitics.
The post The UVA Fiasco and 'Believe the Survivor' Syndrome appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Four months after Rolling Stone magazine published a shocking—and soon discredited—account of a fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia, the Charlottesville police department has released the results of its investigation into the alleged assault. It comes as no surprise that "no substantive basis" was found for the claim by a student known as "Jackie" that she was raped by seven men at a fraternity party as a UVA freshman in September 2012. What's striking is to what lengths both the police and many in the news media have gone to tiptoe around the obvious fact that the tale was a hoax by a serial liar. This dance of denial suggests that in the current ideological climate, it is nearly impossible to declare any allegation of rape to be definitely false.
At the press conference, Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy J. Longo stressed that the department's conclusion "doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie" and that the investigation is not closed but only suspended until new evidence emerges.
It is, of course, nearly impossible to prove a negative. Short of a surveillance tape documenting Jackie's every movement, one cannot know for certain that she was never sexually assaulted at UVA. But the evidence against her is damning. It's not simply that there was no party at Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity named by Jackie, anywhere near the time when she said she was attacked. It's not simply that her account changed from forced oral sex to vaginal rape and from five assailants to seven, or that her friends saw no sign of her injuries after the alleged assault. What clinches the case is the overwhelming proof that "Drew," Jackie's date who supposedly orchestrated her rape, was Jackie's own invention.
Back in the fall of 2012, Jackie's friends knew "Drew" as "Haven Monahan," an upperclassman who supposedly wanted to date her and with whom she encouraged them to exchange emails and text messages. However, an investigation by The Washington Post and other media last December found that "Haven's" messages were fake; the phone numbers he used were registered to online services that allow texting via the Internet and redirecting calls, while his photo matches a former high school classmate of Jackie's who lives in a different state. No "Haven Monahan" exists on the UVA campus or, apparently, anywhere in the United States (at least outside romance novels). The catfishing scheme seems to have been a ploy to get the attention of a male friend on whom Jackie had a crush—the same friend she called for help after the alleged assault.
Is it possible that someone sexually assaulted Jackie on the night when she claimed to be going out with her fictional suitor? Theoretically, yes. But it's also clear that her credibility is as non-existent as "Haven Monahan."
Moreover, the police investigation has debunked another one of Jackie's claims: that in spring 2014, when she was already an anti-rape activist, some men harassed her in the street off-campus and threw a bottle that hit her face and (improbably) broke. Jackie said that her roommate picked glass out of a cut on her face; but the roommate disputes this and describes the injury as a scrape, likely from a fall. Jackie also said she called her mother immediately after that attack, but phone records show no such call.
Despite all this, Chief Longo wouldn't call Jackie's story a false allegation and even referred to her as "this survivor" (though amending it to the more neutral "or this complaining party").
Meanwhile, in the CNN report on the March 23 press conference, anchor Brooke Baldwin, correspondent Sara Ganim and legal analyst Sunny Hostin were tripping over each other to assert that "we have to be very careful" not to brand Jackie a liar and that "she could have been sexually assaulted." Hostin argued that the idea that Jackie made it all up "flies in the face of statistics," because "only about 2 percent of rapes that are reported are false."
This is a bogus statistic, which Hostin misattributed to the FBI. (According to FBI data, 8 to 9 percent of police reports of sexual assault are dismissed as "unfounded"; the reality of false rape reports is far more complicated, and it's almost impossible to get a reliable estimate.) Even if it were true, it would say nothing about Jackie's specific case. What's more, statistics on false allegations generally refer to police reports or at least formal administrative complaints at a college—neither of which Jackie was willing to file.
CNN never mentioned the evidence that Jackie fabricated "Haven Monahan." Neither did the New York Times, which said only that "the police were unable to track Mr. Monahan down."
Jackie's defenders argue that rape victims often change their stories because their recall is affected by trauma. It is true that memory, not just of traumatic events, can be unreliable; a victim may at various points give somewhat different descriptions of the offender or the attack. It is also true that, as writer Jessica Valenti argues, someone who tells the truth about being raped may lie to cover up embarrassing details (such as going to the rapist's apartment to buy drugs).
None of that, however, requires us to suspend rational judgment and pretend that Jackie's story is anything other than a fabrication. While Jackie is probably more troubled than malevolent, she is not the victim here. If there's a victim, it's Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity branded a nest of rapists, suspended and targeted for vandalism—as well as UVA Dean Nicole Eramo, whom the Rolling Stone story painted as a callous bureaucrat indifferent to Jackie's plight.
In this case, at least, there were no specific accused men. But the extreme reluctance to close a rape investigation and call a lie a lie bodes ill for wrongly accused individuals, who may find themselves under a cloud of suspicion even after all the facts exonerate them.
Evading the facts does a disservice to Jackie, too. In a sane environment, she would face disciplinary charges and perhaps mandatory counseling. In a climate where saying that a woman is lying about rape is tantamount to "victim-blaming" and "rape culture"—and where some of Jackie's fellow students say that even if her story "wasn't completely true," it helped bring attention to important issues—she is likely to remain mired in self-destructive false victimhood.
For the rest of us, this episode shows how extreme and irrational "rape culture" dogma has become, and how urgent it is to break its hold on public discourse. The current moral panic may be an overreaction to real problems of failure to support victims of sexual violence. But when truth becomes heresy, the pendulum has swung too far, with disastrous consequences for civil rights and basic justice.
This column originally appeared at RealClearPolitics.
The post Why Can't We Call the UVA Case a Hoax? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In recent months, Emma Sulkowicz (pictured), the Columbia University senior who carries her mattress around campus as a protest against the university's non-expulsion of her alleged rapist (and an art project for her senior thesis) has been hailed as a heroine in the battle against campus sexual assault. Last week, The Daily Beast published my article about the case—based mainly on interviews with the alleged rapist, Paul Nungesser, and materials he provided—which raises serious questions about the pro-Sulkowicz narrative, partly because of her friendly behavior toward Nungesser for weeks after the alleged rape. The response from the rape-culture feminist camp has been to argue that there's no "right" way to deal with sexual assault, generating a #TheresNoPerfectVictim Twitter hashtag. But it's a straw (wo)man argument. Yes, of course victims deal with trauma in different, often startling ways. However, "no perfect victim" doesn't mean that anything an alleged rape victim says or does, no matter how it defies common sense, reason and human experience, must be rationalized as "that's what some victims do!" in deference to the commandment, "Believe the survivor."
I should add that when I first read the New York Times account last May of Sulkowicz's claim that the university badly botched its investigation of her complaint, I thought she probably had a legitimate grievance. She was alleging a violent rape by a man who had been reported for sexual assault by two other women but had always managed to beat the rap. (At the time, my main reaction was that such cases need to be handled by real cops and courts, not campus "gender equity" bureaucrats and pseudo-judicial panels.) But as I read more details of the story, those details raised more and more questions.
At this point, I cannot, of course, definitively state that the allegations against Nungesser are false. But there is more than enough doubt of his guilt to warrant exoneration not only in a criminal case—it's safe to say that no grand jury in the land would indict him, unless it was made up of gender studies majors—but under the low "preponderance of the evidence" standard by which Columbia adjudicates sexual misconduct complaints.
Remarkably, the panel which heard Sulkowicz's charges cleared Nungesser even though he was apparently not allowed to present strong evidence in his favor: his Facebook communications with Sulkowicz in the weeks following the alleged rape. Just two days after Nungesser supposedly brutalized her, Sulkowicz responded enthusiastically to his invitation to a party, writing that "we need to have some real time where we can talk about life and thingz (sic)." A few days later, she contacted him to suggest they "hang out" before or after the meeting of a literary society to which both belonged, adding, "whatever I want to see yoyououoyou." (There's much more in the Daily Beast story, including screenshots of the messages—confirmed as authentic by Sulkowicz herself.)
The other two complaints, filed shortly after Sulkowicz's charge and clearly influenced by it, turned out to be riddled with problems as well (many of them evident in the very first detailed report on the case, published in January 2013 in Columbia's online student magazine, Bwog, and highly sympathetic to the accusers). One woman, Nungesser's former girlfriend, accused him of emotional and sexual abuse which she did not regard as such until long after their breakup—and did not decide to report until Sulkowicz approached her to discuss Nungesser. (Her complaint was eventually dismissed, partly because she stopped cooperating with the investigation.) The other, Nungesser's housemate at a residence run by a campus literary society, claimed he had grabbed her and tried to kiss her at a party over a year earlier. She made the complaint after learning that he was facing another accusation of sexual assault, a few days before her graduation—and apparently with the encouragement of an officer of the society who had earlier tried to have Nungesser ejected from the house. Nungesser was initially "convicted" on this charge and placed on disciplinary probation; the finding was reversed on appeal and the second hearing cleared him.
In spite of all these murky circumstances, Nungesser, "outed" last May, has been not only ostracized on campus but treated as a presumptive criminal in the media—with the negative attention magnified by Sulkowicz's newfound fame as a mattress-toting activist—and branded a "serial rapist" in a press release by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. If he is innocent of any crime, and he may well be, he has a pretty strong argument that he is a victim of grievous harassment, condoned by the university (which has given Sulkowicz carte blanche for her project) and enabled by politicians.
When I was working on my story, I had no doubt that the true believers' response would be to argue that nothing in the record discredits or even casts doubt on the charges against Nungesser, that rape victims often behave in ways that don't fit stereotypical expectations—especially when attacked by someone they cared about—and may often remain in denial about the rape and act affectionately toward the rapist.
It didn't take long. The tone was set by a piece in the online publication Mic by feminist blogger Julie Zeilinger deploring "the narrative of the 'perfect victim,' in which female survivors' stories are evaluated in terms of gender stereotypes such as those related to idealized virginal purity and simplified fallacies about uniquely felt and lived experiences, like the identity of a rapist and the nature of the relationship survivors have with them."
Actually, the only fallacies here are Zeilinger's, since her critique has nothing to do with the questions raised by the Daily Beast article. As far as I know, no one has ever suggested that Sulkowicz's lack of "purity," or the fact that she had previously slept with Nungesser twice without being in a romantic relationship, makes her a "bad victim." It's what happened after, not before, the alleged rape that matters.
Zeilinger also asserts that "some women do not even realize they have been abused," citing a study in the journal Gender & Society which reports that teenage girls "frequently wrote off abuse" because they saw it as normal male behavior. But, aside from the fact that the study is filled with radical feminist jargon and tendentious interpretations, what it found was that girls—primarily from troubled lower-class backgrounds—tend to shrug off minor sexual harassment like being touched on the butt, not violent rape. (They are also benighted enough to believe that being pressured into sex isn't rape if you have the option of saying no.) It's hard to see what bearing this has on Sulkowicz's claim of a brutal, painful anal rape during which she was allegedly slapped in the face and choked so badly that, in her words to the New York Times, "he could have strangled me to death."
Even more bizarrely, Salon's Katie McDonough tried to portray Sulkowicz's behavior as consistent with rape by invoking the horrible recent rape case at Vanderbilt, in which the victim had consensual sex with her boyfriend in the morning unaware that he and three others had raped her the night before when she was blackout drunk and unconscious. The flaw in this analogy is rather glaringly obvious.
I can readily believe that when a rape happens in a previously consensual intimate situation and involves minimal force—for instance, when the man holds or pins the woman down and has sex with her despite her verbal protests—neither perpetrator nor victim may think of it as rape or assault, especially if they know each other well. (If that was Sulkowicz's story, the friendly messages would not have been nearly as damaging to her credibility.)
On the other hand, when activists talk of not realizing they had been raped and staying friendly with their rapists for some time, it's not always easy to tell if they mean what most of us would recognize as actual rape. It could be regretted drunk sex, or giving in to unwanted sex because you didn't have the nerve to say no or because you were nagged, coaxed, or guilt-tripped into it. It could be something like Lena Dunham's so-called rape, in which she admits that she verbally encouraged her "rapist" and was able to halt the encounter as soon as she chose to—but still eventually decided to call it rape, apparently because she didn't feel in control of things and was handled more roughly than she would have preferred (and because the man may have taken off his condom).
Of course, as Cosmopolitan political writer Jill Filipovic and others have pointed out, many domestic violence victims stay with their batterers even after brutal assaults. But this usually happens when victims feel trapped and isolated; often, the abuse escalates gradually and by the time it reaches severe levels, the victim is too psychologically and/or economically dependent, or too scared to get out. Moreover, even in ongoing abusive relationships, a violent outburst is typically followed by a show of repentance from the batterer and a promise not to do it again.
In Sulkowicz's case, the claim is that an Ivy League student with abundant social resources was suddenly and horrifically attacked by a male friend who had never been violent before—and that she went on to exchange chatty, flirty messages with him and offer to have a "chill sesh" two days later and continued to have similar interactions for another two months. I have yet to see a single expert say that this is common behavior in rape victims. (Amusingly, The New York Daily News' Victoria Taylor asserted that "experts backed up Sulkowicz" in her claim that she continued a friendly relationship with Nungesser because she was "confused," then cited the president of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women.)
In an interview to Mic's Zeilinger, Sulkowicz elaborated on why she sought conversations with her alleged rapist: "I wanted to have a talk with him to try to understand why he would hit me, strangle me and anally penetrate me without my consent." But the tenor of her chats with Nungesser seems, to put it mildly, inconsistent with such a motive.
Do communications—even affectionate communications—with the accused after the alleged rape automatically discredit a rape report? No, of course not; it depends on the communications and the circumstances. In these specific circumstances, you'd have to be a hardcore ideologue to deny that these specific communications are highly relevant and highly damaging to Sulkowicz's case.
It is also useful to recall that only a couple of months ago, virtually identical arguments were made on behalf of the now-debunked Rolling Stone story of a brutal fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia. The "discrepancies" and improbabilities in Jackie's story, advocates asserted, were typical of victims' reaction to trauma, and only "rape apologists" and "denialists" would use them to brand the story a hoax.
Obviously, Sulkowicz is not Jackie; the man she accuses of rape actually exists, unlike "Haven Monahan," and there is certainly not enough evidence to brand her a false accuser as some are doing on the Internet. But there are parallels. Both cases involve a story of a shocking rape much less ambiguous and more violent than the typical claim of campus sexual assault (obviously far more extreme in the Rolling Stone case). In both cases—again, much more so in the Rolling Stone story—there are too many details that don't seem to make sense in light of what we know of human behavior. In the UVA story, it was Jackie's friends supposedly dismissing her brutal gang rape as a minor unpleasantness and the chief rapist supposedly approaching her a couple of weeks later to say he had a "great time." In the Sulkowicz story, it's both Sulkowicz and Nungesser engaging in casual, amicable online chitchat after his alleged brutal assault on her.
The advocates' reaction to the new evidence in the Columbia University case makes it plain that for many feminists, disregarding any evidence or argument that may interfere with "believing the survivor" is now a matter of principle. The danger of such an ideology is self-evident. In his 1995 book, "With Justice for Some: Victims' Rights in Criminal Trials," veteran Columbia University law professor George Fletcher wrote, "It is important to defend the interests of women as victims, but not to go so far as to accord women complaining of rape a presumption of honesty and objectivity." Striking that balance is an essential task for the justice system; to abandon it is to endorse a lynch-mob mentality.
* * *
After the original version of this article ran at RealClearPolitics.com, I appeared on MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry Show to discuss my article and the ethics of reporting on sexual assault. The "discussion" was a barrage of constant interruptions and derailments, but the most telling moment happened during the break before my segment when I had just joined the set. Harris-Perry was complaining that all this talk about the need to get the other side of the story when it comes to rape accusations was terribly unfair because, for instance, when we do a story about ISIS, we don't ask ISIS for comment. (Maybe that's because ISIS actually puts out videos in which they saw people's heads off or incinerate them. If there was a video of Nungesser choking, hitting and raping Sulkowicz, I can guarantee that no one would be going to him for his side of the story. Also, he'd be in prison.) Jelani Cobb, the panelist who did not get to say a word during my segment, gently tried to point out that checking the facts when it comes to accusations is important; as an example, he cited Joe McCarthy accusing people of being communists with no evidence and ruining their lives.
Harris-Perry's response: "Yes, but he was just throwing out accusations! Women don't do that!"
And so, after the Duke lacrosse team fiasco, after Brian Banks losing ten years of his life to a false rape charge, after the University of Virginia rape hoax, we're back to the rape myth of our time: Women never lie.
An early version of this article appeared at RealClearPolitics.
The post Flawed Narratives, Perfect Victims, and the Columbia Rape Allegations appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A tragedy in France, involving savage retaliation for mockery of religion, shocks public opinion and pits medieval barbarism against liberal Enlightenment values. Recent headlines? No, an eighteenth-century drama that unfolded in the Age of Enlightenment itself and culminated in the judicial murder of a young man named François-Jean de la Barre, who became the last person executed for blasphemy in Europe.
As it happens, this year marks the 250th anniversary of l'affaire de la Barre. For a long time, this tragic tale was a distant chapter in the story of Western civilization's road to a secular, pluralistic society; the issues it raised had long been settled in favor of freedom of speech. In a 1998 essay on the de la Barre case, French historian Elisabeth Claverie wrote that these questions had ben infused with "a renewed vigor" by the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his novel, The Satanic Verses. Claverie could hardly have guessed that in less than two decades, twelve people—artists and journalists from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo—would be killed in the heart of Paris for perceived blasphemy against Islam.
Of course, a terrorist attack is very different from a (nominally) lawful execution. Still, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the de la Barre case seems startlingly relevant to present-day events. Then as now, the war on blasphemy was in some ways less about faith than about political and social conflict; then as now, the narrative of free thought versus religious tyranny was complicated by thorny issues of power and privilege. And, then and now, what happened was still, ultimately, a stark lesson in the evil of religious orthodoxy imposed by force.
The de la Barre affair was set in motion in August 1765, when the wooden crucifix on the main bridge in the city of Abbeville was vandalized during the night; someone repeatedly slashed it with a saber or a large knife, leaving several scratches. News of the sacrilege spread quickly, and pious townsfolk flocked to the site to express their horror. The next day, the bishop of Amiens arrived at the Abbeville bridge, a procession of clergy in tow; he came barefoot, with a rope around his neck in sign of penance, and delivered a fiery sermon declaring the culprits worthy of "the worst punishments in this world and eternal torment in the next." Simon Linguet, the advocate for de la Barre and his codefendants, later wrote in a brief that the bishop's dramatic appearance had such an inflammatory effect that for days, "the town talked of nothing" but the attack on the cross.
As the authorities opened an investigation—overseen personally by the procurator general of the parliament of Paris, Joly de Fleury—they were under tremendous pressure to find the perpetrators. While no one seemed to have any information on the actual crime, people did come forward with reports of various unrelated impieties—which were treated as possible leads, on the assumption that the suspect would be found among those who had shown disrespect for religion.
Several such reports concerned the Chevalier de la Barre, a 19-year-old destitute nobleman who had moved to Abbeville two years earlier after his father's death; a cousin, the abbess of the town's Willancourt convent, had given him lodgings on convent property outside the cloisters. A weapons instructor to whose school de la Barre came regularly for shooting practice claimed that the chevalier and two of his friends had bragged and laughed about watching a procession carrying the Eucharist go by without kneeling or removing their hats. Other witnesses—a wigmaker, the convent doorkeeper, a servant—told more damaging stories. De La Barre, they said, had sung filthy blasphemous songs, openly flaunted his godlessness and declared that God and the saints were fairy-tales for fools, uttered obscene mock blessings over food and wine, and even expressed a desire to buy a plaster crucifix just so he could smash it.
A search of de la Barre's rooms uncovered a trove of forbidden literature, mostly erotic novels with illustrations—including a book titled Venus in the Cloister, or The Nun in Her Shift that mixed pornography with dialogue questioning church doctrine on sex—but also a copy of Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, banned the previous year. On October 1, de la Barre was arrested. Charges were brought against two of his friends as well; but one managed to flee abroad and the other was a minor, leaving de la Barre as the main defendant. (Two more young men were arrested later as his accomplices, including, ironically, the son of a city magistrate who had been aggressively pursuing the investigation.)
No evidence ever linked de la Barre to the cross defacement. Even some of his other transgressions were in doubt; thus, several witnesses backed his claim that he had never bragged about disrespecting the religious procession but had simply responded to being chided for his lack of piety, offering the excuse of running late for a dinner. De la Barre's cousin the abbess, Anne-Marguerite Feydeau, pleaded on his behalf, claiming that he was a victim of malicious slanders, guilty at most of some youthful follies. Nonetheless, on February 28, 1766, a panel of three city magistrates found the chevalier guilty of "monstrous, execrable blasphemies against God, the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Virgin, religion and the commandments of God and the Church" and pronounced a sentence of shocking severity. After making public penance in front of Abbeville's main cathedral, de la Barre was to have his tongue cut out and then to be decapitated, with his body to be burned and his ashes to be scattered.
The case was appealed to the Parliament of Paris; the procurator general, de Fleury, recommended a commutation. But on June 4, the parliament voted 15-10 to uphold the sentence, apparently swayed by advocate general Denis-Louis Pasquier's diatribe against the menace of irreligion. According to a contemporary journalist, Pasquier explicitly targeted the Enlightenment philosophers—singling out Voltaire—and "presented the Abbeville profanations as a disastrous effect of the philosophical spirit which has been spreading through France." He also reportedly remarked that there was no point in trifling around with book-burning when the immolation of the authors would please God much more. Still, the Parliament contented itself with ordering that de la Barre's copy of The Philosophical Dictionary be thrown into the fire with his body.
The chevalier's supporters hoped for a royal pardon. But Louis XV demurred, apparently concerned that, after the spectacular execution of would-be regicide Robert Damiens nine years earlier, pardoning a blasphemer might be seen as implying that an offense to divine majesty was less grave than an offense to royal majesty. And so, on July 1, de la Barre went to his death.
It was a grand enough occasion that the high executioner of Paris, Henri Sanson, arrived in Abbeville with his eldest son and assistant (joining a crew of four local headsmen). On the morning of his final day, the chevalier was tortured on orders of the court—or, in the parlance of the era, subjected to "extraordinary questioning"—to make him confess to his offenses and betray his accomplices. In a speech over a hundred years later, Victor Hugo painted a grisly picture of de la Barre having his legs shattered by torture and his tongue ripped out with red-hot pincers. But this was a dramatic exaggeration; in fact, the chevalier mounted the steps of the scaffold with no difficulty, and the removal of his tongue was reduced to a symbolic cutting motion. Resigned to his fate, de la Barre had enough sangfroid to chat with the executioners and even quip about being "turned into a choir boy" when his hair was cut to expose his neck for the axe. It is unclear whether he ever made the court-ordered public penance.
The de la Barre affair grew into an international cause célèbre thanks partly to Voltaire. The aging philosopher, who had been living in the relative calm of his Ferney estate near Switzerland, was all the more horrified by the injustice and cruelty done to de la Barre because his own book was cited as proof of the young man's guilt. He championed the late chevalier's case in two pseudonymous pamphlets, "An Account of the Case of the Chevalier de la Barre" (1766) and "The Cry of Innocent Blood" (1775).
The dominant and enduring narrative, promoted by Voltaire and others, painted de la Barre as a freethinker victimized by religious obscurantism and priestly zealotry. A petition for his posthumous exoneration submitted from the Paris nobility in 1788, on the eve of the French Revolution, asserted that "a fanatical bishop"—i.e. the bishop of Amiens—"sent the unfortunate de la Barre to die on the scaffold for embracing this shining era of reason ahead of his time." More than a century later, when France under the Third Republic embarked on an aggressive campaign for the secularization of public life (laïcité), de la Barre—honored with a statue in Paris and dozens of streets named after him across the country—was elevated to martyrdom as a victim of the church.
The reality was more complicated. The Bishop of Amiens had actually added his own voice to the vain pleas for de la Barre's pardon. The chevalier's prosecution and execution was entirely the work of secular authorities; it was also highly atypical for its time. In her essay, Claverie notes that the number of executions for religious offenses in 18th-century Europe was "infinitesimal." The papal envoy to France at the time of the de la Barre affair, Pietro Colonna Pamphili, openly remarked that in Rome under the Inquisition such offenses would have been punished with no more than a year in jail.
Why, then, this cruel and unusual punishment? To some extent, poor de la Barre was the victim of local politics and perhaps social intrigue. (Rumors blamed a vendetta by a magistrate whose romantic overtures had been allegedly rebuffed by the Abbess Feydeau, or by another Abbeville politician whose plans to wed his son to a rich heiress may have been derailed by the young lady's attraction to de la Barre.) Yet it is also clear that the case was part of a political backlash against the rise of secularism, and of other liberal ideas seen as a threat to the established order. For all the vastly different histories of Christianity and Islam, this brings to mind the role of religious insecurity and fear of modernization in forming radical Islamism.
There are other surprising parallels. Modern-day leftists who have mixed feelings about France's cherished tradition of religious irreverence, at least as applied to Islam today, see this as an issue of the privileged mocking the beliefs of the marginalized and the powerless—France's Muslim immigrants. But earlier controversies about blasphemy, too, raised issues of class privilege. A 1920 book by historian Marc Chassaigne, The Case of the Chevalier de la Barre—brought out by a religious publishing house and written as a corrective to the secularist myth—paints de la Barre as an arrogant, thoughtless aristocrat who enjoyed mocking lower-class superstitions and flaunting his superiority over the little people by denigrating their faith. Voltaire's pamphlets in defense of the chevalier have an undercurrent of class prejudice, stressing the executed man's noble birth and taking swipes at one of the judges' lowly status as a former "pork merchant."
None of this, however, changes the appalling fact that de la Barre, like the Charlie Hebdo staffers two and a half centuries later, was murdered for the crime of irreverence—or that outrage at an offense against religion could incite large numbers of people to support such murder. The de la Barre case powerfully illustrates why modern French tradition cherishes the right to blasphemy as a hard-won freedom, and why it is right to do so.
And yet this story also has an odd little-known postscript which reminds us that religious faith is not the only belief system that breeds homicidal fanaticism. By the time de la Barre's conviction was reversed by France's National Convention in 1794, the "shining era of reason" had turned to terror driven by revolutionary zeal. Among its victims was Linguet, the lawyer who had tried to save de la Barre's life; he was sentenced to death for writing in overly flattering terms about the Austrian and English monarchs. He was executed by the same Sanson who, almost exactly twenty-eight years earlier, had beheaded his most famous client.
The post <em>Charlie Hebdo</em> and the Horrible History of Suppressing 'Blasphemy' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>December has not been a good month for the feminist crusade against the "rape culture."
The Rolling Stone account of a horrific fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia, which many advocates saw as a possible "tipping point"—a shocking wake-up call demonstrating that even the most brutal sexual assaults on our college campuses are tacitly tolerated—has unraveled to the point where only a true believer would object to calling it a rape hoax.
At first, when investigative reporting by The Washington Post revealed major holes in the story, activists as well as feminist commentators chastised those who were too quick to declare it discredited. Just because Rolling Stone screwed up its reporting, they said, doesn't mean that Jackie was not sexually assaulted or that her complaint was not neglected by the university. Just because Jackie changed her story, they insisted, doesn't make her a liar—merely a likely rape victim whose trauma-fogged memory caused her to get some details wrong. (Her story, let's not forget, had changed from being forced to perform oral sex on five men to being vaginally raped by seven men, punched in the face, and cut on shattered glass.) "The man that Jackie describes, named 'Drew' in the story, is a real person on campus," wrote leading feminist pundit Amanda Marcotte, referring to Jackie's date who supposedly brought her to a fraternity party and lured her into a rape trap. "He just happens to belong to another fraternity on campus. Which means that, while there's a chance she's lying, there's also a very big and very real chance that this all happened and she just forgot what frat house it was at."
Now, it turns out "Drew"—or "Haven Monahan," the name Jackie originally gave her friends—doesn't seem to exist after all, on the UVA campus, anywhere in the United States, or probably anywhere on the planet. His name is straight out of a particularly cheesy romance novel; his photo, which Jackie's friends got in text messages, turned out to match a former high school classmate of hers who goes to a different college. It also looks like Jackie made up both "Haven" and the sexual assault he supposedly engineered in an attempt to get the romantic attention of Ryan Duffin, one of the friends she called for help that night. Tellingly, her lawyer has not commented on these revelations. The only alternate explanation is that Jackie is the victim of a diabolically clever frame-up by her ex-friends.
Assuming Jackie is a fabulist, one can debate how much blame she deserves. It's clear she's a troubled young woman, and somewhat in her defense she did not falsely accuse any actual men (though it certainly seems that she falsely accused her former friends, two men and one woman, of treating her brutal rape as a minor unpleasantness far less important than invitations to frat parties). It is also clear that she was exploited by author Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and arguably Rolling Stone too, in pursuit of a sensational story. But some of the blame must go to the movement that encouraged her in turning her fantasy of victimhood into activism—especially when that movement is so entrenched in its true-believer mindset that some of its adherents seem unable to accept contrary facts. Katherine Ripley, executive editor of the UVA student newspaper, The Cavalier Daily, continued to post #IStandWithJackie tweets for days after the "Haven Monahan" story broke. Two other UVA students made a video thanking Jackie for "pulling back the curtain" on campus rape and praising her "bravery."
Meanwhile, even as the UVA saga unfolded, the "women's page" of the online magazine Slate, Double X, published an outstanding long article by liberal journalist Emily Yoffe examining the excesses of the campus rape crusade—from the use of shoddy statistics to hype an "epidemic" of sexual violence against college women to the rise of policies that trample the civil rights of accused male students. The piece was retweeted nearly 2,500 times and received a great deal of positive attention, partly no doubt on the wave of the UVA/Rolling Stone scandal. Some of Yoffe's critique echoes arguments made earlier by a number of mostly conservative and libertarian commentators. But, apart from the extensive and careful research she brings to the table, the fact that these arguments were given a platform in one of the premier feminist media spaces is something of a breakthrough, if not a turning point.
Just days after the publication of Yoffe's article, the Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics released a new study boosting her case (and based on data she briefly discussed). The special report, "Rape and Sexual Assault Victimization Among College-Age Females, 1995–2013," shows that not only are female college students less likely to experience sexual assault than non-college women 18 to 24, but the rate at which they are sexually assaulted is nowhere near the "one in five" or "one in four" statistics brandished by advocates. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), from which the BJS derives its data, found that approximately 6 out of 1,000 college women say they have been sexually assaulted in the past year. Over four years of college, economist Mark Perry points out, this adds up to about one in 53. Still a troubling figure, to be sure, but it does not quite bear out claims that the American campus is a war-against-women zone.
Journalists who embrace the narrative of campus anti-rape activism, such as The Huffington Post's Tyler Kingkade and Vox.com's Libby Nelson, have tried to rebut claims that the new DOJ report discredits the higher advocacy numbers. Kingkade asserts that the NCVS "doesn't look at incapacitated rape," in which the perpetrator takes advantage of the victim's severe intoxication or unconsciousness. Nelson argues that because the survey focuses on crime victimization, respondents may underreport acquaintance rapes which don't fit the stereotype of the stranger with a knife jumping out of the bushes.
But neither criticism holds up. The standard question used in the NCVS to screen for sexual victimization is, "Have you been forced or coerced to engage in unwanted sexual activity by (a) someone you didn't know before, (b) a casual acquaintance? OR (c) someone you know well?" In other words, respondents are explicitly encouraged to report non-stranger sexual assaults—and, while they are not specifically asked about being assaulted while incapacitated, the wording certainly does not exclude such attacks.
Kingkade also suggests that the numbers are beside the point, since the effort to combat campus sexual assault is about people, not statistics—specifically, "about students who said they were wronged by their schools after they were raped." Of course every rape is a tragedy, on campus or off—all the more if the victim finds no redress. But if it happens to one in five women during their college years, this is not just a tragedy but a crisis that arguably justifies emergency measures—which is why proponents of sweeping new policies have repeatedly invoked these scary numbers. (Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, has now had the one-in-five figure removed from her website.) And while the stories told by students are often compelling, it is important to remember that they are personal narratives which may or may not be factual. Only last June, Emily Renda, a UVA graduate and activist who now works at the school, included Jackie's story—under the pseudonym "Jenna"—in her testimony before a Senate committee.
Of course this is not to suggest that most such accounts are fabricated; but they are also filtered through subjective experience, memory, and personal bias. Yet, for at least three years, these stories been accorded virtually uncritical reception by the mainstream media. When I had a chance to investigate one widely publicized college case—that of Brown University students Lena Sclove and Daniel Kopin—for a feature in The Daily Beast, the facts turned out to bear little resemblance to the media narrative of a brutal rape punished with a slap on the wrist.
Now, in what may be another sign of turning tides, the accused in another high-profile case is getting his say. The New York Times has previously given ample coverage to Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student famous for carrying around a mattress to protest the school's failure to expel her alleged rapist. Now, it has allowed that man, Paul Nungesser, to tell his story—a story of being ostracized and targeted by mob justice despite being cleared of all charges in a system far less favorable to the accused than criminal courts. No one knows whether Sulkowicz or Nungesser is telling the truth; but the media have at last acknowledged that there is another side to this story.
Will 2015 see a pushback against the anti-"rape culture" movement on campus? If so, good. This is a movement that has capitalized on laudable sympathy for victims of sexual assault to promote gender warfare, misinformation and moral panic. It's time for a reassessment.
The post The Year the Crusade Against 'Rape Culture' Stumbled appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Amidst predictably partisan reactions to President Obama's recent executive order offering five million illegal immigrants a reprieve from deportation, some critics have denounced it as a special affront to immigrants who played by the rules to come to this country. So, as one of those legal immigrants—my family came to America from the Soviet Union in 1980—let me say that illegal immigrants do not offend me. Like some two-thirds of Americans, I believe that if they have committed no crimes while living in the United States, they should be granted the option to stay here legally and, in the President's words, "come out of the shadows."
Yes, they broke the law by coming here. But as federal judge Alex Kozinski and attorney Misha Tseytlin—both of whom, incidentally, are legal immigrants, from Romania and the Soviet Union—point out in a 2009 essay with the self-explanatory title, "You're (Probably) a Federal Criminal," federal law today is so vast in reach that most of us have probably broken it at some point. And a few have done so to accolades from some of the same folks who are greatly exercised about law-breaking border-crossers. See, for instance, Nevada lawbreaker Cliven Bundy, the rancher who insisted on letting his cattle graze on federal land without paying the legally required fees, and whose defenders (before he started spouting racist tirades) included Fox News talk show host and illegal immigration hardliner Sean Hannity.
In many ways, immigration law is especially arbitrary and capricious—and hardly sacrosanct given its history. For a century after the American founding, we had open borders; a 1798 law allowed the President to order the deportation of resident aliens from a country at war with the United States, but that's about it. The first laws limiting immigration were strongly tainted with overt racism; the Page Act of 1875, which forbade entry to "undesirable" aliens, specifically targeted Asian laborers, and its 1882 sequel was actually called the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Obviously, we've come a long way since then. Even so, modern immigration law is flexible enough that what's legal today may be illegal tomorrow; it is replete with quotas, lotteries, and shifting definitions of what constitutes close family for the purposes of allowing legal entry to family members of U.S. citizens or resident aliens. It is less an instrument of justice than a morass of technicalities; no wonder it commands little respect.
Suppose the government imposed a quota on entrepreneurs so that people had to wait for years—or enter a lottery—for a permit to open a business. Would someone who starts an illegal business be viewed as a criminal by most people, at least if the company's products or services cause no harm to anyone? Probably not. For that matter, in a non-hypothetical situation, how many Americans, especially conservatives, would condemn an otherwise law-abiding citizen who runs an unlicensed day care center because the red tape is too costly, as long as the children are safe and well-tended?
True, in those cases we are presumably talking about American citizens. But we are a nation of immigrants—the cliché, in this case, is built on a profound truth—and descendants of immigrants who mostly came here when legal barriers to entry were few. To a very large extent, being here legally is a matter of luck, not of being more deserving.
In my case, the luck was partly a matter of Cold War politics: as Soviet émigrés, my family and I were automatically eligible for residency as refugees. For that, I give thanks on every Thanksgiving Day and on many others. But I am well aware that many people whose plight was at least as bad (or worse, with far more extreme poverty and active persecution rather than general oppression) did not have the same privilege. People who enter this country in violation of the law but earn an honest living, harm no one, and contribute to society—often getting far less back in benefits than do citizens or legal residents—have my sympathy and respect.
Few would deny that there are real, vital national security issues related to border control. There is also a legitimate debate about the social consequences of unrestricted immigration. Yet it is also indisputable that efforts to crack down on immigration violations have often resulted in ungenerous, even inhumane policies that one might call truly un-American.
Think of people brought here as children who never went through the naturalization process, and who suddenly faced deportation to places they barely remembered because of a minor past transgression—a bar brawl, or public urination classified as a sex offense—that made them deportable due to changes in the law. Think of people with American spouses who face the Catch-22 of having to exit the United States to apply for permanent residency, and being barred from re-entry for three or even ten years because they were here illegally. Think of people arrested on suspicion of often technical immigration violations who are imprisoned in worse conditions than violent criminals.
Think of Howard Dean Bailey, an Iraq war veteran who legally came to the U.S. from Jamaica as a teenager and whose heartbreaking story was told in Politico magazine earlier this year. A father of two, a husband and a small business owner, Bailey was deported back to Jamaica in 2012 after two years of often degrading detention; he was shackled during transit from one holding facility to another and once denied access to a toilet until he lost control of his bladder. His crime? A 1995 conviction for possessing marijuana with intent to distribute—which Bailey voluntarily disclosed on his citizenship application in 2005, not knowing it would disqualify him. Bailey, who otherwise has a clean record, says he was duped into picking up some packages for an acquaintance and pleaded guilty without realizing that it would doom his chances of becoming a citizen. Even if his role wasn't quite as innocent, his treatment strikes me as far more outrageous than amnesty for illegal aliens.
Whether President Obama's executive action overstepped the lawful bounds of his role is a question for constitutional law experts. One such scholar, George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin, argues that he did not, because violations of federal law are so ubiquitous that any president must pick and choose which ones to pursue. (Somin, too, happens to be a legal immigrant from the Soviet Union.) Be as it may, I hope that Congress can find the will to pass immigration reform, extend the President's reprieve, and allow illegal immigrants the opportunity to make things right with the law and stay in this country without fear. It's what most Americans want—and it's the American thing to do.
This column originally appeared at RealClearPolitics.
The post Let Illegal Immigrants Come Out of the Shadows appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The festivities for the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a turning point in the collapse of Soviet communism, have passed in the shadow of troubling events around the world. In Moscow, a KGB-bred strongman plots to build a new Kremlin-ruled empire as a nervous Europe looks on. Meanwhile, the specter of radical Islamic fundamentalism is haunting the Middle East. Has the promise of freedom that looked so bright in 1989 faded—or are there grounds for cautious hope, in place of the wild-eyed optimism of a quarter century ago?
Re-reading an essay penned a few months after the Wall came down, "Why Socialism Collapsed in Eastern Europe" by scholar and pro-freedom activist Tom Palmer, one feels nostalgic. After examining the causes of this remarkably peaceful revolution—the inability of statist economies to ensure prosperity and of aging dictatorships to keep out unwanted information—Palmer expressed his excitement at the emergence of a liberal political and intellectual culture in Eastern and Central Europe. If we are lucky, he wrote, these ideas will grow and "drop seeds back into our societies to reinfuse us with the spirit of liberty."
I asked Palmer, now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and executive vice president for international programs at the libertarian Atlas Network, for an updated view. In his email, he sounded more upbeat than one might expect: "Remember what the condition was in 1989 and 1990. Dictatorships. Food shortages. Despair. Visit those countries now and you find very different places. Yes, they are not perfect, but it's so easy to overlook the progress when you're looking for the faults."
Still, Palmer acknowledges that there is a lingering nostalgia for communism among some in Eastern Europe—especially older people for whom normal nostalgia for their youth is associated with the communist past—and that such sentiment paradoxically feeds into the popularity of far-right nationalist and even fascist movements. In the case of Russia, he says, "there is another element, which I call 'Failed Empire Syndrome': the longing for the days when 'we were feared,' mixed in with conspiracy theories of being betrayed, humiliated, etc."
Unlike many critics of American foreign policy—both leftists and anti-interventionist libertarians and conservatives—Palmer is not persuaded by "the narrative of Putin being spurned, threatened, encircled, and so on, so that his turn toward fascism is all the West's fault." In his view, "The biggest problem was the rise in oil and gas prices, which gave Putin and his cronies the idea that they could succeed without the rule of law, since they could build a crony/rentier state on the basis of abundant revenues." This has been exacerbated by Putin's embrace of an extreme nationalist ideology, which he is now seeking to export by cultivating neo-fascist parties and movements in Europe.
The former Soviet bloc is not the only place where the spread of freedom has proven far more problematic than was once hoped. A decade after the fall of communism, radical Islamism emerged as a new global ideology implacably opposed to the values of free and open societies. After another decade, the Middle East was rocked by a series of revolutions that some hailed as the Arab world's answer to the liberation of Eastern Europe. Yet in most countries, the "Arab Spring" quickly turned to either deadly chaos or oppression with a new face—and in Egypt, the revolution's birthplace, even the old face is back.
Meanwhile, in the West and even in the United States, confidence in freedom is at a low point. The moral clarity of 1989 is long gone. At the moment, we seem hopelessly divided over the balance between freedom and justice and the role of the state in society. Too many on the right glibly use rhetoric than erases the vast gulf between a democratically elected government with constitutional safeguards—even one far bigger and more intrusive than many of us would like—and communist dictatorship. Too many on the left would just as glibly sacrifice freedom to their understanding of equality. At a recent New York symposium on free speech and "hate speech," British journalist Brendan O'Neill, editor of the maverick online magazine Spiked, noted that the suppression of "harmful" ideas in the name of social justice—once a bedrock principle of the now-defunct communist world—has migrated to the Western democracies. We could use an reinfusion of the spirit of liberty—but from where?
Still, if there is anything the fall of the Wall can teach us, it's that seemingly hopeless situations can change for the better with dizzying speed. When Ronald Reagan issued his famous challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev in June 1987—"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"—and predicted that the wall would fall because "it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth; [it] cannot withstand freedom," the Soviet press denounced him for giving a "war-mongering speech." Who could have thought then that Reagan's words would come true just two years later?
Today, too, the Atlas Network's Palmer urges a realistic optimism. "If we don't promote our principles and work to implement them, they will not just be implemented on their own," says Palmer, who has worked extensively on pro-freedom projects around the world. "But I am optimistic that, if we fight, we will win. Moreover, we have a moral reason to be optimistic, because pessimism is generally a self realizing-attitude. If you want to promote liberty, you should be an optimist. You owe it to yourself."
In his 1987 speech, Reagan spoke of a slogan spray-painted on the Wall: "The Wall will fall. Beliefs will become reality." There are many walls, physical, intellectual, and spiritual, still waiting to fall around the world. Perhaps, twenty-five years from now, we will look back at some of those walls and marvel at how unshakeable they once seemed.
A version of this column originally ran at RealClearPolitics.
The post Berlin Wall's Fall Didn't Resolve Everything appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I'm happy to say I have never seen an episode of Girls, Lena Dunham's HBO show which sounds like a younger and grubbier version of Sex and the City; but it's almost impossible to follow the modern cultural scene, especially its feminist segments, and not run into Dunham all the time. Anointed as "the voice of a generation" by the elite media, whose ongoing love-affair with Dunham was documented in scary detail in The American Prospect last January, the 28-year-old writer/producer/actress has also been hailed as the voice of millennial-generation feminism. (Her political activism is best encapsulated by a 2012 Obama campaign ad directed at young women in which first-time voting is like sex and Obama is like an awesome boyfriend who cares about your problems and gives you stuff.)
Dunham is now in the spotlight over her confessional memoir, Not That Kind of Girl—an unwelcome spotlight for a change, with some of her confessions being spun into sensational claims that she sexually molested her younger sister Grace. Having perused the book, which a generous estimate would put at about two hours' worth of reading, I think the charge is a wild overreaction that reflects not only sexual-abuse hysteria but a rising, noxious intolerance toward edgy humor. But this entire episode, especially when juxtaposed with the response to another part of Dunham's memoir—one in which she positions herself as a sexual assault victim—also highlights some blatant sexual and political double standards.
The supposedly incriminating passages were first pointed out by National Review writer Kevin Williamson in a cover story on Dunham as the uber-child of the liberal elites, then picked up by the right-wing website TruthRevolt.org under the headline, "Lena Dunham describes sexually abusing her toddler sister." What Dunham actually described was opening up her sister's vagina to peek inside when she was seven and Grace was one (only to freak out at the discovery of some pebbles Grace had apparently stuffed inside). She also says that as a teenager, she let her sister sleep in her bed, and mentions that she occasionally masturbated while Grace lay next to her. And she writes this about their relationship:
As she grew, I took to bribing her for her time and affection: one dollar in quarters if I could do her makeup like a "motorcycle chick." Three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds. Whatever she wanted to watch on TV if she would just "relax on me." Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying.
In happier times, about a year ago, Dunham shared the "motorcycle chick" photo on Instagram; it shows a surly child wearing makeup and a T-shirt with "BAD GIRL" scrawled on it, and is captioned, "that time I dressed my 5 year old sister as a Hell's Angel's sex property." Now, that's more grist for her detractors, not all of whom are on the right (more on that below).
What to make of all this? Williamson's pronouncement that there is "no non-horrific interpretation" of the vaginal inspection episode seems rash, to say the least. While the six-year age gap makes it different from the usual "playing doctor" experience, it seems clear that Dunham's motive was curiosity, not erotic gratification; most experts seem to agree that it's within the range of non-abusive childhood exploration. Taken together, these excerpts may show that Dunham was a weird kid, as she herself has said. They may, and no doubt will, be cited as evidence of the pitfalls of sexually liberated child-rearing. But to turn them into proof of child molestation seems quite an overreach. Particularly absurd is the idea that Dunham's obvious jokes about wooing her baby sister like a sexual predator or dressing her up as "Hell's Angels sex property" are clues that betray her as a sex offender. Dunham has already apologized for her "insensitive" comedic use of the term "sexual predator" and for any "painful or triggering" material in her book. (Personally, I'll take the tackiest sex joke over the word "triggering.") At this rate, it isn't long before every subject except the weather and the flaws of straight white males is off-limits to humor.
And yet it is also hard to deny that Dunham's defenders in the mainstream liberal media, especially her feminist champions, have done a fair amount of spin. They have, for instance, treated Grace Dunham's oddly ambiguous Twitter commentary as a defense of her sister, even though it actually reads more like a deflection. (One tweet affirmed support for "people narrating their own experiences, determining for themselves what has and hasn't been harmful"; two others decried the policing of non-normative sexuality.) They have uncritically cited Lena Dunham's claim that anything she has written about her sister has been "published with her approval," even though it doesn't mesh with Grace Dunham's recent statement in The New York Times Magazine that she and her sister had fought over "my feeling like Lena…made my personal life her property." Nor have they acknowledged that the allegations against Dunham have arisen in a paranoid climate in which children as young as six—nearly always boys—can be treated as sex offenders for playing doctor with a child of similar age, kicking another child in the groin during a fight, or kissing a classmate's hand.
There is also an anti-Dunham feminist faction, which believes Dunham is a sexual abuser and has urged Planned Parenthood to drop her as its spokeswoman. But if anything, it confirms to what extent the charges against her tend to be viewed through the lens of politics. With few if any exceptions, the "guilty" corner is made up of feminists who weren't exactly Dunham fans in the first place—who have long scorned her as too privileged and not radical enough, as the face of white, upper-class, elitist, mainstream media–approved feminism.
The far-left Dunham-bashers who lambaste her for such offenses as "rape culture enabling" are not a particularly sympathetic bunch. But that doesn't make the pro-Dunham portion of the sisterhood any less guilty of double standards. How would the same feminists react to similar reminiscences from a man, or a woman of the wrong political affiliation—say, Bristol Palin? What if Dunham had described being on the receiving end of such behavior from an older, especially male, sibling—and if she had retroactively, in therapy or in a women's studies class, come to regard these experiences as sexual abuse?
That brings us to the Dunham-as-victim narrative, which was undoubtedly the most talked-about part of her memoir until the Dunham-as-victimizer narrative emerged. At one point, Dunham describes an encounter at Oberlin with a "mustachioed campus Republican" named Barry. Actually, she describes it at two points: first, as a comical drunken tumble during which she suddenly spots the condom she thought Barry was wearing hanging off of her roommate's potted tree; then, as a likely rape about the nonconsensual nature of which she was at first in denial.
In the second, supposedly authentic recounting, Dunham runs into Barry at a party while lonely, drunk, and high on Xanax and cocaine. She goes home with him, rebuffing a male friend's attempt to stop her. When they are on the floor "doing all the things grown-ups do" and trying to have intercourse, with Barry not quite up to the occasion, she hazily notices that the condom is on the floor and asks him to put it back on. They do more grown-up things, some of which Dunham asks Barry to do to her. (Retroactively, she believes she was trying to persuade herself she was doing this by choice.) They have another go at intercourse, which is when Dunham notices the condom in the tree. She picks herself up and tells Barry to get out, which he does.
When Dunham relates this to a friend the next day, the friend turns pale and blurts out, "You were raped." Dunham's first reaction is to laugh. Eventually, though, she comes to believe it, partly because she's in pain for a while after that night and she knows she didn't consent to such rough handling or to being penetrated without a condom.
Assuming that Dunham's alcohol-addled memories are reliable (a big if), how is this rape? Because she was drunk and high—as was Barry, who apparently couldn't remember the next day who he'd been with—and wouldn't have done this when sober? She certainly wasn't past being able to say yes or no. Because Barry was too rough during an otherwise consensual encounter? Because he took off the condom—or perhaps lost it when, as Dunham repeatedly mentions, he wasn't fully erect? If he did it intentionally, that certainly makes him a massive jerk. But a rapist? Would anyone apply that label to a woman who lies, for whatever reason, about using birth control?
I would say that, on the basis of Dunham's narrative, Barry is as much of a rapist as Dunham is a child molester. In both cases, there is some questionable behavior that can be described as troubling, inappropriate, possibly exploitative—but far short of criminal. Yet the people who have pooh-poohed the accusations against Dunham have embraced her accusation against Barry (who is, apparently, easy to identify and track down). An essay in Time applauds her decision to share the story as "her bravest work of activism yet," a bold challenge to rape denial and victim-blaming. The Oberlin administrators have even launched an investigation, though no charges can be filed unless Dunham cooperates.
While they're at it, perhaps they should investigate Dunham, too. Immediately after her first description of the Barry fiasco, she writes that her next partner, a senior named Geoff, "once cried in my parents' hammock because, he told me, 'You are forcing sex when I just want to be heard.'"
Forcing sex, to the point of reducing her partner to tears? There's a whole new chapter in Dunham's history as a sex offender! I think TruthRevolt.org needs to get on the case. Maybe their next headline can read, "Lena Dunham describes raping college boyfriend."
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]]>If you're like many people I know, you've been doing your best to know as little as possible about GamerGate, the hashtag movement that is either—depending on who you ask—a consumer revolt against corruption in the videogame media or a harassment campaign targeting women in the videogame world. Who wants to get embroiled in a two-month-long Internet drama over videogames? But this story is not nearly as frivolous as might seem. One reason it won't die is that it's a battlefield in a larger culture war over issues ranging from gender politics to media bias to social libertarianism versus left-wing moralism.
In the last couple of weeks, the GamerGate story has become front-page news after highly publicized threats to two feminist critics of the videogame industry and gaming culture, media analyst Anita Sarkeesian and game designer Brianna Wu. While there is no evidence connecting these threats to any individuals involved in GamerGate, media coverage has heavily implied such a linkage. Newsweek published an analysis of tweets in the #GamerGate hashtag concluding that it is indeed an anti-female harassment campaign; blogger J.W. Caine responded with a counter-analysis arguing that the vast majority of the tweets the Newsweek reported counted as "harassment" were actually neutral mentions of women who were prominent in the controversy.
The full story of GamerGate is so convoluted it could probably fill a book by now. I have done some fact-checking in two previous articles for RealClearPolitics.com and Reason.com (and the Know Your Meme website has a fairly detailed chronicle). While the various charges and countercharges are incredibly difficult to sort out, there are several ways in which the media narrative has been egregiously skewed.
Only a few journalists in the national media, such as Slate.com's David Auerbach, have acknowledged that serious harassment, including threats and "doxxing"—posting a person's private information online—have happened on both sides of GamerGate. Meanwhile, uncorroborated claims by Sarkeesian and Wu that the threats against them are connected to GamerGate have been uncritically repeated. In fact, there are persistent rumors, backed up with screenshots and chat room records, that at least some of the harassment and threats come from trolls who go after both sides to stir things up, because that's what trolls do. To some extent, journalists have been reluctant to look into these claims because they don't want to be targeted, but blaming the threats on GamerGate is also a convenient narrative. Meanwhile, GamerGaters' efforts to stop and report harassment have been only rarely acknowledged. (When GamerGate members claimed to have found the man who had sent threats to Sarkeesian, anti-GamerGate blogger David Futrelle responded by accusing them of harboring some of Sarkeesian's harassers in their midst—citing as his example a netizen known as "thunderf00t," who has done little more than to engage in sharp criticism of Sarkeesian's work.)
The online kerfuffle that eventually grew into GamerGate—a controversy surrounding feminist independent game developer Zoe Quinn—has been reduced to a misogynist attack on Quinn by a vindictive ex-boyfriend who publicized her sexual foibles and by Internet bottom-feeders who falsely accused her of trading sex for positive game reviews. In fact, as I showed in my first GamerGate piece, the Quinn controversy was a grab-bag of many issues, including Quinn's own alleged (and fairly well-documented) attacks on another feminist videogame project.
Since then, I discovered another curious, narrative-complicating wrinkle to this story. Eron Gjoni, Quinn's, was encouraged to go public by at least one woman in the videogame industry: former Tumblr blogger KC Vidya. She believed that Quinn's liaisons with industry insiders and with a gaming journalist who had given her positive publicity were a breach of professional ethics, and that her behavior toward Gjoni went against her declared personal ethics as a "social justice" activist. (While KC Vidya later deleted her blog due to the backlash she encountered, screencaps of her posts still exist.) Ironically, a line from one of KC Vidya's posts was quoted in a Vice.com article as an example of things "males" have said about Quinn; at least in that case, the magazine later amended the wording and posted a correction.
With few exceptions, GamerGate has been portrayed as a group of aggrieved white straight males who don't want women, gays, and minorities on their turf—even though female, gay, transgender, and minority gamers are among the movement's most passionate supporters. Pro-GamerGate pundit/scholar Christina Hoff Sommers has been dismissed by detractors as a right-wing faux feminist (in fact, Sommers is a moderate, pro-choice registered Democrat). But the movement has also received at least partial sympathy from self-identified liberal feminists such as New York comedian/writer Sara Benincasa and Canadian journalist Liana Kerzner. Kerzner has had her conflicts with GamerGate but has lately found herself closer to the "pro" camp, partly because of what she sees as unfair media coverage.
A part of GamerGate's image problem is its own identity problem. While the movement's concerns about cronyism in "elite" gaming journalism (represented by sites such as Kotaku, Polygon, and ArsTechnica) and its rather incestuous relationship with the "progressive" indie development scene are definitely not without foundation, the "ethics in journalism" arguments are often somewhat vague. It is also hard to sustain the argument that GamerGate is not a backlash against feminism when it finds itself conspicuously at war with feminists on and around the gaming scene; indeed, the gamers' complaints about gaming media collusion are often directed at the promotion of a feminist agenda.
But this backlash is not directed at women, who are already a strong presence in the gaming world. (Today, more than half of role-playing videogame players are female, as a third of those playing in massive multiplayer online games.) Nor it is directed at female-oriented content in videogames, where female protagonists—or ones whose gender can be customized by the player—are hardly a rarity. Its target is a narrow brand of feminism that not all women and not all feminists espouse—one that does not simply champion equality and inclusion, but sees modern Western culture as permeated by patriarchy and views male "sexualization" of women as inherently oppressive.
GamerGate has been attacked over anti-feminist comments made by some of the movement's sympathizers, such as provocative British tech blogger and Breitbart.com writer Milo Yiannopoulos. But far less attention has been given to extreme views on the anti-GamerGate side. Take writer Samantha Allen, whose decision to stop writing about videogames, apparently because of GamerGate, has been lamented by Brianna Wu as the tragic loss of a valuable voice. (Update: Allen contacted me to say she gave up videogame writing because of a Twitter harassment campaign in June/July, several weeks before the existence of GamerGate as such, even though Wu's Washington Post column names her as one of the women "lost" to GamerGate.) A few months ago, Allen posted (and later deleted) a diatribe on her Tumblr blog that opened with this declaration:
i'm a misandrist. that means i hate men. i'm not a cute misandrist. i don't have a fridge magnet that says, "boys are stupid, throw rocks at them." my loathing cannot be contained by a fridge magnet.
(It's all downhill from there.)
Obviously, Allen does not express such attitudes in her published work; but it is surely not a stretch to think that they inform her journalism.
In his GamerGate commentary, journalist and blogger Andrew Sullivan notes that the movement was partly a revolt again "the creeping misandry in a lot of current debates … and the easy prejudices that define white and male and young as suspect identities." I disagree with some of Sullivan's writings on gender, which come too close to a "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus" view of intractable sex differences for my taste; but in this case, his insight is on target. This misandry expresses itself not only in many feminist critiques of videogames (which I discussed in some detail in my second piece on GamerGate), but in a climate that treats male sexual expression—and even harmless humor that could be interpreted in a sexual way—with suspicion and disapproval.
In this climate, a man's quip, "Relax, it will be over soon" to a woman during a videogame demonstration can spark an outcry over a "rape joke"; a male game designer can be vilified as a misogynist for casually joking in a pre-Valentine's Day interview that men could earn sexual favors by introducing their girlfriends to his new multiplayer game and letting them win; and a programmer can lose his job over an overheard childish joke about a "big dongle" at a tech conference. In this climate, a leading videogame publication can criticize a game maker for insisting on his innocence of a rape accusation made in the social media rather than admit that he might have inadvertently violated his accuser by not seeking explicit consent.
None of this negates the fact that male chauvinism exists in the gaming community. But to fight it by stigmatizing maleness is exactly the wrong approach, and a way to alienate not only men but many women as well.
The feminism of male demonization and female victimhood has become an insidious force that, despite its faux-progressive trappings, stands in the way of genuine equality. Whatever its flaws, GamerGate is a politically diverse movement of cultural resistance to this brand of toxic feminism. For that, it deserves at least two cheers.
This article originally appeared at SpliceToday.
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]]>Twenty years ago, the elderly owner of the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California; her daughter, grandson, and granddaughter, who worked at the day care center; and three female teachers were charged with unspeakable crimes against children. The allegations, which included not just sadistic sexual abuse and the production of child pornography but Satanic rituals, became fodder for newspaper headlines and breathless TV reports. After a three-year trial that remains the longest and costliest in United States history, the case ended in 1990 without a single conviction.
By then, the panic about pedophile rings and devil-worshiping cultists lurking in child care centers had already spread nationwide, with dozens of new stories springing up from coast to coast. In one of the most sensational cases, 24-year-old Margaret Kelly Michaels, who had worked at Wee Care Nursery in Maplewood, New Jersey, was convicted in 1988 on 115 counts of molesting 20 children ages three to five.
Five years later, Michaels's conviction was overturned after appellate courts found that the children's testimony was hopelessly tainted by suggestive and coercive questioning. This ruling, the Brown University political scientist Ross Cheit writes in his new book, The Witch-Hunt Narrative, marked "a turning point" in the backlash against a perceived hysteria around child sexual abuse—"a major shift in the press, academia, and the courts." Under the new view, the day care child abuse cases of the 1980s were irrational witch hunts that swept up the innocent and victimized the very children they were purporting to protect. By the time the movie Indictment: The McMartin Trial aired on HBO in 1995 to near-universal acclaim, this perspective had gone fully mainstream.
Cheit sets out to provide a counter-backlash. While he admits that there was some "overreaction" and injustice to innocent people—including "five, possibly six, of the seven defendants" in the McMartin case—he argues that the "Satanic panic" hysteria is a myth rooted in exaggeration and distortion. His argument is twofold: first, that the number of cases involving outlandish claims of large-scale molestation with ritual-abuse aspect is too small to sustain the notion of a national witch hunt; second, that many of the defendants, including Michaels, were almost certainly guilty.
Is Cheit's revisionism convincing? Much of his analysis, especially of the McMartin and Michaels cases—which take up more than a third of the book—relies on materials to which the reader does not have ready access, such as trial transcripts, investigation records, and author interviews. Thus, whether the book succeeds in making a dent in the witch-hunt narrative depends, to put it bluntly, on whether we can trust Cheit to give a fair and accurate account of this material. A close look reveals enough evasions, highly tendentious interpretations, and verifiable inaccuracies to conclude that we cannot.
Take the McMartin case. In Cheit's view, the only male defendant, Raymond Buckey, really was a child molester, and his actions may have been abetted by his grandmother, McMartin Preschool owner Virginia McMartin. As proof, he points to allegedly strong medical evidence of abuse in several children, as well as what could be considered unusual sexual behavior by Buckey.
Regarding the former, Cheit himself acknowledges that "changes in medical knowledge that occurred between 1984 and the late 1980s" cast doubt on much of the expert testimony for the prosecution: It is now known that anal and genital inflammations and lacerations in young children, once believed to be clear signs of sexual abuse, also occur frequently in kids who were not abused. But he asserts that for several children, including three-year-old Matthew Johnson—whose mother, Judy Johnson, was the first parent to raise the alarm about alleged sexual abuse at the McMartin Preschool—examinations yielded "evidence that seems significant even with the benefit of advancements in medical knowledge" (emphasis added). At times, Cheit admits that this evidence is inconclusive and hopelessly compromised by overdiagnosis.
As for Raymond Buckey's suspicious behavior, it boils down to testimony that he often walked around preschool grounds wearing loose shorts and no underwear, resulting in occasional accidental exposure; that he was once seen reading Playboy "with kids on his lap"; and that neighbors sometimes saw him masturbating in his bedroom without turning the lights off or pulling the window shades down. (While Cheit writes that "several neighbors" mentioned this to the police, the notes cite a statement from just one couple.) All this may be inappropriate, but it is hardly enough to indicate that someone is a child molester.
Cheit severely undercuts his own credibility when he sets out to rebut the claim that "the McMartin case was started by the delusions of a crazy woman"—Judy Johnson, who died of alcohol poisoning in December 1986. Cheit concedes that by the summer of that year, Johnson was clearly unstable and paranoid. (He leaves out the fact that she was hospitalized for a psychotic episode much earlier, in March 1985.) But he argues that it was probably the McMartin case that brought on her mental instability, not the other way round. Says Cheit, "What is taken as an article of faith—that Judy Johnson was delusional from day one—is flatly contradicted by all of the available evidence."
As proof, Cheit invokes Glenn Stevens, the prosecutor who left the district attorney's office in January 1986 due to doubts about the McMartin case and gave extensive recorded interviews to screenwriters Abby and Myra Mann (the husband-and-wife team that went on to co-write Indictment) shortly thereafter. According to Cheit, Stevens told the Manns that Johnson had no mental health issues when she first reported her son's alleged abuse in August 1983 and was a "great" witness at the preliminary hearing in July 1984.
Yet in 1990, Stevens told the New York Times that "Judy Johnson was psychotic before she filed the first police report." And Cheit's insistence that "there is no evidence…that Johnson was mentally unstable" in August 1983 elides the fact that over the next several months, her allegations grew increasingly bizarre. By December, she was talking about children being taken to a car wash and a ranch to be molested. In February 1984, according to a deputy D.A.'s notes, her reports featured Satanic rituals in a church involving a goat, a lion, and the sacrifice of an infant whose blood her son was forced to drink; her son's ears, nipples, and tongue being stapled; and the claim that at some of the church orgies, Raymond Buckey "flew through the air."
In the Wee Care case, Cheit seeks to rebut the belief that the grotesque accusations against Kelly Michaels—who was said to have penetrated children with plastic utensils and made them perform oral sex, drink her urine, and eat her feces—were the product of an overzealous investigation in which kids were coaxed and badgered into disclosing abuse. (The panic was initially triggered by a little boy's comment, while having his temperature taken rectally by a nurse, that his teacher did this to him at school. Though he clarified that "her takes my temperature," his comment was taken as a reference to being sodomized.) While conceding that there were highly improper interrogations, Cheit argues that none of them involved children who actually testified at trial—and that a number of children did, in fact, make extremely damaging spontaneous disclosures and exhibit shocking sexualized behavior.
This contradicts the conclusions of the New Jersey State Superior Court, which clearly stated in its opinion overturning Michaels's conviction that all the children were exposed to improper influence—from investigators, parents, or classmates. According to the ruling, "The record of available interviews does not disclose that any of the children related their testimony of the alleged abuse by 'free recall.'" Cheit relies on parents' accounts of incriminating child statements and disturbing symptoms of abuse, but we only have his word that these accounts were not tainted by their context as well.
Yet Cheit's bias is evident throughout his counter-narrative. He is intent on reading something sinister into the fact that Michaels left her job at Wee Care shortly before the investigation began and into a teacher's testimony that Michaels once mentioned she wasn't wearing underwear. He mentions a psychologist's evaluation of Michaels as "sexually confused" without revealing that this determination was based largely on her possible homosexuality (Michaels had had some sexual experiences with women in college) as well as uncorroborated speculation about incest in her family. He omits the fact that, as Debbie Nathan reported in The Village Voice in 1988, a second expert who evaluated Michaels found "absolutely nothing" to suggest sexual pathology.
In a particularly deplorable innuendo, Cheit asserts that Michaels "wrote a 'poem' in her preschool roll book that contained arguably lurid lines" and that she was oddly evasive when asked about it. In the endnotes, he quotes only bits and pieces ("the smell of your flesh," "your body will leave me") on the grounds that the full text may be "copyright-protected by Kelly Michaels." He also says that this "strange" poem is quoted in Lisa Manshel's 1989 book Naptime, a pro-prosecution account of the Michaels case.
Intrigued, I ordered a copy of Naptime. Here is the poem in its entirety:
Are you
going about this
the wrong way?
He says what do you want?
I say, Hey, what did you say?
But I know
with the smell of your flesh, (I know)
in a flash as you dress
your body will leave me.
What's "lurid" and "strange" is the suggestion that this verse somehow incriminates Michaels as a likely child molester.
Cheit examines a number of other cases that have been described as day-care witch hunts (saving a major one, that of the Fells Acres Day Care Center in Massachusetts, for a future book). He claims that some of them don't fit the witch-hunt narrative at all because, for instance, they don't include allegations of Satanic rituals—even though, by that strict standard, the Michaels case doesn't fit the profile either. And he argues that while some of these cases did involve grave injustices to innocent defendants, most have strong evidence of guilt which the "narrative" leaves out.
I fact-checked, as best I could, one of his case summaries. It involved Sandra Craig, a Maryland-based preschool owner who was found guilty of molesting a six-year-old girl and was charged with abusing nearly a dozen more children (but never went to trial on those charges because her conviction was dismissed and the case collapsed). Not surprisingly, it turned out to be a hodgepodge of facts, half-truths, and evasions.
Cheit stresses that the prosecution's medical expert found several girls at the day care facility to have "remarkably consistent" vaginal scarring similar to the girl Craig was convicted of abusing. He doesn't mention that this testimony was called into question on appeal, or that the girl was discovered to have named other perpetrators at various times, or that other child witnesses recounted such implausible acts as being anally violated with a screwdriver and buried in a box. He mentions that Craig's teenage son, Jamal, was also accused of child molestation, but he leaves out the fact that it was Craig herself who called social services to report that a girl had complained of sexual abuse by Jamal. He says Craig's defenders hyped the claim that she killed a rabbit as alleged proof of a Satanic ritual element in the case, and that they neglected to acknowledge that there really was a rabbit at the preschool and that it died. But the existence of the rabbit—which is, in fact, brought up in one of the appellate briefs for the defense—hardly supports claims that Craig bludgeoned it to death in front of the preschoolers. That the children's fantasies had some link to reality doesn't make them any less fantastic.
Do all these cases add up to a nationwide witch hunt? Cheit scoffs at claims of hundreds or even thousands of hysteria-driven child abuse cases. But even if there have been some exaggerated estimates, he ignores or brushes aside compelling evidence that the day-care sex abuse/ritual abuse panic in the 1980s (and even the early 1990s) was very real. While Cheit acknowledges the media hype surrounding the issue, he makes only passing mentions of the Los Angeles County Ritual Abuse Task Force, which he admits "followed dozens of 'leads.'" He does not mention the congressional hearings on the subject, or investigations such as the one conducted by University of California-Davis psychologist Gail Goodman for the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. In a sample of nearly 7,000 psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers who returned a questionnaire Goodman and her team sent out, 11 percent had encountered alleged ritual abuse allegations involving child victims and 13 percent had encountered cases of adults who believed they were survivors of ritual abuse. None of those cases could be substantiated.
Cheit almost completely ignores the phenomenon of adult "survivors" discovering, usually in therapy, "repressed memories" of childhood sexual abuse. Yet this was closely related to the child abuse hysteria, and it generated equally lurid and bizarre allegations. Nor does he acknowledge non-day-care cases in which such claims resulted in lengthy investigations, arrests, or even convictions. Ray and Shirley Souza, an elderly Massachusetts couple, were convicted of molesting their two granddaughters in 1993, based on fantastic accusations first elicited in therapy, and remained under house arrest until the sentence ended in 2002. In Pennsylvania in 1991, Richard and Cheryl Renee Althaus were charged with abusing their daughter Nicole, a troubled teen who had fallen under the influence of a teacher obsessed with the Satanic peril; eventually, Nicole began to claim that her parents were cult members and had used her to breed babies for sacrifice. (The case fell apart after FBI agents were brought in to look into the girl's allegations of kidnapping and homicide. Not surprisingly, they quickly realized these were fabrications.)
If it sounds like Cheit has an agenda to push, that may be because he does. In the preface, he claims that his personal interest in the subject stems mainly from his volunteer work with convicted sex offenders. But there is a more personal dimension, too: As a boy, he was molested by the administrator of a summer camp (who later corroborated the abuse in a taped telephone conversation). These experiences faded from Cheit's memory for years until he read a book on sexually abused boys. In his discussion of Cheit's story in the 1995 book Victims of Memory, journalist Mark Pendergrast notes that it's far from clear whether Cheit actually repressed the memory and whether he believes massive repression of memories is possible. Nonetheless, in the 1990s, Cheit emerged as a vocal polemicist against critics of the recovered-memory phenomenon.
The Witch-Hunt Narrative is a continuation of this crusade, with Debbie Nathan—whose reporting played a major role in the exoneration of Kelly Michaels—as Cheit's principal bête noire. (Nathan says that she provided Cheit, at his request, with important materials for his research. Her name does not appear in the acknowledgements.)
Cheit believes the witch-hunt narrative has harmed society, arguing that it has encouraged a dismissive and skeptical attitude toward children's reports of sexual abuse. Yet some of the cases he cites as proof of this dismissiveness ended in convictions that were upheld on appeal. Several times, Cheit returns to the cover-up of Pennsylvania State University football coach Jerry Sandusky's molestation of children as emblematic of our culture's failure to take child abuse seriously enough. But the Penn State fiasco had nothing to do with mistrusting children's claims and everything to do with bureaucratic incompetence and willful blindness to the misdeeds of a high-status local hero.
It is ironic, or perhaps symbolic, that this book has arrived in the midst of a new wave of sex-crime hysteria. Just recently, in the impassioned debate over the sexual molestation charges against Woody Allen, such feminists as Jessica Valenti and Roxanne Gay revived the call to "believe the survivor." The same mind-set also appears in the current campus climate of pressure to accept virtually all allegations of sexual assault regardless of evidence. Despite Cheit's attempted debunking, the lesson of the witch-hunts still stands: Emotion-driven, faith-based crusades against repellent crimes are a grave danger to justice.
The post The Return of Moral Panic appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In my previous article, I tried to make sense of the "GamerGate" drama, which its detractors have described as a sexist male backlash against women in the videogame culture and which its supporters see as a pushback against cronyism and political correctness in the gaming media. The saga continues, with front-page coverage for threats against feminist gaming critics—notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, who canceled a lecture on a Utah campus due to an email threat of a massacre—and with female GamerGaters taking to the online airwaves to give their side. Amidst the charges and countercharges of harassment, thought policing, and unethical conduct, the GamerGate debate always comes back to gender issues. There are valid concerns, shared by at least some GamerGate supporters, about sex-based harassment in gaming groups and stereotypical portrayal of female characters in videogames. Unfortunately, critics of sexism in videogame culture tend to embrace a toxic brand of feminism that promotes antagonism, grievance, and intolerance of dissent, not equality or empowerment.
There is no question that gaming is a male-oriented scene. Those who fault the videogame industry for shortchanging female consumers cite a 2013 report showing that 45 percent of Americans who play videogames are female; but others counter that this includes people who play casual games such as Angry Birds or Candy Crush on their smartphones, and that the market for PC and console games does skew heavily male. In a recent survey of incoming college freshmen, nearly 13 percent of the young men said they had usually spent over 15 hours a week playing video or computer games in their senior year of high school; only two percent of the women did. Other data show more female participation in gaming, though nowhere near parity: in a recent study by Flurry Analytics, women accounted for a quarter of "first person shooter" players and more than a third of those who play role-playing action games.
There are many anecdotal tales of female players encountering hostility and harassment in online gaming communities—from explicitly sexist putdowns of their skills to lewd comments or even threats. This is supported by a 2012 survey by blogger Emily Matthew, distributed through gaming sites and the social media and answered by 499 men and 356 women. Nearly two-thirds of the women—63 percent—reported having experienced "sex-based taunting, harassment, or threats while playing video games online"; fewer than 16 percent of the men did. (In the general population, women are only slightly more likely than men to report sexual harassment online.)
Mathew's survey has its limitations, including selection bias—respondents had to volunteer to answer it, and women who had encountered sexism may have been more likely to do so—and lack of data on frequency of harassment. Women may also be more likely to perceive certain taunts as sexist, whether it's a crude taunt, an slur on one's looks, or "rape" as a synonym for trouncing an opponent (also used by female and even feminist gamers). Tanya McDermott, a British gamer who disagrees with feminist critiques of gaming culture, also argues on her blog that most sexist insults are simply a form of "smack talk" and that men get abused just as much, only in different ways: Players who taunt rivals in a competitive atmosphere will zero in on any vulnerable spot, which includes being "the girl" in a mostly male group. While McDermott makes some good points about group dynamics, it's easy to see how such behavior—regardless of motive—can create an environment where many women feel like second-class citizens. One in ten women in Mathew's survey said they had quit an online game because of gender-based harassment, compared to two percent of men; concerns about harassment also led many women to obscure their gender or avoid playing on some or all public sites.
That said, Mathew's findings hardly paint male gamers in general as woman-haters or Neanderthals. Men and women in her sample were almost equally likely—10 percent and 7 percent—to admit that they had used sexist slurs while gaming. Slightly more than half, men and women alike, said they had actively intervened to stop such behavior. Mathew herself called these results "heartening." While she also reported receiving 22 abusive comments in response to her survey (eight of them containing sexual slurs), these made up fewer than 4 percent of all male responses.
The other issue cited by critics of sexism in videogames—representation of women as characters—is even more complex and rife with incomplete and misleading information. For instance, a recent BBC News story on sexism in videogames says that only one of the top 25 best-selling videogames of 2013 had a female protagonist (Tomb Raider's Lara Croft); a 2013 Guardian article cites a study by the videogame market research firm EEDAR showing that only 24 of 669 titles released in 2012 featured an exclusively female lead. Technically, both these claims are accurate, and they seem to paint a picture of a video landscape populated almost entirely by male heroes and passive female characters who are there to be rescued and romanced.
But "technically accurate" doesn't always mean "true." What's left out is that some of the 2013 best-sellers, such as Saints Row IV, allow players to customize the lead character as male or female; others, such as Assassin's Creed IV and Lego Marvel Super-Heroes, have multiple playable characters of both sexes, while Minecraft features a genderless Lego-like player figure. In the EEDAR sample, nearly half of the games had a female-protagonist option. Highly popular games with an optional female lead include Skyrim, Fallout, and Mass Effect; in the latter, even male gamers often chose the female-protagonist option, apparently due to the female voice actor's impressive performance.
The real hot-button issue in feminist videogame criticism is not the shortage of female protagonists but the sexual objectification of female characters who, critics say, are routinely treated as eye candy for the "male gaze." It would be silly to deny that female characters in videogames are often sexualized—certainly not always, but far more than male ones and sometimes to an extreme degree. Videogame journalist Georgina Young, who leans pro-GamerGate and is skeptical of the feminist critiques, agrees that "you only have to look at the breast mechanics in Team Ninja's Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball 2 trailer to realize that no woman had any hand in its developing or marketing process" and that many games that could appeal to women have visuals designed with men in mind.
The problem is that criticism focused on the sexualization of female characters often hinges on subjective perception—one feminist's sexually empowered woman is another's sex toy—and can easily turn to sex-shaming. Bayonetta, featuring an over-the-top, deliberately hypersexualized female super-fighter, has been slammed as exploitative by critics including Sarkeesian. Yet in a 2012 guest post on the ThinkProgress.org blog of left-wing feminist Alyssa Rosenberg, writer Tony Palumbi defended the game as an exercise in exuberant girl-power and wrote that its detractors were "wrapped up in a confining vision of the liberated female: one where sex needn't define any part of a woman, and flaunted sexuality is inherently a concession to the male gaze."
While such critiques often have a strong undercurrent of hostility to male sexual desire, they can also come across as attacks on women who don't toe the line. In 2011, after the designer of Skullgirls, a fighting game with miniskirted, busty anime-style heroines, objected to charges of sexism and noted that the lead animator was female, a feminist "geek culture" site, The Mary Sue, mocked him in a post suggesting that "this unnamed animator" was either non-existent or not allowed to speak for herself. A quick check could have revealed that she is a successful videogame artist, Mariel Cartwright, who had blogged about her work on Skullgirls on the game's website. More recently, actress Erin Fitzgerald, who voices "the Sorceress," one of the playable leads in a game called Dragon's Crown, posted a scathing response to those who were attacking the game as sexist because of her powerful character's large, undulating breasts. (All the Dragon's Crown characters have stylized, exaggerated physiques.)
When gamers complain about too much feminist criticism of sexism and misogyny in videogames, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that they themselves harbor misogynist attitudes. But another explanation is that much of this criticism relies on manufactured outrage and cherry-picked, distorted, or out-of-context information.
For instance: three years ago, there was a major outcry over alleged misogyny in Batman: Arkham City, particularly the portions in which the player character is Catwoman. The cause of this outrage was that Catwoman is repeatedly called "bitch" and supposedly threatened with rape by various anonymous thugs.
In actuality, the "rape threats" consist of a couple of sexualized taunts such as "Nice suit! Now take it off!" and the line, "You're mine"—which is also directed at Batman elsewhere in the game. (The entire Catwoman play-through can be seen in two YouTube videos.) Both these comments and the word "bitch" are mostly spoken just before Catwoman pummels her enemies into the ground— prompting one author on Kotaku, a gaming site sympathetic to "social justice" causes, to speculate that the writers "aren't comfortable portraying fearsome female characters without having the male characters attempt to belittle them." But surely it's at least as plausible that these impotent attempts to belittle her underscore Catwoman's power. Incidentally, no one made much of the fact that in one of Batman's fights, a thug taunts, "I'm gonna make you my bitch, Wayne"—which is probably closer to a "rape threat" than any of the remarks to Catwoman.
Perhaps most ironically, when the next Batman videogame, Arkham Origins, toned down the language to remove the B-word, one feminist blogger crowed victory—despite admitting that the game also took away the option of playing as a female character ("You win some, you lose some"). As they say, this is why we cannot have nice things.
Sarkeesian's Tropes vs. Women videos, which feature prominently in the debate about videogames, feminism and sexism, are full of selective and skewed analysis—one that neglects positive female images, ignores examples of male characters getting the same treatment she considers sexist for women, and attacks games for encouraging deadly violence toward female characters when killing those characters is actually the "bad" option that causes player to lose points. (A fairly detailed three–part discussion of the flaws in Sarkeesian's critique was posted a few weeks ago on Gamesided.com; for upfront disclosure, the first part quotes from an old column of mine criticizing radical anti-sex feminist Andrea Dworkin, on whose theories Sarkeesian sometimes relies.) It should go without saying that the biased shoddiness of Sarkeesian's arguments does not in any way excuse the online harassment toward her, let alone violent threats. But the harassment should not preclude a critical examination of her critique—instead of the largely unquestioning adulation it has received from the elite gaming media.
Another problem is that in its current form, feminist gaming criticism tolerates no disagreement. In 2012, Brendan Keogh, a journalist who writes for leading gaming media including Gamasutra and Polygon, posted a rant on his personal blog denouncing the controversial trailer for the game Hitman: Absolution, in which the lead character battles and kills a group of female assassins who arrive disguised as nuns, then strip off their robes to reveal tight neoprene outfits. "Infuriated" and "upset" by the fact that not everyone found the trailer offensive, Keogh asserted that it its combination of sexual titillation and violence was a classic example of "rape culture"—"the means by which our society keeps women subservient to men by constantly reminding them that if they step out of line…men will rape them and put them back in their place." When some commenters questioned the existence of a "rape culture" in America, Keogh promptly deleted their posts, announcing that he refused to tolerate "denialism." (Recently, he compared GamerGate supporters to 9/11 "Truthers.")
A couple of days later, the online videogame magazine Kill Screen posted a short essay by writer Michael Thomsen titled "What Is Rape Culture, and Do Videogames Have One?", disputing Keogh's thesis and defending the right to create scandalous art. After a firestorm in the comments and in the social media, the editors of Kill Screen not only amended the title of the article "for insensitivity," changing it to "On the Messy Morality of Hitman: Absolution," but also posted this note at the top:
"We've since apologized for this piece. We can't retract because this is an opinion, not news, which is part of problem. Also, we believe that we should keep our mistakes live. Please accept our deepest apologies."
In this kind of atmosphere, it's not surprising that many people aren't very keen on having discussions of gender and sexism. Sabrina Harris, the British tech writer and longtime gamer who supports GamerGate, told me in an email:
Many gaming publications have, over the past few years, demonised any attempt to evaluate the arguments of women involved in gaming criticism, no matter how idiotic or demonstrably false the things they say can be. If you're a man criticising a woman, you're sexist. If you're a woman criticising a woman, you have internalised misogyny. There is no allowing for discussion with the kind of people writing these articles: you agree with their worldview or you are a bigot. Personally, I feel #GamerGate is a result of this shameful attitude being pushed by those in the gaming media with positions of power for a prolonged period of time.
While it is commonly argued that feminist criticism seeks only to examine "problematic" media, not to deny anyone the right to enjoy them, the language employed by the critics often suggests otherwise. Sarkeesian says that refers to videogames depictions of women being "harmful," "dangerously irresponsible," and related to real-life negative attitudes toward women and possibly even violence. A feminist videogame designer says that sexualized depictions of women in videogames are "unacceptable." In a recent blogpost chastising gamers who dislike "social justice warriors," writer and comedian Joseph Scrimshaw offers a condescending explanation of their anger as motivated by "fear": "If you admit some of the videogames you like are objectifying women, you might have to stop playing them." Even more condescendingly, he goes on to speculate that the people who harbor this fear are worried that they will also have to treat women as equals in real life.
This moralism is all the more obnoxious since it is directed exclusively toward men. No one is telling women in female-dominated fandoms (based on television shows, for instance) that they might have to stop making or enjoying fan art and videos that blatantly objectify men, or even posting pornographic fanfiction about their favorite actors.
"I do think such issues as sexism exist in gaming," Harris, who considers herself a feminist of the pro-equality kind, told me in our email exchange. "I do think issues such as sexism exist in gaming, as they do in most other areas of life. Unfortunately, much of the discussion is framed in a very black and white way, i.e. 'this is sexist, and if you don't agree you are a sexist.' This type of discussion is very unproductive and creates polarisation between groups that can actually have middle ground on the issue. I feel that with more reasoned, less hysterical discussion, we could contribute to making games more progressive where they need to be."
Any backlash against radical feminism is likely to serve as a magnet for people who are genuine misogynists, such as pro-GamerGate lawyer Mike Cernovich whose numerous vile tweets were exposed by GamerGate opponent Matt Binder. But after following the #GamerGate tag closely for several weeks, I see no evidence that people like Cernovich—of whom I had never heard until I saw Binder's post—are influential in the movement. This is an anti-authoritarian rebellion, not an antiwoman backlash.
A version of this article appeared at RealClearPolitics. This version contains corrections.
The post GamerGate, Part 2: Videogames Meet Feminism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Two days ago, Ezra Klein, the editor of Vox.com, penned what may be the most repulsive article yet on the subject of affirmative consent laws. Klein's argument in a nutshell: yes, these laws are overbroad and will probably result in innocent men being expelled from college over ambiguous charges. Which is good, because the college rape crisis is so terrible and the need to change the norms of sexual behavior is so urgent that this requires a brutal and ugly response. Or, as Joe Stalin was fond of saying, "When you chop wood, chips must fly." That's the Russian equivalent of "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs."
Toward the end, Klein writes:
Then there's the true nightmare scenario: completely false accusations of rape by someone who did offer consent, but now wants to take it back. I don't want to say these kinds of false accusations never happen, because they do happen, and they're awful. But they happen very, very rarely.
I only just found out, from this column by James Taranto, that the link in this passage goes to my recent piece on Slate XX.
The whole point of which was to rebut the idea that false accusations of rape are so infinitesimally rare that they needn't be a serious factor in deciding whether laws dealing with sexual assault are unfair to the accused.
I repeat.
I wrote a piece (extensively fact-checked, I might add) arguing that wrongful accusations of rape (either deliberately false or based on alcohol-impaired memory and mixed signals) are not quite as rare as anti-rape activists claim, and that we need to stop using their alleged rarity to justify undermining the presumption of innocence in sexual assault cases.
And Ezra Klein cites this very piece in an article that justifies, pretty much, throwing the presumption of innocence out the window.
Is there a word for having one's writing hijacked to support (in an egregiously misleading way) the very point you are arguing against?
I suggest "voxjacking."
The post The Argument Against Affirmative Consent Laws Gets Voxjacked appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A controversy over videogames may seem an unlikely candidate for a big story, especially with everything else in the news. Yet an epic Internet drama known as "GamerGate," now in its second month, continues to get media attention and fuel animated debate. (In its latest flare-up, Intel found itself in the crossfire last week when it pulled its ads from Gamasutra, a gaming webzine at the center of the quarrel.) While this saga has everything from sex to alleged corruption, GamerGate has also become a battle in a larger culture war. To the liberal and progressive commentariat, it's part of a reactionary white male backlash against the rise of diversity—in this case, "sexist thugs" out to silence and destroy women who seek equality in the gaming subculture. To conservatives and right-leaning libertarians, it's a welcome pushback against left-wing cultural diktat, particularly in the area of gender politics. Meanwhile, gamergaters themselves—who seem to lean left-libertarian—say that what they want is ethics and transparency in the gaming media.
As often happens, reality is more complex than any of these narratives. While the gamers' revolt has very legitimate issues, is also true that it has been linked to some very ugly misogynist harassment of feminists. It also seems clear that the overwhelming majority of GamerGate supporters reject such tactics—and that harassment related to this conflict has been a two-way street. For a supposed misogynist "hate mob," GamerGate includes a lot of vocal women—and they have their own complaints of gender-based abuse, such as being called gender traitors or even "male sockpuppets." Finally, the feminism GamerGate rebels against is not simply about equality or diversity; it is an authoritarian, far-left brand of gender politics that views everything through the lens of patriarchal oppression and tolerates no dissent.
A disclaimer is in order: I am not a gamer, unless you count playing Space Invaders and Millipede at the student center arcade in college and a mild Tetris addiction after I got my first home computer. While I have no experience with role-playing videogames, I have some knowledge of them thanks to several (mainly female) friends who play and one who writes videogame-based fan fiction.
I do have personal experience with the gamers' mortal enemies, the so-called "social justice warriors," to know they can be a highly toxic Internet presence. Those who voice their loathing of "the SJWs" are not simply talking about people sympathetic to socially progressive causes but about cultist zealots who enforce the party line with the fervor of Mao's Red Guards, though luckily without the real-life power. In social-media discussions of art and entertainment, the "warriors" can be found sniffing out and attacking such ideological deviations as liking a heterosexual love interest for a character perceived as gay, liking or disliking a character on the wrong side of race-and-gender identity politics, or (I kid you not) using the "ableist" nickname "derpy" for a klutzy pony on the TV cartoon My Little Pony. Let them gain enough influence in an online community, and they will poison it for anyone who wants to talk to other fans of their favorite shows, movies, or books—or games—without relentless hectoring about "privilege" and "oppression."
Back to "GamerGate" and its tangled web. (A fairly detailed, straightforward, and balanced chronicle of the events can be read on the Know Your Meme website.) The drama began in mid-August, when Eron Gjoni, a programmer and ex-boyfriend of videogame developer Zoe Quinn, made a massive blogpost accusing her of infidelities and deceptions, with screenshots of their online chats as corroboration. Quinn, a vocal "social justice" Internet activist, had numerous enemies—many of them on the notoriously anarchic, anonymous 4Chan message board. They were quick to seize on the disclosures, portraying this as an ethics issue because some of Quinn's liaisons had possible implications of favoritism. One of her partners was later a judge in an independent videogame festival that had just bestowed an award on Quinn's game, Depression Quest; another was a videogame journalist who had given her a couple of positive mentions. Threads discussing this dust-up, some of them quite nasty, proliferated in a variety of forums.
With the focus on Quinn's sexual conduct and allegations of using sex for professional gain, the "Quinnspiracy"—as it was initially known—was inevitably seen as a sexist attempt to take down a female developer. In late August, the controversy got a boost when actor Adam Baldwin, whose politics lean right, took interest in it and tweeted links to some YouTube videos critical of Quinn—also coining the #GamerGate hashtag. Around the same time, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, whose Tropes vs. Women video series critiquing sexist clichés in videogames had made her the gaming community's bête noire, reported that she had left her home as a precaution after a Twitter user sent her a string of rape and death threats which included her address.
For some, the attacks on Quinn and on Sarkeesian became a perfect storm of gaming-culture misogyny. On August 28, Gamasutra ran a blistering attack on "game culture" by feminist cultural critic Leigh Alexander, declaring that "gamers are over" and ridiculing them as socially inept, badly dressed young males addicted to mindless gadget-buying and "getting mad on the Internet." This was followed by a spate of online articles—both on sites devoted to gaming or "geek culture" and in general-interest publications such as Vice and The Daily Beast—attacking gamer culture or announcing its demise. The gamers struck back in the social media, finding supporters in gadfly tech blogger Milo Yiannopoulous of Breitbart London and dissident feminist/critic of feminism Christina Hoff Sommers.
Sorting out the charges and countercharges in this still-ongoing war, with its claims of chat room conspiracies, manipulation of electronic records, hacking, harassment and other malfeasance, would be a gargantuan task. But here are a few facts.
1. The "Quinnspiracy" was not just—and not even primarily—about attacking Zoe Quinn as a woman.
To be sure, discussions of the Quinn drama in free-access, unmoderated chatrooms can be easily mined for crude, hateful, disgusting comments. However, GamerGate blogger J.W. Caine makes a strong case that those chats reveal far more interest in attacking the "social justice warriors" and SJW-friendly tech media than in targeting Quinn herself. Indeed, many discussants warned that personal and sexual attacks on Quinn would undermine the larger effort—a fact conceded even by writer/blogger Jon Stone, a passionate GamerGate opponent.
It is also absurd to suggest that Quinn was disliked simply for being an award-winning female videogame developer. (There have been no hate campaigns against far more prominent women in the field such as Ubisoft executive Jade Raymond, who helped create the hit game Assassin's Creed, or Kim Swift, designer of the highly successful Portal.) For one, long before the latest drama, Quinn had been widely seen in the gaming community as a beneficiary of gaming-media favoritism. The glowing reviews and awards for Depression Quest, a text-only game that has the player make day-to-day choices as a depressed person, rankled gamers who felt that it wasn't even a real videogame but a (dull) interactive fiction. There was a widespread feeling that it was getting praised due to "political correctness"—partly for promoting the socially conscious cause of mental health awareness, partly because of Quinn's earlier, widely publicized claims of harassment by users of a forum for depressed men.
Was the resentment against Quinn at least partly related to her gender? Perhaps—though a male game developer widely seen as receiving undeserved acclaim, Phil Fish, was more or less driven from the field last year by relentless Internet abuse. (Having made a semi-comeback, Fish was recently targeted by hackers after publicly supporting Quinn—an incident that has been cited as proof that men in the gaming world only get ill-treated when they speak up for women. But Fish's troubles with haters long predated the Quinn brouhaha.)
In any event, at least some of the anti-Quinn sentiment stemmed from an incident in which she appears to have engaged in truly appalling behavior—and which had nothing to do with her gender or sex life and everything to do with "social justice" zealotry.
Last February, Quinn learned about a women's videogame contest sponsored by a charity called The Fine Young Capitalists, or TFYC—artists and entrepreneurs who seek to encourage the creation of videos and videogames by women and minorities. Women were invited to submit ideas for videogames; the winner was to work with TFYC's designers and programmers to develop her concept into a game and get a cut from its sales. Quinn was outraged by what she felt was the contestants' "unpaid labor"—but even more so by the rule requiring transgender participants to publicly identify as female prior to the start of the contest. In dozens of angry tweets, Quinn accused TFYC of exploiting women and "policing transwomen's transition points," then gloated over accidentally crashing their website with her Twitter storm. (In August, Quinn claimed that she had only "posted 4 tweets saying I didn't know how I felt about their approach.") In a recent interview, a TFYC spokesman said that Quinn later continued to publicly attack the contest as "exploitative" and "transphobic," resulting in online harassment toward the group, loss of financial backing, and the cancelation of several planned articles about the project. Quinn and her supporters have cited a conciliatory statement TFYC issued in late August as a rebuttal of those accusations; but that statement was a "peace treaty" TFYC withdrew a few days later, saying that Quinn had not held up her end of the bargain.
Of course none of this justifies harassment or threats toward Quinn. But the full story does not make her a very sympathetic figure. All of this complicated history has been almost completely erased from GamerGate coverage in the "progressive" media (gaming and mainstream), which reduced the Quinn saga to prurient revelations about her sexual exploits.
Which brings us to the next point:
2. The media ethics issues raised by GamerGate are valid, not just an excuse for bashing women and their supporters.
The ethics issue is not that Quinn supposedly slept her way to good reviews (she did not). Rather, it's excessive coziness between journalists who cover the videogame industry and certain game developers who have a "progressive" cachet, a problem acknowledged by Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo. Among other things, GamerGate drew attention to the fact that Quinn had received contributions to help finance Depression Quest through the Patreon crowdfunding platform from a Kotaku editor and from a staff writer for another major gaming website, Polygon, who went on to review the game. Due to these concerns, Kotaku banned such contributions by its staff while Polygon adopted a policy requiring reviewers to disclose them. (Incredibly, one leftist commentator, Samantha Allen, took to Twitter to attack these policy changes as motivated by anti-female animus: "These people did not care about journos being friendly w/devs until those devs were women.") The extremely one-sided coverage of the "Quinnspiracy" certainly supports the charges of cliquishness. Thus, Kotaku reporter Jason Schreier contacted TFYC after their fundraising page was hacked in apparent retaliation against hacker attacks on Quinn and her supporters—but never published anything about their situation or their conflict with Quinn.
3. GamerGate-related harassment and online abuse have happened on both sides.
The TFYC hacking was just one of many disturbing incidents directed at GamerGate supporters. In late September, there was a "doxxing"—net-speak for public release of private information—directed at six prominent GamerGate supporters including Yiannopoulous and Baldwin, with their "crimes" listed alongside their home addresses. Yiannopoulous also received a jiffy bag in the mail containing a syringe. Oliver Campbell, a black male videogame journalist, has written about being harassed and threatened on Twitter after he spoke out in support of GamerGate.
A young female gamergater who wanted to be identified only as Lizzy F.—she says there have been attempts to hack into her email and Twitter account—wrote to me in an email that she has experienced a stream of harassment:
I have been told to drop dead on multiple occasions, and received a threat of "I hope your windows are secure." The last statement was sent from someone who also threatened to release the home address of another female supporter. I have been called a gender traitor, a "token," all off the female derogatory slurs in the book, and even had my "woman card" revoked, somehow.
Most hurtful, Lizzy says, was the accusation of "internalized misogyny" and tweets dismissing her as a male troll posing as a female. Like many other women involved in GamerGate, Lizzy had to resort to posting a photo as proof of her womanhood.
That brings us to one more highly relevant fact:
4. Many of GamerGate's most active supporters and sympathizers are female.
Here's a fun fact: Adam Baldwin's role in GamerGate started with retweeting a post by "concerned feminist blogger" Ariel Connor (a pseudonym), or "MissAngerist" on Twitter, who wrote that she had been wrong in her earlier negative view of the anti-Quinn backlash and in her defense of Quinn. She has become one of many strong female voices on GamerGate's side.
Some feminists such as blogger Rebecca Watson have responded with a blanket dismissal of the women of GamerGate as dupes "stupid enough to join" a misogynist campaign. But a look at what these women have to say shows that they are more than capable of thinking for themselves.
One such woman, Sabrina Harris, a British technical writer and self-described "general consumer of traditionally nerdy things," recently published an essay asking writers who depict GamerGate as misogynist to "please stop erasing us." In an email to me, Harris stressed that she has never seen GamerGate support misogyny or harassment of women and that "plenty of people on the tag have actively policed" such comments when they do show up.
Interestingly, Harris not only considers herself a feminist but is quite willing to acknowledge that there are real issues of both sexism in gaming culture and sexist depictions of women in videogames. Yet she strongly believes that most feminists currently addressing these issues are doing so in a counterproductive way.
What's the real story on videogames, women, and feminism? Stay tuned for the second and last installment of this article.
Note: This version of the article incorporates a minor correction to the original, which incorrectly stated that the Kotaku editor who contributed to Zoe Quinn's crowdfunding account went on to review her game. It also contains some additional information in the first paragraph on the political profile of GamerGate supporters.
Also see Reason's Video Game Nation coverage of gaming issues.
The post GamerGate: Part I: Sex, Lies, and Gender Games appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The tragedy and turmoil in Ferguson, Missouri—the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, followed by sometimes violent protests and a heavy-handed police crackdown—have once again brought the national spotlight on race relations in America. It has also revealed unusual political alignments, with libertarian-leaning Republican Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and some other libertarians and conservatives joining liberals and leftists to denounce abusive police behavior, particularly toward young African-American males. Others on the right—not only Rush Limbaugh but black commentators such as Jason Riley—are taking a more traditional conservative view which sees the black community's worst woes as due not to racism but to its own cultural problems, aggravated by the welfare state and liberal paternalism.
Each of these narratives—"racial injustice" and "cultural dysfunction"—has its truths and its blinders. Each, by itself, is overly simplistic and (as it were) black and white, both with regard to the situation in Ferguson and with regard to the larger picture.
What are the facts in Ferguson? For starters, we can all agree that the Ferguson police department couldn't have done a worse job of handling the crisis from the start. Leaving Michael Brown's body lying in the street for hours, treating protesters and journalists like the enemy in a war zone, stonewalling on the identity of the officer who shot Brown and then releasing it together with information about Brown's involvement in a convenience store robbery—it seems as if, every time the cops had to make a decision, they made the one most likely to inflame anger.
Pending a full independent investigation, we don't know the exact circumstances of Brown's death at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson—an army of armchair experts notwithstanding. We don't know how relevant the robbery, captured on a security camera video, may be. Its disclosure, denounced as a "smear," was certainly poorly timed—and further bungled by contradictory police statements on whether Wilson knew Brown was a suspect. Still, George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf, no right-winger, argues that the video may be valid evidence: if Brown had just committed a crime, that makes it more plausible that he could have been aggressive in his encounter with the police. Given that early reports portrayed Brown as quiet and non-confrontational, withholding this information seems hard to justify from an accuracy-in-reporting standpoint. Had officials kept it from the media, there would have been a strong chance of a leak followed by claims of a politically correct cover-up.
Actual smears of Brown as a "violent gun-toting gang-banger"—based on nothing more than photos of hand gestures said to be "gang signs," most likely the posturing of a teen who wanted to be a rap artist—have appeared on some far-right websites. These and other posts in the right-wing blogosphere are a sobering reminder of how easily the "cultural dysfunction" narrative can cross the line into racism—which is thick, overt, and vile in the reader comments. Yet Brown's defenders have shown biases of their own, however well-meaning—for instance, dismissing the store robbery as "petty theft" or "shoplifting," even though the assault on the clerk who tried to stop Brown clearly raises the level of the offense to "strong-arm robbery." Left-wing activist and blogger Olivia Cole dismisses as a troll anyone who talks about waiting for the evidence and deplores (seriously!) "riot-shaming."
Beyond the specifics of the Ferguson situation, there is the bigger issue of the relationship between the police and the black community—actually, a tangled web of difficult issues.
There is the general problem of a police culture that often harbors authoritarian attitudes—starkly illustrated by the much-discussed Washington Post column by Los Angeles police veteran Sunil Dutta blaming most police/civilian conflicts on insufficiently submissive civilians—and fosters an "Us vs. Them" mentality that views citizens as a hostile element to be kept in place. Demographically, I'm very near the top of the totem pole as far as police interactions go—female, white, middle-class, conventionally dressed—but even I have unpleasant memories of a routine traffic stop during which I was brusquely told not to argue with the police officer's rather dramatic overestimate of my speed, and then ordered to state my exact destination.
In many cases, this mentality leads to the shielding of police misbehavior and lack of accountability—even when someone winds up dead. It's not just about race or even class; last week, Politico magazine published the troubling account by retired Air Force Colonel Michael Bell (who is white) of his unarmed son's shooting by a police officer during a routine traffic stop, with no consequences to the shooter. The post-Ferguson shooting in St. Louis, Missouri of a knife-wielding, mentally ill African-American man, Kajieme Powell, has prompted many comments to the effect that no white person would be so cavalierly gunned down. But one can easily find recent instances of mentally ill white people—such as South Carolina teenager Keith Vidal last January, or disabled 51-year-old National Guard veteran Brian Newt Beaird in Los Angeles last December—being shot under dubious circumstances.
What happens when race is added to the mix? There is no question that young black males are killed by the police in disproportionate numbers. African-Americans make up about 13 percent of the population of the United States; according to various statistics, they account for 32 to 41 percent of Americans killed by law enforcement and 28 percent of arrests. At least some of this gap is clearly related to the demographics of violent crime. An analysis of shootings in New York City in 2011 finds that blacks, about 22 percent of city's population, were the targets in about half of police shootings—and the suspects in 70 percent of criminal shootings in which the suspect's race was identified.
Conservative analysts, most notably Manhattan Institute fellow Heather MacDonald, argue that all racial disparities in arrest and incarceration are due to differences in crime rates and that racism in the criminal justice system is a myth. That too is an oversimplification. Some of the studies MacDonald cites actually find that the demographics of crime are the primary, not the sole, reason for those gaps; there is documented evidence of black and Hispanic defendants being treated more harshly than otherwise similar white offenders. But it's also difficult to take the liberal narrative seriously when it results in such fallacies as writer Jamelle Bouie's purported debunking of the "myth of black-on-black crime." The gist of Bouie's argument is that most violence involves same-race victims and offenders, regardless of racial group. True; but, unfortunately, it's no myth that a vastly disproportionate number of intra-racial murders in America—almost 50 percent—are black-on-black.
Commentators as different as black progressive Ta-Nehisi Coates and white conservative Charles W. Cooke have warned that to bring up black-on-black violence in the context of Ferguson amounts to "changing the subject" and "hectoring blacks" instead of confronting the fact that a young black man was gunned down by the police under highly questionable circumstances. But surely there is room to talk about both—as writer John McWhorter demonstrates in his fine recent essay on Brown's killing in The Daily Beast. Otherwise, one gets a jarring sense of cognitive dissonance when MSNBC contributor Michelle Bernard says that incidents such as Brown's shooting are par of a "war on black boys" that could turn into "genocide" with no acknowledgment that black boys are in far more danger of being killed by other young black males than by white cops or vigilantes. Few would disagree with Coates that crime in the black community exists in a historical context of white supremacy and racism. That does not make it any less vital to address these problems.
White conservatives can sound distastefully tone-deaf when discussing race, justice, and the demographics of crime (a risk of which I am well aware as I write this). Thus, in a July 2013 article in the wake of George Zimmerman's acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin, MacDonald acknowledges that law-abiding African-American men are often targets of "humiliating" scrutiny and suspicion. Then, she goes on to say, "Here's a proposal: For a good five-year stretch, blacks bring their crime rate down to white and Asian levels. Once it becomes widely understood that blacks are no more likely to steal, rob, rape, or shoot than whites or Asians, we'll see if blacks still elicit the defensive reactions." However solid MacDonald's statistics, this comes across as smug and insulting, if only because there's nothing law-abiding blacks can do to bring down black crime rates.
Yet surely white liberals like The New Republic's Julia Ioffe sound no less smug when they lecture blacks who condemn self-destructive behavior in their community on the perils of "self-flagellation" and "preaching respectability." And both liberals and libertarians can easily forget that, as grave a problem as police brutality is, violent crime takes a horrific toll on low-income minorities—not only because it hurts its immediate victims and strips others of their sense of safety, but because it ravages neighborhoods and businesses and perpetuates the poverty trap. For all the racially charged controversy about New York's stop-and-frisk policy, a poll last October found that two-thirds of the city's black residents wanted it to continue, albeit with changes.
Where do we go from here, other than waiting for the law to take its course in Ferguson? Meaningful police reform would certainly help: more cameras; curbing the use of law enforcement to boost municipal revenues through fines for petty offenses; a hard look at less deadly ways to subdue violent suspects. Most people appreciate the fact that cops have an extraordinarily demanding and stressful job. But that should not be an excuse for bullying or violence, any more than the stress of poverty is an excuse for crime. Law-and-order conservatives should remember that the principle "power corrupts" applies not only to government but to the police.
At the same time, no amount of reform can completely eliminate racial tensions around law enforcement as long as African-Americans are disproportionately involved in crime. That brings us to the much larger unfinished business of racial inequality. The "national conversation on race" is a perennial cliché. But the only way to even get that conversation started is to listen to different voices.
The post Ferguson, Abusive Policing, and Racial Politics appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last February, after Ukraine's pro-Russian president Victor Yanukovych fled the country and ceded power to a pro-Western coalition, my column on the Kiev revolution dubbed Vladimir Putin the biggest loser of that week: his efforts to turn Ukraine into a vassal state had succeeded only in turning it into an unfriendly neighbor. In March, when Russia completed its triumph in Crimea with a formal annexation, I received my share of comments pointing out, ruefully or gleefully, that the "loser" had bitten off a large chunk of Ukraine and was poised to grab more. Yet less than six month later, the Kremlin autocrat looks more and more like the proverbial emperor with no clothes—an apt metaphor given both Putin's taste for imperialism and his taste for topless posing.
The past week has been nothing but a string of bad news for Putin. In the wake of the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, almost certainly by Russia-backed and Russian-led insurgents in Eastern Ukraine, the United States and the European Union have mustered the will to impose sanctions that have some real bite.
Meanwhile, the slow-grinding wheels of justice are catching up with Putin over old crimes and misdemeanors. In a landmark decision Monday, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague, Netherlands ordered Russia to pay $50 billion to former shareholders of Yukos, the oil giant dismembered and sold off by the Russian government after its owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, ran afoul of Putin by refusing to stay out of politics. On Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France hit Russia with an additional 1.9 billion euros—over $2.5 billion—in compensation to Yukos shareholders. (If Russia does not start paying up, its assets abroad can be targeted.) Adding a minor but stinging insult to injury, the Strasbourg court also awarded almost $40,000 in damages and legal expenses to Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov over an improper arrest at a 2010 rally. The money is a drop in the bucket, but the symbolism matters.
Also on Thursday, Putin's very own version of Banquo's ghost came back to haunt him from England, where a judge opened a high-level official inquiry into the 2006 radioactive poisoning death of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. (The suspects are Russian agents, one of them now a member of Putin's toy parliament.) British authorities claim the timing has nothing to do with current events; yet, only a year ago Home Secretary Theresa May admitted that the inquiry was stalled partly due to concerns about "international relations." International relations aren't what they used to be.
There is widespread agreement that Putin stumbled badly with his plans for "Novorossiya"—the archaic, Tsarist-era term for Eastern Ukraine that he and his propagandists have dusted off. After the quick success in Crimea, met with toothless and fairly muted outrage from the West, Putin apparently hoped to use the same modus operandi in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions: having a motley crew of disaffected locals and Russian "volunteers" seize power by taking over city and regional government buildings, hold referendums, and declare independence. His goal may not have been annexation—a bit too much even for the accommodating international community to swallow—but gaining enough leverage to keep Ukraine cowed, demoralized, and unfit for European Union partnership.
As Putin learned the hard way, "Novorossiya" is no Crimea. A large percentage of Crimea's population did support unification with Russia (even if the official referendum results were bogus, as confirmed by data disclosed by a government-affiliated Russian human rights group). In Eastern Ukraine, on the other hand, widespread distrust of the new pro-Western government in Kiev did not translate into separatist sentiment: in a Pew poll in April, secession was viewed as a permissible option by only 18 percent of the region's population and 27 percent of its Russian speakers. The "referendums" in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions lacked even the patina of legitimacy that the Crimea vote had, and even Russia didn't quite have the nerve to recognize it.
The fact that the leadership of the two pseudo-republics was dominated by Russian citizens—often with ties to Russia's "special services" and with vaguely comical backgrounds of political spin doctor or battle-reenactment hobbyist—didn't help boost their credibility. Neither did their record of kidnappings and other thuggish actions. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian army was able to overcome its initial problems with organization and morale, mounting an impressive and largely successful offense against the rebels.
The shoot-down of Flight MH17, which killed 298 people on board, was both a tragic twist of fate and a natural outcome of Russia's reckless actions: creating a war zone on European soil and supplying powerful, army-grade weapons to a ragtag militia with a lot of crazy extremists, thugs, and thrill-seekers among them was bound to have unintended consequences, none of them good.
Now, commentators both in the West and in the independent Russian press note that Putin may be caught in an actual no-win situation. On the Russian website EJ.ru, political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin writes:
Who'd want to be in the boss's shoes? Instead of a thunderous Novorossiya blitzkrieg greeted by the jubilation of women, he got the quagmire of a long, bloody fratricidal war—one, moreover, that looks more and more obviously lost. Add to that the albatross of three hundred foreign dead bodies around his neck.
Right now, Putin has several choices:
(1) Ditch the insurgents, seek compromise, and risk losing face in front of the Russian public whose nationalist fervor he has whipped up: from world-defying Protector of Russians Everywhere to craven sellout on bended knee before the West. (What's more, the betrayed insurgents could come back to foment nationalist unrest within Russia.)
(2) Openly invade Eastern Ukraine on a "peacekeeping" mission—a scenario rife with obvious potential for disaster.
(3) Continue unofficially aiding the "Donetsk Republic" with manpower, firepower, and other support, creating a long-term "frozen conflict" in Eastern Ukraine. While this would not be as disastrous as open war, it would still risk even stronger international backlash, including more sanctions that could severely hurt not only Russia's economy but the personal fortunes of Putin and his crony capitalists. It could also become a non-option if the Ukrainian army manages to rout the insurgency.
So far, Putin has continued—perhaps in an attempt to stall for time—to vacillate between the "war party" and the "peace party," between saber-rattling and apparent moves to curb the nationalist madness. In recent days, Russian military units have been acting more aggressively at Ukraine's border. Yet there are also signs that the Novorossiya Plan is on its last legs.
One of its most ardent proponents, "Eurasianist" Kremlin guru Alexander Dugin, seems to have fallen out of favor; he has been dismissed as chair of the Moscow State University department of sociology, and possibly sacked altogether. A few days ago, Kommersant columnist Andrei Kolesnikov—who, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty writer Brian Whitmore, "regularly travels with Putin and is often a conduit for messages from the regime's inner sanctum to the broader elite"—wrote that Putin will cut the insurgents loose if it turns out they are definitely responsible for downing the Malaysian airplane. And on Saturday, a Moscow rally in support of Russian intervention to save "Russian Donetsk" was attended by only about 1,500 people from far-right nationalist groups, with no people bused in by official organizations (by comparison, a March 2 Moscow rally in support of Crimean separatists was about 20,000 strong).
There is a view, voiced recently in the Time cover story by Simon Shuster, that Putin has an almost supernatural ability to come out on top, growing stronger from each crisis like a mythological monster. But Shuster's analysis was based on the already-dated premise that the West would not muster the collective will to impose tough sanctions—and on the assumption that feeling the pain from Western punishment would cause Russians to rally even more loyally around their leader.
In the short term, that may be true. But I wouldn't bet on this loyalty to stand the test of real hardship. Putin's unspoken agreement with his constituency has always been a trade of civil rights and political freedoms for economic security. And that means not just the drab Soviet-era minimal-welfare state with its cramped apartments, food lines, and perennial shortages of goods, but a relatively affluent consumer society. Passionate patriots like newspaper columnist Ulyana Skoibeda may declare their readiness to "wear peasant boots" and forego "thirty different kinds of sausage in the refrigerator" for the sake of national pride and Slavic brotherhood, but it is far from certain that such sacrifice with prove popular in practice—perhaps even with those who preach it.
Meanwhile, there are many signs that Putin's billionaire pals are already chafing at the costs of his adventurism. Even before the latest sanctions, there were reports, based on German intelligence sources, of a power struggle in the Kremlin between hardliners and business leaders. Early in July, a similar report of a split between "hawks" and "doves" within Russia's power elites appeared in the Russian online newspaper Znak.com, which Russian online media analyst and Moscow Times columnist Victor Davidoff told me has connections to Kremlin insiders. Today's Russian elite, unlike the Soviet-era nomenklatura with its home-based dachas and luxury foods, has a lot to lose in the West. The latest reminder of this fact comes from reports on the U.S. properties of Mikhail Lesin, former press minister and currently head of a giant state-controlled media holding, who may soon become the target of a federal money laundering investigation. Lesin and his immediate family members own multiple residences in the Los Angeles area said to be worth at least $28 million.
The ongoing crisis may signal other troubles for Putin as well. The flirtation with separatism in Eastern Ukraine is already rousing long-simmering separatism in some Russian regions, including Siberia. The armed Russian ultranationalists and neo-fascists the Kremlin is enabling across the border may bring their fight home if they are kicked out of Ukraine, especially if they blame their defeat on Putin's inaction. Crimea has already become a money pit—the government has raided future retirees' pension funds to finance the peninsula's development—and a source of ethnic conflict.
With his stunning 86 percent approval rating, Putin may seem to be riding high. But this patriotic and imperialist fever may prove to be the start of Putinism's final crisis.
This article originally appeared at Real Clear Politics.
The post Putinism's Final Crisis? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Valeria Novodvorskaya, the firebrand Russian activist and writer who died in Moscow on July 12 at the age of 64, was practically unknown abroad and had a somewhat scandalous notoriety at home. Enemies derided her, often in crudely misogynist terms, as a demented Russia-hating hag; even many allies viewed her as something of an embarrassment, a ridiculous old woman prone to saying things that made the already marginalized liberal opposition look crazy. In death, she was quickly and almost literally canonized by the same opposition. Many said that they were only now beginning to understand what a great soul had lived in their midst, and was now gone. "The things we whispered, she said loudly," wrote former tycoon and political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. "The things we were willing to tolerate, she was not."
On the other side, some gloated about "Granny Lera" burning in hell—but others voiced respect for her courage and conviction. In a surprising gesture, Vladimir Putin, whom she had compared to Hitler long before it was fashionable, expressed condolences; prime minister and former (puppet) president Dmitry Medvedev praised not only her talent and bravery but, presumably with a straight face, her contributions to democracy in Russia. An odd piece in the pro-government Izvestia that teetered between mockery and eulogy said that she was "a walking joke" who, after she died, "forced everyone, as if by inaudible command, to take her seriously."
To say that Novodvorskaya, whom I briefly met on a trip to Moscow in 1991, was an extraordinary woman would be an understatement. She was a fighter as tireless as she was fearless, as unbowed by state reprisals as by her own failing health; she was also a powerful writer of keen intelligence and vast knowledge who wrote on history and literature as well as politics. She was a towering figure of her age; and, like many such figures, perhaps especially in Russia, she was a creature of extremes and contradictions. Her passion for freedom and justice, and her intense hatred of communism, sometimes led her to strange places. Yet fellow dissident Alexander Skobov, a democratic socialist whose views were very different from Novodvorskaya's free-market radicalism, summed it up best when he wrote that the only people with a right to judge her were those who equaled her courage in confronting tyranny.
Courage was one thing Novodvorskaya never lacked. In her 1993 memoir, On the Other Side of Despair, she recalled that at 15, she marched into the local draft board office demanding to be sent to Vietnam. She admired Joan of Arc and Spartacus, going to see the Stanley Kubrick film more than a dozen times. (Spartacus was widely shown in the Soviet Union as a glorification of the revolutionary struggle; little did the authorities suspect that it was helping nourish a rebel who would take up that struggle against them.) At 17, she read Solzhenitsyn's fictionalized account of Stalin's gulag, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and quickly concluded that the Soviet regime was as great an evil as the slavery against which Spartacus rebelled. "Instead of shedding tears," she wrote, "I regarded it as a gift from fate": she would get to be a fighter after all.
Still in high school, she spoke sedition in the classroom and wrote heretical essays, miraculously escaping trouble with the help of a few friendly teachers; after starting college, she wasted no time organizing an underground student group. The shock of the 1968 Prague Spring and its suppression by Soviet tanks further radicalized Novodvorskaya. In December 1969, at the age of 19, she threw a pack of typewritten leaflets—some with a proclamation, others with an angry poem of sarcastic thanks to the Communist Party—from the balcony of a major Moscow theater. A sympathetic usher urged her to run, but she would do no such thing; her well-thought-out plan was to get arrested, scare the KGB with tales of a large secret network of subversives, make fiery speeches at a public trial, and then get executed, shattering societal apathy with her martyrdom and willing her imagined revolutionaries into existence. "This plan took no account whatsoever of practical reality; other than that, it was perfect," Novodvorskaya noted wryly in her memoir.
Instead, the would-be Joan of Arc was quietly hustled off to prison and eventually, after refusing to repent, hospitalized for "sluggish schizophrenia"—the standard made-up diagnosis for dissidents. It was a far worse punishment than prison or labor camp; inmates were given psychotropic drugs with nasty side effects and excruciatingly painful injections. When Novodvorskaya was released in 1972, her health was broken—at 22, she had a full head of gray hair—but her spirit was not: she went right back to clandestine activities as a dissident, distributing illegal samizdat literature, trying to organize a political party, participating in a short-lived attempt to create an independent labor union. There were more arrests, more prison time, another stint in a psychiatric hospital.
In the late 1980s, came Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, and Novodvorskaya threw herself into activism with a new abandon, and with a radical message that went beyond reform to call for the dismantling of the Soviet system and a rejection of state socialism. She got arrested again, a total of 17 times between 1987 and 1991—the last time for publishing an article titled "Heil, Gorbachev!" in the newsletter of her new party, the Democratic Union. The hated regime fell; but Novodvorskaya's joy was short-lived. Boris Yeltsin's rule—during which she made her single, failed attempt to run for office—brought increasingly bitter disappointment, particularly at the war in Chechnya. Then, ex-KGB officer Putin rose to power, bringing back the Soviet anthem, crushing Chechnya, and mounting an increasingly undisguised assault on Russia's fledgling freedoms.
Novodvorskaya's worst disappointment was in the Russian people. As a young Soviet dissident, "I believed in the people," she said in a radio interview. "I sincerely believed that the people were oppressed by the Communist Party, that they were forced and threatened into submission. That, as soon as they were no longer being raped, they would immediately, joyfully, enthusiastically start taking advantage of their freedoms and rights and set about building capitalism." For a while, this faith seemed validated by the massive anti-Soviet protests of the late 1980s and the crowds that came out to defend the Russian White House against the hardline communists' coup in August 1991. By the mid-1990s, that illusion was over. In the Putin years, Novodvorskaya freely admitted that if the Russian masses rose up, it would not be to bring about the Western-style liberal democracy she idolized but some hideous hybrid of "red-and-brown," communism and fascism.
In her disillusionment, she transferred her hopes to neighboring ex-Soviet countries where she saw the spirit of freedom thriving, and where Putin's Russia was seeking to squash it: specifically, Georgia and Ukraine. In her final months, her columns for the independent website Grani.ru were filled with passion for the Maidan revolution, as well as frustration and bitterness at the West's lack of resolve to back Ukraine's struggle against Russian aggression. (While Novodvorskaya was close to libertarian views on economic and social issues—on several occasions, she expressed admiration for Ayn Rand—she was also, in American terms, an unabashed neocon, a staunch believer in American power and leadership as the world's best hope for liberty; her political icons were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, as well as Czech dissident-turned-president Vaclav Havel.)
She said eyebrow-raising, and sometimes hair-raising, things. For instance, that she would welcome an American attack on Russia: "It would be better for Russia to become a state within the United States. But I think that the Americans don't need us." Or that the Russian character was so corrupted by centuries of slavery that a mere 5-10 percent of the population had the capacity for freedom and dignity—and they were the only ones who truly mattered, while the rest were "reptiles," "amoebas" or "dinosaurs." At the end of On the Other Side of Despair, she wrote that someday Russia might be reduced to "a charred wasteland, a vast forest, or a mass grave"—but at least "there will never be a new Gulag Archipelago here."
Comments like these led many to say that Novodvorskaya was not only a fanatical Russophobe but "a Bolshevik in reverse," willing to sacrifice millions for her liberal capitalist utopia. But to a large extent, such words were the product of pain and anger—and, in part, deliberate provocation. There were other times when she wrote of Russia with a tender, unrequited strange love. A darkly funny 2009 column titled "I'm Married to Putin," in which Novodvorskaya caustically described her relationship with the Kremlin autocrat as "classic Russian family life"—spouses who can't stand each other but still share a home—ended with a poignant prophecy: "I know he'll outlive me. He's young and athletic, I'm old and sick. And then I feel scared: our sad little child, which got dropped on its head at the maternity hospital and has cerebral palsy and mental disabilities—a child called Russia—will be left in his hands, with no one to pity the poor orphan."
Sometimes, she found herself at odds with the human rights activists who were her usual allies, as she argued that absolutist notions of political freedom for all were helping empower enemies of freedom such as communists or Islamist fanatics. Yet, when a Ukrainian online magazine asked her in a 2008 interview whether there would be "hangings" if she somehow came to power in Russia, Novodvorskaya reiterated her staunch opposition to the death penalty: she would do nothing more than ban communist and fascist parties and forbid their adherents to hold public office. In a qualified eulogy for Pinochet, she insisted that the Chilean dictator deserved credit for stopping a likely communist takeover; but she also readily admitted that, had she lived in Chile, she would not have survived under his regime because she would have felt compelled to defy it. From someone else, this would have been an empty boast; in Novodvorskaya's case, no one could doubt that she meant it.
She was, inevitably, a maverick who mostly walked alone. In the Putin years, she sometimes got invited to appear on talk shows on government-run TV channels from which more even-tempered liberals, such as chess champion Gary Kasparov or former governor Boris Nemtsov, had long been blacklisted; some suspected it was a deliberate strategy to discredit the opposition, not only because of Novodvorskaya's reputation for extremism but because she was seen as an oddball.
In a society where traditional sexism is still strong and overt, her gender and her appearance made her all the more vulnerable to ridicule; a heavy woman in thick glasses, with short-cropped hair, a deep voice and an often brusque manner, she was often mocked as mannish or sexless. She met the mockery head on, defiantly sporting conspicuously feminine, almost girly clothing and jewelry—and freely admitting that she was a virgin (her life's mission, she explained, had left no place for family or romance, and sex for its own sake seemed a waste of time). She took sexism in stride—though in 2011, after years of dismissing feminism as silly, she wrote a sympathetic column about women's battle for equality. And, surprisingly often, she managed to win respect: the Russian edition of the men's magazine, FHM, which had a policy of doing extended interviews only with men who could be role models for its readership, made an exception for Novodvorskaya as "the only real man left in Russian politics."
She was often criticized for having a black-and-white outlook—and she did (though it extended only to institutions and actions, not individuals: she was flexible enough to warm up to erstwhile foes such as Gorbachev). A passionate J.R.R. Tolkien fan, she sometimes explicitly framed the battle against the authoritarian state as a Lord of the Rings-like clash of good and evil. One might say that she never outgrew teenage rebellion; many people who knew her described her as oddly childlike. And yet, under a brutally repressive system, such intransigence and moral absolutism, however naïve, may be essential to having the strength to fight and persevere against all odds. After her death, the writer Dmitry Bykov, who had once lampooned Novodvorskaya as a pyromaniac yearning to burn down the world in a cleansing fire, penned an emotional tribute to her unbreakable honor and concluded, "Surely people of this breed—rare but most necessary—cannot be extinct in Russia. Otherwise, what's the point of it all?"
There is a certain symbolism in the fact that, as Russian-Ukrainian commentator Vitaly Portnikov has pointed out, Novodvorskaya died just as the Putin regime was being fully exposed as the gangster state that she had always said it was. Some mourned her death as the end of an era, the passing of "the last of the dissidents." Others saw her life as an embodiment of undefeated freedom and hoped that her death would inspire other fighters. A widely distributed tweet (wrongly attributed to the popular singer Alla Pugacheva) said, "If a million people in Moscow turn out for Novodvorskaya's funeral and refuse to go home, Putin is done. Come on, Russians!" That did not happen; but enough people young and old turned out to say good-bye to this unique woman, standing for hours in the scorching sun, to keep the faith in her spirit. As the coffin with her body left the Sakharov Center, where the funeral was held, the crowd took up a chant: "Heroes do not die."
A version of this column originally appeared at RealClearPolitics.
The post Life and Death of a Russian Freedom Fighter appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the 1990 film Awakenings, survivors of an encephalitis outbreak are brought out of decades-long catatonic states by a new wonder drug, but then start relapsing as its effects wear off. There is a particularly poignant montage near the end of the movie in which the once-"awakened" patients are returned to wheelchairs and hospital beds and re-outfitted with adult diapers as they revert to the status of living death.
Consider it a predictive metaphor for recent events in Russia, a quarter century after the country's awakening from communism. The neo-authoritarian Kremlin regime of Vladimir Putin is closing its grip, squeezing the air out of the remaining pockets of dissent, cranking up the propaganda machine to Soviet levels, and setting up the conditions for a new Iron Curtain.
At the time of this writing, it's impossible to tell where the Russia-Ukraine crisis will lead. But one thing is clear: The spring of 2014 featured a high-water mark for Putin's post-Soviet restoration, with its overt and belligerent rejection of "Western values," its confrontational stance toward NATO, and its aggressive claim to dominance in formerly Soviet territories. As Komsomolskaya Pravda columnist Ulyana Skoibeda rhapsodized after the mostly unchallenged Russian annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, "It's not about the Crimea coming back to us. It's we who have come back. Home, to the U.S.S.R."
To some extent, this flight of patriotic fancy is exaggerated and premature. Even now, Putin's Russia is not the U.S.S.R., domestically or internationally, and it's too early to tell how lasting his momentary triumph will be. But even if Putinism lasts for only the next few years, the Kremlin's new phase threatens to make the world a markedly less free place.
The Runaway Printer
From the moment Putin reclaimed the presidency two years ago, there were signs that the repressive state he had started building in 2000 was taking a more hard-line turn after the mini-thaw of Dmitry Medvedev's faux presidency and the brief revival of an opposition during the 2012 presidential campaign. Commentators such as Andrei Kolesnikov, a columnist at Novaya Gazeta (one of the last surviving media outlets that publishes dissent), believe that Russia's "new normal" began the day before Putin's inauguration, on May 6, 2012, when a sanctioned protest march on Moscow's Bolotnaya Square became the target of a massive crackdown. After intentionally blocking the demonstrators' path and provoking a confrontation, police bashed and mauled dozens, then initiated a wave of arrests and prosecutions on charges of rioting.
In the next two months, the Duma, Russia's rubber-stamp parliament, approved harsh new measures explicitly intended to rein in dissent. One law not only imposed ruinous fines and other penalties for participation in unauthorized protests but barred anyone convicted of more than one such offense from seeking a permit for a lawful rally. Another law required nonprofits engaged in any form of activism to register as "foreign agents" if they received any money from abroad, and then indicate this status on all of their literature.
More repressive legislation came in 2013, creating penalties for insulting the feelings of religious believers and, most infamously, for "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors," which effectively banned any pro-gay expression that could be accessible to children. With bitter humor, dissenters began to refer to the Duma as "the runaway printer."
Individual opposition leaders were targeted as well, particularly Alexei Navalny, the blogger and anti-corruption activist who had become the face of the protest movement in 2011-2012, and whose populist knack for reaching ordinary Russians made him a special threat to the regime. In June 2012, Navalny was charged with embezzlement allegedly committed in 2009 when he served as advisor to the governor of the Kirov region-a case investigated and dismissed by local prosecutors only two months earlier but reopened on orders from Moscow. A year later, after a Kafkaesque non-jury trial in which the judge disallowed all 13 witnesses called by the defense, Navalny was convicted, handed a five-year sentence, and thrown in prison.
Amidst this bleak picture, there were occasional flickers of good news. For instance, Navalny was released pending appeal after some 15,000 rallied near the Kremlin to protest his imprisonment. He was even allowed to run for mayor of Moscow during the appeals process, getting nearly 28 percent of the vote in September 2013 despite a blackout in the major media. (His appeal is still pending while he faces new charges.)
And in December 2013, the Kremlin's traditional holiday amnesties and pardons included the release of Russia's three most famous political prisoners: former oil tycoon Mikhail KhoÂdorkovsky, who was granted a presidential pardon on humanitarian grounds due to his mother's illness; and two still-imprisoned members of the punk band Pussy Riot, freed under an amnesty for nonviolent female offenders with young children. Some wondered if this could be a cause for optimism, recalling that in 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev's decision to free some prominent political prisoners was a harbinger of liberalization.
But such hopes proved illusory. On New Year's Eve, the holiday spirit did not prevent more than two dozen arrests-reportedly accompanied by vicious beatings-at a peaceful protest in downtown Moscow.
By then, the domestic crisis in Ukraine was already underway, blowing a chill wind toward Russia. In mid-November, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who had won the 2010 election in large part by reinventing himself as a moderate who was both Russia-friendly and committed to his country's integration into Europe, bowed to Kremlin pressure and backed out of a trade agreement with the European Union, which had been seen as paving the way to eventual E.U. membership. The response was a surge of protest, with nonstop demonstrations on Kiev's Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), the site of the 2004-2005 "Orange Revolution" that undid Yanukovych's first victory in a fraud-riddled election, forcing a recount and ushering in a pro-Western government.
Back then, the revolution next door—viewed by Russia's power circles, and not least by Putin himself, as a coup engineered by the United States and its allies—triggered a massive spike in state paranoia and hostility toward both the West and domestic opposition. (While the previous year's "Rose Revolution" in the former Soviet republic of Georgia certainly annoyed the Kremlin, Ukraine was different: Not only is it the most populous of the former Soviet states, with nearly 46 million to Georgia's 4.5 million, but it is widely viewed by Russians as something of a mini-Russia due to close ethnic and cultural ties.)
The "orange threat," synonymous with foreign-backed subversion disguised as grassroots protest, became a standard phrase in the official Russian lexicon; neutralizing this threat was one of the government's explicit objectives in mobilizing loyalist "youth movements" such as Nashi ("Ours"), a group that combined thuggish intimidation tactics with tacky publicity stunts such as pro-Putin lingerie calendars. In late 2011 and early 2012, when the Russian opposition managed to rally Maidan-sized crowds in Moscow's streets, "orange" became the go-to government slur against the protesters.
The rebirth of Maidan, which happened just as Putin was on the cusp of realizing his longstanding goal of pulling Ukraine back into the Russian fold, inevitably prompted fresh denunciations of "the orange menace." New laws enacted in December gave the government broader powers to target nonprofits for investigation (including surprise checks of compliance with various regulations and prior official orders), and to block websites without prior judicial approval if they were deemed to encourage unsanctioned protests.
There were also moves to muzzle the last islands of independent broadcast media. In late January, the cable channel Dozhd TV, the only television outlet for non-government-approved news, became the target of both an organized social media backlash and government harassment after posting an online poll that was considered insulting to Russia's role in World War II. (The poll asked if Leningrad should have been surrendered to the Germans rather than have endured a siege that cost up to one million lives.) After the Duma ordered an investigation into the station's alleged illegal deals with cable operators, providers began dropping Dozhd from their packages and advertisers fled, raising doubts about the channel's survival.
In February, Yuri Fedutinov, the CEO and general manager of Ekho Moskvy (Moscow Echo), a radio station that has remained a unique platform for dissent despite its 2005 takeover by the government-controlled natural gas giant Gazprom, was abruptly fired. Fedutinov's replacement was Yekaterina Pavlova, who had previously held high-level posts in pro-government radio and television.
As street tensions in Kiev escalated into violence, with Yanukovych fleeing the capital in late February and Ukraine's parliament voting to remove him from office, the crackdown in Russia intensified. Navalny, facing prosecution on new charges of fraud and extortion (publicly disavowed by the alleged victim, the French cosmetics firm Yves Rocher), was placed under house arrest and forbidden to use the Internet. In mid-March, the prosecutor general's office ordered Russian Internet providers to block access to three leading opposition sites—Grani.ru, EJ.ru, and Kasparov.ru—on grounds of promoting illegal protests. When Grani.ru appealed the ban, pointing out that the order did not supply any specific examples of such promotion (other than a single screenshot of a news story on an unsanctioned protest), a Moscow court ruled that the authorities could base their decision on the site's "general tone."
Meanwhile, the "runaway printer" continues to churn out more repressive legislation. Repeated participation in unauthorized protests may now carry a sentence of up to five years in a penal colony. A freshly minted law requires bloggers to obey regulations governing the news media-including mandatory government registration-if they have more than 3,000 daily visitors. Another criminalizes "knowingly false" or even "disrespectful" claims not only about the U.S.S.R.'s actions during World War II, but about any historical events related to Russia's "military glory" or "defense of the Motherland." There is also a new ban of online obscenities, which prompted sharp-tongued writer Dmitry Bykov to wonder if this was yet another way to stop Russians from speaking the truth about their country's current situation, since "you can't say anything about it without using unprintable language."
The Rise of Russian Fascism
Some Western pundits, including foreign policy realists and anti-interventionists who see U.S. support for Ukraine's pro-Maidan leadership as a textbook example of ill-advised meddling and dubious alliance-making, contend that the Russian point of view in the Ukraine crisis has been insufficiently considered and unfairly maligned. Russia has legitimate reasons, they say, in not having hostile neighbors, not being surrounded by NATO members, and for feeling general resentment at being kicked around by the West after the end of the Cold War.
There is certainly much to debate about various U.S. and NATO actions in Eastern Europe after 1991, and the extent to which the United States should be involved today in counteracting Russia's coercion toward its neighbors. That said, it is hard to see by what moral or geopolitical principle an authoritarian crony capitalist regime in Moscow is entitled to bite off chunks of a non-consenting Ukraine.
A few years ago, retired Russian general and former arms negotiator Vladimir Dvorkin wrote in a column for EJ.ru that the real cause of the Kremlin's anxiety about NATO expansion was not fear of invasion—an absurd idea given Russia's nuclear arsenal—but fear of "encirclement" by more liberal and modernized societies, which would then exert pressure on Russia to follow the same path. In a similar vein, political scientist Andrei Piontkovsky argues that the Putin regime is a "pakhanate"—a coinage derived from pakhan, Russian underworld slang for a gang boss—intent on surrounding itself with a protective ring of copacetic "godfather states" to protect itself against change.
The idea of the bureaucratic, centralized E.U. as a beacon of liberty may seem odd to some; but for countries saddled with the legacy of communism, E.U. membership has been a much more effective path to the rule of law, civil society, and a market economy than the space under Moscow's wing. In Ukraine's post-Soviet political climate, being in favor of European integration—the principal goal of Maidan II, which became known as "Euromaidan"—is largely synonymous with being pro-freedom.
A common assertion in quarters sympathetic to Moscow's position, from The Nation to Antiwar.com, is that the West is ignoring the dangerous influence of fascist and even neo-Nazi forces on the Maidan and in the new Ukrainian government. This is the watered-down version of the Kremlin propaganda trope that Ukraine's latest revolution was in reality a fascist coup. This charge is, from all available evidence, false.
In early February, Vyacheslav Likhachev, a Russian Jewish journalist and board member of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, estimated that "radical nationalists" made up about 1 percent of the Maidan protesters. The paramilitary nationalist group Right Sector, which figures heavily in the neo-Nazi scare, became more prominent as demonstrators came under attack from Yanukovych's riot squads, and subsequently played a leading role in the defense of the Maidan. But, in the aftermath, Right Sector polled at less than 1 percent in the presidential vote scheduled for May. Most liberal Ukrainians, including Jewish leaders such as World Jewish Congress Vice President Josef Zissels—who was palpably impatient with questions about the Ukrainian far right during his appearance in New York in late April—regard the group as negligible.
The same goes for the far-right Svoboda party, which holds about 8 percent of the seats in Ukraine's parliament and (thanks to coalition politics) several posts in the interim government but doesn't stand a chance in the upcoming elections.
Ukrainian nationalism has a problematic history, particularly during World War II, when Stepan Bandera's Ukrainian Insurgent Army at times fought on the side of the Nazis and was implicated in atrocities against civilians. Today, Bandera and his followers are still viewed as heroes—albeit in mythologized and whitewashed form—by many mainstream pro-independence Ukrainians, providing fuel for the Russian propaganda effort.
Yet whatever its tainted myths, there is little doubt that today's Ukrainian revolution is on the whole a liberal, pro-Western movement. Whether it will succeed in building a functional liberal democracy, even without Russian interference, is another question; but as the post-2005 foundering of the original Orange Revolution shows, the biggest obstacle to this goal is not nationalist extremism but corruption and power-grabbing politicos.
If anything, "fascism" is a far more apt description of the current situation in Russia, with its escalating political repression and censorship, embrace of nationalism and "traditional values," and de facto government control of privately owned industry.
It could be said that, unlike Soviet communism, Putin's system does not have a clear ideological foundation. Today's pro-Kremlin discourse is a crazy stew in which "Hail to the U.S.S.R." coexists with talk of Holy Mother Russia and her mission to protect Orthodox Christians everywhere—just as pro-Russian separatist rallies in Eastern Ukraine sport portraits of Lenin right next to icons of Christ. But determined Russian pundits have tried to find patriotic method in this madness.
A few years ago, Elena Yampolskaya, managing editor of the leading newspaper Izvestia, wrote a column urging Russians to embrace both "the star and the cross"—meaning the Soviet legacy and the Orthodox tradition. Noting that "people who despise all things Soviet are usually indifferent to all things Russian as well," Yampolskaya suggested that "the U.S.S.R. was built on the Christian capacity for self-sacrifice." (If there were an Objectivist heaven, somewhere in it Ayn Rand would be saying, "I told you so!") Similar musings on the spiritual kinship of Soviet-style socialism and Orthodox Christian ethics turn up today in the ultranationalist journal Zavtra ("Tomorrow"), whose editor in chief, Alexander Prokhanov, was once relegated to the lunatic fringe but now appears in mainstream newspapers and on television.
State-approved fascism a la Russe can also be found in the "Eurasianist" philosophy of Alexander Dugin, an author, scholar, and activist who has recently come into the spotlight as a longtime champion of the Russian takeover of Crimea and opponent to independent Ukrainian statehood. (An intercepted Skype call in late March confirmed Dugin's personal involvement in fomenting pro-Moscow separatism in eastern Ukraine.) A veteran of anti-Semitic and "National Bolshevik" groups, Dugin now heads a think tank at Moscow State University and is a regular on Russian TV. Since the late 1990s, Dugin has served as official and unofficial advisor to key figures in the Duma, the government, and the ruling party (United Russia), most recently with current State Duma Chairman Sergei Naryshkin. He also has ties to the military: the editor in chief of Krasnaya Zvezda ("Red Star"), the official publication of the Russian Army, is on the board of Dugin's International Eurasian Movement.
In his writings from the 1990s, Dugin openly advocated fascism, arguing that it had not yet been tried in its true form. (Though a common enough claim for communism, to say "give real fascism a chance" takes some nerve.) Today, he no longer uses the f-word, calling himself a "traditionalist"; but the ideas remain the same. In a 2008 interview with the white supremacist American website Counter-Currents, Dugin explained that the Eurasian movement's goal is to defeat "the West's liberal hegemony," which seeks to impose its values—"the free market, free trade, liberalism, parliamentarian democracy, human rights, and absolute individualism"—all over the world. To this end, he calls for uniting "all the forces that are opposed to Western norms," from the anti-capitalist, anti-globalist left to right-wing nationalism and religious fundamentalism of various stripes. Eurasianism, Dugin asserts, is inherently "anti-universalist" and recognizes diverse value systems as long as they are hostile to the liberal order, which he describes with no trace of irony as "the face of the Beast."
Of course, Dugin's eccentric manifestoes are not official documents. Yet, disconcertingly, many of the ideas he originally advanced almost two decades ago, such as Russian Orthodoxy as the foundation of Russian national identity, now have the force of government policy. Likewise, Duginite conspiracy theories about a systematic effort by the U.S. and its "Atlanticist" allies to subvert Russian power (among other things, by bringing about the Soviet collapse) have become a staple of state TV propaganda. Notably, too, Dugin's network abroad supplied many of the international monitors for the March Crimean referendum on secession from Ukraine and unification with Russia, including a rogues' gallery of ultra-rightists such as Poland's Mateusz Piskorski, a former member of parliament whose history as a neo-Nazi propagandist was exposed by the Polish media in 2006, and Greek neo-Stalinist Charalampos Angourakis.
Putin himself has echoed the concept of "Eurasianism" as a counterweight to North American and Western European influence; indeed, his attempt to draw Ukraine into a "Eurasian Economic Union" of post-Soviet states ultimately precipitated the Ukrainian crisis. While it is unlikely that Putin or his kleptocratic entourage actually share Dugin's messianic fantasies, their quest to rebuild Russia's international influence is based on political values deeply hostile to individual and economic liberty, and dependent upon alliances with anti-freedom forces around the world.
In an insightful recent column on Grani.ru, one of Russia's newly banned websites, the veteran dissident Alexander Skobov argued that the present conflict between Russia and the West should be seen as a "clash of systems." "The essential difference between them lies in who has 'primacy': the individual or the state, society or the 'elite'?" Skobov wrote. "The conflict over this issue is not between civilizations but within each of them. Every state seeks to dominate the individual; every elite seeks to dominate society. But some countries have succeeded at developing a set of institutions that limit the power of the state and the elite over the individual and society, while others have not."
Those mediating institutions may be highly imperfect in today's liberal capitalist democracies; but Russian power unquestionably exerts a pull in the opposite direction.
Islands of Freedom
There is little doubt that Putin's authoritarian restoration at home and aggression abroad are inextricably linked in a mutual feedback loop. Even in countries with a robust tradition of freedom and a distrust of militarism, being in a state of war usually creates social and political pressures against "unpatriotic" dissent. As Moscow carried out its Crimea takeover in a proverbial cakewalk, such pressures within Russia reached fever pitch.
In his speech to the nation, Putin spoke of the opposition as a "fifth column" and as "national traitors" (using an odd phrase, natsional-predateli, that some bloggers traced to Hitler in Mein Kampf). His once-sagging approval ratings surged, with nearly 90 percent of Russians supporting the government's actions and saying that Crimea's unification with Russia made them feel "pride in their country" and "satisfaction in the victory of justice." There was a bid in the Duma to unseat Ilya Ponomarev, the sole parliament member to vote against annexation.
Yet at least for now, neither authoritarianism nor militarism has achieved full triumph. Small pockets of independence remain even in official or quasi-official structures, such as the President's Council on Human Rights, which has no authority (and is split between liberals and nationalists) but provides a public voice of dissent. In early April, the council publicly condemned the firing of Moscow State Institute of International Relations professor Andrei Zubov, who had published an article warning against a Russian invasion of Ukraine and comparing it to Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938. (After the council's statement, Zubov was reinstated in his job—probably more symbolically than not, since he is officially on leave and his contract expires this summer.)
In May, the council caused a stir by releasing a report on Crimea which not only painted a grim picture of human rights abuses by the pro-Russian local government but included real data from the March referendum, showing that only 30 percent of Crimeans turned out to vote and only half of those voted for secession. (This compares to official figures of an 83 percent turnout with nearly 97 percent voting to secede.) Though quickly removed from the council's page on the presidential website, the report has remained available on the council's own site.
And some islands of Russian media freedom live on. Echo Moskvy has retained its independent voice under the new pro-government manager—partly, editor in chief Alexei Venediktov has said, because its charter gives the staff a significant amount of control over editorial policy. Even Dozhd TV seems to have received a new lease on life after Putin magnanimously suggested during a televised chat with the people that the channel deserved another chance in spite of its error, prompting some cable operators to reopen negotiations with Dozhd management.
A number of independent online media sites continue to function, though they have taken to much stricter moderation of reader comments to avoid giving the government pretext to accuse them of fostering "extremism." (The blocked websites are still available to many Russian readers as well via mirror sites and other means to circumvent the blocks in an endless cat-and-mouse game with the censors.) Even mass protests, unthinkable in Soviet days, still manage to obtain approval: In mid-March, at the height of the push for the Crimea annexation, tens of thousands gathered for a peace march in downtown Moscow.
All these independent forms of expression may be allowed to exist primarily as window-dressing, as long as they pose no real threat to the regime and its authority; they may also be hobbled by intimidation and fear of overstepping a line. Still, they create spaces in which civil society can survive and grow.
Though the Russian state clearly has the means to shut down virtually all legal expression of dissent, for now it seems unwilling to cross the line and make an open break with the community of "respectable" nations. (While Russia has made noises about quitting the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe after having its voting rights suspended for the rest of 2014 as punishment for its Ukrainian adventure, Moscow has not actually taken that step.) This may be partly due to the peculiarity of the Russian nationalist mind-set, ever torn between claiming superiority over the weak and decadent West and wanting the West's respect and approval.
But there is another factor potentially staying Putin's hand as well: Neither Russia's emergent middle class nor most of its political power class is quite willing to pay the price of isolation.
The number of Russians who told pollsters they were "fully" or "substantially" willing to make personal sacrifices for the sake of Crimea's unification with Russia dropped from 26 percent in late March to 17 percent in mid-April. Russian officials may have conspicuously laughed off high-level U.S. and E.U. travel bans, but in late April, when Putin issued awards to 300 journalists for "objective" coverage of the Ukrainian crisis, the list was kept secret so as not to expose the honorees to penalties.
Jitters over economic sanctions targeting the Russian elites, and over the tottering Russian stock market, may have been partly responsible for Putin's apparent willingness in early May to back down from further land grabs in Eastern Ukraine. If the feared military incursion does not happen, this may turn out to be a striking vindication of the jokey Russian saying that gained currency in the 2000s: "Bablo pobezhdaet zlo," or "Dough defeats evil." Economic self-interest may drive kleptocracy, but it also keeps the powerful from wreaking too much havoc.
If Putin's empire-rebuilding quest stops at Crimea, the euphoria of quick and easy victory will not take long to wear off. Already, there are hopeful signs: Despite the propaganda blitz, Russian support for admitting secessionist regions of Ukraine into Russia dropped from close to half in mid-March to just 25 percent in mid-April. In another survey in late March, a substantial minority of almost 40 percent said they did not trust the state-run media. The potential is there for Russia's embattled dissenters to reach those of their fellow citizens who are willing to think for themselves-if they have enough room to reach out.
A Russian invasion of Ukraine, complete with an intensified crackdown at home, is still possible. And even without military adventures, the Putin regime is certain to continue its efforts to bully neighbors and silence domestic critics. An effective response from the West will require a nuanced, multifaceted approach that relies on brains more than brawn. This would include reducing Russia's energy leverage and forcing its leadership to confront the choice between transitioning to a modern information economy, which is impossible without liberalization, or falling hopelessly behind.
In any scenario, Russia's neo-authoritarian and imperialist course will be a failure in the long term, for the same reasons Soviet imperialism didn't last: Central planning produces unsustainable economic results, particularly at the edges of empire. In the shorter run, the most liberal democracies can do is find a way to engage and support pro-freedom forces within Russia while containing the Putin regime's ability to extend influence beyond its borders.
The post Putin's New Old Russia appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Efforts to legislate "affirmative consent" as the standard for college disciplinary proceedings on sexual assault, which I discussed in my last column, continue to advance. The California bill requiring colleges and universities to adopt such a standard to qualify for state student aid, S.B. 967, was overwhelmingly approved by the State Assembly's Committee on Higher Education on June 24. And now, reports legal expert Hans Bader, similar measures may be coming on a federal level. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who leads the congressional crusade against campus rape, apparently supports a definition of sexual assault that includes any sexual activity without "explicit consent"; so does the federal Office on Violence Against Women.
While the bill has been criticized across the political spectrum as an intrusive and bizarre attempt to micromanage sexuality, its defenders are mobilizing as well. They claim that "affirmative consent" is meant simply to ensure that all sex is wanted sex and that its critics are either rape-loving misogynists or misguided folks confused about what this standard actually means.
So, how convincing are those defenses?
A rather strongly worded diatribe against "rape apologists"—and, specifically, yours truly—comes from firebrand feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte on RawStory.com. According to Marcotte, I am a "professional female misogynist" who thinks that women "exist in a state of consent all the time" unless they explicitly say "no." Of course, what I actually wrote was that consent is usually given through nonverbal cues—often, especially in first-time sex, in a gradual buildup of physical contact. A woman who gives an affectionate hug in the context of a non-sexual relationship is certainly not consenting to having her breasts groped (and such an act would indeed amount to sexual assault). On the other hand, fondling a woman's breasts after an interlude of passionate kissing and touching is a normal progression of intimacy, and it's commonly accepted that it's up to the woman to object if she'd rather not move on to that level. Obviously, the same applies if the recipient of sexual touching is a man.
Marcotte, who insists that "explicit" consent need not be verbal, thinks she has caught the "anti-feminists" in a hypocritical inconsistency: asserting that consent can be signaled nonverbally while demanding a clear verbal statement of non-consent. But no one would deny that, for instance, silently removing a man's hand from where you don't want it amounts to a "no." The question is how clear non-verbal signals must be. A male college student who starts pawing a female classmate during a dorm room study session because he reads seductive intent into the way she flipped her hair or shifted her body would not qualify for much sympathy if he got in trouble. Neither should a female student who complains that her partner didn't stop when she "stiffened"—Marcotte's example—in the midst of consensual kissing and touching.
Hardly anyone would dispute that sexual assault can occur without any expression of non-consent—not only when the victim is unconscious or severely disoriented, but when the situation is inherently frightening even without an overt threat. The California Supreme Court upheld a rape conviction in such a case two decades ago in People v. Iniguez. The victim in that case was staying overnight at her aunt's place; she was awakened by the approach of the aunt's drunken boyfriend and lay frozen in shock and fear while he forced himself on her. But proponents of "affirmative consent" typically focus on far more ambiguous situations.
Marcotte also offers this charming scenario to illustrate the supposed absurdity of applying my reasoning to non-sexual social interactions:
If I, say, go to Cathy Young's house and walk in without knocking and sit on her couch and fart mightily into it while asking her if she could grab me a beer, she can't, you know, throw a fit, right? I mean, she didn't say no—in part because she had no idea I was coming, but you know, details—and we don't want to be Big Sister who is all bossing me around about the "correct" way to socialize.
Actually, home invasion is an excellent analogy. Of course you cannot walk into a stranger's home without knocking, even if the door is open. However, if a friend decides to pay me a surprise visit, rings the doorbell and announces herself without explicitly asking "May I come in?", and I stand by and let her enter, I can hardly file charges later on—even if I looked less than thrilled and half-heartedly mumbled that I'm really busy. Likewise, if the owner or occupant of a residence asks you to leave and you refuse, this legally qualifies as trespassing. But no sane person would extend this to a guest who disregards polite hints that she has overstayed her welcome. Being pushy and socially clueless is not a crime, and adults are generally expected to deal with such annoyances without help from the authorities—unless the obnoxious behavior rises to a threatening level.
More level-headedly, Tara Culp-Ressler, who covers "rape culture" for the leftist website ThinkProgress.org, concedes that there are "legitimate questions" about whether legislation is the best way to promote affirmative consent. However, she argues, "much of the hyperbolic concern over turning students into rapists and taking the fun out of sex stems from a misunderstanding about how affirmative consent actually operates in practice."
And how does it operate? Culp-Ressler quotes some New Agey rhetoric from feminist writer Jaclyn Friedman about "enthusiastic consent" being a constant state like the water in which you swim. In a way, this isn't particularly radical; contrary to what Culp-Ressler implies, our culture's standard "script" for sex is based on mutual enthusiastic participation, not reluctant compliance. (Just think of any sex scene from a movie, TV show, or book.) But it's also based on spontaneous give-and-take. By contrast, says Culp-Ressler, affirmative consent requires "both partners … to pay more attention to whether they're feeling enthusiastic about the sexual experience they're having." Most people are likely to see this as a prescription for overthinking and self-consciousness, not "better communication"; but to each their own. The problem is that the "affirmative consent" message is currently being preached through both practical and moral intimidation: the fear of penalties and the fear that you may become an accidental rapist.
While Culp-Ressler allows that affirmative consent is "a departure from the way our society often approaches sex," she thinks concerns about it are much ado about nothing. After all, she observes, if a student starts kissing his girlfriend without an explicit go-ahead, or a couple moves from foreplay to intercourse without prior verbal agreement, "those hypothetical situations aren't necessarily breaches of an affirmative consent standard." Aren't necessarily? So Culp-Ressler herself isn't sure whether the policy she is defending criminalizes most human sexual interaction? Well, worry not: "If both partners were enthusiastic about the sexual encounter, there will be no reason for anyone to report a rape later." And what if someone starts to feel ambivalent about a sexual encounter after the fact and reinterprets it as nonconsensual—especially after being repeatedly told that only an explicit, clear and sober "yes" is real consent? Culp-Ressler ignores this possibility, reiterating the usual mantras about the rarity of false accusations.
Culp-Ressler's other defense of the affirmative consent legislation is that it's no big deal because such policies are already common on college campuses (a fact I noted in my last column). But that's not very reassuring, given that, as Bader points out, these policies have led to a number of instances of male students being expelled for apparently consensual sex.
Still less reassuringly, Culp-Ressler points to the recent Yale memo that attempted to clarify the definition of nonconsensual sex with hypotheticals—some of which involved penalties for misreading minute cues. Thus, "Ansley" rebuffs "Devin's" attempt to escalate things during consensual petting, saying, "Not so fast—I'm not sure"; Devin backs off but tries again later, at which point Ansley makes no objection but "inches backward" and "lies still" during sex. (According to Yale officials, such a complaint would lead to a lengthy suspension or expulsion.) In a particularly absurd vignette, "Kai" starts to reciprocate a sexual act without looking to "Morgan" for a nod signaling a clear go-ahead—an offense deemed worthy of a reprimand, even if Kai stops immediately when Morgan asks.
In the end, Culp-Ressler's argument boils down to this: A rule so murky that even its advocates aren't sure exactly what it means or how it will work, and which allows virtually any sexual encounter to be reclassified as a violation after the fact, is not a problem because people can be trusted not to abuse it. What could possibly go wrong?
This article originally appeared on Real Clear Politics.
The post 'Affirmative Consent': The Sex Police on the Defensive appeared first on Reason.com.
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