What Arthur Miller said about Free Speech in 1980 and Why We Shouldn’t Stop Social Media from Carrying Lying Propaganda Emanating from Russia

What Arthur Miller said about Free Speech in 1980 and Why We Shouldn’t Stop Social Media from Carrying Lying Propaganda Emanating from Russia

By

David Gottfried

In 1980, I attended a talk that Arthur Miller gave in a synagogue on the Upper West Side of  Manhattan.   Apparently, he enjoyed shocking people because he said that there was more freedom of speech in the Soviet Union than in the United States.  After he savored the astonishment and outrage he had provoked, he gave us one of the most incisive and blessedly brief discourses on free speech that I have ever heard:

He said that the Soviet Press lied all the time.  He said that the Soviet Union suppressed free speech.  However, he said that state suppression, along with perhaps a healthy Russian inquisitiveness and disputatiousness that made them seem more boisterous and raucous than Americans, taught the Russians not to believe the state and to think for themselves.  Whereas Americans were often so apathetic and intellectually lazy that they often never read a newspaper (Nowadays, we have the internet, but most people just look at picture of events in the news or porn), Russians devoured Samizdat, or the underground press.  By analyzing the lies with sophistication and verve, they were often able to arrive at a rough approximation of the truth.      

In part, Americans did not bother reading the news because Americans were sure their government looked out for them and “had their back.”    In the beginning of the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville  hit the nail on the head:  Americans are so sure that their government is benevolent that they do not question their government and become like little children, pliable and easily lied to.    Although we celebrate our imagined individuality and pesky rebelliousness, it is contrived and artificial.  Most radical phenomena, from fashion trends to foreign policy tenets, are very quickly neutralized by the center right consensus. For example,  in the late fifties and early sixties long hair was associated with rebelliousness, but starting in around 1970 long hair became styled, as silly as David Cassidy on the “Partridge Family,” and something that even articles in Redbook praised.  In 1977, punk rock and the idea of punk was seen as rebellious, but by 1981 stores on 8th Street were selling ripped t shirts that bore the word “punk” for several hundred dollars and the silly rich kiddies who bought them were making rich entrepreneurs, and grotesquely richer realtors, much richer.   “Activists” who toil in the Democratic Party elect Presidents who always choose, as secretary of the treasury, a thief from Goldman Sachs. 

Since most supposedly progressive organs of America eventually sing the tune favored by the state, the people were fed a steady diet of fake news long before Trump coined the term.   Whereas the Russian people damn well knew they were dominating Eastern Europe, Americans actually believed that we were fighting in Vietnam to defend the Vietnamese.   The thoroughly coopted and phony liberal New York Times adamantly supported the war in the beginning. extolling our alleged war for freedom.   While Americans believed fictions, the rest of the world knew that we were fighting the majority of the Vietnamese people, North and South, who much preferred a government that wasn’t run by stooges of the West.  Indeed, Eisenhower commissioned a poll that showed that 80 percent of the Vietnamese supported the communist leader, Ho Chi Minh – of course neither CBS nor NBC nor  ABC ever accosted your innocent, virginal ears with such stark information. 

Most of our killing was committed not in North Vietnam, which our lying government castigated as the communist aggressor, but in South Vietnam, which we said we were aligned with, where vast swaths of the land mass were free fire zones where we killed anything which moved, where according to Bobby Kennedy, in November of 1967, we killed one thousand innocent civilians a week,  where millions of peasants were forced to leave their villages and live in special institutionalized towns where they could be watched and prevented from assisting the communists, and where we most ignobly produced the first anti-personnel weapon in human history, a sort of bomb which, when dropped, would explode and release hundreds of tiny knife-like objects which were extremely difficult to extract from the human flesh they mangled.

In any event, what does this have to do with Facebook’s Russian Propaganda for Donald Trump?

Very simply, the American people are politically naïve and almost, to put it bluntly, downright stupid.  Realpolitik is something they have never heard of.  They are so freaking stupid that I have heard voters say, and have read articles in which voters have said, that they liked a candidate because he looked “dreamy,” knew how to shake hands like a real man, talked “real down home, like a Preacher,” and think they would like to watch television with a candidate.  

In any event, instead of censoring Facebook, we should educate the American people so they can recognize bullshit when they see it.   I subscribe to a view of free speech which holds that all ideas should be allowed expression and that the good sense of the people will be able to  distinguish truth from delusion.   To give the people good sense, they need to get educated and fast.   If you doubt my contention that we are a nation of urbane and spoiled stupid apes, just go on you tube and witness the steady dumbing down of political speeches.   There was a time when politicians quoted Latin, alluded to great works of literature and made intelligent arguments.  Now politicians specialize in sounding folksy and down to earth.  They bore me to death with platitudinous horseshit, telling us that they want peace and prosperity.  Amazing.  I thought they were going to say they seek war and poverty. 

In any event, we have to take the American people out of elementary school and make them at least as intelligent as an average eighth grader in the days of Harry Truman (He never went to college, but he learned Latin and Greek in High School, and he learned those languages while plowing the fields on the family farm).   The edification of America is a prerequisite for democracy.  

We should not install a journalistic regime in which media outlets are forbidden form broadcasting anything other than the government approved truth.    Very simply, what is true is very much a matter for debate.    I would hate to regress to the fifties and the first half of the sixties when Americans were chastened to believe  in one absolute and utter lie that masqueraded as gospel truth.  I would hate to resurrect the sick mind set of August of 1964 when Lyndon Johnson lied to the nation by telling us that North Vietnam attacked our vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin, and the nation obediently gave him an unfettered right to annihilate Southeast Asia.   Of course, the idea that North Vietnam would have attacked United States vessels and thereby incur the wrath of a nation infinitely bigger than North Vietnam was absurd.  Besides, at that time, the communists were steadily gaining and seemed poised to liberate all of South Vietnam by 1965.  North Vietnam had no reason to arouse American ire and invite American bombs and ground troops.    The American willingness to believe this delusion was a testament to their political infantilism.   PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON’S ASSERTION THAT NORTH VIETNAM HAD ATTACKED THE UNITED STATES WAS AS HUGE A LIE AS HITLER’S ASSERTION THAT POLAND HAD ATTACKED GERMANY.