April 7, 2022 33reporters holding back incendiary rev-
elations about influential people; ac-
tors eliminating lines so their theaters
can stay open; humor being deployed
to imply what cannot be said openly.
Berkowitz hardly mentions any of these
stratagems or subterfuges. He does al-
lude to Shakespeare, mostly to show
how publishers cut potentially seditious
scenes or how Bowdler purged words of
the Bard as “unfit to be read aloud by
a gentleman to a company of ladies.”
Absent is any examination of the ways
in which Shakespeare shaped his plays
with an eye to the Master of the Rev-
els, whose approval was necessary for
performances. It could be argued that
his fear of state intervention influenced
how Macbeth or the Roman tragedies
cunningly engage in politics.
It is under the shadow of censorship
that many of humankind’s greatest cre-
ations have been forged by those who
chose neither the exemplary death of
martyrdom nor the death-in-life that
is often the result of banishment. Ri-
cardo Piglia, for instance, stayed in
Argentina (a country unmentioned
by Berkowitz) and produced Artificial
Respiration, one of the masterpieces of
experimental fiction in Latin America.
In that novel, without once alluding to
the Dirty War raging around him, he
denounced the disappearance of thou-
sands of his compatriots and dissected
the grinding machine of censorship that
was trying to silence the survivors.^5
An entire book could be written
about these and other surreptitious
strategies of communication. It is not
the book Berkowitz set out to write.
This is not because he is unaware of
how ingenuity can outwit the overseers
and smuggle offensive material into
the mainstream, or because of a lack
of sensitivity to the intricacies of liter-
ary expression, as proven by his subtle
approach to Flaubert and Baudelaire.
If he sidesteps the vast gray areas of
human creativity, it is because he is
singularly focused on those heroes and
heroines who refused to submit to the
dictates and biases of their time. The
fact that their works are still with us
today hammers home the central thesis
of Dangerous Ideas: censorship is ulti-
mately futile and cannot permanently
extinguish the thirst for freedom of
expression.
Berkowitz has assembled a stirring
cast to demonstrate this point. There
is Margaret Sanger, arrested in 1914
because, in violation of the notorious
Comstock Act, she wrote a sex educa-
tion column, What Every Girl Should
Know, that was distributed through the
mail. Berkowitz writes: “The column
was suppressed; a blank box was put
in its place that read ‘What Every Girl
Should Know—nothing, by order of
the United States Post Office!’” Sanger
was not dissuaded and doggedly kept
campaigning for women’s reproductive
rights.
Just as admirable in his defiance,
though less to my liking, is the fanat-
ical English lawyer William Prynne,
sentenced in 1634 for seditious libel
and thereafter “pilloried, fined, im-
prisoned, and deprived of his ears,”
because of his hysterical criticism ofthe indecency of plays, actresses, and
spectators. Revelry of any sort, he
believed, was an abomination, con-
demned by the Scriptures. The fact
that Berkowitz chooses someone with
whom he strongly disagrees accentu-
ates the need to respect adversaries
whose views we find distasteful. More
inspiring is Titus Labienus, a victim of
Rome’s draconian decrees against sat-
ire. Though he committed suicide after
“his entire oeuvre was set aflame,” his
friend Severus was true to his memory,
declaring, “If they really want to de-
stroy the works of Labienus, they must
burn me alive. For I have learned them
by heart!”This solidarity that preserves a perse-
cuted person’s work for future readers
is crucial in the eternal battle to defeat
censorship. It is what happened with
Giordano Bruno, defiant even when he
was burned alive, along with his books,
in 1600 in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori.
Others hid his books and passed them
from hand to clandestine hand until the
world was ready to celebrate them.
Berkowitz fills many pages with
those who, from the relative safety of
their privilege, expanded the borders
of free speech. There are thinkers who
began to map out the need for protect-
ing destabilizing ideas (John Milton,
Baruch Spinoza, John Stuart Mill,
Benjamin Franklin, James Madison,
Leslie Stephen, and the lesser-known
William Walwyn and Thomas Maule)
and the legislators, judges, and activists
(Charles Pinckney, Richard and Jane
Carlile, and Supreme Court justices Ol-
iver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis,
Robert Jackson, and Hugo Black) who,
through a series of tentative steps, cre-
ated laws guaranteeing the liberty to
speak our minds that some of us take
for granted today.
As is evident from the names just
listed, Berkowitz centers this slow
progress primarily in England and
the United States, an emphasis that I
can appreciate, having found refuge
here from the Pinochet regime. And
yet I would have preferred that less
attention be lavished on the details of
judicial wrangling and political and
legislative accomplishments in these
nations to make space for other parts
of the world.
Spain, for instance, despite being
part of the “West,” is almost entirely
neglected. Surely General José Millán
Astray’s ominous words in 1936 at the
University of Salamanca—“Down with
intelligence! Long live death!”^6 —are
worthy of inclusion, especially as they
anticipated what awaited the nation
that was one of the post–World War
II allies of the “free world” and yet
applied to its citizens, in the name of
god, civilization, and the purity of the
family, a ferociously comprehensive
system of censorship whose boundar-
ies were constantly tested by struggling
intellectuals and artists (for example,
the filmmakers Carlos Saura and Luis
Berlanga).Something similar could be said
about South Africa, which merits one
paragraph from Berkowitz on Steve
Biko without probing, even in passing,
some of the richest examples of resis-
tance in literature, theater, music, and
graffiti of the twentieth century.^7 Brazil
is touched upon, mainly in order to de-
nounce the mistreatment of an Amer-
ican, Glenn Greenwald. I deplore that
persecution but lament the absence of
the many Brazilians who risked their
lives fighting censorship. Berkowitz
employs the same anecdotal tactic re-
garding Israel, where the suppression
of one Israeli author’s book in Arabic
on the intifada is mentioned, but not
a word about the flagrant persecution
of Palestinian journalists or the con-
straints on the kind of news that can be
published in that country and the ruses
used to foil these limitations.
Lip service is paid to the colonies
that gained independence after World
War II in a page on Indonesia that,
welcome as it is, cannot make up for
the omission of so many other coun-
tries where democracy is besieged but
dissident voices find a way of shrewdly
expressing themselves. Think of what
we can learn from the Arab world,
Vietnam, South Korea, Nigeria, India,
and Sri Lanka, just to name a few. This
dearth is even more regrettable be-
cause, as democracy is besieged every-
where and crises loom ahead—war and
plagues, mass migration, and climate
apocalypse—the temptation to censor
and control will increase exponentially.As I read through Berkowitz’s wide-
ranging overview, I could not help but
notice parallels with our own time. Au-
gustus Caesar forbade satiric insults
against his person, and millennia later
Winnie the Pooh was banned in China
because apparently the portly, lovable
bear was being used by dissidents to
mock President Xi Jinping. The Su-
preme Court in 1920 upheld the sentenc-
ing of the Socialist Eugene Debs to ten
years in prison for “a speech denouncing
[World War I] as a capitalist plot,” and
the ayatollahs of Iran, a century later,
imposed harsh sentences on Arash
Ganji for translating a book on the
Kurdish struggle in Syria, and on others
like Nahid Taghavi and Mehran Raoof
for “propaganda against the state.”
The British government in 1792
sought to put Thomas Paine on trial
for his seditious writings, forcing that
hero of American Independence and
supporter of the French Revolution to
flee the country of his birth; more than
two hundred years later came the dis-
quieting news that my friend Sergio
Ramírez, Nicaragua’s most prominent
living author, whom I had met when
we were both in exile, had been forced
again to wander the earth, this time be-
cause President Daniel Ortega, the man
he had served as vice-president in the
Sandinista government, had ordered
his arrest for “acts that foment and in-
cite hatred and violence.” All the more
depressing because Ortega himself hadonce been a revolutionary jailed for
fighting for freedom—as depressing as
news from Cuba that its government is
harassing artists and dissidents.
The parallels seem endless: heretics
murdered in Tudor England and jour-
nalists murdered in today’s Russia, the
shaming of dissidents in Puritan Massa-
chusetts and the shaming of professors
with controversial views in our times,
the Nazis’ use of force to “compel cul-
tural homogeneity” and House Bill
3979 in contemporary Texas forbidding
the teaching of critical race theory in
schools—a not- so- covert way of stop-
ping students from discovering the deep
roots of white supremacy in America’s
past.^8 And, of course, recent book
burnings echo the pyres of yesteryear.^9
Berkowitz has wisely decided not
to be distracted by the alarming con-
tinuities between past and present,
waiting until a brilliant final chapter
to describe the many persecutions that
still threaten us while also emphasizing
how much has changed, as well as the
new challenges brought about by seis-
mic alterations in “the nature of infor-
mation and its transmission,” akin to
what happened after the invention of
the printing press. Inspired, perhaps,
by the fearless predecessors he ad-
mires, he does not shy away from any
number of controversial issues. Most of
them derive from the paradox that the
Internet—initially hailed as “a technol-
ogy of freedom”^10 that would let “all
voices be heard in equal measure”—is
now “marred by hate, threats, data pri-
vacy breaches, and fake news driven
by bots, troll armies, and unseen ac-
tors,” forms of online speech man-
aged by “self-serving corporations...
whose readiness to manipulate people
is matched by their platforms’ suscep-
tibility to exploitation.” “It may be
time,” Berkowitz declares, “to rethink
some cherished assumptions” about
unrestrained discourse.
How to balance the need to restrict
hate speech with the need to safeguard
people’s right to express repulsive, im-
moral, toxic, and, yes, dangerous ideas?
How to deal with evident falsehoods that
poison today’s polarized electorate and
undermine democracy? How to make
sure that the need for new ways of includ-
ing racial and social equality in our com-
mon conversation does not lead to the
false innocence of hygienic “safe spaces”(^5) For more on Piglia, see Adam Thirl-
well, “Imaginary Conspiracies,” The
New York Review, July 19, 2018, which
analyzes his “technique of the implicit,
the unsaid.”
(^6) See my analysis of how these phrases
reflect on Trump’s attitude toward sci-
ence and truth in “Trump’s War on
Knowledge,” nybooks.com, October
12, 2017; and “I Warned of Trump’s
Attack on Science. But I Never Pre-
dicted the Horror That Lay Ahead,”
The Guardian, April 20, 2020.
(^7) See J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense:
Essays on Censorship (University of
Chicago Press, 1996); André Brink,
Mapmakers: Writing in a State of Siege
(London: Faber, 1983); and Margreet
de Lange, The Muzzled Muse: Liter-
ature and Censorship in South Africa
(John Benjamins, 1997).
(^8) For those interested in current vio-
lations of free expression, some re-
sources: PEN America’s Freedom to
Write report; the Committee to Protect
Journalists; International Emergency
Campaign to Free Iran’s Political Pris-
oners; Project Censored: The News
That Didn’t Make the News; and Index
on Censorship (full disclosure, I am a
member of its advisory committee).
(^9) For example, seminarians in Boone,
North Carolina, consigning to the
flames books that question the tradi-
tional teachings of the Catholic Church;
authorities in Ontario setting fire to five
thousand books, including copies of the
comics Tintin and Asterix, because they
denigrated indigenous peoples; and offi-
cials in China burning “illegal” and “bi-
ased” books at a state-run library. On
the recent banning of Art Spiegelman’s
Maus by a Tennessee school board, see
Tom Engelhardt, “My Life with Maus,”
tomdispatch.com, February 17, 2022.
(^10) The term comes from Ithiel de Sola
Pool, Te c h n ol ogies of Freedom (Har-
vard University Press, 1983).
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