Russian censorship | The Perfect Response

_{Current Taboo Terms in Federal Agencies}

We have recently been told by the Trump administration that “improper ideologies” are taught in our schools, universities and cultural institutions.

Lately the Trump administration has taken interest in the exhibits and narratives at some of the nation’s premier museums. Notably, even the Smithsonian Institution has come in for criticism from MAGA dogmatists for going beyond “objective facts” with “distorted narratives driven by ideology rather than the truth.” In a word, they seem unhappy that the nation’s major historical blunders have become part of our shared history: events no longer sufficiently papered over by older and more sentimental narratives. Hence, we get lists of terms (above, collected by the New York Times) that agencies are discouraged from using. Actor Jack Nicholson’s Col. Nathan R. Jessep could have been talking to the MAGA faithful in the film A Few Good Men (1972) when he told other officers “You can’t handle the truth!”

The unspeakable horrors visited on native Americans, and the centuries long struggle of African Americans for freedom and a piece of the American dream are just two of the historical realities that have been traditionally finessed. Even with more grit in modern western films, we still warm to the favored manifest destiny in How the West was Won (1962) than narratives about the Sand Creek Massacre in eastern Colorado. A marker on the barren plains and a Wikipedia Post remain. But the murder of 750 native American men, women and children in 1864 is history that I never encountered as a student in Denver.

What do we do with atrocities committed in the name of a society we want to celebrate?

We have recently been told by the Trump administration that “improper ideologies” are taught in our schools, universities and cultural institutions, mostly meaning that new and less fantasized cultural sensitivities are now part of the curriculum. The awkward phrase reads like a line in Mao’s Little Red Book, or boilerplate lifted from an old Soviet training manual. Its use suggests a person or group reaching for good reasons where there are none.

Events can be affirmed or disputed, but ideologies cannot be fully grounded in empirical data. Each of us engages with aspects of ideological premises as we form our foundational beliefs to navigate the world. Ideologies are also not monolithic; they emerge from our unique political and social histories. Given the conventional usage of the term, can we truly label certain ideologies as “improper”? This notion is akin to accusing someone of possessing a “vivid imagination” or offering an “imprecise estimate.” In both cases, the initial adjective suggests—yet fails to provide—a definitive benchmark for assessment. We can manipulate language to mask the inherent contradictions between concepts, but ultimately, these distortions reflect an unfounded yearning for certainty. In authoritarian regimes such as Russia authorities can penalize the expression of “improper” ideas. Yet, ideas function as cognitive tools—they can embody thoughtful or dubious insights, but they should never be deemed “improper.”

Draconian sanctions against certain ideas are small-minded. It is disheartening to hear an American administration endorse this kind of rhetorical beast. Its sudden presence in our official rhetoric is unamerican and another reason to admire the built-in give and take in parliamentary systems that would expose “improper ideologies” as a semantic monstrosity.

Anyone in an open society has the advantage of seeing what Putin and his nation cannot. One of the glories of an open society is that information travels easily and mostly unencumbered.

American intelligence reports note that Vladimir Putin has functionally locked himself and his nation behind a media firewall, afraid to let his citizens hear what the world knows. The Russian dictator is notorious for keeping his own council. But it seems worse this time, with many of his aides apparently willing to be the bearer of bad news. So even though he has initiated the human catastrophe of the Ukraine war, he and many Russians may still know little of the horrors that have been unleashed. As the New York Times’ Tom Friedman recently noted, “Putin, it turns out, [has] no clue what world he was living in, no clue about the frailties of his own system, no clue how much the whole free, democratic world could and would join the fight against him in Ukraine, and no clue, most of all, about how many people would be watching.” Meanwhile, most of the gains Russia achieved in the last 20 years are being rolled back by sanctions imposed by the world’s democracies.

By contrast, ordinary citizens in most of the rest of the developed world could fill him about the aimless marauding of the Russian Army. Most anyone in an open society has the advantage of seeing what Putin and his nation cannot. One of the glories of free societies is that information travels freely and mostly unencumbered. The democracies of the world take access to a multitude of sources doing credible reporting as their birthright. Individual sources may not always be accurate. But without much effort, citizens can “triangulate” between multiple sources to find truths that seem to be reasonably solid. If a conservative-leaning source confirms the same conclusion as a more liberal outlet, we can judge that the news is probably accurate. If one outlet plays favorites, a thoughtful reader–and their are too few–will cross check with other sources before reaching a conclusion.

Now, imagine living in a prison where the only loudspeaker ever heard is controlled by the guards. Welcome to North Korea or Russia, trying to impose the medieval values of top-down control on their citizens.

In no particular order, here are some easily accessible news-gathering outlets, available mostly for free to Americans via their ubiquitous computers, and key websites like YouTube. All outlets on this partial list are doing original reporting in English from Ukraine and Eastern Europe: