America’s censors have committed their Guernica The culture war was won years ago

It’s hard to understand how someone could read Chen’s words and see a woman who is “speaking for power”, and blind to the plight of the Palestinians, let alone defending genocide. “There is a limit to which the human soul can stomach atrocities and keep going,” she writes, in a paragraph that mentions both the October 7 slaughter by Hamas terrorists and the ongoing massacre in Gaza. The essay, which has since been republished by Washington Monthly, is interspersed with lines of poetry by Palestinian writers, people Chen knows personally from having translated their work, and also describes her ongoing work as a volunteer driving Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals. But of course, most of the essay’s fiercest critics didn’t read it, at least not comprehensively — and of course, not reading it was exactly what they wanted everyone else to do. That’s the thing about censors: they don’t really care what you’re saying. They just want to stop you from saying it.

In truth, the most interesting thing about Guernica‘s collapse is how familiar its contours seem. The substance of the controversy changes, but its shape remains the same. There was the cherry-picking of one allegedly offensive line — in this case, Chen grimacing as a friend tried to comfort her children by describing the sounds of rocket fire as “good booms” — which was then repeated ad nauseam, like a magic password that allowed critics to condemn the essay while bypassing any actual engagement with its content. A search for the phrase “good booms” on X is an illuminating, if depressing, reminder that what you cannot bring yourself to read charitably you will also inevitably struggle to comprehend — and that even the most literate among us are not above pretending, for the sake of tribal signalling, to have the intellectual capacity of a turnip.

But of course, this was just step one; eventually, and particularly if a backlash has begun to brew, the censors will pivot to a litany of secondary indictments: a lack of oversight by the editor (“A rigorous editorial process might have produced something worth reading!”), an error in the publication process (“Only one editor saw it!”), the quality of the censored work (“It’s not even good!”).

For those of us who come to these debates based on a sincere and principled commitment to free expression, this rhetorical barrage is disorienting; it’s like being invited to a scrimmage only to find your opponent repeatedly picking up the goalposts and carrying them all over the field, jeering at you over their shoulders for wanting to play in the first place. It would be almost hilariously bewildering, if it weren’t so damned bleak. The journal editors who are supposed to be the custodians of the literature that allows us to know ourselves, our world, and each other — people who spend their lives bewailing the dangers of book bans from the Right — become a pack of sneering authoritarian bullies when confronted by work that dares to empathise with anyone but their chosen side. The artists who are supposed to be our truth-tellers, our rule-breakers, whine that a story wasn’t subject to proper editorial process, like a snotty bureaucrat sending you to the back of the line because you didn’t properly fill out Section 320A of Form 981 at the DMV.

It doesn’t matter if the story was good; it doesn’t even matter what the story was about. Anyone who cares about art, and especially the ones who care about it enough to make it, knows this for the cringing, callow conformity it is. It is — or at least, it should be — utterly beneath us.

A common criticism of Israel is that, in its treatment of the Palestinians, the country has become the thing it once hated. This seems too facile to adequately describe the complexities of a conflict thousands of years old, in which all parties involved have suffered, and struggled, and spilled the blood of others as surely as others have spilled their own. But it could perhaps describe the current state of the arts in America, in this moment of absolute hegemony by the Left in every place where culture is produced — and in which the flag of the progressive cause can be found literally flying over everything from corporate headquarters to the White House.

We call this a “culture war”, but in truth, it feels like that war has been over for some time, and that the Guernica controversy is just the latest flex by a regime that has been in power for over a decade. Consider how long we’ve lived in thrall to the shrieking, puritan mode of cultural critique first advanced on the Your Fave Is Problematic Tumblr. Consider how long we’ve been policing books and films for “harmful tropes”, or obsessing about the racial makeup of the Oscar nominees. Consider that it was 2017 when progressive folk hero Roxane Gay effectively torpedoed HBO’s Confederate, an alternate-history drama led by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, by calling it “slavery fanfiction” in the pages of the New York Times.

I often think about Confederate. Who knows: maybe the concept was, if not slavery fanfiction, too flawed to pull off. Maybe it would have been in truly bad taste. But maybe it would have been interesting, or provocative, or even great — and we’ll never know.

This, too, is the thing about censorship: at its worst, it isn’t just about one book, one film, one painting going up in flames. At its worst, it yanks the paintbrush from the artist’s hand before he’s painted a single stroke, all for fear of what he might create. It’s why, even now, it still seems so strange and terrible to me that so many of these avid censors are often artists themselves. The one-time counterculturalists who overthrew the scolds of the Moral Majority, ascending into power through the sheer audacity of their art, their stories, their songs — how long did it take before these same people started using their newfound influence to silence the voices of the artists they didn’t like? A year? Five years? Was it always going to be thus?

Maybe. What matters, I think, is that we are fully living on the other side of that moment, and have been for a while. The spasms of the past few years, whatever you want to call them — wokeness, cancel culture, something else — were not a power struggle, but the aftermath of one: the part where the winner shows his strength and supremacy by stamping his boot on the faces of the losers, not forever, but certainly until everyone knows exactly who’s in charge.

Seen this way, what happened at Guernica is simply what has been happening. Not a revolt from below, but a reminder from above of who holds the power, the influence, and the censor’s pen in their hot little hands. That Guernica has published nothing since the meltdown over Chen’s essay seems less like accidental fallout, and more like things going exactly as planned.

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Kat Rosenfield is an UnHerd columnist and co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast. Her latest novel is You Must Remember This.

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