{"id":83900,"date":"2021-02-18T17:05:22","date_gmt":"2021-02-18T15:05:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=83900"},"modified":"2021-02-12T09:55:59","modified_gmt":"2021-02-12T07:55:59","slug":"18-05-56","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=83900","title":{"rendered":"Death to Me!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Death to Me!<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

DAVID MIKICS<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Police photographs of Grigori Zinoviev, taken by the NKVD after his arrest, 1934WIKIMEDIA\/NKVD<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

And here I stand before you in filth, crushed by my own crimes,\u201d confessed Yuri Pyatakov in January 1937, \u201cbereft of everything through my own fault, a man who has lost his Party, who has no friends, who has lost his family, who has lost his very self.\u201d Pyatakov, once the head of the Soviet State Bank, admitted his crimes of Trotskyism and Hitlerism after a month of being tortured by an old friend, Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet the accused in Stalin\u2019s show trials confessed for many reasons beyond the rigors of interrogation and torture. Sometimes they hoped to save themselves or their families through an energetic performance, as in the cases of Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, Stalin\u2019s old allies, who were judged and executed during the 1936 Moscow Trials. (\u201cSome hoped to save their heads, others at least to save their wives or sons,\u201d Arthur Koestler wrote.) Sometimes they found it unthinkable to betray the party, even if they had lost faith in Stalin. As Nikolai Bukharin, once Stalin\u2019s equal in the party leadership, remarked in 1935, \u201cIt is not [Stalin] we trust but the man in whom the Party has reposed its confidence.\u201d Trotsky himself declared in 1924, before he became Stalin\u2019s archenemy, that \u201cwe can only be right in and through the Party, for history has provided no other way of being right.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The ice-cold logic of Marxism dictated that it was impossible to dispute, or even wish to dispute, the will of the party. As Pyatakov wrote, \u201cFor such a Party a true Bolshevik will readily cast out from his mind ideas in which he has believed for years.\u201d The party was a lifeline, a mother, a god. Bukharin said, \u201cFor three months I refused to say anything. Then I began to testify. Why?\u201d Bukharin explained that \u201can absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness.\u201d You have to give your death a meaning, and the only real meaning is to sacrifice yourself for the party in whose will you long ago drowned your own.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bukharin\u2019s remarks were the seed of Koestler\u2019s\u00a0Darkness at Noon<\/em>\u00a0and Orwell\u2019s\u00a01984<\/em>. Koestler went on to stress the basis for the Bolsheviks\u2019 guilt feelings, namely their constant betrayals and murders. Bukharin and so many others had blood on their hands, and their confessions were a way to expiate their real crimes.<\/span><\/p>\n

The role that public confessions play in demonstrating and validating the power of ideologies that refuse any criticism is worth revisiting for the obvious reason that such confessions are now part of our culture, too. Now, as then, the most baffling and disturbing aspect of these confessions is the enthusiasm with which the accused embrace their supposed guilt.<\/span><\/p>\n

Many have wondered why the Soviets spent so much time procuring confessions at all. The answer is clear: In the absence of real evidence and reporting, public confessions helped buttress the credibility of the system. Even skeptics might think there was a grain of truth to the charges. And the outside world was, for the most part, easily convinced.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last Friday, Donald G. McNeil Jr., a science reporter for\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0since 1976, and one of the mainstays of the paper\u2019s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic\u2014a matter of life and death for millions of people around the planet\u2014was forced to leave the paper. \u201cDean and Joe\u201d (Dean Baquet, the paper\u2019s executive editor, and Joe Kahn, managing editor)\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0staffers that McNeil had cited a racial slur in a conversation with two high school students, and therefore had to go, since \u201cWe do not tolerate racist language\u00a0regardless of intent<\/em>\u201d (italics mine; I will come back to those words\u00a0later<\/a>). The editors then helpfully appended McNeil\u2019s resignation letter to their email:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

To the staff of The Times:<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

On a 2019 New York Times trip to Peru for high school students, I was asked at dinner by a student whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used a racial slur.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I should not have done that. Originally, I thought the context in which I used this ugly word could be defended.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I now realize that it cannot. It is deeply offensive and hurtful. The fact that I even thought I could defend it itself showed extraordinarily bad judgement. For that I apologize.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To the students on the trip, I also extend my sincerest apology. But my apology needs to be broader than that.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My lapse of judgment has hurt my colleagues in Science, the hundreds of people who trusted me to work with them closely during this pandemic, the team at \u201cThe Daily\u201d that turned to me during this frightening year, and the whole institution, which put its confidence in me and expected better.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So for offending my colleagues\u2014and for anything I\u2019ve done to hurt The Times, which is an institution I love and whose mission I believe in and try to serve\u2014I am sorry. I let you all down.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Donald G. McNeil Jr.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If I were Donald G. McNeil Jr., I would want to tell\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, and its publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, to go jump in a lake. Instead, McNeil chose to declare his love for the paper and proclaim his guilt for having \u201churt\u201d many hundreds of people. For McNeil\u2019s professional death to have meaning, the party\u2014or the paper\u2014must be infallible. Death to me!<\/span><\/p>\n

That this kind of groveling confession is not unique to the\u00a0Times<\/em>, but rather plays a key functional role in the politics of woke anti-racism, can be judged with the frequency with which such apologies are staged across institutional and corporate settings where wokeness holds sway. Consider this open letter by an academic named Matthew J. Mayhew who, after weeks of bullying and abuse, publicly recanted a seemingly anodyne op-ed he wrote for Inside Higher Ed expressing his enjoyment of college football as a distraction\u2014one with the capacity to unite us all during the pandemic. Apparently, Mayhew learned a lot from the furious reaction of his colleagues to such an ignorant, hateful, and deeply damaging viewpoint:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

I learned that I could have titled the piece \u201cWhy America Needs Black Athletes.\u201d I learned that Black men putting their bodies on the line for my enjoyment is inspired and maintained by my uninformed and disconnected whiteness and, as written in my previous article, positions student athletes as white property. I have learned that I placed the onus of responsibility for democratic healing on Black communities whose very lives are in danger every single day and that this notion of \u201cdemocratic healing\u201d is especially problematic since the Black community can\u2019t benefit from ideals they can\u2019t access. I have learned that words like \u201cdistraction\u201d and \u201ccheer\u201d erase the present painful moments within the nation and especially the Black community. …<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I am just beginning to understand how I have harmed communities of color with my words. I am learning that my words\u2014my uninformed, careless words\u2014often express an ideology wrought in whiteness and privilege. I am learning that my commitment to diversity has been performative, ignoring the pain the Black community and other communities of color have endured in this country. I am learning that I am not as knowledgeable as I thought I was, not as antiracist as I thought I was, not as careful as I thought I was. For all of these, I sincerely apologize.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Up with the revolution!<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Untold millions of true believers lived and died in Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union. When told they were guilty, they sooner or later agreed with the charges against them, even if they couldn\u2019t locate their guilt in anything they had actually done. When the exhausted prisoner finally gives in to the party, which has sole grasp on truth, a soothing relief may come: History has spoken. Koestler and Orwell testify as much in their famous novels.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Admittedly, at times the prisoners were merely surrendering to a superior force that worked through the deprivation of sleep and food and relentless interrogations\u2014and through more baroque tortures. And there were always those who refused and resisted. But the Soviet system stood for decades on the bedrock of shared guilt.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the absence of real evidence and reporting, public confessions helped buttress the credibility of the system.<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\n

Reporting for\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0about the Moscow Trials of 1936,\u00a0Walter Duranty commented<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0that \u201cit was unthinkable that Stalin and Voroshilov … could have sentenced their friends to death unless the proofs of guilt were overwhelming.\u201d Other newspapers signed off on Stalin\u2019s executions, too. In fact, the\u00a0New Statesman<\/em>\u00a0(Sept. 5, 1936) argued, the defendants had demanded the death sentence for themselves! Surely they must have been guilty.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stalin\u2019s most celebrated victims were themselves used to humiliation and self-abasement. As Robert Conquest writes in his indispensable book\u00a0The Great Terror<\/em>, \u201cTheir surrender was not a single and exceptional act in their careers, but the culmination of a whole series of submissions to the Party that they knew to be \u2018objectively\u2019 false.\u201d Conquest tells of a former member of the Soviet Supreme Court who was informed by an interrogator, \u201cWell, the Party demands that you, as a Bolshevik, confess that you are an English spy.\u201d The man responded: \u201cIf the Party demands it, I confess.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

These days we repeatedly confess our racism and misogyny, suppressing any sense that we are perhaps not as sinful as we are told. Maybe we haven\u2019t harassed, demeaned, or insulted anyone\u2014but the very impulse to defend ourselves indicates our guilt. After all, we are all part of \u201cthe system,\u201d and only a thoroughgoing racist would dispute the idea that the system is guilty.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, America is not Soviet Russia, or, for that matter, Xi\u2019s China. Our new political commissars don\u2019t use torture, prison cells, and executions. Today\u2019s woke ideology can be publicly attacked, unlike communism in the Soviet Union. Its critics are in fact legion: According to polls, most Americans of all genders and ethnicities think political correctness is a problem. But people are afraid for their careers, and so they remain silent\u2014no matter how much \u201cpower\u201d or \u201cprivilege\u201d they ostensibly have.<\/span><\/p>\n

For those who believe in the power of institutions to moderate the ideologically driven madness of this moment, the most worrisome aspect of McNeil\u2019s firing is the about-face of Dean Baquet, the paper\u2019s editor. At first Baquet had declared, after an HR investigation of the Peru trip, that McNeil would stay. \u201cHe showed extremely poor judgment, but it did not appear to me \u2026 that his intentions were hateful or malicious,\u201d Baquet wrote. While one can quibble with the word \u201cextremely\u201d\u2014a sop to the woke\u2014the editor\u2019s decision was surely a reasonable one, given McNeil\u2019s decades of meritorious service and the paper\u2019s presumed need to provide its readers with informed reporting on the coronavirus crisis.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet a few days later, Baquet abruptly reversed himself, and McNeil was fired. What changed? Had some new, damning piece of evidence surfaced? No, only a mob uprising, a familiar phenomenon at the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0of late. On Wednesday afternoon 150\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0staffers wrote a letter to A.G. Sulzberger demanding McNeil\u2019s ouster. \u201cOur community is outraged and in pain,\u201d they lamented like the chorus of a Greek play. Oh, the fragility of the masses when they are set on vengeance!<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOur harassment training makes clear that what matters is how an act makes the victims feel,\u201d wrote the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0staffers. Even if McNeil \u201cdidn\u2019t act maliciously or with hateful intent,\u201d they added, that doesn\u2019t matter, since \u201cintent is irrelevant.\u201d Instead, what matters is the \u201cvictim\u2019s\u201d perception (fantasy? imagination?) of what happened. In other words, what had begun as a case about punishing stray bits of private conversation had become a contest over a very serious ideological precept\u2014namely, the idea that the seriousness of a crime can and must be measured by its impact on its self-proclaimed victims. Anything can therefore be a crime, whose impact can in turn be beyond measure.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, the students who complained about McNeil had parents who paid $5,500 for a two-week tour, suggesting that they were hardly an oppressed bunch. But they were \u201charmed\u201d nonetheless, as was the entire staff of\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0New York Times<\/em>. Among other things, McNeil, the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0staffers had learned, \u201creportedly made claims that white supremacy doesn\u2019t exist,\u201d a hanging offense. Moreover, there were rumors swirling that he \u201chas shown bias against people of color \u2026 over a period of years.\u201d Not one specific incident was cited in support of this claim, and indeed, none was necessary. Such vagueness lets readers freely imagine just how racist Donald McNeil Jr. is. Beyond measure would be putting things lightly.<\/span><\/p>\n

Refusal to recite the required mantra that white supremacy rules America now leads directly to getting yourself fired. If you show resistance to the prescribed formula, you \u201churt\u201d many people: your colleagues, your employer, your community. Your recalcitrance in admitting the fullness of your guilt only increases the harm that you are causing. Though the only concrete speech crime that anyone could cite was McNeil\u2019s repetition of the N-word, that would have to do.<\/span><\/p>\n

Racist language must be forbidden \u201cregardless of intent,\u201d Baquet and Kahn decided. Astoundingly, the editors of\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0are now on the record saying that the mere appearance of a word in one\u2019s mouth renders one guilty, \u201cregardless of intent.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

OK, fine. If that utterly nonsensical standard indeed applies at\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>, then let\u2019s consider the evidence of the paper\u2019s own guilt: A quick search of the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0archives reveals a total of\u00a0135 uses<\/a>\u00a0of the N-word and\u00a023 uses<\/a>\u00a0of a common slang variant over the past five years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Though you might not want to type that word in the search bar, if you value your job, consider what this terrible number says about the paper\u2019s own guilt, and what punishment would be appropriate. If the harm caused by McNeil\u2019s repetition of the N-word before two high school students in Peru mandates his firing and public humiliation, the harm that the paper has done 158 times over, in public, before an audience of 4 million subscribers, as well as potentially every person on the planet with access to the internet, numbering perhaps 3 to 4 billion\u2014is incalculable, even genocidal.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shouldn\u2019t every writer and editor at the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u2014starting with Dean Baquet and Joe Kahn, and of course publisher A.G. Sulzberger\u2014resign their jobs, right now? Resign! But first, confess\u2014so that your departure can have meaning, and so that America\u2019s once-greatest newspaper can continue leading us into a future free from hatred, bigotry, want, need, fear, and war, just like in the old Soviet Union.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

David Mikics<\/strong> is the author, most recently, of Stanley Kubrick (Yale Jewish Lives). He lives in Brooklyn and Houston, where he is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English at the University of Houston.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Death to Me! DAVID MIKICS Police photographs of Grigori Zinoviev, taken by the NKVD after his arrest, 1934WIKIMEDIA\/NKVD And here I stand before you in filth, crushed by my own crimes,\u201d confessed Yuri Pyatakov in January 1937, \u201cbereft of everything through my own fault, a man who has lost his Party, who has no friends, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83900"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83900"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83940,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83900\/revisions\/83940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}