What dastardly offense?
The American Booksellers Association apologized Wednesday for a “terrible” and “serious, violent incident.” What dastardly offense did it commit? The profound trauma occurred this month when the trade group dedicated to selling books sent out a paperback copy of a book some of its members don’t like.
So its members have all liked every single book the ABA has ever sent out? This shocking violence of sending one that some didn’t like is a brand new event in the world?
No, it’s not that, it’s that Abigail Shrier’s book is different. It’s violent enough to say that some girls who say they are trans are just caught up in a fad.
Ms. Shrier’s book nonetheless offends the sensibilities of the woke left, which has tried to censor research into rapid-onset gender dysphoria and the regret felt by some who have undergone gender transitions. Twitter mobs are now leading a campaign to ensure that the public can’t buy or read Ms. Shrier’s book.
The American Booksellers Association did not respond to a request for comment, but its groveling statement makes clear it caved to the censors. The group apologized for mailing the “anti-trans” book to its members, calling it an “inexcusable” act that went against “everything we believe and support.” It also promised to take “concrete steps to address the harm we caused,” since “apologies are not enough.”
Then they flagellated themselves with knotted cords until the blood ran.
The trade group isn’t alone. On Thursday afternoon Ms. Shrier’s book no longer appeared to be available on the website of Target, the giant retailer. (Target didn’t respond to a request for comment.) This week NBC News reported that two Amazon employees resigned after the company continued to offer Ms. Shrier’s book. Hundreds more have called in a petition for the book’s removal from the online marketplace.
Oh well. Climate changes has passed the tipping point so none of this will matter for much longer.
Excellent article from Katha Pollitt in Dissent.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-left-needs-free-speech
Classical Marxism saw the world battle for socialism as primarily one for the ‘economically advanced’ countries of Europe and North America. But things did not work that way.
Anticolonialist and anti-imperialist movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America were up against entrenched oligarchies, not democracies. And overthrowing the oligarchies (colonialists are NEVER democrats) required the raising of an army and the fighting of a guerrilla war. Moreover, their struggle required a breaking of the mystique of the colonial power; of the idea that it was invincible.
Classical Marxism saw the world battle for socialism as primarily one for the ‘economically advanced’ countries of Europe and North America. But things did not work that way.
Anticolonialist and anti-imperialist movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America were up against entrenched oligarchies, not democracies. And overthrowing the oligarchies (colonialists are NEVER democrats) required the raising of an army and the fighting of a guerrilla war. Moreover, their struggle required a breaking of the mystique of the colonial power; of the idea that it was invincible.
In WW2, the Japanese Army obligingly busted that illusion.
Post-WW2 there came a multitude of revolutionary movements in the countries subject to imperialist domination: from China right round to the Middle East and on down into Africa. But there was a catch.
Such guerrilla fighters make an awful lot of enemies in overthrowing their country’s ancien regime. So for their own self-protection they became anti-liberal, and so ruined their own cause.
Cromwell’s revolution of the 1640s in England replaced absolute monarchy with a despotism of its own creation, and England’s democracy is still a work-in-progress, and will be as long as there is the House of Lords with its right of veto of legislation ‘coming up’ to it from The Commons. (Would you like fries with that?)
Arguably, England’s bourgeois revolution and counterpart to 1789 in France, took place in 1776 in its American colonies: a blow from which English absolute monarchy never recovered.
Was the Empire an absolute monarchy even before then? I got the impression that Parliament had significant power even at that time (though obviously not to the degree Congress does)
The monarch’s power rested on the fact that he/she was commander-in-chief of the armed forces, to whom all the various nobles owed their legiance.. Still is the case today. That forced Cromwell’s faction to create an army of their own, the New Model Army. And so to an indecisive civil war.
While the monarch was head of the armed forces, parliamentary approval was required for release of funds for the king’s use.
But in the course of it, and to make their point, the republicans terminated the absolute monarchy of Charles 1 by chopping his head off. For that they were later hunted down and themselves terminated with prejudice as regicides. But not Cromwell. He lived on as Lord Protector, and died in his bed in 1658.
Democracy tends to oligarchy, (vide Trump) and monarchy (as in North Korea) to absolutism. I am sure that Trump would have loved to have had the power and authority of North Korea’s ‘Little Rocket Man’.
@Roj #1
Thanks for that link, marvelous essay. It appears not to have been spurred by the ABA debacle, but it is clearly relevant. She writes so well.
I see that this essay is part of a Dissent Magazine section on free speech, and the whole section is outside the paywall and free to read. Excellent stuff, I’ve been enjoying them all morning.