I Remember Self-Censorship in Apartheid South Africa
I remember being told not to repeat to other kids what I heard my parents say about the government. I remember my parents ordering me to rewrite my letters to relatives and to remove anything that wasn’t purely personal because they were sure, probably with justification, that our letters were being read by the government. I was a child and I was parroting my parents’ political opinions, but I had yet to learn what they already knew: that in a police state, one can speak one’s mind inside the home but not outside it and not to strangers, nor write it in letters.
In Nazi Germany, the Heil Hitler salute was officially termed “the German greeting.” The bitter joke among Germans was the real German greeting was the cautious swiveling of the head to side to side to make sure no one was listening before speaking frankly to a friend. I remember listening to my father and a neighbor he didn’t yet know as they engaged in a verbal dance, a careful sounding out, moving from neutral subjects to ever more political ones, gauging each other’s true politics before they both began criticizing the government. That was the South African greeting.
And now I’m seeing the same thing here in America. It’s not new, of course. There was plenty of violent retribution for unpopular speech/behavior/political positions during Colonial times. During the Revolution, Loyalists were harassed, chased from their homes, even murdered. Abolitionists were murdered in the antebellum South, and the same has happened to civil rights proponents into modern times. Then there were the Red Scare, the McMartin Preschool/Satanic ritual abuse hysteria, and so on.
Perhaps the current evil will die out, as most of the above did. But look at the destruction that those evils caused before they vanished. Surely Trump can’t last much longer, and I hope that he won’t be followed by another figure with the same insane appeal to the worst among us. But we can’t be sure of that, can we? Such “leaders” keep popping up. Even if Trumpism ends with Trump, the damage he has done will take a long time to repair, if it can be repaired.
In the meantime, our media and social platforms, increasingly owned by plutocrats who deem it in their interest to support Trump, are shifting rapidly to the right. The result isn’t censorship in the strict sense because it’s not being done by the government. Instead, it’s a pervasive and powerful form of self–censorship.
The end result is what I saw as a boy in Apartheid South Africa: a silence born of fear.
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