Review: The New York Times 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History- David North & Tom Mackaman-Mehring Books-$24.95

Both ideological and historical myths are a product of immediate class interests.  These myths may be refuted by restoring historical truth—the honest presentation of facts and tendencies of the past.—Vadim Z. Rogovin

"Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies."

― Leon Trotsky

This groundbreaking book adds significantly to the arsenal of Marxist works that have utilised the historical materialist method in examing complex historical questions. This collection of essays and interviews represents the most consistent and sustained attack on the New York Times 1619 Project, released in August 2019. The book's publication is a significant political and intellectual event

The 1619 project denounced two seminal events in American history: the 1776 revolution that founded the United States and the Civil War of 1861–65. In its place, the New York Times put forward a completely new revisionist narrative that stipulated that the rebellion against Britain was a counterrevolution instigated to defend slavery and that the union forces in the Civil War were led by a president, Abraham Lincoln, who was a racist.

The lead writer and Project founder Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones said, "Our democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true". For this piece of deep insight, the author was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Hannah-Jones made the preposterous claim that anti-black racism "runs in the very DNA of this country".

As you would expect from a work published by Mehring books, this collection of essays and lectures is based on meticulous research. It thoroughly discredits the 1619 Project's lies and distortions.

One question to book seeks to answer is why would the Times lie. As Leon Trotsky once pointed out the that when one lies about history, it is done to conceal real social contradictions. The Times project was released amidst truly staggering levels of social inequality produced by capitalism. As one writer wrote, "These contradictions can be resolved on a progressive basis only through the methods of class struggle. Efforts to divert and sabotage that struggle by dissolving class identity into the miasma of racial identity lead inexorably in the direction of fascism".[1]

Contained in the book are interviews with the most renowned scholars and specialists in the history of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s — Gordon Wood, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum, Richard Carwardine, Clayborne Carson, Adolph Reed Jr., and Dolores Janiewski. Subjects examined are the "complex development of slavery in the New World, the American Revolution, the sectional crisis over slavery and the Civil War, the struggle for social equality in the twentieth century, and the class politics of racial identity in the present".

The most disturbing feature of the Times revisionist project was not so much what it contained, which was easily refuted, but the fact that it was left to the Trotskyist movement and the World Socialist Website(WSWS) to attack this abomination of historical falsehood. The Attack by the WSWS drew immediate media attention and very quickly seriously undermined the whole 1619 project. As one writer put it, it destroyed the Times "new historical narrative" and exposed it as a money-making venture.

In reading this book and its sustained attack on the 1619 project, it is not hard to understand why the stand taken by the WSWS and several leading Historians has altered the political and "intellectual terrain". It has destroyed the 1619 project. It has provided a textbook Marxist approach and has implemented a historical materialist method of historical investigation. One also has to admire the bravery of the historians that collaborated with the WSWS. These historians had "strong reservations about important aspects of the 1619 Project" and were "dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it." It is one thing for a Marxist to launch a polemical attack. After all, it is in their DNA. It is another for world-renowned historians to put their life's work on the line by defending historical truth.

The stand taken by the WSWS and these leading historian has encouraged others to enter the field of battle. One notable book has been Peter W Wood's book 1620. Peter.W.Wood's book is a very useful critique of the New York Times 1619 Project. It has been described as historiography of the debates over the 1619 Project. The Times basic premise is to reset American history by "asserting that all the laws, material gains, and cultural achievements of Americans are rooted in the exploitation of African-Americans".

To his credit, Woods does not buy into this absurd and dangerously wrong assumption. The book is an attempt, to sum up what critiques of the Project have written. While many of the most important historians who have written on the subject have published articles and letters opposing the Times, the political leadership in this fight against this travesty of historical study has fallen to the Trotskyist's at the World Socialist Website. While semi acknowledging this in the book, Wood's is not happy that it was the Trotskyists who first exposed this racialist and revisionist approach to American history. The fact that the Times project has been so discredited is down to the role played by the Marxists.

As the Marxist writer David North correctly points out, "As a business venture, the 1619 Project clambers on, but as an effort at historical revision, it has been, to a great extent, discredited. This outcome is owed in large measure to the intervention of the World Socialist Web Site, with the support of several distinguished and courageous historians, which exposed the 1619 Project for what it is: a combination of shoddy journalism, careless and dishonest research, and a false, politically-motivated narrative that makes racism and racial conflict the central driving forces of American history".

In his book, Wood opposes the 1619 project and offers a different starting point for modern American history, which is when the first pilgrims set foot in America in the 1620s. The political and historical study of the pilgrims is a worthwhile subject. To some degree, Wood's has a case in point, but American history has many such starting points. Most historians seem to stick with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 as America's founding.

Wood's book is one of the better critiques of the 1619 project, but it does not probe the politics behind 1619. As David North points out, "The "financialisation" of the Times has proceeded alongside another critical determinant of the newspaper's selection of issues to be publicised and promoted: that is, its central role in the formulation and aggressive marketing of the policies of the Democratic Party. This process has served to obliterate the always tenuous boundary lines between objective reporting and sheer propaganda. The consequences of the Times' financial and political evolution have found a particularly reactionary expression in the 1619 Project. Led by Ms Nikole Hannah-Jones and New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, the 1619 Project was developed to provide the Democratic Party with a historical narrative that legitimised its efforts to develop an electoral constituency based on the promotion of racial politics. Assisting the Democratic Party's decades-long efforts to disassociate itself from its identification with the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal to Great Society era, the 1619 Project, by prioritising racial conflict, marginalises, and even eliminates, class conflict as a notable factor in history and politics".[2]

Given that the Trotskyists from the WSWS have led the political and historical fight against the Times deeply right-wing and revisionist historical viewpoint, it is perhaps not surprising that the WSWS has come under sustained attack from not only conservative sources but has been attacked by several Stalinist and Pseudo left individuals and organisations.

One of the more stupid and ignorant attacks came from the predictable Louis Proyect, who wrote," Indeed, nobody has published more "Trotskyist polemics" than them, as long as you are using the term Trotskyist without regard for what Trotsky stood for. An examination of the record will place Trotsky firmly in the Project 1619 camp. When Trotsky was living in Prinkipo, an island near Istanbul, in 1933, he met with Arne Swabeck (who coincidentally was one of the talking heads in Warren Beatty's "Reds"). Swabeck asked, "How must we view the position of the American Negro: As a national minority or as a racial minority?" Trotsky's reply probably would have made both Wilentz and his friends at WSWS beet-red with fury. He urged his comrades to support self-determination for Blacks even if it antagonised white workers, who were far more radical in 1933 than they are today".[3]

Proyect has a history of right-wing attacks on the WSWS. The WSWS called him a professional liar and said, "Proyect's blog—or should we call it blather—lacks all credibility. In his dishonesty, cynicism, and debased vulgarity, he epitomises all that is politically diseased in the milieu of American pseudo-left politics. His attack on the WSWS is the work of a man who has absolutely nothing to do with the politics, principles and culture of the Marxist movement. His blog were it correctly named, would be called "The Unrepentant Liar."[4]

Further attacks on the WSWS have come from the Stalinists of the USA Communist Party who wrote, "Trotskyists have traditionally attacked mainstream Communists and others who have sought to construct centre-left coalitions to defeat the right, attacks that have aided the right. Here, North, London, and the World Socialist Review have acted to support a centre-right backlash against a new history of slavery, a kind of negative United Front with the liberal and conservative celebrators of U.S. history. The author and co-signers of the protest letter, whom they defend, would never put "bourgeois" in front of "democratic" to define the American Revolution. In my experience, they would do what they usually do—reject the work of those like the scholars of the 1619 Project who challenge conventional wisdom and by their rejection prevent the article's publication in mainstream media".[5]

This duplicity has been the trademark of the Stalinists for nearly a century. It has been exposed and refuted by the Trotskyist movement and represents a desperate attempt by the Stalinist to breathe new life into the discredited Democratic party and join forces with the various other Pseudo Left groups that have backed the Project and have attacked the WSWS.

In the past, these Pseudo left organisations would have at least paid lip service to the struggles of the working class, but now this has been replaced by an open acceptance of new forms of non working class forms of struggle. James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose summarise this succinctly in this article[6] "We have moved into a new stage of history. The battles the left fought over the past half-century have largely been won. We cannot go back to focusing on miners' rights and trade unions, or on securing equal pay for women, outlawing racial discrimination, or legalising homosexuality: we have won those wars. Much of the right support these advances now too. We have new battles to fight. These include combating climate change, securing our place on the world stage and within the global economy, and fostering cohesive multiculturalism, free from moral relativism and enforced conformity. The left now finds itself pulled in many directions at once. This is the source of its profound identity crisis".One manifestation of this right-wing shift is the support by the Pseudo Left organisations of the 1619 racialist project.

Conclusion

It is hoped that The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History: Essays and Interviews will find a wide audience. Its essays and interviews will be of interest to all readers of American history.

It is an essential aid for all teachers and college professors, students and the general reading public to counter the Times' blatant historical falsifications. It will also be a valuable tool in the struggle of both black and white workers in their struggle against capitalism.

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[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/25/pers-j24.html

[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/04/intr-d04.html

[3] https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/10/project-1619-and-its-detractors/

[4] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/08/proy-j08.html

[5] https://www.cpusa.org/article/the-1619-project-backlash-from-the-left/

[6] The Left is Having an Identity Crisis- https://areomagazine.com/2019/12/18/the-left-is-having-an-identity-crisis/

Comment: Philip Roth And His Dead Dogs

 "Can men write about women?" And the fool expects an answer."

Heinrich Heine

"Roth possessed a verbal brilliance and breadth probably unsurpassed by any American novelist in the postwar period. He could be enormously, subversively funny. He mocked many sacred cows and poured cold water on many national myths. His treatment of his own foibles and those of his friends and lovers were often unsparing".

David Walsh

"In some quarters, 'misogynist' is now a word used almost as laxly as was 'Communist' by the McCarthyite right in the 1950s—and for very like the same purpose."

Philip Roth

To tell the truth, is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

Leo Tolstoy

Thomas Carlyle complained once that during the writing of his study of Oliver Cromwell, he had been required to "drag out the Lord Protector from under a mountain of dead dogs". With Philip Roth being dead only two years I feel the same must be required of him.

The last two years have seen an outpouring of vitriol against Roth. This has increased with the recent release of several biographies. The most important one of these biographies is one by Blake Bailey.[1]Since I have not read this 900-page book, I will not comment on it but will later. This article is about the hysterical response from the book reviewer Leo Robson.

Although not all of the book reviews needlessly attack Roth, the majority highlight that we live in a time, according to the writer David Walsh that contains "widespread historical ignorance and cultural debasement". In Roth's case, the manufactured controversy is a product of this environment. It must be said that in the latest reviews of Bailey's biography, some preposterous things have been written accusing the novelist of misunderstanding or being hostile to women and having sexual failings.[2]

This new collection of reviews have a commonality about them. All of them seem to advocate a new form of Puritanism and want to return to a period when writers were censored and their books burnt.

As Walsh writes, "What irks a good number of the commentators is the fact that the late novelist had no use, generally speaking, for the obsession with identity politics, the brand of fraudulent and reactionary postmodern "leftism" that has proliferated on American campuses and elsewhere over the past 40 years or so. Roth treated several female academics and other such types rather roughly in his books, suggesting that behind their aggressive "feminism" lay a good number of hidden factors, including psychological insecurity, personal ambition and avarice. His instinctive hostility was entirely appropriate".[3]

Perhaps the vilest and worthless attack on Roth comes from Leo Robson, whose review of Bailey book reaches new heights of hysterics and manufactured controversy. He writes, "He reports without comment the BBC's bananas contention that Roth was 'arguably the best writer not to have won the Nobel Prize since Tolstoy', as well as the maybe even sillier claim made by Roth's friend Benjamin Taylor that his work is 'built to outlast whatever unforeseeable chances and changes await us and our descendants'. Quoting postmortem hyperbole is always a tempting recourse for the exhausted biographer bidding farewell, but by loading his epilogue with the encomia of the novelist's most ardent fans, not exactly absent from the rest of the book, Bailey dodges a far more pressing duty, to explain why Philip Roth – nostalgist, American chauvinist, spouter of 'amazingly tasteless' opinions, serial seducer of students, and, latterly and not unrelatedly, a critic of #MeToo – has outlasted the changes already upon us".

Like all critics of Roth, Robson hates the fact that Roth had the temerity to attack the #MeToo movement. David Walsh correctly attacked this movement whose ostensible aim "is to combat sexual harassment and assault, i.e., to bring about some measure of social progress. However, the repressive, regressive means resorted to—including unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process—give the lie to the campaign's "progressive" claims. Such methods are the hallmark of an anti-democratic, authoritarian movement, and one, moreover, that deliberately seeks to divert attention from social inequality, attacks on the working class, the threat of war and the other great social and political issues of the day".

Robson does have a track record of hating Roth.His review of Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth-By Benjamin Taylor was not too flattering. His latest review of Blake Bailey's biography of Roth should have been sent back to him by the editors, and have been asked to do better.

The first thing that strikes you of Robson's article is the title which has a question mark. I am unsure if the editor at Literary Review magazine choose this or Robson himself. Either way, it is a pretty stupid thing to do because any objective criteria would show Roth to be one the greatest writers of the 20^th century.

Also, the low level of Robson's article is shocking, but even more shocking is the fact that Literary Review printed in that form in the first place. Take this quote, "But even as Roth settled into the role of grumbling grand old man, he remained more than ever the entitled child, in permanent need of soothing, powerless to resist a tempting treat or keep a tantrum at bay. 'Tell him to grow up,' Nicole Kidman, who played Faunia in the film adaptation of The Human Stain, is reported to have said on learning that Roth was annoyed about a date that went awry. I mean, what is that about. It is just childish gossip. Who cares.

Robson is right about one thing that Roth was a product of his environment. The monkey finally typed a sentence. It is not Roth's fault that he grew up in the early part of the 20^th century. He did not choose the conditions, but he achieved artistic greatness despite all the political handicaps he faced.

As Walsh said, "Roth grew up during the Cold War, and the limitations of American intellectual life during that epoch also helped shape him, as much as he may have cursed and even kicked against its confines".

The great Marxist writer Leon Trotsky put it even better "There would be no art without human physiology because there would be no human beings at all, but that does not mean art can simply be explained by human physiology. Between that physiology and artwork, as Marxists understand, lies a complex system of transmitting mechanisms in which there are individual, species-particular and, above all, social elements. The sexual-physiological foundation of humanity changes very slowly, its social relations more rapidly. Artists find material for their art primarily in their social environment and in alterations in the social environment. Otherwise, there would be no change in art over time, and "people would continue from generation to generation to be content with the poetry of the Bible, or of the old Greeks".[4]

To conclude, it is only fitting to end with the words by David Walsh, who has intelligently commented on Roth's work when he "wrote "I'm less and less convinced that one ought to judge an artist primarily or even substantially by the social views he or she espouses. A great many factors go into the formation of such views, many of them outside the control of the individual artist. But the artist does have responsibility for the honesty and integrity of his or her approach to life and art, for the continual reworking of themes and language or materials, for the maintenance of that level of dissatisfaction and restlessness, transmitted to a reader, that contributes to giving a work meaning and value. I am moved by Roth's efforts. Roth's best novels will endure".[5]If Mr Robson wants to reply to this article, my website is free for him to reply. I wait with bated breath.

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[1] Philip Roth: The Biography Hardcover – 8 April 2021 Blake Bailey

[2] David walsh -https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/18/roth-j18.html

[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/18/roth-j18.html 

[4] Leon Trotsky - Culture and Socialism - 1927

[5] See Walsh’s collected writings- The Sky Between the Leaves: Film Reviews, Essays and Interviews 1992 - 2012 Paperback – 22 Nov. 2013 Mehring books

Review: Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution by Selina Todd.Chatto, 304 pp., £18.99, August 2019, 978 1 78474 082 5

Selina Todd is a gifted historian, and her books are well worth reading. Tastes of Honey is no exception. The book is essentially a biography of the working-class female writer Shelagh Delaney.

Delaney was 19 when she wrote her greatest work, A Taste of Honey. Todd respects and even admires Delaney. She describes Delaney as being one of the first writers to show that women "had minds and desires of their own…  She develops this point further by saying, "more than a decade before the Women's Liberation Movement emerged in Britain", her work "challenged the assumption that women found fulfilment in marriage and motherhood". They "openly longed for a taste of honey, craving love, creativity, adventure and escape".

Like the former Communist Party historian E. P Thompson, Todd would like to rescue people from the condescension of history, and she does precisely that with Delaney. Delaney, it is true, does need to have all the dead dogs cleared from on top of her. The book is extensively researched, and Todd was given access to what little papers were left to her daughter by Delaney.

Delaney was a complex figure, and despite writing some very good stuff, she found writing difficult, a point echoed by the director Lindsay Anderson, who said, "She finds it difficult to turn the stuff out".

Delaney was part of a generation of working-class writers that had to fight every inch of the way to get recognition and reach a wider audience. On a personal note, I and probably a lot of my generation were influenced by the books of Delaney and other authors Like Alan Sillitoe, who wrote among other books  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Late Night on Watling Street by Bill Naughton, The ballad of a Sad Café by Carson McCullers[1]. However, last but not least, A Kind of Loving by Stan Barstow. These books were on the list of every Comprehensive school's English class when I was growing up. I shudder to think what is on there now.

Like I said in the opening to this review, Todd is a very good historian and is a very good writer. I have no qualms over her portrayal of Delaney. But Todd has an agenda and presents a distinct perspective on Delaney.

As Simon Lee put it, "Todd is particularly invested in repositioning Delaney as a paragon of feminism, specifically the second-wave feminism of the 1970s. But the question remains: to what degree is this authentic to Delaney? Todd's repositioning assumes an authoritative stance because of its biographical form. As a result, Tastes of Honey makes a strong claim about its subject, but the book's relative success or failure can be gauged by how well Delaney supports that claim".[2]

Todd's feminist agenda has been emboldened by the new Me too movement that originated in the United States and is now a Global Phenomena. As David Walsh points out the "The ostensible aim of this ongoing movement is to combat sexual harassment and assault, i.e., to bring about some measure of social progress. However, the repressive, regressive means resorted to—including unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process—give the lie to the campaign's "progressive" claims. Such methods are the hallmark of an anti-democratic, authoritarian movement, and one, moreover, that deliberately seeks to divert attention from social inequality, attacks on the working class, the threat of war and the other great social and political issues of the day".[3]

While it is important to rescue figures like Delaney, whose work is still relevant and tackles issues still with us today, trying to portray Delaney as a feminist icon has more to do with Todd's politics than Delaney's actual legacy or politics.

As Lee again writes, "Todd herself has become somewhat of a lightning rod of controversy as one of the more prominent figures of "gender critical" feminism — otherwise known as "Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists," a movement that sprang from 1970s second-wave feminist politics".[4]

In the section entitled policy and politics on her website,[5] Todd outlines her political views. She writes, "If we are to create an alternative to dog-eat-dog capitalism, then we can only do so collectively through socialism.  I have written for the Guardian and other media on the need for comprehensive, non-selective, free education for everyone, at whatever stage of their lives. I am also a feminist who believes that sex and gender are different. I believe that boys and girls should be able to do exactly what they want to do and do not have an innate gendered identity, based on my historical research, which shows that as expectations of boys' and girls' behaviours change, so do their actions and ambitions. There is no innate 'feeling' that defines womanhood, as some organisations such as Stonewall suggest. My research leads me to believe that women are and have been treated as different and inferior to men on the basis of our biological sex and our potential and actual role as mothers. As such, sex needs to be taken very seriously in understanding the discrimination women face.  I also believe in the right to evidence-based debate about women's rights. As such, I am proud to be involved in the women's rights group Woman's Place UK".

Todd's socialism is, at best, a watered-down form of reformism. At worst, her support for a feminist solution to female working-class emancipation, no doubt how sincere, will lead to the pitting of female workers against their male counterparts. She does not believe in revolution, and she is certainly against a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism which is the only way female emancipation will come about.

As the great Rosa Luxemburg said, "Women's suffrage is the goal. But the mass movement to bring it about is not a job for women alone, but is a common class concern for women and men of the proletariat".[6]

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[1] See My Autobiography of Carson McCullers – 29 April 2021-by Jenn Shapland 

[2] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-progenitor-of-second-wave-feminism-on-selina-todds-tastes-of-honey/

[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/19/year-o19.html

[4] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-progenitor-of-second-wave-feminism-on-selina-todds-tastes-of-honey/

[5] https://selinatodd.com/

[6] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1912/05/12.htm

Comment: What Ever Happened to Innocent Until Proven Guilty?

The decision by publisher W.W.Norton to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of the late novelist Philip Roth from print is a significant act of censorship and has dangerous implications for democratic rights.

The publisher said it had decided to do this because several individuals have accused Bailey of sexual harassment. So far, none have produced evidence to back their claim up. Bailey’s book, which on the whole has been well received with be pulped. Bailey’s 2014 memoir will also be dropped. The publisher has amended its website, so anyone looking for the book gets the message, “Our apologies! We cannot find the page you are looking for.”

Norton said that it was contacted by email anonymously by a woman in 2018, who alleged that Bailey had assaulted her. This begs the question of why act now against Bailey.

Despite saying that “Norton is here for you.” and will “stick to the business of publishing the best books we can lay our hands on and then keep our hands on them for as long as maybe.” Or as one writer put it “until some clique of gender-fixated zealots applies a bit of pressure”. Well Norton has now folded like a cheap shirt as soon as a few MeToo “zealots” make some noise.

As the writer, David Walsh, points out, “The purging of Bailey’s book sets a sinister example, intended to intimidate artists, biographers and scholars alike. The message being sent is clear: any influential figure who rubs establishment public opinion the wrong way can be denounced and dispatched in like manner. The filthy snout of the New York Times has been busily at work in this affair. On April 21, the Times published an article setting out the “sexual assault allegations” against Bailey. There is no reason to give the slightest a priori credence to the claims made in the Times article, which conforms to a pattern of trial-by-media that has been “perfected” since the launching of the #MeToo witchhunt in October 2017. Bailey has never been charged with or convicted of a crime. None of the alleged incidents was ever reported to the authorities”.[1] 

Bailey has rejected the allegations calling them “categorically false and libellous.” His lawyer criticised the publisher’s “drastic, unilateral decision … based on the false and unsubstantiated allegations against him, without undertaking any investigation or offering Mr Bailey the opportunity to refute the allegations.”

As Walsh points out, “The attack on Bailey is unprecedented since the dark days of McCarthyism when the U.S. government removed thousands of books by left-wing authors and sympathisers from its overseas libraries. It continues and escalates a recent process that has already involved the ruination (or attempted ruination) of individuals such as the late James Levine, Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Placido Domingo, Aziz Ansari, Louis C.K., Charles Dutoit, Garrison Keillor and Geoffrey Rush, and the institutionalisation of censorship.[2]

It would seem that those attacking Bailey are also attacking the subject of his biography, Philip Roth. Many reviewers of Bailey’s biography have attacked him for his refusal to attack Roth’s so-called indiscretions or “mistreatment” of women. That Roth is no longer around to defend himself has only emboldened those who wish to see his work trashed and Roth becoming a non-person. Roth accused  his critics of resurrecting the old McCarthyite witchhunt, which he says, “In some quarters, ‘misogynist’ is now a word used almost as laxly as was ‘Communist’ by the McCarthyite right in the 1950s—and for very like the same purpose.”[3]

Not everyone has gone along with this right-wing attack on democratic rights. The chief executive of PEN America, Suzanne Nossel, has raised concerns that “If we were to apply that standard writ large there would be thousands of books by bigots, misogynists and miscreants that could be removed from circulation on those grounds,” While these books may be picked up elsewhere, once that stigma is attached, there might not be another publisher willing to touch them.”[4] 

The attack on Roth and Bailey has a definite right-wing feel about it. As the working class starts to come into conflict with the ruling elite, this same elite encourages any form of backwardness to, as Walsh writes, “ dull popular consciousness and awareness. It inevitably fears any work that sensitises and alerts the viewer or reader or encourages a searching, thoughtful approach to public matters. In that sense, every significant attack on democratic rights is an attack on the working class and its political progress”.

In a typical attempt to play down the attack on democratic rights, New Yorker Magazine writer Alexandra Schwartz said, “This is not a case of censorship, which implies the suppression of ideas but, rather, a scramble at damage control”.[5]

Unlike Schwartz, I believe this is an attack on democratic rights and a suppression of ideas. It must be opposed, and Norton’s censorship should be opposed, and I defend Bailey’s and Roth’s right to represent the world as they saw it.

  

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[1] Book-burning comes to America https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/29/bail-a29.html

[2] Book-burning comes to America https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/29/bail-a29.html

[3] https://terenceblacker.com/philip-roth-it-was-my-good-luck-that-happiness-didnt-matter-to-me/

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/28/publisher-cancels-philip-roth-biography-after-sexual-abuse-claims-against-blake-bailey

[5] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/blake-bailey-philip-roth-and-the-biography-that-backfired