From Matt Taibbi’s Substack, Racket News:
Yesterday a House Committee — Republican-led, but still — released a series of documents showing without a doubt that the FBI has been forwarding thousands of content moderation “requests” to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube on behalf of the SBU, Ukraine’s Security Agency.
The documents not only contain incontrovertible evidence that our own FBI pressures tech companies to censor material, but that the Bureau is outsourcing such work to a foreign government, in this case Ukraine.
Taibbi’s post is meant to engage “the ‘card-carrying’ liberals from the seventies, eighties, and nineties” . . . “who always reflexively opposed restrictions on speech.” Those liberals had a history of being appalled when the FBI informed record labels of law enforcement’s opinion about rap singles like “F*** the Police.” They saw that as censorious pressure from the government, and fundamentally illegitimate. But now, most liberals seem satisfied that Big Tech is censoring the right opinions and doing so freely after the government merely consults with them.
I have some ideas about how the change among card-carrying liberals has been effected. They feel they have sufficient control over the sense-making institutions AND law enforcement. After 2016, when social media seemed to play a role in Boomers supporting Brexit and Donald Trump, they feel at ease that most censorship decisions will continue to go their way. This reveals them to be unprincipled, but not entirely stupid. I happen to agree with Taibbi that these issues should be treated as matters of principle because the political balance of power may yet change again and reshuffle in surprising ways.
But my problem with the evidence is a little different. I’ve had the unpleasant duty to remind people that the rhetoric about the Ukraine war as one between a free people living in a liberal democracy versus an autocracy is not really true. Ukraine has been embarked on an ultranationalist cultural project meant to transform the internal politics of Ukraine. It is doing so for reasons I find perfectly legible and, in some ways, understandable. But it is not a liberal or democratic undertaking. It is more like a combination of civil war and radical reconstruction.
Ukrainian nationalists want to reorient Ukraine to Western Europe, and to do so they are pursuing a project of cutting up the cultural and political ropes that keep them tied to Russia. This was the whole subject of Putin’s essay on Ukraine’s unity with Russia. While it was popularly portrayed as denying a Ukrainian identity at all, the essay argues that Ukraine can’t have an authentic identity that is also anti-Russian, given their shared historic, linguistic, and religious patrimony. This is arguable. There is a strong Galician linguistic and religious patrimony in western Ukraine, which was never part of Kiev-Rus but of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and subsequently Western-facing. What’s inarguable is that Ukraine is using its nationalist cultural project for political ends.
Ukraine began banning political parties in 2014, starting with the Communist Party. It then banned the Party of the Regions, the party that typically won most of its support from Ukraine’s eastern region, where Russians settled during the Soviet era. It has banned almost all successor parties to the Party of the Regions. It has passed a series of harsh language laws that require Ukrainian competency to hold office or to be appointed to civic positions. It banned opposition media. It banned Russian-language schooling. More recently it has banned the importation of more than a handful of Russian-language books. While Ukrainian and Russian are sister languages, to get some idea of imagining the aggressiveness of this move, imagine that Northern Ireland landed under the control of the IRA, which then rewrote the law so sons of Orangemen would be educated in gaelscoileanna so that they couldn’t even speak in English. None of this is unprecedented exactly. How do we think the French state handled (and still handles) languages such as Breton? But it is illiberal and ugly. It necessarily involves quite a bit of injustice in its execution.
But it wouldn’t be my business except for the fact that our assistance to Ukraine goes beyond military aid and includes paying for this kind of illiberal government. And now, I find out that our FBI is assisting Ukraine’s security service in censoring American citizens expressing their political views on American-founded tech platforms. Don’t tell me we’re not at war while treating my morning news reading to a foreign government’s wartime censorship. Despite this, of course, it is still possible to root for Ukraine in solidarity with Ukrainians. Russia’s invasion was costly to the world order, to food security, to energy prices, and harmful in hundreds of diffuse ways
I’ve long worried that getting deeply enmeshed in this blood-soaked area of the globe would begin to corrupt our politics, that it would tend to make our Congress more and more resemble their Rada. Hunter Biden was just the beginning of it. I would just like for one of these chest-pounding defenders of the liberal world order stand up for liberal institutions and liberal conversation for once.
They won’t, of course; they prefer the moral clarity of war.