The Historic Failure of No-Platforming

If we were to try to assess the overall impact of no-platforming campaigns over the course of the past century, what would we conclude?

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The tactic has gone by many names, but its proudest exponents have often called it "no-platforming."  It's been an actively practiced thing on the left for a long time, including for my entire life, especially during the Reagan/Thatcher era of my youth and during the Trump era as well.

Many of my closest friends, and leftwing musicians I have recorded with and toured extensively with on both sides of the Atlantic, have been deeply involved with physical battles to shut down events of all kinds put on by far right organizers, or to defend their own events when violently attacked.  Good friends who are around my age and lived through the resurgence of the right that was happening in the US and England during the 1980's remember those times with a panoply of mixed emotions, generally including lots of pride and lots of regrets.  Many have terrible physical scars to show for their involvement with this movement.

Like so many veterans of "real" wars, they are generally traumatized by their experiences and often wonder how necessary it was for some of those fights to be fought in the way they were.  At the same time, we are all to varying degrees surrounded by a left culture that lionizes certain glorious and especially clear-cut moments of no-platforming, such as the successful, violent effort in 1936 to stop British fascists from marching through a Jewish neighborhood in London that has gone down in history as the Battle of Cable Street.

It would barely be an exaggeration to say that in England, every politically-oriented songwriter alive today, from teenage punks to elderly veterans of the Folk Scare, has written a song about the Battle of Cable Street.  Most have also written at least one song that includes the Spanish phrase, "no pasaran" ("they shall not pass"), popular especially as a slogan of resistance against the right during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930's, and during the Battle of Cable Street.

The most widespread and most violent form where we could say the tactic of no-platforming was applied was throughout the streets of Germany in the early 1930's, when the left and the right were regularly waging pitched battles, which were usually won by the left.  That was just before Adolf Hitler's National Socialist party got a significant chunk of the vote and he was invited to join the government, after which he declared himself dictator and invaded a whole lot of other countries, slaughtering tens of millions of human beings in a wide variety of ways.

Ever since that genocidal episode of the twentieth century in Europe, there has been talk about "the next Hitler" by some element of society every time a new president gets elected in the US.  Although most presidents since the Second World War share lots of things in common with Hitler, such as regularly vilifying marginalized people and having a penchant for dropping lots of bombs on innocent civilians in lots of different countries in the name of progress, none of them have quite gotten to the point of firing up any gas chambers.  Which is not to dismiss the possibility that this might change.

In any case, the received wisdom from the rise of Hitler and from the Battle of Cable Street is that when fascists are again rearing their ugly heads in society, running for office, giving incendiary speeches, holding marches, and saying hateful things on TV and on social media and everywhere else, they need to be de-platformed in every possible way, by any means necessary.  It's urgent, fascism is around the corner, and the lesson from the streets of Germany, it seems, is the left didn't fight hard enough.  If they think they can occupy a space somewhere in society and have some kind of platform, they must be shut up and beaten down.

We have all grown up in the shadow of the Nazi Holocaust.  How could this not be the case?  Hitler has been the official Face of Evil ever since he started invading all his neighbors, and there are millions of people in the US who lost much of their extended families back in Europe to Hitler's genocide (including me).  Between the reality and the propaganda, that's quite a combination.

And we have all grown up to respect and admire the brave souls who fought and often died in the struggle against fascism, whether they were part of the D-Day landings or suppressing Moseley's boys in London.

To be very clear, I am part of this cultural milieu, I'm a little part of this history, too, and I'm not at all trying to pretend otherwise.  I have also written lost of "no pasaran" songs and celebrated the many fighters against fascism in its various forms, including those who have practiced extreme forms of no-platforming, such as assassination.

In recent decades, but particularly in the past few years beginning with Trump's election, we've had a situation where media and social media figures, authors, activists and cultural figures, politicians, and so many other people are daily being denounced as Nazis and subjected to all sorts of no-platforming efforts because they're critical of Covid policies, or they support peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, or they're critical of Israeli apartheid, or they interviewed and thus in theory lent credibility to the wrong person on their YouTube channel.

No-platforming, as a tactic, has clearly been easily manipulated by those wanting to push the envelope for whatever reason, either because they're some kind of accelerationists or because they really believe the wrong kind of feminist, or those skeptical of claims made by pharmaceutical companies, or those in favor of preventing World War 3 are Nazis who need to be de-platformed, whether from Twitter, from Spotify, or from giving a book talk at a local book store.  With such a wide variety of easily-accessible "Nazi" targets to choose from, anyone who wants to write a bunch of angry, anonymous comments on a Reddit post can feel like they're proud participants in a very important no-platforming campaign that's going to somehow or other make the world a less problematic place.

But what if we were try to assess the overall impact of no-platforming campaigns?  Have they been successful in the short term or the long term, and how so?

These are questions I have noticed the people who have found an intellectual niche in life as proponents of no-platforming, as keepers of the flame of antifascism, and the historians of this phenomenon as well, have wanted to avoid confronting.  This is understandable.  Political science isn't really a science, and neither is interpreting history.  Or if it is a science, it's a really complex one for which sufficient data is never available to reach a definite conclusion about some things.

But it certainly behooves us to try to interpret the history, ancient and recent and in between, especially when we realize we might be repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

When I ask myself where no-platforming has been practiced in a big way and what has been the impact, and where has no-platforming been a less prominent part of society, and what has been the impact there, the history tells a story, at least for me, as I look at it now, with a perspective that I'll be the first to admit has been evolving over time, hopefully in the direction of more accuracy, rather than less.

If we take the most prominent and consequential example, the rise of fascism in Germany and Hitler's ascension to power in 1933, it's clear to many students of that period that the chaos on the streets characterized by constant battles between fascists and communists was a major factor in increasing support for Hitler, not decreasing it.  It was a factor in the decision to invite Hitler to join the government as well.

How far we'd need to rewind European history to get to the point where we could do some things very differently and avoid the rise of fascism during the early twentieth century is a big and important question, which I'm not going to try to get into here.  But by the time Germany was in the political, economic, and cultural state that it was in by the time fascism as a political tendency was on the rise, is there any evidence that the grassroots efforts to violently suppress the movement were successful?  No, quite the contrary.  Hitler came to power.  Which doesn't prove anything.  History is too complicated for that kind of thing.  But it sure doesn't seem to make the case for no-platforming.

Later no-platforming efforts aimed to prevent far right speakers from campaigning for office and from speaking on college campuses and elsewhere.  Such efforts have been a backdrop of college life as long as I can remember across the US, England, Germany and other places.

In a myriad of cases, no-platforming campaigns against fairly clear-cut Nazis have expanded to include all kinds of people that wouldn't normally be considered Nazis, such as peace advocates having a book talk in Minneapolis, lesbians wanting to organize a festival who have the wrong definition of womanhood, or journalists interested in exploring a wide variety of viewpoints among the people they interview.

In Germany today, the no-platformers say white environmental activists are racist if they have dreadlocks.  In England today, the no-platformers are attacking anyone who has ever been associated with Jeremy Corbyn, due to his alleged antisemitism.  In the US today, so many of the best tenant organizers, community organizers, and left intellectuals and artists are being constantly smeared with accusations of all kinds, in an online frenzy of no-platforming campaigning that could only be conceived of in a world where corporations that profit from our conflicts control our means of communication, and our lives are largely lived online, through their algorithms.

And what has been the result of all of this no-platforming?  In England, they drove the National Front off the streets, but the Conservatives running the country today have adopted policies that those racists hadn't even thought of yet.  In the US and England, my friends may have had success in their endeavors to make sure "no pub is a Nazi pub," but the next chapters in these countries has been Trump and Brexit.  

Again, no evidence that no-platforming was responsible for Brexit or Trump, but I see no evidence that it played any role in preventing these things from happening, and lots of reason to believe that these kinds of campaigns were easily weaponized by various media and social media to make the no-platformers look like wackos, which in many cases is not difficult -- just catch them on camera yelling obscenities at people waiting in line to hear someone talk. 

And what of those places and time periods where no-platforming was not a prominent feature, but where life was more likely to be characterized by popular public works projects or popular universal programs that benefit and engage all of society?  I don't want to overstate the difference between, say, places like Denmark or Sweden with places like Germany, England, or the US, but the countries that have been more characterized by polarized politics, no-platforming campaigning, and a lot more black-and-white analysis are the ones that have had the big problems with fascism and corrupt neoliberal war-making regimes like those currently running things in the UK and the US.  

When you look at the big overview of the past century there seems to be no question that the countries whose populations generally pursued a path more oriented towards finding commonalities and building a better society based on them have done much better.

I'm not only interested in history and current events, but I have spent a lot of time in all the countries I'm talking about.  One of the most notable things about Scandinavia is how much those societies are oriented towards raising happy children.  Certainly compared to most of the world, the childcare and the schools are top-notch and there's generally an emphasis on the welfare of children coming first.  See Danish pandemic policies for some clear examples of this thinking in action.

Seeing all the great parenting everywhere around me in Scandinavia and thinking about how this great parenting is largely the result of a successful, long-term social experiment to raise a society full of happy children who will make great parents, I have no doubt that this approach to society has made it much more difficult for no-platforming and widespread suspicion of each other for being closet fascists to become a widespread phenomenon.  

And it especially makes the practice of stomping out the fascists wherever they surface a difficult tactic to embrace for many people in Scandinavia, from what I've observed.  Because no one would raise their children that way, to stomp on anyone.

Yes, in early twentieth-century Germany, the US, and many other places, it was popular to believe that there was an evil spirit lurking within all babies, and this wildness must be beaten out of the children in order to civilize them.  Many people have argued that the widespread acceptance of this sort of parenting helped fuel the rise of fascism and authoritarian rulers in many parts of the world.

But for the past several generations in Scandinavia and some other places, this kind of authoritarian parenting has been rejected, in favor of fostering the emotional intelligence and general well-being of the children of the society.  The idea that some kids are just bad and need to be stomped out is not really a way of thinking there, and I think this lack of interest in stomping out the wild spirit of the children tends to extend itself into the world of adults, and a generally high degree of mutual respect in society.

When you look at no-platforming from the vantage point of good parenting, it's obviously a hugely troubling tactic.  Because if you're not going to actually kill a person, be they child or adult, how would you expect someone to react to being prevented from attending an event, or prevented from speaking, or denounced as a Nazi, an antisemite, a racist, a TERF, an abuser, etc.  Do children tend to become more civilized and thoughtful if you yell at them, denounce them, or beat them more?  I've heard they don't.  Why should adults react differently to such treatment?  History, from the 1930's to the present, would indicate that they don't.

A whole lot of anecdotal evidence suggests, on the other hand, that if you're living in a society where what's happening is the building of cooperative housing for everyone, with good schools for all the kids and a giant, tree-filled courtyard with a playground for them to play in, what happens is the parents and the kids generally learn to get along fine, whether they're white, Black, rightwing, leftwing, etc.  This phenomenon has been observed from Tennessee to Trondheim.

Now, we could have some groups building cooperatives like that, and at the same time have other groups denouncing the cooperative-builders as Nazis for daring to associate with all sorts of deplorable people who also need housing, and schools for their kids.  We could call this situation "diversity of tactics"!  Or we could embrace the tactics that work, and lose the ones that are counter-productive, and call it progress.

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On August 2nd I’ll be opening for Chris Chandler in Portland. A week after that, a family trip to California, with a bunch of little concerts, mostly outdoor house concerts.

October still could involve a trip to the midwestern US, if I land another good gig or two in the region…

I’ve extended my November trip to Scandinavia. I’ll be there from November 1-16. I have gigs in various parts of Denmark and Sweden planned, and room for more! November will now also include a short visit to the Netherlands, where I could potentially do a gig or two, on November 17 or 18, before I head back to Portland.

If you’re in France, Germany, Belgium, or Switzerland, I’d love to talk to you about doing a gig in your neck of the woods in February 2024.

And for those who are into really advance planning, I intend to come back to visit Britain and Ireland from mid-June to early July 2024.

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I had a fascinating conversation with Prof John Coleman in Connecticut and anarchist historian Paula DeAngelis in Australia about the longstanding global challenge on the left of the phenomenon of the Circular Firing Squad, aka Cancellation Campaigning.

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