By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, June 29, 2026
I can think of one good thing—and only one—to say about
Boko Haram, the Nigerian jihadist militia: They practice truth in advertising.
The Hausa word boko is simply a
borrowing of the English word books, while haram is the
familiar Arabic word meaning forbidden. What’s meant by the phrase is
that Western education—non-Islamist education—is forbidden, but the literal
meaning is something like a red interdictory circle: “NO BOOKS!”
The soldiers of Boko Haram look and act about like what
you’d imagine when hearing the words “Nigerian jihadist militia”—a bunch of
guys in camouflage fatigues and balaclava masks riding around in Toyota Hilux
pickups with machine guns mounted on tripods in the bed, toting Kalashnikov
rifles, raping and pillaging. But book haters come in all styles.
There are even Western progressives who think of themselves as good liberals
who will hoot and holler about books “banned” in the United States on Monday
(there are no books banned in the United States) and then on Tuesday pressure
Amazon to disappear books they do not want people to read—campaigns that often achieve shockingly easy success. (And
here I will rehearse my observation, probably too often reiterated, about how
easy it is to bully some of the planet’s richest men, including Jeff Bezos.
What is the point of having “f—k you” money if you never say “f—k you”?) Under
the constitutional principle of streitbare
Demokratie, it is a crime to sell certain political books in otherwise
liberal and open countries such as Austria. The practice in many European
countries turns the American ideal expressed in the First Amendment on its
head: While our free speech protections are principally about political speech
and political publications, which, in theory, enjoy a higher level of
protection than does controversial non-political expression (say, pornography),
in much of Europe it is only political speech, political journals,
political books, and political organizations—including political parties—that
are the targets of specific prohibition.
Most book haters are bland little men in suits working in
fluorescent-lit offices. They may not look like Boko Haram jihadists, but,
ultimately, they enforce their diktats by sending out men with guns to
shut down the bookstores, to stop the presses, or simply to murder those who
say and write that which they do not wish to be said or written. Boko Haram and
groups of that nature just cut out a lot of the middlemen.
The so-called People’s Republic of China once again has
turned its attention to Hong Kong’s bookshops, locking up figures including
Leticia Wong, proprietor of the Hunter Bookstore, for the crime of trafficking
in “seditious” materials. Books considered seditious include biographies of
Jimmy Lai (the businessman, newspaper publisher, and activist), as well as such
classics as George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. I can almost
understand, from the point of view of purely calculating totalitarian
amorality, the desire to suppress works about Jimmy Lai. But anybody with a
lick of public relations sense would immediately see that banning 1984 and
Animal Farm is simply a confession that the state has implemented
precisely the kind of ghastly, repressive, hypocritical system Orwell was
writing about: Yep, Orwell is talking about us. But, in a broader sense,
the attempt to ban a book is always a confession of something: guilt, very
often, but sometimes weakness. To take an obvious homegrown example: For a guy
who claims not to care what the media says about him, Donald Trump sure seems
to follow every adjective published in the New York Times and the Washington
Post and spends a great deal of time denouncing journalists as “traitors”
and “enemies of the people.”
(It’s a little like the emails I get from people telling
me I am “irrelevant,” which I may very well be—but I don’t think the people
writing me to tell me I am irrelevant think I am irrelevant. They aren’t
writing to the people they think are irrelevant.)
Xi Jinping and his circle (to the extent that he has a
circle rather than mere underlings, which is not always clear) often behave in
ways that seem inexplicable and self-defeating, from petty things such as
suppressing books about Jimmy Lai (not petty to Leticia Wong and others who
have been jailed, disappeared, tortured, and murdered) to bigger,
geopolitically consequential concerns such as Beijing’s idiotic abuse and
betrayal of Hong Kong, which has, among other things, deepened the commitment
of those in Taiwan resolved to resist absorption into the so-called People’s
Republic. In 1997, the year of the British handover of Hong Kong, the
autonomous territory was home to the wealthiest Chinese community in the
world—more prosperous even than Singapore. Today, Singapore (which is about 76
percent ethnic Chinese) has a GDP per capita about 1.8 times that of Hong
Kong—it is well on its way toward being twice as affluent as Hong Kong. It is
not difficult to imagine a scenario in which Beijing could have gone a long way
toward effecting de facto unification with Taiwan under a “kill them
with kindness” strategy based on the free movement of people, goods, and
capital—if not for the fact that the Taiwanese can look to the example of Hong
Kong and know that their booksellers would never be safe, that no level of
prosperity, security, or fundamental political cooperativeness would ever be
enough for Beijing, which demands nothing short of total submission.
Xi’s actions often seem perplexing and short-sighted. I
am far from being an expert in these matters, but I am persuaded by those
experts who argue that the key to understanding Xi’s political leadership is to
keep in mind that he is exactly what he says he is: a true-believing socialist,
mindful of 21st-century realities but rooted in Marxist-Leninist
philosophy and committed to the principle of political control of the economy.
Some of our naïve friends continue to tell us—forgive the cliché—that “real
socialism has never been tried.” But that is precisely wrong: Real socialism is
being practiced in China, just as real socialism was practiced in the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics. Real socialism is here to be seen and
examined—it is hypothetical socialism that has never been tried, because
it is hypothetical, theoretical, and utopian.
Voguish American progressives make a great many arguments
in favor of socialism, which is very much in fashion at the moment (not only in
New York City), and almost all of those arguments amount to: “The idealized
hypothetical version of my policy is preferable to the real-world version of
your policy.” Indeed, a great deal of political debate is very little more than
that, to the modest extent that policy per se is part of the discussion
at all. Fascism is notoriously difficult to define, but probably the best way
to think of it is that fascism is what people who think of themselves as
fascists do when they have power, and, to the extent that the actions and beliefs
of people who do not think of themselves as fascists or call themselves
fascists resemble the actions and beliefs of the confessing fascists, these may
be understood to a correspondent extent as fascistic or fascist-adjacent. The
socialism of theoretical essays is one thing, but the socialism of history is a
different thing—and reality isn’t optional.
Appending the word democratic in front of the word
socialism serves mainly as a reminder that what the genuinely democratic
socialist countries largely have in common is that they spent much of the last
part of the 20th century using democratic means to drop the
socialism: cf. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, etc. Countries that are both democratic and
socialist generally stop being one of those things over time. That is
not to say that they have, will, or should adopt the American model, which has
problems of its own—there is more than one political arrangement consistent
with free enterprise, free trade, property rights, entrepreneurship, etc.
The hated “neoliberals” were—and are—right that there
exists a relationship between economic liberty and wider political liberty,
even though it was not the case that the economic reforms of the Deng Xiaoping
era and China’s partial economic integration with the rest of the world were in
themselves sufficient to secure general political liberty for the Chinese
people. The world is complex, but the relationship between economic freedom and
intellectual freedom is real and lasting. Those little Hong Kong bookshops are
an example of this: Without the freedom to buy and sell, the freedom to write
and to speak is a relatively small and constrained thing.
Again, I do not say that everyone has to do things the
American way. Vienna is not some totalitarian hellhole, even if the Austrians
do not have a First Amendment or free speech rights that are as expansive as
those we enjoy here in the United States. And here in the United States, it is
always necessary to keep an eye on our property rights, which is where those
who would restrict our speech tend to focus, the First Amendment itself being a
mighty bulwark against the traditional kinds of formal censorship. Since the
Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, we
have heard no end of lamentation about the supposed corrupting influence of
“money in politics.” But do you know what the Citizens United case was
actually about? The question was whether a political group could show a film
critical of a major-party presidential candidate before the election. During
the course of the oral argument, the justices inquired as to whether the same
line of thinking that could empower the government to forbid the showing of a
film could be used to forbid the publication of a book or a pamphlet, and the
government affirmed that yes, indeed, that was the case. The government in that
matter was represented by Elena Kagan, then-solicitor general and now on the
Supreme Court. Many of my colleagues over at Advisory Opinions and SCOTUSblog
are great admirers of Kagan’s, but I remain suspicious of her. Some things
really must remain non-negotiable. I do not put Elena Kagan in the same class
as Xi Jinping—obviously, no more than I put today’s German book banners in the same category as the
German book banners of 90 years ago. But it remains the case that the
regulation of commerce is regulation of writing, speaking, and
publishing—it always has been and always will be.
I myself would prefer to live in a world in which no boko
is haram. Bookshops are civilized and civilizing places. Which is why
they always eventually come under the bootheel of those who prefer bayonets to
arguments.
Words About Words
I have been asked to weigh in on this several times, but
I don’t think I can improve on Evelyn Lamb writing in Scientific American:
There is a phrase,
or a type of phrase, that instantly causes me to feel like I’ve stumbled into
Wonderland or some other topsy-turvy dream world. “X is n times less than Y” is
the basic formulation, where X and Y are quantities that can be compared and n
is some number, usually (but not always) a whole number.
Most recently, I
encountered it in an article that stated that Spain’s maternal mortality rate is five times less than that of
the USA. I don’t want to pick on that article alone, both because I don’t
want to trivialize the problem of maternal mortality and because I see similar
phrases everywhere. Actual growth of energy demand is three times lower than Duke
Energy estimates. Graphene paper is six times lighter than steel. Relative risk ratio for immunological graft rejection is 15
times lower than DSEK (whatever that means). YouTube runs five times slower on Chrome than on Firefox.
When I read one of these phrases, I can almost feel my brain rejecting it like
an ill-fated transplant, perhaps one that used DSEK instead of an immunological
graft.
…
When I first
noticed my negative reaction to this type of phrase, I thought I just needed to
think through the situations carefully, but I’ve come to the conclusion that my
rejection is wholly warranted. Please, stop writing “three times less than” or
“six times lighter than” or “twenty times thinner than.” Think of your
long-suffering, literal-minded math writer friends and rewrite! “Steel is six
times as heavy as graphene paper.” Thank you. Now I can continue my day without
a pesky brain reboot.
People get funny about numbers, particularly when trying
to communicate relative scale or importance. The desire to write something that
sounds dramatic leads the clumsy writer astray. For example, you’ll read about
a car collector who “owned more than 28 cars.” More than 28? Like, 29? Or like
2,849,999,431,291, which also is more than 28. Check my English-major
theoretical mathematics here, but I think there is a whole infinity of numbers
more than 28.
In Other Wordiness …
After? Must have been a heck of a bad day!
A woman in her 70s
was critically injured after being shot while waiting at a bus stop in Orange
County on Monday, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.
I wonder what happened between the time she was shot and
the time she was critically injured.
The New York Times writes that photographer Nancy
Sheung “traveled across Hong Kong and East Asia” for her work.
Well. I am not sure that traveling across Hong Kong was much of an
accomplishment. For one thing, Hong Kong is only 24 miles long from north to
south. You can travel across it pretty easily on a bicycle. For another—she
lived in Hong Kong. I know what they meant to communicate—that she was a
gallivanting free spirit. Just a weird way to write it.
In Closing
I don’t think I have particularly good manners, but I
think about manners a fair bit, because I think they are important. There are
two ways to have good manners: One is the kind of easy, natural grace that
comes to people like my wife and other natural aristocrats—people who knew
William F. Buckley Jr. well remarked about his easy, unshowy cordiality, his
way of putting people at ease without making a show of it. The second way of
having good manners—which can, for a certain kind of person, be at odds with
the first—is knowing and following formal rules of etiquette and conduct. These
are enormously important both for the person observing the rule and for the
person to whom courtesy is being offered: Having agreed-upon expectations and
rules saves us all the stress and anxiety of having to improvise these things
in the moment.
I think of it like dancing: Whether it is square dancing
in Arkansas or waltzing in Vienna, having set steps and forms and rules is, to
my mind, vastly preferable to the kind of improvisational, make-it-up-as-you-go
nightclub dancing that is what we mostly mean when we talk about dancing now. I
think more people probably would dance, and would enjoy dancing, if the dancing
were structured and they knew what to do. Certainly that is true for
self-conscious types such as myself.
(I have square danced; I have never waltzed in Vienna or
anywhere else, but I stand by my assumption.)
As I wrote above, it is the case that formalism can get
in the way of the more genuine kind of courtesy. Allow me to introduce a touchy
subject and a possibly unpopular opinion: I think that white people—especially
middle-aged white men wearing suits, which is fully me on some days and at
least partly me every day—should be like 11 percent more courteous than their
baseline when interacting with black people they do not know. Is that
condescending? Maybe. Probably. There’s a kind of stereotypical nice liberal
who says, “I don’t see race.” I do. Do you know who else sees race? Every
single black person I’ve ever asked about it. Admittedly, that’s a limited data
set. I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing or a bad thing—just a thing.
A social reality. A little courtesy, gracefully deployed, can go a long way.
Many of you will have heard stories from black Americans
about being trailed through shops as though they were suspected shoplifters or
being treated badly in restaurants, finding it difficult to hail a cab back
when hailing a cab was a thing, that sort of stuff. Allow me to introduce
another related subject and an even more likely-to-be-unpopular opinion: I
don’t think all those stories are true. Not all of them. But they are
not based on nothing, either. There are certain social tensions that are simply
a fact of life when it comes to race, and it is easy for misunderstandings to
happen on either side of an interaction. Conversely, you will sometimes hear
white people complain that some black person was rude or intentionally
unhelpful to them in some social or commercial setting and that they suspect
that race had something to do with this. And maybe they are right, at least
some of the time, too. I think that being a little extra polite in such
situations is a good idea: Err on the side of making people feel like they’re
being treated with respect.
I don’t know that I need to rehearse my whole social
résumé here, but suffice it to say that I have probably about the kind of
racial psychological baggage that you would expect from a conservative white
man born in the 1970s in the South (to the extent that West Texas really counts
as the South) and had a lot of the characteristic experiences of that time,
including being bused to a majority-black school in the third grade as part of
a federal desegregation program. I try to be a person of goodwill and to treat
people decently, and, of course, I think racism per se is both backward
and evil.
But I will not claim to be so enlightened as to be free
from sneaky little racial assumptions, one of which showed itself in an amusing
way last week. (I know this story will not reflect well on me, but I tell
unflattering stories about lots of people.) I was staying in a hotel in
Baltimore and went to the elevator to go downstairs and get some coffee. A
middle-aged black woman approached the elevator from the opposite direction
wearing a blue smock and matching pants, kind of like scrubs, with her name printed
on the front. I did not pay much attention. I stood aside at the elevator, said
“After you,” and let her go in first. Tiny little act of courtesy, the sort of
thing one does without really thinking about it. My brain registered that woman
as hotel housekeeping staff, which I like to think had more to do with the
uniform—the untucked top with the name printed on the front, etc.—than with her
race. But, again, who really knows? Anyway, she steps onto the elevator, and
there is a young white man wearing the same blue smock and scrub-ish pants who
suddenly stands up very straight and says:
“Good morning, admiral!”
Who knew an admiral’s workaday uniform could be so casual?
I thought about that admiral for the rest of the morning.
And what really stuck in my head wasn’t the question of race or sex—as
important as these obviously are in American life—but the uniform. I don’t have
any idea what her life has been like, but I’ll bet it was not easy to
rise to that rank. I’ll bet she did some real hard things. If I had put
in the work and the years to become an admiral, I’d probably dress like Cap’n
Crunch. But that is not what her day called for. And, of course, the important
stuff—service and sacrifice and honor and all the rest of it—isn’t in the
epaulets and the fruit salad, and surely it is the case that an excessive
interest in martial plumage and display—as in the case of Pete Hegseth, the secretary of thirst—speaks poorly of a military leader,
the ideal type being not the showy and strutting George Patton but the modest,
supremely capable Dwight Eisenhower.
(One can take that too far, as with the tech moguls who
affect a college sophomore uniform of T-shirts and hoodies, albeit $500
T-shirts and $10,000 hoodies. The Silicon Valley sumptuary code is complicated
and weird.)
I do think that our national racial anguish is often
exaggerated, but, then, I don’t know what it looks like, how it feels, on the
other side of that line. I know there is a line, and the brute fact of
the line matters a great deal as a social reality. (“Thinking of a key, each confirms a prison.”) But I do know
how it looks from over here, where, if I’m not paying very close attention and
haven’t had my morning coffee, I might mistake an admiral for a housekeeper.
There isn’t a thing in the world wrong with being a housekeeper, and a
housekeeper is no less deserving of respect and courtesy, but different things
are different things.
And there is something enviable in military manners: The
rules are the rules, everybody knows what the rules are, uniforms are called uniforms
for the reason of uniformity, and there is no obligation to pretend that there
isn’t a hierarchy. It is an excellent thing to have reasonably well-thought-out
rules.
And maybe a Cap’n Crunch hat would help out a few of us
bleary-eyed and oblivious civilians.
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