A once respected literary magazine memory holed an essay because the writer failed to hew to the radical woke Left agenda — this is how tyrannies start
We still await the “fulsome explanation.”
It’s finally happened: The cancel battalion has landed on the beachhead of American literature. I suppose it was inevitable. For that matter, the anti-everything woke Left had been preparing and staging for the assault for some time. That doesn’t make it any less disconcerting, and disheartening.
The literary journal Guernica is among the most well-respected outlets for serious literature, poetry, interviews, and essays. It is on any writer’s bucket list of places to be published. While well-regarded in writers’ circles it is largely unknown to a wider audience. It has a circulation of around 10,000. It is an unlikely forum for political controversy, much less one that generates national headlines.
Last week Guernica published a piece called “From the Edges of a Broken World,” by a writer named Joanna Chen. Chen is a British-born Israeli Jew who works as a writer and translator. The subject matter is heartrending, as Chen describes her experiences during the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and her efforts to emotionally and physically grapple with the war that resulted. It is as honest a piece I have read about the current situation in that part of the Middle East. Which means, of course, the rage-addled radical Left immediately sprang into action. According to the Los Angeles Times, the essay “an uproar in the activist literary world.” The magazine unpublished the piece (incorrectly calling it a “retraction”) and apologized to readers. That did not stop some 12 or 15 editors and staff from quitting in protest. This is what happens when art and literature is subsumed by politics. Nothing good can come of it.
Chen is no warmonger: She refused to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) when she turned 18 and clearly has a mixed relationship with her adopted country. As an adult her grief over losing her childhood home as a teenager is palpable (when she was 16 her parents moved their family in search of a new start after Chen’s brother died). For the last five years she has volunteered for a nonprofit called Road to Recovery, driving Palestinian children needing medical attention to hospitals in Israel, risking her own life in the process. She has worked with Palestinian and other Arab writers, bringing their words to wider global audiences. A previous essay she wrote for Guernica, about settling with her partner in the Ella Valley and the pains they took to avoid building on land that may have been occupied by Palestinians before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, remains published. A chest-thumping Netanyahu disciple she most assuredly is not. Her current essay is still available thanks to the WayBackMachine.
Suffice it to say, it’s likely that Chen has done more in her life to help the Palestinian people than all of the hand-wringing, indignant Guernica editors and staffers combined. No matter: For the sorts of people who work at literary magazines these days, Chen’s original sin is being an Israeli and a Jew. In the eyes of the radical woke Left, increasingly in thrall to a particularly toxic brew of anti-semitism, she was poisoned irredeemably by a decision not her own. The woke Left cannot abide someone speaking about Israelis as human beings, much less an actual Israeli citizen, much less in the context of the current conflict. To do so is a direct threat to their moral superiority and the simplistic binaries through which they view the world. Israel evil and corrupted, Palestine blameless and pure. Anything more than that is beyond their reckoning.
Most striking about the editors’ and staff’s responses is the sheer churlishness of it. They sound like high school kids who just watched the first season of The Man in the High Castle, or maybe a couple episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale. They use big words, words that sound important, and are. Yet somehow coming from this collection of juvenalia they sound more like a temper tantrum than a profound declaration of moral indignation. It’s the literary equivalent of slapping their hands over their ears, squinting their eyes shut, and screaming, “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you! I hate you!” then running out of the room and slamming their bedroom door as hard as they can.
Former Co-publisher Madhuri Sastry posted a resignation letter on Twitter, because of course she did. Of course she believes the wide world was waiting breathlessly for an official statement from the head of an obscure literary journal. Sastry did not disappoint: Her statement is a master class in self-important grandiosity. She declared, “Since the onset of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, Jina Moore Ngarambe (co-publisher and editor-in-chief), Michael Archer (co-founder and board president) have been discussing Guernica’s role as a cultural institution, as a magazine of art and politics.”
Sastry doesn’t seem to have a clear grasp on the source of her outrage. She refers to conversations since the “onset” of Israel’s “ongoing genocide,” presumably meaning October 8. Of course, her fellow travelers on the woke Left believe that the “onset” was 75 years ago, with what Lebanese Arabs called the nakba, or “catastrophe” of Israel’s founding. She’s incoherent even in her self-righteousness. Then again, children often are. They’re. Just. So. Mad! Also, Guernica is a good literary mag, but “cultural institution” is a reach.
She keeps swinging for the fences: “An editorial politics is symbolic or representative of a certain type of institution, which informs people’s expectations of Guernica….I can no longer defend or represent Guernica in my capacity as co-publisher. There is no redemption from this decision, but there must be accountability.”
Cut through the pomposity (and the incomprehensibility of that first sentence) and you’ll find a chilling core message: There are certain types of speech from which there is “no redemption.” Speak them, and be forever cast out. Self-appointed, volunteer editors at places like obscure literary magazines and late night talk shows are the final arbiters. Those who have studied history know to be afraid when those cultural arbiters start invoking religious terminology. That way be monsters.
Similarly, they toss around big, important-sounding words like genocide, imperialism, Zionism, colonialism, and such, but one gets the sense they don’t really know what the words mean. Another former editor declared the magazine had become “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness.” Apparently the editor didn’t realize she was working at such an evil, hateful institution until just now.
Have any of them actually studied the Holocaust and Israel’s history? Have they studied the long, tormented history of the Jews and the Muslims? Have they studied the Crusades, during which Jews were slaughtered at the hands of Christians and Muslims alike? Have any studied the forces that gave rise to actual genocidal regimes throughout history? (As an aside, let’s be absolutely crystal on one point: If Israel, with one of the most powerful and capable militaries in history, wanted to exterminate the Palestinians, they would have done it a long time ago.)
If the aggrieved staff and editors had studied history they would see reflections of their own attitudes and actions in the German Brown Shirts and the Ottoman gendarmes. They would see disconcerting parallels between their cries for cancellation and the snuffing of independent thought in places like the Soviet Union and North Korea. They would realize they are using the words of fascist tyranny when they declare they are “withdrawing their labor” from the magazine.
Several of the quitters cheered their colleagues’, and by extension their own, “courage.” Again, let’s be clear: What occurred last week at Guernica was precisely the opposite of courage, it was an act of collective cowardice. Standing behind a work of social commentary that challenges your and your audience’s opinions and values, that’s courageous. A bunch of privileged hipsters in New York and London taking their toys and going home is simply pathetic. And they are the epitome of modern Western capitalistic privilege: If you are able to afford to live in either of those cities and still have sufficient time and resources to volunteer at a literary magazine, much less as an editor, you are not among the oppressed. You aren’t in solidarity with anyone except people exactly like yourselves. A look at some of their social media profiles reveals many also spend additional time and money on grooming and personal appearance and still more time posing for Instagram and Twix posts that entire tens of people view. Those hipster haircuts and tattoos aren’t cheap. The sheer hypocrisy of their pretense is difficult for normal people to comprehend.
Meanwhile, even as the staff at Guernica tried to memory-hole Chen’s thoughtful, thought-provoking essay, still published is a piece called “Good Mourning Palestine,” ostensibly written in the style of Robin Williams’s Adrian Croneaur character in Good Morning, Vietnam. It is sophomoric and desperately unserious, to the point of mockery. Yet there it is, in all its infantile glory. Here’s a sampling:
“What is a Checkpoint Zone? Sounds like something out of the Wizard of Oz. Ohhh nooo! Don’t go in there! Hey ho, birthright beau, you’ve now landed in Jericho. You’re among the big people now. You represent the IDF, the IDF. Oh no! Follow the birthright trail. Follow the birthright trail. Oh I’ll get you my pretty. Oh my God it’s the Wicked Witch of the East Jerusalem! It’s Ben! It’s Golda!”
It goes on like that for a solid 600 words. I remember writing something in a similar style when I was 17 or 18. I thought it was inspired, a brilliant stream of conscious manifestation of my yet-to-be-recognized literary genius (for the record, my genius remains largely unremarked upon). But again, I was a teenager, and the poem was adolescent bunkum of the sort that would shame me to my core should it ever see the light of day. Yet here is an allegedly serious literary journal, proudly publishing similar dreck tinged with hatred and anti-Semitism – the writer refers to Israel and its “supporters” (presumably the United States) as “the devil” – as if it is serious art.
The writer’s Twitter feed is littered with anti-Semitic tropes, celebrations of political violence, and unhinged rantings about the various people and countries she hates and the conspiracy theories she believes. These things apparently pass muster at Guernica. A Jew writing an intensely personal, even vulnerable essay about her experiences and thoughts in the midst of a war? Begone, you dirty scoundrel. The editors may as well have joined Donald Trump and accused her of “poisoning the blood” of their precious publication. The sentiments are really no different.
Ponder that a moment: A deeply reflective, self-critical essay written from the midst of a war zone is scrubbed because the writer has the wrong identity and fails to hew to the totalitarian woke Left. At the same publication, a tone-deaf, unserious screed written by an individual with truly hateful beliefs remains live and published because she hates the right people.
This is what happens when the smart people get stupid, or stupefied. Unsurprisingly, most of the editors and staffers have advanced degrees. It’s only on the modern American college campus where such race hatred still flourishes, until it seeps into the wider culture from those cesspools. The memory-hole replaces robust dialogue, and unhinged temper tantrums become acceptable behavior by alleged adults. Anyone you disagree with, just scream real loud until they give up. The editors and staffers stomped their feet and got their way, and then still stormed out of the room in an uncontrolled rage. It’s happening across industries, but somehow in the arts and letters it feels more menacing. Corporate mission statements do not speak to the hearts of human beings. Essays, stories, and poems do. To censor them is to set down a very dark path. Make no mistake: What happened at Guernica was no different than a Nazi book burning.
This is the path on which we currently find ourselves: MAGA book banning and woke Left memory-holing. Do both sides not realize they are exactly the same kinds of reprehensible? One might even call them all, collectively, “deplorables.”
the all aspect report 