{"id":341835,"date":"2025-10-06T15:57:39","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T11:57:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/epress.am\/?p=341835"},"modified":"2025-10-06T16:04:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T12:04:10","slug":"two-cultures-of-denunciation-sheila-fitzpatrick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2025\/10\/06\/two-cultures-of-denunciation-sheila-fitzpatrick.html","title":{"rendered":"Two Cultures of Denunciation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: right;\">Armenian translation is available on\u00a0<span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/epress.am\/2025\/10\/06\/two-cultures-of-denunciation.html\">Epress.am<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span class=\"dropcaps dropcap--i\">I <\/span><span class=\"smallcapslede smallcapslede-spaced lrb-t-cac\">don\u2019t<\/span>\u200b\u00a0<span class=\"smallcaps\">think<\/span>\u00a0I ever dobbed anybody in \u2013 or if I did, I would have told myself I was doing something else. Dobbing is the preferred Australian word for denunciation or snitching to the bosses, and it is taken to be a shameful betrayal of one\u2019s fellow subalterns. I\u2019m quite sure that, as a child, I never sneaked to a teacher about other girls: that would have been contemptible in schoolyard culture and I would remember if I\u2019d done such a thing. For adults, it\u2019s easier to obfuscate the act. A university dean of my acquaintance once told me that faculty members at his Ivy League school regularly dropped in to his office for casual chats whose real purpose, usually not directly stated, was to let him know that \u2018there might be a problem\u2019 with some other colleague.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">When I first went to the Soviet Union as a British exchange student in the 1960s, I found that Soviet attitudes on the matter were similar to those I had grown up with in Australia. To be a snitch (<em class=\"emphasisClass\">donoschik<\/em>) was and remains contemptible in Russian eyes, no matter how much governments \u2013 from 17<span class=\"ord\">th<\/span>-century Muscovite to Soviet \u2013 have encouraged it, and how common the practice is in real life. Of course, as a principled position, this blanket ban on informing the authorities about anything has its problems. In the 1980s, when I had become interested in denunciation as a social historian, I asked one of my Soviet\/Russian friends what he would do if he found out his neighbour was a serial murderer. Would he break his own rules and go to the police with a\u00a0<em class=\"emphasisClass\">donos<\/em>, or remain silent and risk more people dying? \u2018I would tell them,\u2019 he said, after a moment\u2019s thought. \u2018But I would hate myself for doing so.\u2019<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">America, as I realised soon after arriving there as a budding Sovietologist in the Cold War, is different. Telling the authorities about another citizen\u2019s wrongdoing becomes an ipso facto betrayal of subaltern solidarity only in context of a strong dichotomy between \u2018us\u2019 and \u2018them\u2019; and this dichotomy seems to be only partially and episodically present in American life. It was \u2018us\u2019 and \u2018them\u2019 for the anti-Vietnam protesters of the 1970s, and for intellectuals in the McCarthyist 1950s, outraged at the pressure put on witnesses before the House Un-American Activities Committee to \u2018name names\u2019 of communists and sympathisers. But in general, Americans have seemed to accept the idea that government is their representative, not a thing apart, so they don\u2019t feel so bad about telling the authorities something the authorities should know.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">Among the difficulties of talking about denunciation is that there are so many words for it, along with sharply opposed understandings of its morality. If you denounce me, you\u2019re a snitch with a personal agenda. If I denounce you, it\u2019s because I\u2019m a public-spirited citizen. Many of the terms in different languages are negative or at best neutral officialese, but Americans, uniquely, have invented a term for denunciation that is wholly positive: \u2018whistleblowing\u2019. This word, reportedly coined by Ralph Nader in the early 1970s to avoid the pejorative connotations of \u2018snitching\u2019 and \u2018informing\u2019, refers specifically to the reporting of abuses on the part of bosses of corporations, government departments and the like. Since whistleblowers risk retaliation by speaking out, they are seen (except by their targets) as brave, public-spirited truth-tellers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">By contrast, denunciation was seen by\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">US<\/span>\u00a0Sovietologists, as well as a broader Cold War public, as a distinctively Soviet phenomenon, part of the \u2018atomisation\u2019 fostered by the totalitarian state through the breaking of traditional family and friendship loyalties, and wholly negative. The case always cited was that of Pavlik Morozov, a Young Pioneer who denounced his own father during collectivisation, whose example was recommended to generations of Soviet children.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">In the course of my research on Soviet history, I became interested in Stalin\u2019s Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s and early 1930s, a precursor to (and no doubt an inspiration for) Mao\u2019s better known Cultural Revolution in China decades later. The Soviet Cultural Revolution was an assault on the entrenched power of elites (the \u2018bourgeois\u2019 intelligentsia and \u2018rightist\u2019 bureaucrats) in the arts and education. The campaign was taken up with enthusiasm by young communist militants eager for a fight as well as people with grievances in all fields of culture. Denunciation of opponents to the Party was a major weapon in these conflicts. Such denunciations were known as \u2018signals from below\u2019, a positive Soviet term for denunciation which, despite official endorsement, never caught on in ordinary Russian speech.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">The Great Purges of the late 1930s, which were initiated by Stalin but gathered their own momentum, offered a different kind of mass-denunciation experience. Communist elites were the main target, and popular denunciation was a common way of identifying the victims (\u2018spies\u2019 and \u2018enemies of the people\u2019) who were to be arrested, executed or banished to Gulag. In contrast to the Soviet Cultural Revolution, which was not usually hysterical, this became a real moral panic \u2013 a witch hunt in which \u2018enemies\u2019 might be suddenly and intuitively recognised with no real evidence offered or required. Citizens thus accused were unable to defend themselves, and if well-wishers tried to step in, even just by calling for due process, they instantly became \u2018enemies\u2019 too.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">Comparisons with American experience were in general discouraged in\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">US<\/span>\u00a0Sovietology, so the Salem witch hunts in late 17<span class=\"ord\">th<\/span>-century Massachusetts were never invoked as an earlier episode of moral panic. Since denunciation was seen as a by-product of totalitarianism, it was taken as read that no such practice could exist in a democracy. This was one of the Cold War axioms encountered in the\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">US<\/span>\u00a0in the 1970s that struck me as self-evidently wrong. Having grown up with an outspoken left-wing father who trod on toes in Cold War Australia (where we had our own\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">HUAC<\/span>\u00a0equivalents in the form of Royal Commissions on espionage and communism), it seemed odd to me that Americans had so quickly forgotten their own experiences of the 1950s. Of course there is denunciation in Western democratic societies as well as in totalitarian ones. The question is about moral status and equivalence.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">The philosopher Judith Shklar had an answer: denunciation is good when made to a good government, and bad when made to a bad one. Perhaps that helps to some degree. We might agree that, since the Soviet government was bad (which is clearly Shklar\u2019s premise), it was also bad to denounce \u2018enemies of the people\u2019 under Stalin, \u2018dissidents\u2019 under Brezhnev and, mutatis mutandis, anti-war and gay activists in post-Soviet Russia under Putin. But how about denouncing \u2018Stalinists\u2019 under Khrushchev or Gorbachev? Or \u2018Nazis\u2019 and \u2018Nazi collaborators\u2019 under any of these?<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">Shklar\u2019s argument suggests that denunciation should always be morally acceptable in a democracy. But in the\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">US<\/span>\u00a0some might prefer to decide on a case by case basis, or at least administration by administration. Denouncing \u2018terrorists\u2019 under George W. Bush in the 2000s is one thing (though don\u2019t take that as a personal endorsement), but denouncing \u2018communists\u2019 under Truman or Eisenhower in the 1950s might seem more dubious to American liberals, not to mention denouncing \u2018woke\u2019 intellectuals under Trump in the 2020s.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">It would be nice if we could distinguish between denunciations on the basis of motive, but that seems hopeless. Most denunciations are couched in public interest terms, motives are generally mixed, only God can see into the heart etc. We may be on firmer ground making distinctions between denunciations on the basis of likely outcomes. Under Stalin during the Great Purges, these included arrest, exile to Gulag and summary execution. While the denunciatory processes of McCarthyism had some similarities to the Purges, their outcomes were hugely different. Victims of McCarthyism (despite the Rosenberg case) didn\u2019t typically suffer death or long-term exile, but \u2018only\u2019 reputational damage. Loss of employment was a high possibility, but the chance of arrest was small. This was much closer to the level of consequences likely to follow a Soviet denunciation in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">Shklar focuses on political denunciations, but it\u2019s difficult to draw a hard and fast line between these and denunciations for criminal acts, or for behaviour that is merely deemed \u2018inappropriate\u2019, to use an anachronistic term. After the opening of classified Soviet archives in the 1990s exposed a remarkable range of Soviet\u00a0<em class=\"emphasisClass\">donosy<\/em>, I did a study of three hundred denunciations made by Soviet peasants against their bosses in the 1930s. It made little sense to divide them into political or non-political, since so many combined both: a typical denunciation against the chairman of the kolkhoz would include a political accusation (\u2018Trotskyite\u2019) as well as a criminal one (\u2018embezzler\u2019), along with allegations of abusive or disrespectful behaviour such as slapping rank-and-file kolkhozniks or having sex with their daughters. Peasants seem to have written the same kind of letters throughout the Soviet period, with cosmetic changes on the political side (\u2018Nazi collaborators\u2019 for \u2018Trotskyites\u2019 after the war). Indeed, for a large range of denunciations, not only in the Soviet Union, the nature of the current political regime seems largely irrelevant. Should sexual abuse have been reported in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev but not under Stalin? Would my Russian friend have been morally in the clear if he had kept quiet about his neighbour\u2019s putative crimes until Gorbachev or Yeltsin came along?<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">But I didn\u2019t have to go all the way to the Soviet archives to find examples of denunciation. In the\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">US<\/span>, where I had been living since the early 1970s, the mainstream press provided ample evidence of the phenomenon. The new moral panic was not about communism but about the sexual abuse of children in kindergartens. Denunciations came in from parents reporting their children\u2019s fantastic tales of flying witches, Satanic rituals and being flushed down the toilet to secret chambers where the abuse took place. One of my friends, normally a rational person, but with young children, took the accusations semi-seriously. So did the courts in California and elsewhere, sentencing some nursery school workers to long prison terms. Eventually the hysteria died down; the charges were dropped and the teachers released. In January 1997, the ex-felons were invited to a \u2018Day of Contrition\u2019 \u2013 held, appropriately, in Salem.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">Crime Stoppers, another product of the 1970s, offered a new avenue of anonymous denunciation for citizens who were too squeamish or too prudent to report directly to the police. Crime Stoppers is now an organisation with international reach whose function is to pass on the information it receives from individuals to the relevant national and international authorities. Even Australians, with their strong anti-dobbing tradition, have embraced this useful \u2018receiving service for people wanting to share what they know about unsolved crimes and suspicious activity without having to say who they are\u2019, as its Australian website currently puts it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">Political whistleblowers in the\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">US<\/span>\u00a0periodically captured the headlines in the\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">US<\/span>\u00a0press. In 1971, there was Daniel Ellsberg\u2019s leak of the Pentagon Papers to the\u00a0<em class=\"emphasisClass\">New York Times<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<em class=\"emphasisClass\">Washington Post<\/em>. Since his aim was to discredit the government position on the Vietnam War, most liberals regarded his actions as morally justified, indeed admirable. In 2013, when Edward Snowden did something similar with\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">NSA<\/span>\u00a0documents, the reaction was more mixed (his flight to Russia was a bad look). In between, the denunciation of the \u2018Unabomber\u2019, Ted Kaczynski, by his brother David in 1996 made many Americans uneasy: against the undoubted \u2018good\u2019 of catching a terrorist was the \u2018bad\u2019 of snitching on his own family, something uncomfortably close to the Pavlik Morozov story. Then, in 1998, came the scandal of Monica Lewinsky\u2019s sexual relationship with Bill Clinton, which came to light as a result of a denunciation by Lewinsky\u2019s co-worker Linda Tripp. This provoked even more strongly divided opinion. Perhaps it was in the national interest to expose the president\u2019s sex life (and his false denials); on the other hand, Tripp, who seemed eager for the limelight, was betraying a friend\u2019s confidence and getting that friend\u2019s reputation completely trashed for what was at most, on Lewinsky\u2019s part, a minor peccadillo.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">But it was the anti-terrorist panic following 9\/11 that was the turning point in\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">US<\/span>\u00a0attitudes, the moment when denunciation became not only acceptable but also, with regard to suspected terrorists, a moral duty. I remember the shock of driving down the New Jersey Turnpike soon after the attack and seeing a flashing sign admonishing me to \u2018Report any suspicious persons\u2019. The state of Pennsylvania advertised a toll-free number for the public \u2018to report tips about possible terrorists or terrorist activity\u2019. It\u2019s true that when Congress tried to reproduce this nationally as Operation\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">TIPS<\/span>\u00a0(Terrorism Information and Prevention System) in 2002, the House majority leader, Dick Armey, a conservative Republican, objected that he could not support a law that encouraged Americans \u2018to spy on one another\u2019. The initiative was defeated, but both anonymous and signed tips about people with Middle Eastern names kept flooding in anyway. Perhaps not coincidentally,\u00a0<em class=\"emphasisClass\">Time<\/em>\u00a0declared 2002 \u2018The Year of the Whistle-Blowers\u2019, choosing three female whistleblowers as its Persons of the Year.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">The idea of a duty to denounce (terrorists or anyone else) was taking hold. \u2018If you see something, say something,\u2019 a catchphrase originating from the New York transport authority after 9\/11, was licensed to the Department of Homeland Security in 2010 for use in a nationwide anti-terrorism campaign. The equivalent message in the\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">UK<\/span>, \u2018See it, say it, sorted,\u2019 emphasised the relief passengers should feel on unburdening themselves of unwanted knowledge and responsibility.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">The #MeToo movement that began in 2017, for retrospective denunciation of powerful men for sexual abuse, was undoubtedly a good cause, but it also had some of the characteristics of a moral panic, notably the insistence that victims\u2019 statements must never be questioned and that those they accused must immediately be judged guilty without the right of self-defence. \u2018Speaking out\u2019 in the context of #MeToo was seen as truth-telling, something quite different from denunciation, snitching or even whistleblowing, despite the functional equivalence. #MeToo was part of a broader climate fostering the reporting of many forms of \u2018inappropriate\u2019 behaviour in the sphere of sex and gender, including the failure to use an individual\u2019s chosen pronouns. Researchers at North Dakota State University found that 72 per cent of students thought that professors who made \u2018offensive\u2019 remarks should be reported to the university administration.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">Experiences were very different in Russia. Communism had been overthrown in 1991, the Union disbanded, \u2018wild capitalism\u2019 tried under Yeltsin, and a degree of law and order, with emphasis on national self-respect, restored under Putin Mark 1, before Putin Mark 2 swerved into international aggression with Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine. For Russian citizens, some everyday practices have changed, but not the practice of denunciation. Currently, the offences most often denounced are anti-war attitudes towards the Ukraine conflict and\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">LGBT<\/span>\u00a0rights activism (\u2018propaganda\u2019). The first are patriotic in tone, the second go under the banner of \u2018traditional family values\u2019. In both cases, the baleful influence of the West is often cited.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">The invasion of Ukraine was viewed critically by the Russian liberal intelligentsia. Most people maintained a prudent silence in public, though in the first months it wasn\u2019t unusual for university teachers to raise the issue for discussion in their classes, making their own anti-war stance clear. Over time, however, such people became more wary. A number of intellectuals with Western contacts chose to move abroad, at least for the time being (with Russian borders now open, it is possible, unlike in Soviet times, to retain some ambiguity as to whether one has emigrated), while retaining their jobs and working remotely via Zoom. Alarmed at the prevalence of denunciation of academics for anti-war attitudes, one group of Russian scholars (who feel safer remaining anonymous) undertook a study of it, based on interviews and the documentary public record. They reported a climate in which denunciation of those with anti-war attitudes by students, colleagues and outside vigilantes has become ever more common and reputationally damaging. These denunciations are generally made not to the\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">FSB<\/span>\u00a0(the\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">KGB<\/span>\u2019s successor) but to university administrations. At first, the universities often tried to defend their faculty, but increasingly they have resorted to disciplinary measures, including pressure to resign and actual firings.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">Of course, denunciation is only part of the picture of repression in Russia. The Foreign Agent law, originally designed to reduce the influence of foreign NGOs, is now also used against individual Russian citizens deemed to be \u2018under foreign influence\u2019, which requires those with foreign contacts to put themselves on a register. Foreign agents are, among other things, banned from public office and from teaching; failure to register, if you are judged to be under \u2018foreign influence\u2019, is a criminal offence. Putin\u2019s regime takes domestic dissent seriously; it has an active security police to keep an eye on those who oppose the war, and over the past decade an array of laws has been passed to allow them to be punished. According to data gathered by researchers at\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">OVD<\/span>-Info, 356 people are currently in prison in Russia for anti-war crimes, only occasionally as a result of citizen denunciations.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">A Moscow publishing insider told me that in commercial publishing, denunciation is still the main method of control. Unlike in Soviet times, there is no formal censorship, but in some ways this only makes life harder since, while there are undoubtedly subjects you are not supposed to publish on and things you are not supposed to say, you essentially have to sniff the air and guess what they are. The direct threat comes from self-appointed vigilantes who \u2018carefully read books on subjects that interest them\u2019, and then, if they see offensive material, \u2018write denunciations to all possible authorities and the security organs, which are always glad to receive news of easily uncovered violations of law and launch appropriate actions \u2013 in most cases administrative and not criminal\u2019.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">Criticism of the Soviet performance in the Second World War and the equating of Stalin with Hitler are among the themes that are known to be disapproved of \u2018up there\u2019, and are particularly likely to attract denunciation by vigilantes. But the biggest target, apart from criticism of the Ukraine war, is gay and trans activism. Both have been criminalised, so here denunciation can cause more than reputational damage. Recent reports of prosecutions for \u2018gay activism\u2019 noted the role of \u2018tips and complaints\u2019 from vigilante organisations such as the Safe Internet League and the Veterans of Russia. For longtime Soviet\/Russia-watchers, this is an intriguing variation on the old story of pernicious Western influences. In the late Stalin period, capitalist degeneracy and \u2018cosmopolitanism\u2019, probably peddled by Jews, were blamed for aberrations in high culture such as abstract art and atonal music. Despite a current reported rise in popular antisemitism in Russia, Putin seems to have avoided giving that kind of signal. But his message on the sex and gender question has been quite explicit: \u2018A man is a man, and a woman is a woman.\u2019 The Orthodox Church, the Duma and \u2013 judging by opinion polls \u2013 the great majority of the public heartily agree.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">Russian denunciation appears to have stuck to the traditional rule that denouncers are usually conservatives and their targets liberals. The same used to be true of denunciation in America, but that changed in the first two decades of the present century, when sex and gender offences became prime causes of denunciation. In the North Dakota survey, students identifying as \u2018liberal\u2019 were significantly more likely to be in favour of denouncing professors for inappropriate speech acts than those identifying as \u2018conservative\u2019. In an analysis from 2020 of \u2018scholarship suppression\u2019 in the\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">US<\/span>, the social scientist Sean Stevens and his colleagues noted that in Western academia, denunciations, typically made online in social media campaigns against sex and gender offences, come predominantly from the left.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">But now, in the age of Trump, the anti-liberals seem to have regained the initiative as prime movers of denunciation; liberals, accordingly, have remembered that they have objections in principle. The consensus liberal view on denunciation under the new administration is revealed by the headlines: \u2018Trump wants you to snitch on your co-workers\u2019; \u2018Trump is propping up his agenda on a network of snitches.\u2019\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">ICE<\/span>\u00a0has an online portal for reporting on illegal immigrants and suspected criminal activity, and a hotline sponsored by the Department of Education calls for anonymous informing by \u2018students, parents, teachers and the broader community\u2019 on schools and teachers \u2018perceived as promoting diversity, equity or inclusion\u2019. Shortly after Trump\u2019s inauguration, a directive from the Office of Personnel Management led to emails being sent to employees of the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, Nasa and other agencies asking them, within ten days, to identify colleagues still persisting in work on diversity, equity and inclusion \u2013 in other words, snitch or be snitched on. In April, the Department of Health and Human Services called for denunciations from health workers and the public of doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors. While there were some awkward problems with regard to patient privacy at first, these have now been circumvented, partly by classifying informers as whistleblowers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">The Trump administration\u2019s campaign against \u2018antisemitism\u2019 in universities relies on a double denunciation process: students and faculty are encouraged to provide information about alleged offences, and universities are required not just to act on this information but also to report it to Washington. Fear of such denunciation is rampant among faculty, according to Rashid Khalidi, recently retired from Columbia University. George Washington University has been censured by the Department of Justice, with the usual threat of dire consequences, for failing in the first instance to take action on complaints received, and in the second to report them.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">People from the Make America Great Again movement aren\u2019t going to call reporting via the new tip lines \u2018snitching\u2019, or even \u2018whistleblowing\u2019, because these are liberals\u2019 words. But the activist group Moms for Liberty has found a\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">MAGA<\/span>\u00a0way of naming the practice: it described the call for denunciation of teachers for\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">DEI<\/span>\u00a0activism as \u2018putting power back in the hands of parents\u2019. Calling for denunciations is one way of mobilising ordinary Americans to challenge the power of the \u2018deep state\u2019 and the liberal elites who despise them. Back in the day, when Stalin was presiding over his Cultural Revolution, this was called \u2018mobilising the masses\u2019 against \u2018bourgeois liberal\u2019 elites, and denunciation played exactly the same role in identifying offenders for the authorities to prosecute or fire.\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">MAGA<\/span>\u00a0is Trump\u2019s Cultural Revolution.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">We should \u2018resolve to make 2025 the year of no snitching\u2019, the American labour journalist Hamilton Nolan wrote in January. That\u2019s fine with me. I\u2019m an Australian liberal who internalised the belief that dobbing is shameful when I was in primary school. But I can see why\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">MAGA<\/span>\u00a0supporters have a different take. From their perspective, snitching is the pejorative liberal word for the exercise of grassroots democracy needed to keep bureaucrats honest and put phoneys from the \u2018woke\u2019 intelligentsia in their place. If it hurts corrupt bureaucrats and phoneys, so much the better: this is payback time. Or, as Stalin would have put it, it\u2019s class war. And if it\u2019s class war, perhaps I should just stick to my own class standpoint, the liberal elite one, and continue to oppose snitching in almost all circumstances.<\/p>\n<p class=\"lrb-t-r lrb-t-mdp has-dropcap\">But wait. Shouldn\u2019t the anti-Trump forces be on the counter-attack? That was presumably the rationale behind the decision of Democrats in the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to set up their own tip line to report \u2018potential wrongdoing under the Trump administration\u2019. The announcement, in February, noted that \u2018whistleblowers have a vital role in helping Congress conduct its constitutionally mandated oversight responsibilities\u2019 and calls on the public to pass on information about \u2018abuses of power and threats to federal workers\u2019 emanating from the administration. Fox News described it as Chuck Schumer\u2019s \u2018Deep State snitch line for anybody who wants to dime on Trump\u2019. So the Democrats are fighting fire with fire and denunciation with denunciation. The attached form may be submitted anonymously.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Sheila Fitzpatrick<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Originally published in the <span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/the-paper\/v47\/n17\/sheila-fitzpatrick\/diary\">London Review of Books<\/a><\/span>, 25 September 2025.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Or, as Stalin would have put it, it\u2019s class war. And if it\u2019s class war, perhaps I should just stick to my own class standpoint and continue to oppose snitching in almost all circumstances. 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