In 1955, the American Friends Service Committee published a pamphlet, fairly ridiculous in retrospect, advising Americans against “hysteria” regarding the sundry brutalities of the Soviet Union and maintaining that the Soviet expansionism of the time was in no essential way different from the American expansion to the west. As a historical matter, the pamphlet is memorable for two reasons: The first is that the American Friends Service Committee suppressed, at the time, the name of one of the work’s authors, owing to the fact that he was a homosexual. The second, ironic in light of the first, is that the pamphlet carried as its title a phrase that has far outlived the rest of its content: “Speak Truth To Power.”
“Speaking truth to power” is a bit of rhetoric that has produced any number of risible and lamentable results, nowhere more so than in the arts, though there is a kernel of truth associated with it: One of the characteristics of a good society is that its members are safe when criticizing their government and other powerful institutions. As Thomas Jefferson put it in a letter to George Washington:
No government ought to be without censors, and where the press is free, no one ever will. If virtuous, it need not fear the fair operation of attack and defense. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting out the truth whether in religion, law, or politics. I think it as
