Banning Kanye West is a mistake

Attempts to suppress West’s song ‘Heil Hitler’ have played right into his hands.

A group of black men stand in formation wearing animal skins. An auto-tuned voice half-raps, half-sings: ‘Man, these people took my kids from me, then they closed my bank account / I got so much anger in me, got no way to take it out… So I became a Nazi, yeah, bitch, I’m the villain’. Thereafter, much of the song revolves around the chorus of men repeatedly singing: ‘Nigga, Heil Hitler’. At the end of the video, we hear the voice of Adolf Hitler himself, an excerpt from a speech he delivered at the Krupp Factory in western Germany in 1935.

Whatever else Kanye West is trying to achieve by producing this video, it has certainly been successful in terms of provocation. The song has been banned on virtually all streaming services, including Spotify, Apple Music, and SoundCloud. On X, it has been viewed many millions of times, its appeal greatly enhanced by the fact that it has been removed elsewhere. This is known as the ‘Streisand effect’, whereby attempts at censorship and suppression inadvertently draw more attention to the offending material.

Our interpretations of the video will be informed by the context. For a long while, West - or ‘Ye’ as he prefers to be known - has been dabbling in antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories. In interviews, he has repeated the myth that Jewish people control the banks and the media. He appears to believe that the existence of some powerful Jewish people proves his point, but the notion that one of the most historically persecuted groups somehow simultaneously retains complete global dominance is so preposterous that it could only ever be fuelled by ignorance.

Elsewhere, West has been even more explicit. In October 2022, he posted a tweet which said ‘I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE’. During an appearance on Alex Jones’s InfoWars show, West said: ‘They did good things too, we’ve got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time’, and ‘the Jewish media has made us feel like the Nazis and Hitler have never offered anything of value to the world’. When he uttered the words ‘I like Hitler’, even Jones looked shocked. Soon after, West posted on X a picture of Hitler accompanied by a goat emoji; the acronym GOAT means ‘Greatest Of All Time’.

West is not a performance artist who believes in provocation for its own sake. I once saw a show by drag artists at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern which involved bloodletting, sexual penetration and a defiantly sustained Nazi salute. It was bad art, but it wasn’t fascist apologism; the point was to shock and to obliterate the limits of tolerance. West is not an avant-garde performer of this ilk, and so it is not unreasonable that we should take his comments at face value.

So what is West attempting to achieve with his ‘Heil Hitler’ video? Judging from his past remarks, there are solid grounds for interpreting the song as outright antisemitism, or at least an effort to goad Jewish people. Others see it as a satirical commentary on misinterpretations of his position, a sentiment akin to ‘if they’re going to call me a Nazi anyway, I may as well go as far as possible’. Some have seen it merely as an elaborate joke. West cannot be oblivious to the fact that Hitler would hardly have relished the prospect of a group of black men chanting his name; this is about as far from the reification of his Aryan utopia as can be imagined.

The explanation that has gained the most traction seems to be that West is trying to prove a point about freedom of speech. In his view, the First Amendment is now celebrated only so far, and the subject of supposed Jewish hegemony is the red line. Of course, genuine advocates of free speech also accept, often reluctantly, that racism should not be censored. In 1977, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) famously defended the rights of neo-Nazis to march in the suburb of Skokie, Chicago. By banning ‘Heil Hitler’, the likes of Spotify are providing fuel for West and anyone else whose narrative depends on the notion that Jewish people hold disproportionate power in society.

This is an easy victory for West, because consistency on this issue takes some courage. I understand why so many baulk when it comes to standing up for the free speech of historian David Irving, for example, whose Holocaust revisionism has been proven comprehensively in court. But when Irving was sentenced to three years in prison in Austria for Holocaust denial, it granted him the kind of martyr status that he did not deserve. For many, it lent credence to his views; the punishment of dissent invariably encourages people to assume that the heretic might be on to something.

Censorship, in other words, is the absolute worst response to those who are wrong about history, or who celebrate the atrocities of the past…

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