Bookfair 2020: Trans Totalitarian Anarchism?

Editorial Note:

IN January 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay entitled 'The Prevention of Literature' in which he addressed the indifference of the public to the promotion of free expression and what Orwell calls 'the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers'.

 The reader will observe the humility here in Orwell's tone and will no doubt contrast it with the self confidence and even arrogance of much contemporary  commentary.  

'If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion.  In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.'

This lack of guts, this fear to challenge the latest orthodoxy still prevails in the anglo-saxon countries today.  But it's not the general public that are setting the agenda for acceptable opinions, it is a kind of fashionable elite view which bullies and bamboozles dissidents who either refuse, or are slow to swallow the latest flavour of the month.

2020 BOOKFAIR

The charming Tweets below from the proponents of the 2020 BOOKFAIR in London beautifully illustrate a naive mentality which is all too prevalent today.  In a way I feel sorry for the poor souls who churn out such stuff.  Do they really believe that they can silence criticism of Trans mania by such crude bans at Bookfairs?  All they have accomplished so far is to close down successful bookfairs as in London or to be forced to do deals as at the recent Manchester People's History Museum Bookfair.  Their every ban or censorious step tottering with the 'cocks in frocks' creates more opposition.

George Orwell, in the preface intended to accompany his book Animal Farm, which was not published in the first edition and remained undiscovered until 1971, wrote:
If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

The 2020 Bookfair organisers are desperately trying to keep the debate over the business of the Cocks in Frocks off the agenda.   It seems they can't cope with having to defend their curiosities of their position.  

Freedom & Professor Chomsky

When we had to take on Professor Chomsky in 2001, with our publication of the Alternative Raven, entitled 'Language, Mind & Society: Chomsky & His Critics' (2001)*, we were met with a more serious and subtle resistance.  In that case pressure was applied slyly through Milan Rai to get Freedom Press to block publication, after the great man Chomsky became aware that we were going to publish some essays challenging to his linguistic ideas on the universal grammar in what was then The Raven.  Milan Rai had been for a time closely associated with Chomsky and now edits Peace News. 
Milan worked behind the scenes on Professor Chomsky's behalf to get the then editor of Freedom to prevent the agreed publication of The Raven critical of his theory on language.   In the end a group of northern anarchists and academics brought out an Alternative Raven, which included the articles challenging Chomsky's theories.  Later Freedom even refused to review the Alternative Raven. when Donald Rooum over-ruled the then editor Toby Crowe.  Later in a letter to me, Chomsky came to admit that he had throughout been in touch with with Milan Rai over that issue, but in mitigation said he only contacted him as a friend.

None of the people involved in trying to suppress the criticism of Chomsky's linguistics at Freedom covered themselves with glory over this matter, and Freedom lost some of its integrity by first agreeing to publish The Raven on Chomsky's linguistics, and to later when Milan Rai got involved to withdraw its offer.  

Self-censorship & 'uncomfortable truths'

When Orwell writes about the 'discomfort' of intellectual honesty, he meant that even during the Second World War, with the Ministry of Information’s often ham-fisted attempts at press censorship, 'the sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.'   Self-censorship came down to matters of decorum, Orwell argues—or as we would put it today, 'civility.'   Obedience to 'an orthodoxy' meant that while 'it is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other… it is "not done" to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was "not done" to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.  Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness,' not by government agents, but by a critical backlash aimed at preserving a sense of 'normalcy' at all costs.


At stake for Orwell in the 1940s was no less than the fundamental liberal principle of free speech, in defense of which he invokes the famous quote from Voltaire as well as Rosa Luxembourg’s definition of freedom as 'freedom for the other fellow'.  'Liberty of speech and of the press,' Orwell writes, does not demand 'absolute liberty'—though he stops short of defining its limits.  But it does demand the courage to tell uncomfortable truths, even such truths as are, perhaps, politically inexpedient or detrimental to the prospects of a lucrative career.  'If liberty means anything at all,' Orwell concludes, 'it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.'

Unlike in the 1940s, when Orwell was around trying to get Animal Farm published, we are not being nudged into a vulgar Marxist or pro-Soviet totalitarianism.  The kind of totalitarianism of the Trans mania we are now expected to civilly swallow is the decorum of the Cocks in Frocks.

*  http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/class_text_117.pdf