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IN an article on the NV blog a couple of weeks ago I referred to something I wrote at the end of June 2020. I commented that having read some of the abusive posts directed at Priyamvada Gopal, who had posted a ‘tweet’ which said “I’ll say it again. White Lives Don’t Matter. As white lives”, I thought you would meet nicer turds in a slurry pit.
A long article by Brendan O’Neill on the Spiked Online website graphically describes the vile abuse directed at author J. K. Rowling. From the context it appears that it came via her Twitter account, which of course means the brave authors could remain anonymous.
My own experience of anonymous communications is somewhat limited. I had one letter from an unknown ‘Christian’ in 1970 after I wrote to the local paper saying that I did not think that the Muslim children at the school I worked at should be made to attend what was in effect a Christian oriented morning assembly. I had another in 2010 after I had the temerity to point out in the same paper that Canada Geese were in a nearby park because their staple diet was grass which they got from the lawns and not the bread which they got to the visitors. Short of blocking my letter box there was nothing I could do to prevent them being delivered.
One of O’Neill’s concerns is the almost complete absence of people willing to publicly defend J. K. Rowling. He also took a few well aimed potshots at ‘Cancel Culture’ and ‘Identity Politics’. But it seemed to me that he was somewhat missing the point. If Rowling was distressed at what was being said about her on Twitter, the remedy was in her own hands, literally. All she had to do was switch off her smartphone or if that was too radical, delete the ‘app’.
Rowling, the footballers, Priyamvada Gopal and Sajid Javid are all in their own way ‘commodities’ where image matters. Keeping their names before the public is how they can both relish their present fame and make sure there they are putting something in the metaphorical bank for the future. Rowling may yet write another book; the footballers may think of taking a leaf out of the book of Lionel Messi and launch a premium fashion brand; judging by the Twitter post which led to the abuse Gopal evidently likes to be seen as ‘controversial’, and Sajid Javid is a politician who wants to be seen as ‘just like us’. He has learned the hard way that that there’s always someone who will make a grab the moral high ground if you dare use a word they don’t like.
It’s no use waiting for the government to solve the problems raised by social media by banning so called ‘hate speech’. If you find it unpleasant just stop it being delivered to your smartphone, because it will only hurt you if you let it and no one is forcing you to read it. This isn’t a ‘freedom of speech’ matter. None of the individuals I have used as examples would have the slightest difficulty in getting their voices heard in the UK media, something that cannot be said of the people who resort to vulgar abuse. I doubt the NV editors would turn down a piece on ‘transphilia’ by Ms Rowling.
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by Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator
The capitulation of Batley Grammar School has been a truly dispiriting sight. In response to protests by angry Muslims it has suspended a teacher for the supposed offence of showing a caricature of Muhammad to his pupils. This is an extraordinary act of moral cowardice. Batley Grammar has buckled to religious extremists, cravenly begging for forgiveness for something that ought to be perfectly acceptable in an institution of learning — encouraging young people to engage with and discuss controversial issues.
Everything about the Batley Grammar controversy stinks. It began when a teacher at the prestigious West Yorkshire school, as part of a religious education class, showed his pupils an image of Muhammad. Some Muslim groups that caught wind of this fact started stomping their feet. Mohammad Sajad Hussain of the Islamic charity Purpose Of Life said Muslims will feel ‘deeply hurt’ by the teacher’s behaviour and demanded that he be ‘permanently removed’. At 7.30am yesterday morning a group of mostly young men gathered at the school demanding that the teacher be sacked for the allegedly awful sin of displaying an image of the Prophet.
What happened next was staggering, even by the standards of today’s yellow-bellied culture of self-censorship. Batley Grammar’s headmaster, Gary Kibble, suspended the teacher — pending an investigation — and issued a ‘sincere’ and ‘unequivocal’ apology for the ‘totally inappropriate’ display of the Muhammad image. The school also put on hold the part of the religious-studies course in which the Muhammad incident occurred. And it is being reported this morning that the school has switched to remote learning, telling teachers and kids to stay home.
Forget the religious-studies teacher, who was only doing his job by encouraging his kids to confront all sorts of issues head-on. The true scandal here is the behaviour of the school. It has surrendered to religious intolerance. What next — Mr Kibble standing outside the school gates and flagellating himself for the blasphemous transgression of allowing an image of Muhammad to appear in one of his classrooms?
Bizarrely — but also predictably — the school has been cheered on by so-called progressives. Tracey Brabin, the Labour MP for Batley, says she is glad the school has recognised ‘the upset and offence’ it has caused and has now ‘apologised for the offence caused’. Well done for repenting — that’s effectively what Brabin is saying.
So is it Labour policy to support the suspension of teachers who hold open, frank discussions about Islam? Does Labour support the punishment of public servants who are accused of engaging in blasphemy? We should be told. Many Labour voters in Yorkshire and elsewhere will be keen to know if Labour now backs the public shaming of people who are accused of holding blasphemous thoughts against Islam.
That’s surely the central point in all of this: Britain is not an Islamic country. We do not live under Sharia law. It might be a punishable offence in Islamic nations to make or display an image of Muhammad, but it isn’t here. So what is going on? Why has a teacher been suspended and a school reportedly closed over something that is perfectly legal and perfectly acceptable in an educational context: encouraging discussion of religious icons and controversies?
Batley Grammar’s capitulation will inflame religious intolerance. It will embolden those who believe they have the right to bully and silence anyone who ‘disrespects’ Islam. Moral cowardice is the fuel of contemporary censorship. It is the negative energy on which the zealous crusaders for speech-control feast and get fat. Every time a cultural institution, a publisher or a school yields to the demands of the easily offended, the arrogance of modern censorship intensifies and faith in liberty dims further.
The idea of ‘Islamophobia’ plays a central role in contemporary censorship in Britain. Batley Grammar is being accused by some of inflaming Islamophobic sentiments. This is a slippery way of conflating discussion of Islam with racism; of treating critical discussion about a world religion as a species of racial hatred. But of course, as everyone ought to know, it is perfectly possible to criticise Islamic ideas and even to ‘diss’ Muhammad without harbouring a single hateful thought against the Muslim community.
This controversy is more than dispiriting — it is chilling. The teacher has reportedly been given police protection. That isn’t surprising given that, just a few months ago, a schoolteacher in France was beheaded by a radical Islamist for also initiating a classroom discussion about images of Muhammad. In such a climate anyone who is whipping up opposition to the Batley teacher, or engaging in spineless apologetics for those who are, should be utterly ashamed of themselves.
This teacher needs our support. The school has failed to give him its support, so perhaps the Prime Minister will? Boris Johnson, teachers in 21st-century Britain should be free to engage mature pupils in discussions about Islam and Muhammad — correct?
Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked, the online magazine.
by Philip Dickens Comment, on the FREEDOM PRESS WEBSITE Jan 12th
Editorial Note: We are publishing below a post by Philip Dickens from the anarchist Freedom Website. In it Phil Dickens mocks the blog 'Spiked' edited by Brendan O'Neill as representing the 'reactionary fringes of the mainstream discourse'. It is worth noting that not only the American Civil Liberties Union has warned about the unchecked power of platforms like Twitter and Facebook to remove people from the forum of everyday discourse. I say 'everday discourse', but of course many people, including me, do not use either.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that Mr. Dickens sneeringly jumps up and down announcing: 'Predictably, this led to #thisis1984 trending on Twitter, with the right decrying the ban as Orwellian.'
And yet Dickens is right to argue that there is a 'legitimate debate about the impact of corporations on freedom of speech and expression, but it doesn’t rest on the right of a US President to Tweet'.
Nor is this a novel problem of the internet era. Indeed, Orwell noted in 1946 in his essay 'The Prevention of Literature' that:
'Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his [sic] integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the conceration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nealy every writer to earn part of his living by hack work, the encroachment of official bodies like the Ministry of Information and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions... Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed to him from above and never telling the whole of the truth.'
Dickens knows all of this, as he himself suffers from earning his living as a tax inspector. At one time the left were the main advocates of free speech, but because of the cancel culture campaigns etc. this ground as the novelist Margaret Atwood has recently argued, has been largely surrendered to the right. The FREEDOM WEBSITE despite its anarchist pretentions has in the last two decades fallen short as a defender of liberty or free speech; its current editor in 2016 even put up a blacklist of four people he didn't like who had the audacity to apply for positions on the FRIENDS of FREEDOM PRESS committee. Dickes approach suffers from being too simplistic as shown were he writes that 'private ownership by the capitalist class is protected from dissent by the state and its monopoly on violence.' Dividing politics into a left / right dichotomy is of questionable application today, especially in relation to Trump who was generally recognised to be an unconventional president.
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'FREE SPEECH for PRESIDENTS' by Philip Dickens
FOLLOWING the short-lived occupation of the US Capitol building, Twitter and a number of other social media platforms have banned US President Donald Trump.
Predictably, this led to #thisis1984 trending on Twitter, with the right decrying the ban as Orwellian. Brendan O’Neill of Sp!ked – the publication which leads the advance of terrible opinions from the reactionary fringes into the mainstream discourse – declared this “a chilling sign of tyranny to come.” This is, he says, “a very significant turning point in the politics and culture of the Western world” as it sees “exceptionally wealthy and aloof elites determining which elected politicians may engage in online discussion.”
This isn’t a position confined to the right, however. A member of the American Civil Liberties Union’s legislative counsel has said that “it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions — especially when political realities make those decisions easier.”
There’s a legitimate debate about the impact of corporations on freedom of speech and expression, but it doesn’t rest on the right of a US President to Tweet.
Yes, a few companies in Silicon Valley control the whole social media landscape and have undue influence as a result. That’s not a unique or historically unprecedented phenomenon though: it reflects the balance of power and ownership in both the traditional media and physical spaces.
What O’Neill calls the “powerful, unaccountable oligarchies of the internet era” are mirrors of the media barons who dominate print and broadcast news. However, the almost unmoderated right of reply that exists in social media is absent, and instead the discourse both reflects and directs the ‘Overton Window’ of acceptable opinion – with what is acceptable defined not by popular or democratic will but by who owns the press and by the fact that it doesn’t sell news to an audience but an audience to advertisers. In other words, just as O’Neill says tech companies are doing, media owners and advertisers have long been “exploiting their monopolistic power to dictate what political opinions it is acceptable to hold and express.”
In physical spaces, from the workplace to the public square, private ownership by the capitalist class is protected from dissent by the state and its monopoly on violence. Anti-strike legislation limits the extent to which workers can stand up to their bosses, whilst a tangle of laws serve to restrict the conduct of protests and criminalise protesters in a myriad of ways.
The media commentators who see unprecedented totalitarianism in Trump’s Twitter ban have no qualms over any of the above. Instead, they view any kickback against that monopolisation of discourse as the real threat to free speech. This is why they have been vocal in opposition to the Stop Funding Hate campaign, which seeks to redirect advertising influence towards making (for example) media demonisation of migrants unprofitable. It is why all of the furore around ‘cancel culture’ is centred on the defence of those with a considerable platform and privilege from any consequences for their words yet they will say nothing when Julia Hartley-Brewer, a member of the Free Speech Union’s PR/Media advisory council, threatening to get a man sacked for challenging her Covid-denying propaganda against the NHS.
In other words, they’re concerned about defending the free speech of the powerful from efforts by the powerless to resist that through free association and action.
So it is with Twitter. The platform is genuinely guilty of arbitrary and questionable banning decisions – more often than not against small voices who challenge the powerful or the genuinely dangerous. That, under immense pressure, it is occasionally forced to follow its own rules and look at safeguarding and risks of incitement isn’t the problem. Rather, the fact that under other circumstances the power and influence those accounts hold would protect it and see instead the less influential who challenge them banned is the problem here.
Private monopolisation of what should be public spaces is the key issue. Within that, the fact that (just like in real life) the powerful are protected from the consequences of their actions except in the most extreme circumstances is the crucial point.
Anarchists recognise that genuine liberty and equality go hand in hand, and that we cannot have either if we fail to address questions of power.
Alongside formal hierarchies, such as those embedded in the institutions of the state and capital, this includes invisible hierarchies that inevitably grow out of supposedly ‘structureless’ environs. In a group without a formal leadership, those with the most confidence and the loudest voices dominate with no democracy to rein them in. In a meeting without a chairperson, the most brash can speak unhindered – but the consequence is that others in turn are silenced.
That’s why our primary concern isn’t the right of US President to a massive platform and untold influence, including the ability to incite (amateurish, incompetent) coup attempts.
Those whose only demand is that those already with a platform and influence are never deprived of that do not stand for free speech. They stand in defence of a fundamentally unjust status quo in which free expression is directly linked to power.
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