Andy Wastling's Response to Chris Draper's Post

Response to Chris Drapers recent and extremely timely article on Northern Voices , Guess Who Is Reading Your Census ? by Andrew Wastling

IN response to Chris Drapers recent and extremely timely article on Northern Voices 'Guess Who Is Reading Your Census?'

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Readers might also like to have a read of 'Demilitarise the 2021 census' in Peace News: Demilitarise the 2021 census Peace News

There is also an extremely helpful template PRESS RELEASE for campaigners to send to their local media to explain why they are taking such action - though as we know unfortunately the likelihood of such a letter being published locally is indeed slim!

Milan Rai, editor of Peace News, which is circulating a guide to creative resistance to the census, commented: ‘Lots of British people are likely to feel uncomfortable adding to the profits of a giant US arms company developing weapons of death and providing IT services to those who’ve been waging war in Afghanistan and around the world for decades.’

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PEACE NEWS & THE TRUMP COUP?

Where was the activist army when it was needed, Milan?

MILAN RAI in PEACE NEWS (December 2020 - January 2021) wrote an editorial entitled 'Countering Trump's Coup':

'As we went to press, Donald Trump had just sent a tweet which was the closest thing to conceeding that he lost the US presidential election that we're probably going to get.'

There had been speculation for some time that Trump would not accept the election result, and well before the US election Milan Rai's friend, Noam Chomsky, had been predicting that Trump supporters would stage a 'Coup' in the event that he lost the election.

Thus in last month's editorial Mr. Rai suggested investigative journalist Alan Nairn put it well on Democracy Now!:

'...in the crucial hours after late election night, when Trump went into his tent and started sulking like a bully who had been thwarted, I think he may have missed his moment, because that was the key moment to call his people on to the streets and start stopping and trashing the votes, and he failed to do that.'

Milan Rai then felt it necessary to claim: 'If Trump had seized his moment for creating chaos, his forces would have been met by a national nonviolent mobilisation against the coup attempt. Tens of thousands of US activists had been preparing for that exact situation. They had been organised by dozens of groups specifically to opose a Trump coup.'

Indeed Mr Rai argued: 'Choose Democracy, one of the new groups, held online anti-coup trainings with over 1,000 participants at a time' and that '(o)ver 37,000 people signed the Choose Democracy pledge of resistance, committing themselves to civil disobedience in event of an attempted coup.'

However, when the coup attempt actually came on Wednesday I may have overlooked their manifestaion of resistance, but I didn't see much of the non-violent resistance in evidence on Capitol Hill. Perhaps despite all their earlier forcasts and predictions, they were genuinely taken by surprise?

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Free Speech: Heretical, Unwelcome, Provocative!

by Les May

I WROTE the article italicised below in October last year. I thought that the topic and the approach would make it suitable for Peace News.   It would not be correct to say that the editor refused to publish it, he simply did not acknowledge it.

Given the recent ruling by Mr Justice Julian Knowles in a case brought by Harry Miller.  I have included it below this link to a Guardian article.  In his ruling Knowles stressed 'the vital importance of free speech”, saying it included “not only the inoffensive, but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative.'

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/14/transgender-tweet-police-acted-unlawfully

In one of this year’s Reith lectures Jonathan Sumption, who between 2012 and 2018 sat as a member of the Supreme Court, raised the question of whether the law may be returning to its earlier role as a means of enforcing social conformity. As instances of how it had exercised this function in the past he cited the use of the law to enforce a single pattern of religious worship in the 17^th century and the continued discrimination between denominations into the 19^th century.

To act as a mechanism for social conformity it is not necessary that this be exercised by the state, only that the state passes laws which allow individuals to use the law in a way which forces others to conform to their views.

In October of last year a case came before the Supreme Court in which a Gareth Lee had placed an order for a cake decorated with the words ‘Support Gay Marriage’.  The owners of the bakery, Daniel and Amy McArthur declined the order because as Christians they were being expected to express a view that they disagreed with. Lee argued that they were discriminating against him because he is a homosexual. Two lower courts had accepted this argument but the Supreme Court did not.

The president of the Court Lady Hale said:

‘It is deeply humiliating to deny someone a service because of that person’s race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, religion or belief’.

‘But that is not what happened in this case. As to Mr Lee’s claim based on sexual discrimination, the bakers did not refuse to fulfil his order because of his sexual orientation’.

The court accepted the argument of the McArthur’s lawyer that forcing them to bake the cake would be forcing them to go against their religious beliefs.

Lee was trying to use the Courts to force the McArthur’s to accept his view of the world.  His mistake was to argue that the couple were being ‘homophobic’ when they simply had a different view about the world.  A view to which he took exception.

But, as I have argued previously in Peace News, Lee’s approach is far from uncommon.

https://peacenews.info/node/9175/no-right-not-be-offended

Increasingly we see people who express a view which the listener or reader does not like being labelled as antisemitic, homophobic, islamophobic, mysoginistic or some similar pejorative epithet.

The court’s ruling means that provided we do not discriminate against someone because of what they ARE, we will not find ourselves in court for expressing our dissent from the views they hold. In other words such an expression of dissent is not ‘judiciable’, to use a word which has recently been rediscovered.

I would not expect to find it a matter for a court to consider if I decline to call someone who says they are transgender, ‘she’ or ‘her’, if I sincerely believe them to be a man. If however referring to such a person as ‘he’ or ‘him’ becomes seen as ‘hate speech’, as some people wish it to be, then it could be claimed that this is a matter for the courts.

Commenting on the ruling in the wedding cake case the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission said:

‘Freedom of expression – including the right not to express a view – and freedom of belief are rightfully protected in a democratic society and this case demonstrates the need for a more nuanced debate about how we balance competing rights’.

Debate, nuanced or otherwise, has been noticeably absent from anything surrounding what have become known as ‘trans’ issues.   Are claims of being cis, trans, non-binary and gender-fluid simply ephemeral affectations as some people see them or do they go to the core of an individual’s being and identity?  Unless we are willing to discuss the question we will never resolve the matter.

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Democracy & the anarchists

by Brian Bamford

REVIEWING a recent interview involving the academic Ruth Kinna, the critic Les May asks on this blog about the way she tackles the question about the attitudes of English anarchists to democracy. Here Les May suggests that she hesitated and appeared to stumble when the interviewer asked her whether anarchists believed in democracy.   Mr. May puts this down to the abysmal way in which some modern anarchists have handled themselves when confronted with political, moral and intellectual differences.  He probably has in mind people being roughed-up, shoved around and sent packing at anarchist  book fairs and other events.  The list is long but the recent exclusions of Helen Steel has excited interest, and not just on Mums Net.  This raised another issue: the crude hierarchical nature of the anarchist's methodology in so far as some of them seem more than willing to defend minor celebrities like Ms. Steel but hold back from backing 'lesser' figures who fall foul on some political point of order.

At the Liverpool Anarchist Book fair last year, where a blacklist was in operation and tolerated, even by Milan Rai, the editor of Peace News failed to give his full backing to people who were blacklisted there.  Mr. Rai who accepts that the practice of a blacklist was unfair in Liverpool, non-the-less he didn't let it get in the way or prevent him from doing his own book promotion at the same event.  Political expediency seems to be name of the game among the political libertarians of all shapes and sizes.  Moral compass, it seems, takes a back seat.at all levels among the English, particularly when it gets in the way of business.  The New from Nowhere set who were organising the Liverpool Bookfair, were more worried about losing business through the bad publicity that ensued than upholding any moral standards.

Les May writes:  'Democracy isn’t just about voting, it’s also about how we treat people we disagree with.'

What is democracy, we might ask?

The book 'School for Dictators' by the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone, has a character called Thomas: the Cynic who declares:  'Democracy is universal sufferage plus certain conditions.  The Greeks who were the first to experience it, [and] described four of them as follows: isonomia, or equality of rights before the law; liberty (which is a word plain enough in itself); isocratia or political equality; and isegoria, or freedom of speech.'

Mr. May asks:  'Why is it that people who claim to follow a political philosophy which extols personal freedom, trust in the individual, working for the collective good and personal responsibility, so often turn out to be authoritarian when they band together in groups?'

What maybe puzzling Mr. May, who has been around the English anarchists at least since the Freedom Anarchist Ball in the early 1960s, is that some anarchists today are actively repressing others and trying to prevent them presenting alternative viewpoints.  


But it is not only Milan Rai at Peace News who has fallen short and failed to be consistent in his stand against the persistent censorship, bullying and gagging among the adherents of anarchism in this country.  Pensioned-off academics like David Goodway and Peter Marshall who wrote 'Demanding the Impossible:  A History of Anarchism', both sit on a committee 'Friends of Freedom Press' which oversees a blacklist which named several northern anarchists.  This blacklist was compiled by a Freedom incomer from East Anglia Simon Saunders who also works as a hack for the Morning Star.

As Les May writes in his article:   'There’s no shortage of examples of such authoritarian behaviour which have been recorded on the Northern Voices blog, some in recent weeks.   Why do they do it?'

We live in troubling times in which politics on all fronts in this country has now been generally discredited by a degree of intolerance.  It is surprising that in some respects it is at its worst among the anarchists and among the readers at book fairs.  

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Justifying Reviews on the NV Blog

We have taken the unusual step of publishing two reviews of the controversial booklet 'Shit Wigs and Steroids: Anarchism's (and the left's) Tolerance of Delusion'.  We have done this because in the current climate we believe this publication, whatever its flaws, offers a valuable insight into developments on the strange shores of the British political left and beyond.  It needs to be read, because too many people are what we would call 'skedaddlers', ducking and dodging all requirements for moral compass in a social context like the current trends and fashions encouraged by the Gender Recognition Act.

The authors of the two reviews on this Blog offer different perspectives in their approach to the text.  Both are experienced reviewers; Les May reviewed 'Smile for the Camera: The Double Life of Cyril Smith'* and Chris Draper wrote 'Who Killed Freedom?: an unauthorised history'**.  

In the past Freedom newspaper would have had the courage to run alternative assessments together with follow-up correspondence, always encouraging controversy.  Nowadays, Freedom in all its forms offers a less challenging body of work both intellectually and in propaganda terms.  One might have thought that Milan Rai, the editor of Peace News, who was at the Liverpool Bookfair when the incident described in the book occured, and its author was accosted, detained and roughly expelled, would be willing to review it, and certainly it might be expected that it would be a worthy subject of debate on a thread on Libcom?

Any problems in the contents ought to be left to the readers to access its value.  Whatever it shouldn't be censored by the supercillious southern anarchists who think they can decide what is suitable for us northerners to consume.

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* 

N.V. Review of 'Smile for the Camer - Northern Voices

northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2015/10/nv-review-of-smile-for-camera.html

**  Who Killed Freedom?: an unauthorised history 4. - Northern Voices

northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/.../who-killed-freedom-unauthorised-history_7.html

PEACE NEWS DEFENDS FREE SPEECH!

ACTIVISTS need to find better ways to struggle with each other and to fight with each other, argues Milan Rai

'People ask me how we would defend the bookfair from a fascist attack, but I’m not worried about them out there.  I worry about what we might do to each other in here.’ – one of the organisers of the London Anarchist Bookfair, [said] on 28 October.
A few hours later, a group of trans rights activists stopped some feminists handing out leaflets that they found oppressive to trans women.  A nontrans woman, Helen Steel, objected to this censorship. About 30 trans rights activists then surrounded Helen Steel and shouted at her for having stood up for the leafleters.
The confrontation went on for a long time.  Some people (including members of the bookfair collective) surrounded Helen Steel to protect her from possible assault.  An unknown person then tripped the fire alarm, leading to an evacuation of the building.

After the bookfair, there was sharp criticism of the organisers.  The collective have decided not to organise the London Anarchist Bookfair next year.  We’ve published lots of relevant documents in this issue, in full or (in one case) nearly in full, to give PN readers the chance to make up your own minds about what’s happened at one of the most important radical gatherings in Britain.

We believe this conflict has wider significance for grassroots movements for change, not just in Britain,

Steel by name

Our starting point is that standing up for free speech is necessary and important.  It is appalling that 30 activists gathered to threaten someone for standing up for the right to leaflet. It is shocking that people in the crowd shouted ‘ugly TERF’, ‘fucking TERF scum’, ‘bitch’, and ‘fascist’ at her because she refused to accept their harassment of two women leafleters.  This kind of bullying is completely unacceptable. (The word ‘TERF’ is now mostly used as a derogatory term meaning ‘someone with transphobic views’.   It originally stood for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’.)   It’s shameful that groups have issued statements of solidarity with the trans rights activists without criticising this intimidation.

When Helen Steel stood up for freedom of speech, when organisers of the bookfair helped to protect her, these were courageous and principled acts.

We shouldn’t allow anyone, whether the government or any activist group, the right to dictate what ideas should be allowed to circulate.  Freedom of speech is deeply connected to freedom of thought. Most of us discover what we really think by talking with others, by expressing ourselves, and then hearing other people’s responses.  Everyone should have the chance to find their own political truths, to make mistakes, to grow and to stand on their own feet intellectually.

There is an old slogan: the answer to bad speech is more speech. In 1969, US anarchist Noam Chomsky wrote: ‘a movement of the left condemns itself to failure and irrelevance if it does not create an intellectual culture that becomes dominant by virtue of its excellence and that is meaningful to the masses of people who, in an advanced industrial society, can participate in creating and deepening it’.

Our arguments should become dominant by virtue of their excellence, not because we have shouted down the other side.

Shutting down debate – by shouting people down or blockading a talk or triggering a fire alarm – can be seen as a lack of confidence, a lack of belief that you have the arguments to win the argument.

Free speech

Defending someone’s freedom of expression is not the same as approving of what they are saying. Chomsky points out:  ‘If you’re in favour of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favour of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.  Otherwise you’re not in favour of freedom of speech.’

When should free speech be limited?  Chomsky stands with the US supreme court ruling of 1969 which said that speech should always be protected from legal punishment except when people are trying to incite, and likely to produce, ‘imminent lawless action’ with their words.  According to this standard, the law should not be used to stop or punish speech that justifies or advocates oppressive violence in general.  The law should only be used against speech when those words are being used to try to start an actual violent attack right here, right now (‘imminently’).

Whatever else you might say about them, none of the gender-related leaflets passed out at the bookfair either justified or tried to incite anti-trans violence.  The nearest the bookfair came to imminent violence was when 30 people surrounded Helen Steel.

It has been claimed that what was written in these leaflets was a form of violence.  This is to bend the meaning of words completely out of shape.  Offensive or oppressive speech is not violence.

If you choose to define oppressive speech as violence, and if you accept the right of violent self-defence, then it is justified to carry out violence against pretty much everyone, because we all say things that are oppressive or that can be seen as oppressive.

Yes, hate speech can help create a climate of intolerance and hatred which encourages violent attacks. That doesn’t mean hate speech is violence or that it should be subject to legal punishment. (We’re not saying the leaflets were hate speech.)

How to destroy ourselves

In our last editorial, we described how conservatives, liberals, socialists and communists all helped to create an authoritarian climate in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, paving the way for Nazism (PN 2610–2611).

The socialist SPD banned meetings, newspapers and demos.  The communist KPD broke up meetings.  Together, they undermined democratic habits and independent thinking within German working-class movements, leaving them paralysed when the Nazis came to power.

When we stop public discussions, either through the law or through some kind of force (like a fire alarm), we move politics away from debate and persuasion, what pagan activist Starhawk calls ‘power with’, towards the world of force and compulsion, what Starhawk calls ‘power over' others.  If politics turns into a ‘power over’ game, the winners will be those who are most brutal.  That outcome won’t favour any kind of feminist.

Every time disruption or threats make it impossible to hold a public meeting – whoever is speaking, whatever their views – we undermine free speech and we weaken our already weak movements for change.

We need to find better ways to struggle with each other and to fight with each other, to disagree deeply while continuing to work together where we can.  We need to create bigger, stronger activist organisations, independent media, radical publishers and bookfairs.  We need to support the London Anarchist Bookfair, not destroy it.  We should be inspired how it makes freedom work.

Editorial note: In five articles ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5]), Peace News is documenting the free speech conflict at this year’s (2017) London Anarchist Bookfair. The origins of the Anarchist Bookfair are briefly recounted here, and the issues concerning free speech are the subject of this issue's editorial above.

Worrying Words of Doctor Rupert Read!

The Man who took on Freedom, Chomsky & the Transgender Politics

IN January, Rupert Read who is a Philosopher and Green councillor, had to apologise for some tweets in which he questioned the validity of trans people's gender, describing trans women as 'a sort of "opt-in" version of what it is to be a woman'.  His comments were condemned by the Green LGBTIQ group, and Sahar Brown, a former Cambridge councillor and trans activist, attacked him for 'endorsing a fringe form of feminism that portrays transgender women as dangerous sex pests and predators'.

Mr. Read has said:  'It is completely, 100% untrue, for instance to claim that I "portray transgender women as dangerous sex pests and predator".  On the contrary I reject transphobia completely.  But I also remain a very strong backer of feminism.  All that I have done is join many feminists in saying that it is up to women, not anyone else - and certainly not me - to decide who gets let into women-only spaces, such as women's toilets.  All women have a right to be involved in making those decisions.  I think that most Cambridge residents will see that as a not-unreasonable point of view, and will find it surprising that I have been told repeatedly on Twitter to "Go f*** myself (and much worse) for saying so, including by a handful of activists from certain other parties, who perhaps have been looking at this as an easy way to stick the boot into the Greens as we threaten them in the polls both nationally and here in Cambridge.'

Thus, Mr. Read believes, I think, that only 'real' women should have the right to decide who uses the 'Ladies' toilets.  That is according to Read the position of 'many feminists', and he says that they have the right to let women into women-only spaces. 

 

Elsewhere Rupert has claimed that Media Lens tends to talk up the numbers of victims from western actions but to minimise those of regimes in conflict with the west, such as those of Milošević and Bashar al-Assad in Syria.^[26]  He has accused them of using dubious source material on fatalities in the 2012 Syrian crisis from Aisling Byrne and Robert Dreyfuss.

Back in 2001, Rupert Read while then at the Manchester Met. University (MMU), wrote an essay in a publication titled  'Chomsky & his Critics'  and what was to become the Alternative Raven:  Language, Mind & Society, when the then managers of Freedom Press refused to publish Mr. Read's essay entitled 'What is "Chomskyism" or Chomsky Against Chomsky'.  The reason given by Donald Rooum, now one of the Friends of Freedom Press, was that the essay by Rupert Read was 'too academic' for anarchists in England to understand.  Others took the view that the real reason was because Professor Noam Chomsky himself had taken strong exception in a letter to me as editor to Mr. Read's essay; which while it praised Pro. Chomsky's politics it strongly criticised his linguistic theories.

At the time I, as editor of The Alternative Raven, wrote:

'The majority of articles in this Alternative Raven are concerned with the work of the leading linguist and political thinker, Noam Chomsky, the essays of Rupert Read ('What is "Chomskyism"?') and Wil Coleman ('Noam Chomsky & the Myth of the Generative Grammar') are both controversial critiques of the writings of Chomsky.  But Doctor Read's less technical cheeky polemic, perhaps because it is more lightweight has drawn blood.' 

 

I claimed that both Read and Chomsky 'recognise they are trying to tackle the job set by Orwell in his essay "Politics & the English Language".'   In that essay written for Horizon in 1946, Orwell claimed, 'In our time political speech is largely the defence of the indefensible'.

 

I continued:

'Naturally Rupert Read's attempt to extend this criticism of the misuse of words from the realm of politics to linguistics, cognitive science and philosophy as well as sociology and ethnomethodology is upsetting some people.' 

 

Hence, Mr. Read not only trod on the big toes of Professor Chomsky in 2001, but he caused some consternation among the Freedom Press anarchists such as Donald Rooum, who was desperate to insist that Freedom was not engaged in censorship in order to protect Noam Chomsky's feelings.  Professor Chomsky seemed to have a special relationship with Freedom through the good offices of Milan Rai (now the editor of Peace News).  Mr. Rai was formerly Professor Chomsky's political secretary, and had seemingly been putting pressure on Freedom not to publish Rupert Read's essay.

It was one of those moments when Freedom showed itself to be lacking the guts to take on Professor Chomsky and Milan Rai, who I believe is now editor of Peace News. 

At that time supporters of the Northern Anarchist Network like Harold Sculthorpe, at that time in 2000 the Secretary of the Friends of Freedom Press, fully supported Rupert Read's article and believed Freedom ought to publish it in the Raven.  Indeed, at that time, Harold Sculthorpe who went to many lectures on the Manchester Ethnography Group at both Manchester University and the MMU, thought the sun shone out of Rupert Read's arse.  On that occasion as on several occasions since Freedom lacked the nerve to challenge those like Professor Chomsky in powerful positions.

Since then the reputation of Freedom has declined considerably with each year of its fragile life in the 21st Century.  In 2010, Chris Knight and Milan Rai debated Noam Chomsky's science and politics at the London Anarchist Bookfair, and Chris Knight drew attention to the episode of Freedom's failure to publish the Rupert Read article and the other essays challenging Chomsky's linguistics.

The link to the Alternative Raven posted by Chris Knight on his site Radical Anthropology and containing Rupert Read's article is to be found on:

Language, Mind And Society: An Alternative Raven - Radical ...