Reclaiming free speech in 2012

Thursday January 26, 2012

Dennis Hayes identifies three ways in which we can all resolve to reclaim free speech in the coming year

In twelve months’ time, when we are looking back on 2012, we might describe it as ‘the year of silence’ in which there was a historical turning point in our attitudes to free speech.

Looking back on 2011, it began well for all lovers of freedom with entirely unexpected movements for political freedom across the Arab world. The ‘Arab Spring’ was a reminder of how all states, even tyrannical and autocratic ones, can fracture and fall at the call for freedom. To adapt a well-known political slogan ‘The state only appears great because we are on our knees’ and it is possible for us to stand up against it.

One of the main drivers of the Arab Spring was the desire for freedom of speech on the part of the largely educated participants. It was their education, not the new means of communication, that brought about the desire for freedom in the first place.

By the close of the year little was left of the political optimism about the prospect for freedom in the Arab world and for free speech there or elsewhere. So 2012 began with a poor prospects for freedom. Not only was there a greater number than usual of cries of ‘You can’t say that – it’s offensive!’ but a growing clamour not to speak at all.

When Academics For Academic Freedom (AFAF) was founded in late 2006, the press announced that academics were fighting for the ‘right’ to be offensive. What AFAF defended was not an absurd ‘right to offend’ but the right to express your views whether or not ‘they were deemed offensive’, because labelling opinions you found unacceptable as ‘offensive’ was used to silence their expression without argument. This way of silencing opinions is now accepted without question as these following examples show.

It was ironic and amusing to see Diane Abbott fall foul of the New Labour inspired angst about thought crime when she was accused of making a ‘deeply offensive’ and ‘racist’ remark. Her thought crime was to tweet that criticism of black leaders was inappropriate because “White people love to play ‘divide and rule.’ We should not play their game!”

Over-sensitivity to offence continued to fill the beautiful game with more bathos than ever when the Oldham defender Tom Adeyemi was reduced to tears after a Liverpool fan’s offensive racist taunts.

Even the Prime Minister had to apologise for being offensive to people with mental problems when he compared Ed Balls’ heckling to “having someone with Tourette’s permanently sitting opposite you.”

So this is my 2012 Resolution 1: Defend the right to speak your mind – whether or not what you say is deemed offensive – and sign up to the Academics For Academic Freedom (AFAF) definition of academic freedom and free speech.

While Britain continued its familiar, silent decline in to PC hell in the first few weeks of 2012 there was a new but complementary celebration of silence.

The ‘Occupy’ camps and their celebration in the media and by the chattering middle classes and the clueless left are the marker of the historical turn towards silence.

Traditional industrial and other occupations had clear and often immediate goals. Typically they were to stop sackings or cuts. The protestors’ goals were clearly articulated and argued for. Physically occupying a factory or building was merely a tactic.

In the traditional sense of an occupation the ‘occupy’ camps are not occupations. They are more like the ‘camping out’ of adolescents who leave home in an inarticulate rage with their parents. Adolescents, however, soon see sense and go home.

The grown-up and grungy occupiers of 2011 haven’t gone home. They have turned a tactic into a strategy and refuse to articulate their demands. This is held to be a noble thing and they have been encouraged to ‘resist pressures to clarify demands’ to preserve their obsession with ‘raising questions’ and ensure they resolutely stick to having no ‘concrete demands.’ They exhibit a ‘lack of cohesion’ unless, of course, they are suddenly issuing authoritarian camp ‘rules.’ No statements. No argument. They know best in the way of all self-appointed elites.

Brendan O’Neill, editor of the on-line magazine Spiked has argued that this political vacuity has made them media darlings because members of the media class can put their own political prejudices onto the occupation. It is telling, although most people do not know this, that the movement was not a grass roots outburst but a media creation of the magazine Adbusters which considers ordinary people to be easily-led ‘zombies.’ This magazine started the occupy movement when in July 2011 it carried its own advert saying ‘What is our one demand? Occupy Wall Street, 17 September. Bring tent.’ O’Neill is right about the media creation and love of ‘occupy’ but the broader social impact of the campers is to celebrate silence! The idea that not knowing or attempting to say what you want is a good thing should not be allowed to catch on.

Resolution 2 Don’t be fooled by ‘Occupy’ – expose the celebration of incoherence.

Silence has already caught on in academia. Not merely in the various protests supposedly about ‘fees’ or ‘pensions’ that had no purpose or aims except to turn people out on the streets, often to stand pointlessly about in the cold. All the education demonstrations which would have been argumentative affairs only a few years ago were marked by an absence of, and an absence of interest in, debate.

Worse than this, silence pervades academia over the fundamental issue of academic freedom. The test case for academic freedom in Britain in 2012 will be that of Dr Rod Thornton. You may not have heard of Rod. He does not tick any of the usual left wing or radical boxes. He is white, middle aged, rather formal, an ex British Army sergeant who was awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal. He has worked for the Ministry of Defence, the US Department of Defense and NATO.

Rod has been suspended from his post as a lecturer in politics at the University of Nottingham since Spring 2011. His offence was to write a long academic article “How a student’s use of a library book became a ‘major Islamist plot’” which was published on an academic website. The University of Nottingham did not like it, not because it was about them and their actions, but because they claimed it went beyond their definition of academic freedom and named and ‘defamed’ individuals.

What Rod wrote about was another invasion of academic freedom at his University, one that is recognised as such throughout the academic world. In May 2008 the University administration called in the police because one administrator downloaded and printed a copy of the so-called Al Qaeda ‘training manual’ for his friend’s research. The document is probably a fabrication and is feely available from the CIA website and from Amazon, and possibly your local W.H. Smith. It is just the sort of document any lecturer or student of terrorism should know about. The tragic consequences for the ‘Nottingham Two,’ Hicham Yezza and Rizwaan Sabir, of their innocent activities is documented for those interested here . Thornton is number three of what is now the ‘Nottingham Three.’

Rod’s disciplinary has not yet taken place and it is nine months since his suspension. Everything is quiet. Hardly any academics from his University have spoken out publically about his case, although many internationally distinguished academics have (see Letters, The Guardian 10 May 2011). Fear rules academia, and if Thornton is dismissed all academics will be losers and the sound of silence will replace academic freedom.

Resolution 3: Defend Rod Thornton – off your knees, academics, and stand up, not just for Dr Thornton but for yourselves.

Dennis Hayes is the Director of Academics For Academic Freedom