Hypocrisy: alive and well
But, behind it, lies an attack on our free speech
Let me begin this woeful tale (forgive me for casting a dark shadow over the much welcome – despite the doomsayers in the Met Office and the NHS saying we’re all going to die of heat exhaustion – sunshine) with two headlines from today’s Guardian (unwittingly or knowingly placed next to each other?).
‘Israeli forces kill 21, Gaza authorities say, amid IDF warning of major offensive in north’ and ‘Glastonbury organisers “appalled” by Bob Vylan’s anti-IDF remarks during performance’. You all know the reaction of our supine, slipshod, flip-flopping Government, led by an actual donkey (he opens his mouth but talks out of his ass), with sheep for a cabinet. They want to prosecute the producers of the BBC live feed for allowing Vylan – and others, including, apparently, the majority of those watching – to cast aspersions on an army not known for tlc towards the civilians in Gaza (or Lebanon, Iran, Iraq or Syria)
Contrast this with: ‘We are coming. We are coming. We are coming to Gaza. We are coming to Lebanon. We will come to Iran. We will come to every place. We will annihilate the enemy. We will return the Middle East to a situation where Arabs are terrified of Jews. We will come to annihilate you [emphasises]. To a-n-n-i-h-i-l-a- t-e. Annihilate. Pass this on, share this video so all your friends can see what we are about to do to you’, said the anchor of Israel’s Channel 14’s tv morning show, Shai Golden, on 17 October, 2023.
Or, perhaps most chillingly of all: ‘Gaza deserves death. The 2.6 million terrorists [the entire population] in Gaza deserve death! … Men, women, and children – in every way possible, we must simply carry out a Holocaust on them – yes, read that again – H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T! For me, gas chambers. Train cars. And other cruel forms of death for these Nazis. Without fear, without hesitation – simply crush, eradicate, slaughter, flatten, dismantle, smash, shatter …. Gaza deserves death. Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza’, said Elad Barashi, a TV producer affiliated with Channel 14, on 27 February this year, in a post on X (which was later deleted).
And, then, most recently, in May, ‘I’m not sure you’re speaking for us when you say we want to treat every child and every woman. I hope you don’t stand behind that statement either. When fighting a group like this, the distinctions that exist in a normal world don’t exist’, said Likud party member Amit Halevi in the Knesset, in response to a statement from an Israeli doctor saying suffering children [in Gaza] should get painkillers.
Many Israelis are appalled by this. ‘This is clearly not a matter of a few isolated voices saying outrageous things in the heat of the moment’, Ran Cohen, the director of the Israeli Democratic bloc said in a statement to the Guardian. ‘The pattern of incitement emerging from Channel 14 is systematic, sustained, and orchestrated – not incidental. We have documented hundreds of statements, many delivered by regular hosts and guests, broadcast daily into Israeli homes and directly watched by soldiers. The line between media and war propaganda has been erased’.
Arwa Mahdawi, a Palestinian commentator, living in New York (and fearing a knock on the door any time now from Trump’s Gestapo tactic-loving ICE, coming to deport her, despite her being an American citizen with duel USA-UK citizenship, wrote last week: ‘It’s clear now that nothing will shame the West into stopping Israel from carrying out its “total victory” in Gaza. But I’ve written this to serve as yet another reminder that we all knew what was coming. Nobody can feign ignorance. Nobody can pretend they didn’t know.’
Let’s pause there, to take this in, take some deep breaths, before we move onto the question of free speech. In a thoughtful, considered essay, published this month in The Author, the journal of the British Society of Authors, Fara Dabhoiwala, who teaches at Princeton, and is the author of What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea, just published, writes, inter alia: ‘Freedom of speech is an essentially artificial doctrine. Our modern notion of it, as a general right to speak out on matters of public concern, only emerged around 1700, when the accidental lapsing of press controls in England unleashed a media revolution fuelled by partisan politics.’
He continues: ‘Free speech can have many aims, but its ultimate justification has always been that it advances truth.’ And there’s the conundrum we all know of in the current climate where, as so often in the past, the very notion of what ‘truth’ might be is a fluid, ever-changing, concept. (Even in science, today’s ‘truth’, for example in quantum mechanics, is tomorrow’s error (not lie, note, because at least in science the – probably futile – search for an ultimate ‘truth’ will remain elusive – as perhaps it should be.)
In the rest of life, it is more complicated but nonetheless important, this dual and intimate connection of truth with free speech. The words quoted above, for example, exist: they were said or written. We need to start worrying when a debate about what is actually happening is closed down, as it is in grave danger of being in this country by, of all people, our elected Government. It is, for them an ‘inconvenient truth’ that individuals are opposed to their insistence that only their version is to be allowed: ‘do as I tell you, not what you wish to discuss’. In the USA, a concerted effort is being made to stamp out any opposition to a confected reality, far from what is known to be the case. It was once said that ‘when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold’. In denying plain facts, daily put before us, we are being told – not asked, note – to ignore them, to ‘follow the line’ as dictated by the likes of Yvette Cooper.
There is an irony, not lost on historians, that Labour Home Secretaries, with the notable exception of Roy Jenkins (think David Blunkett, Jack Straw, the egregious Jacky Smith) are more authoritarian than their Tory counterparts (excepting, I concede, the appalling succession in recent years, of the likes of Theresa May, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman). We stand in clear and present danger of having our freedom to speak out about atrocities, condoned by a Labour Government, being stamped under foot. And buried, like the truth.
As Fara Dabhoiwala says: ‘words come in many different forms and registers. To communicate with other people is hard, especially if you don’t know them. To have a platform to speak or write, or to be able to amplify the words of others, is a privilege. It comes with responsibilities. It can be abused. The history of free speech, too, does not suggest that it should necessarily be allowed to trump other principles, or even that it is best conceived of only as an individual right, rather than as a public or collective good. On the contrary, ever since our modern concept of it was invented around 1700, it’s been a perennially weaponised, embattled, and fought over slogan. We can’t live without it: but we can certainly think harder what free speech should really mean, now and in the future.’
We’re on the edge of a slippery slope to the kind of society that the likes of Putin, Xi (and Trump) know and cherish. As the cliché – nevertheless a vital truth – has it: ‘I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it’.
This week: Tim started to re-read Joseph Conrad’s Chance. It is largely told through the eyes of Conrad's regular narrator, Marlow, along with others, who take up the complex narrative at different points. The novel is unusual for such strong positive emphasis on a female character: the heroine, Flora de Barral. Its publication, in 1913, marked the start of Conrad’s real success as a consummate story-teller, although – and here I do sympathise – contemporary critics and readers found the narrative style (you really have to pay attention) hard to swallow. Like most great novelists, there are times when you simply have to concentrate to get the drift. With Chance, that effort is well rewarded. It is well said that Nostromo is his greatest fictional achievement. Chance could be viewed as his practice run.
Quote of the week: ‘Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen’ (Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings). Heinrich Heine writing in the 19thcentury. Heine was Jewish.
Music of the week: Havergal Brien is one of the most intriguing composers of all time but his music is, putting it mildly, very difficult to hear. Some while ago I decided to get hold of CDs of all of his astonishing 32 symphonies (a number exceeded only by Mozart and Haydn). His last was composed when he was 92. He wrote 25 after the age of 70 (he lived to 96, his last years spent in a council flat in Shoreham, near Brighton). His first symphony, the Gothic, is one of the largest (in terms of orchestra) ever composed. I heard it at the RAH, many years ago. Here’s my advice: try the mighty Third or the 8th and 9th (together) for an insight into his huge talent. The only version of the latter two available is on EMI Studio with Sir Charles Groves and the Royal Liverpool Orchestra, performed six years after Brien’s death in 1972.