Pride Is A Protest

Fair play to them. When you think Pride is supposed to be about an oppressed group of people refusing to hide or be ashamed of themselves, asserting their right to be themselves in public, it does seem wrong for the Gay Village to be walled off, out of reach to all but the “Queer Elite”. “Too poor to be gay,” bemoaned one of the protestors’ banners. I guess this tells you something about the extent to which sexual liberation can be acheived under capitalism; no sooner has homosexuality ceased to be a taboo than it is commodified, a lifestyle choice that one can by into, and image that one has to fit.

One could say similar things about the changing place of women in society, from locked away at home to plastered onto every billboard. That said, I’d much rather be a woman or a homosexual today than fifty years ago.

Personally, beyond the profiteering what really offended me about Manchester Pride was that the enormous float in the lead was that of, wait for it, the police. I’m sure to a lot of people this was a sign of how far queer liberation has already come, to the point where even the forces of order have been won over. But I couldn’t help thinking of the statue, two streets over, of Alan Turing, a scientist whose work so inspired me at uni (first time around) that he’s beyond Einstein in my eyes, and a man who was hounded to death by the state in its attempts to “cure” him of his “condition” – a condition for which many of his contemporaries were thrown in prison.

(Far) Right to Free Speech

The protests against the BNP’s “Red, White and Blue Festival”, a fascist rally outside the village of Codnor, Derbyshire, has set off a raging debate on the far left. Or at least, it has set off a series of denunciations and increasingly hysterical counter-denunciations behind which, if one looks hard enough, there is a series political argument trying desperately to be had. How far do we go in Smashing the BNP? What is the best long-term strategy for Smashing the BNP, and what is the most appropriate immediate tactic. This is an important debate to have, but it’s confined to the ghetto of maybe 10,000 left activists. Step outside this circle, and this debate starts to seem a little out of touch. It’s less about how we can smash the fash than whether we should. That is the debate that needs to be had in broader society, and this is my contribution to that debate.

The BNP’s “Eurofascist” strategy – hiding the Swastika tattoos under the respectable suits – has, with more than a little help from mainstream media and politicians, enjoyed a certain amount of success. This has seen the fascist persecution complex take on a new twist – the supporters of Hitler and White Power are often able to present themselves as victims of far-left oppression, denied their freedom of speech by the Anti-Nazi League , Antifa, and their successor organisations. I don’t want to overstate my case here; when I poster or petition for Unite Against Fascism the response is often very supportive, even grateful. But at the same time – and especially in areas where the BNP have yet to build up a presence, and where there is consequently a doubt of which they can be given the benefit – I’m invariably told at least once, that “they have the right to express their opinions” in a way that suggests that I don’t have the right to express opinions hostile to theirs.

At this level, the freedom-of-speech argument is flatly contradictory. How can the BNP’s right to free speech be legitimate, but not that of UAF? If fascist organisations can be part of the political process, why can’t antifascist organisations? And there was a time when I would have left it there, considered anti-fascist activity to be just a matter of leafleting and protesting; things that felt effective but “legitimate” without really challenging liberal sensibilities. I don’t want to be dismissive of such activities either; they serve a very important purpose.

As I became more involved with the left, I found it became harder and harder to reconcile a commitment to oppose fascism with a commitment to freedom of speech as I’d thus far understood it, and eventually came to reject the whole liberal outlook on rights and freedoms. If we are to truly defend freedom of expression, we will need a better understanding than is given by the idea of a “right to free speech”.

It first became an issue with the idea of “No Platform-ing” the BNP and their ilk from the Students’ Union: that is to say, barring them from affiliating to, organising within, receiving funds from, or speaking in the name of, the union. The point of this was obvious. A fascist foothold on campus would facilitate the growth of fascist organisations that would come back to haunt us in the future, and would create an atmosphere of racism and intimidation in the present. Stamping this out was clearly a good thing. But it also seemed audacious to ban a whole political philosophy from being expressed. Surely this put us in the camp of the oppressor, the antidemocratic communists who were supposed to be a figment of rightwing propaganda? I also wasn’t convinced by the “yeah, but…”, the idea that the threat of fascism was so severe, so beyond the pale, that it justified the suspension of normal practice. The Tories don’t, of course, represent the same threat as the BNP. But still, if it’s okay to chase the BNP off campus, can’t we get rid of the Tories too? Either it means something, freedom of speech, or it doesn’t; you can’t switch these things on and off.

It’s not like I ever devoted my political and intellectual life to grappling with this idea. I was also an avid reader of, among other things, Media Lens, and was acutely aware of how certain facts, ideas and points of view are systematically excluded from mainstream media discourse. I don’t just mean “Is it really a coincidence that the Independent has still never serialised Lenin’s pamphlet On The National Question?”, more like the coverage of the war. Criticism of it occurs, but is never allowed to question the inherent benevolence of the occupying forces. At worst, they were too stupid to see the damage they were doing; usually, they were just doing the noble task of “keeping extremism at bay”, or something. Through, for example, the routine mass killing of civilians in air assaults, through a global network of prisons in which the “disappeared” of the Muslim world are tortured. And the phrase “rebuilding Iraq” was a lie that provoked the urge to vomit.

The closest thing to honesty on the question of the war was a sketch on That Mitchell And Webb Look, in which two Nazi soldiers began to wonder, “are we the baddies?” Yes, yes we are! I wanted to shout from the rooftops, and couldn’t believe that this wasn’t an accepted axiom of political debate. At the very least, it should have been considered. And if you believe in freedom of speech, the fact that it wasn’t surely indicated that it was an irrelevant superstition that nobody could possibly be expected to take seriously. If it was the obvious truth, why was it not appearing in every paper? The answer to that question wasn’t hard to find: because the newspaper owners didn’t want it to.

Okay, the ways in which various branches of the rich and the powerful control the media are numerous and subtle, but they’re undeniable. Write an essay on how taxing the poor to oblivion while giving generous subsidies to the rich is actually the only route to social justice, and you’ll have to beat back with a stick the editors offering you work. Whereas write an essay exposing newspaper editors, owners and advertisers as a shower of unadulterated bastards, and prepare for a stony silence. You are free to say what you like, as long as they agree with it being said. Otherwise, you’re free to set up your own paper, if you have millions upon millions of pounds at your disposal, which you don’t, so you’re not.

Technology has, very very slightly, then, opened up a bit more democratic space. I still can’t get my point of view on display in every paper shop in the land like Rupert Murdoch can, but I can write it in a blog that people can find if they search hard enough. Not much of a space, but a space worth using. And now that I have my space, have a small core readership, have a bit of platform from which to speak, how do I use it? When I don’t have time to write something myself, I might promote something by someone else which I feel deserves to be read. But, while I don’t have a formal editorial line, all this falls generally inline with what I feel needs to be said. I certainly won’t be lending this space I have carved out to Martin Amis for him to accuse feminists of selling us out Islamofascism by refusing to devote their lives to outbreeding the hordes of brown people. Why would I possibly want to do a thing like that?

So the issue is not merely about who has the abstract “right” to speak, but who controls the means of speaking. Those who have the printing presses and television studios can say what they want, and then shrug dismissively at those with something to say but without the wherewithal to say it. When the print workers of the Daily Sun refused to print a slanderous front page attacking the miners on strike, was it any less legitimate than the countless times a day when the editor of that paper decides not to run a given article? The latter form of censorship is invisible while the former is a startling rebellion, but both involve a decision being made over what points of view the paper supports and what it doesn’t.

Surely, in terms of how legitimate these decisions are, we must look at how democratic they are. When one of the people in the paper, who just happens to own it, makes the decision himself and imposes it on the others, who happen to be employees, surely this is an imposition on the latter’s freedom of speech. Whereas when they get together and decide, it’s a bit more democratic. And so it is with the Students’ Union; when it works well, it is a democratic institution controlled by and representing its members. And when those members reject fascism, why should their institution promote it, given funding an a public platform to members of the new Hitler Youth? Why should they invite military recruiters to the freshers’ fair, while their members reject the war.

For an institution to recognise the wishes of its members when deciding what to promote is to give them a meaningful say over what their institution does. This is democracy. Whereas, for it to insist that the Nazis and the Air Force have a place there whether they like it or not, is antidemocratic. It is using the discourse of rights and freedoms to deprive them of any power over something that is supposed to represent them.

Of course the issue doesn’t end there. Speech isn’t spoken in a vacuum, and cannot be considered in a vacuum. Can we really argue that people have no right to invade Iraq/beat up immigrants, but they do have the right to say “come, join us as we invade Iraq/beat up immigrants”? If we a break up a meeting at which people are plotting how to go about invading Iraq/beating up immigrants, is it really their freedom of speech which we are restricting and not, in fact, their freedom of Iraq-invading and immigrant-beating?

I think most people would support the right of the RAF to bomb the crap out of a meeting between Hitler and his aides and allies in 1944, even if all they did there was speak. Just that no Jews were being gassed in that room at that moment doesn’t mean that what happened in there was completely seperate to the horror of the Holocaust. Views were merely being expressed as to how Jew-gassing quotas were to be met, but no-one would suggest that we engage with those views and defeat them through rational debate, perhaps on Comment Is Free. That “common sense” example rests on certain widely-held myths about the role of the British Empire in WW2 which the left rightly rejects, and getting from there to an endorsement of hardcore fash-smashin’ involves a further argument about the state’s monopoly on identifying legitimate targets of violence and employing violence against them, but it shows how easy it is to abandon the idea of the right to free speech.

I realise that rejecting the discourse of freedom as a “right” opens a door to some scary places. Is there a slippery slope from a union excluding those who would agitate to smash unions and Stalin purging the Communist party of all those who disagreed with him with the justification that he represented the view of the minority (even Lenin and Trotsky were hardly above reproach in their dealings with dissenters) ? While the newspapers who cited “a duty to free speech” as their reason for reproducing racist Danish cartoons were clearly being disingenuous bastards, doesn’t there reach a point where the dogmatic exclusion of certain points of view gets in the way of a deeper understanding?

Undoubtedly there is truth in here, and we do ourselves no favours in pretending that the reality is any simpler. Individually and collectively, we must be careful, principled and responsible not only in our speech and actions, but in how we control, individually and collectively, our carelessness, lack of principle and irresponsibility. But it is infinitely better to to recognise this difficulty than to pretend it doesn’t exist, or to tell a fairy story of rights to keep us from ever taking this responsibility seriously.

No, I don’t believe the fascists have a right to expect Student Union support in their quest for racial hatred, because as a member of that union I reject the quest for racial hatred. I reject their right to talk about which curry house they plan to brick, because I don’t beleive in their right to brick curry houses, and I don’t recognise their right to threaten “Pakis” with bashings they don’t have the right to issue. That’s not how things work.