Read You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom Online
Authors: Nick Cohen
Tags: #Political Science, #Censorship
You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (34 page)
I do not mean ‘depoliticised’ as an insult, and there is much that is admirable about demands for transparency. Democracy and freedom of information go together, because if the electorate does not know what has been done in its name, it cannot pass a fair verdict on its rulers. Democracy’s advantage over other systems is that it allows countries to replace rulers without violence. But electorates cannot ‘throw the scoundrels out’ if censorship prevents them from learning that the scoundrels are scoundrels in the first place. The limiting of state corruption, meanwhile, is also an ambition that is beyond conventional politics, because it is a universal human aspiration that everyone who has experienced the insolence of office shares.
The emptiness of the transparency movement does not lie in its limited aims, but in the phoniness of its claim that it has escaped politics. WikiLeaks, the supposed source of sunlight for the twenty-first century, which ignorant celebrities and unprincipled activists instructed ‘everyone who believes in the power of transparency’ to ‘stand up for’, had a political programme that allowed it to intervene on the side of the world’s darkest forces. To quote him for the last time, the transparency movement amply proved the truth of Orwell’s remark that ‘So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.’
WikiLeaks could not leave the Belarusian dissidents alone. They did not fit into the narrow mentality of modern radicalism. The American and European governments offered the Belarusian opposition nominal support, as they offered support to the opponents of the Taliban, the Iranian mullahs and other anti-Western dictatorships. To a certain type of Western radical, Belarusian dissidents were therefore suspect and tainted. They had collaborated with the great satan. They were not real dissidents at all. So, in Belarus WikiLeaks’ conduit was a believer in the fascist conspiracy theory who wished to help former communists fight the democratic opposition. Julian Assange’s chosen emissary was Israel Shamir, a renegade Russian Jew who converted to Greek Orthodoxy and embraced every variety of contemporary anti-Semitism. A French court convicted him in his absence of stirring up racial hatred. His published writing showed him to be a Holocaust denier who believed that a secret conspiracy of Jews controlled the world.
The dalliances of the ‘radical’ WikiLeaks with a proponent of neo-Nazi thought are not as surprising as they once would have been. If you believe that Western democracies are the sole or prime source of oppression, then you are wide open to the seduction of fascistic ideologies, because they come from a radical anti-democratic tradition that echoes your own. If you think that Israel or the West is the sole or prime source of conflict in the Middle East, your defences against anti-Semitism are down, and ready to be overrun.
Assange made Shamir WikiLeaks’ associate in Russia. Shamir gave the KGB in Belarus information it could use when he printed WikiLeaks documents that told the dictatorship there had been conversations between the opposition and the US. Shamir went to Belarus, praised the rigged elections and compared Natalia Koliada and her friends to football hooligans. Whether he handed over a batch of US cables without blacking out the names of Belarusian political activists who had spoken to American officials was an open question. The Russian Interfax news agency said Shamir ‘confirmed the existence of the Belarus dossier’. The Belarusian state media added that he had allowed the KGB to ‘show the background of what happened, to name the organizers, instigators and rioters, including foreign ones, without compromise, as well as to disclose the financing scheme of the destructive organizations’. Given Shamir’s record, it was prudent to fear the worst.
WikiLeaks said in public that Shamir had never worked for it, and that Assange and his colleagues did not endorse his writings. Privately, Assange told Shamir that he could avoid controversy and continue to assist WikiLeaks by working under an assumed name. When the BBC revealed Assange’s double-dealing, his lawyers accused it of using stolen documents to expose their client – a priceless accusation for the apostle of openness to level after he had received 250,000 stolen US cables.
WikiLeaks then sunk lower. For all my liberalism, I cannot think of one honourable reason why governments should not be allowed to keep information secret that might be used by the Taliban to compile a death list. Yet a death list was what the founder of WikiLeaks appeared ready to give men who would crush freedom of speech and every other human right. The US State Department cables Bradley Manning leaked to Julian Assange contained the names of Afghans who had helped allied forces fight the Taliban. One of the histories of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to a London restaurant in 2010. The Taliban had massacred religious minorities, murdered teachers for the ‘crime’ of teaching girls to read and write, and confined women to darkened rooms where passing men could not see them. Aware of its record, the reporters wondered whether Assange would endanger Afghans who had helped the Americans if he put their names online. ‘Well, they’re informants,’ he replied. ‘So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.’
No man is under oath when the wine is flowing at a restaurant table. Assange denied at a public meeting that the conversation had taken place. His actions justified his assertions. Like a journalist who realises he has a moral obligation to protect confidential sources, he carefully suppressed documents that named Afghans the Taliban would want to kill. His decent behaviour did not last. In late 2011 WikiLeaks put all the US State Department cables on the Net, unedited, unredacted, with the names of better and braver people than Assange could ever be in Afghanistan, China, Ethiopia and Belarus for their dictatorial enemies to find and charge with collaboration with the US.
As I said at the beginning of this book, all the enemies of liberalism are essentially the same. Opposing them requires not just a naïve faith in technology, but a political commitment to expand the rights that we possess to meet changing circumstances, and a determination to extend them to the billions of people from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe who do not enjoy our good fortune.
1 The political is not personal
The private life of civilised society is built on white lies. Everyone except sociopaths self-censors when talking to friends and strangers. Our relations with others would break down if we did not restrain free speech and treat them with respect. No one, however, should demand respect for public ideas that have the power to oppress others as long as criticism is not a direct incitement to crime. Religious and political ideas are too important to protect with polite deceits, because their adherents can seek to control all aspects of public and private life.
2 The personal is not political
However hard journalists find it to argue for the suppression of the truth, demands for a right to privacy are justifiable. They will grow as the Net replaces the anonymity of the twentieth-century city, which was so well suited to anonymous liaisons, with a global village. As in all villages, tell-tales, Peeping Toms and poison pens will proliferate. The Net makes ineradicable proofs of past indiscretions available to every cyber-bully and Net-spy with a search engine. As it opens up previously unavailable information to employers, police forces, corporations, democratic governments and dictatorial states, many will realise that the new technologies are a secret policeman’s dream, and ask for the law’s protection.
It is symptomatic of the banality of what ought to be a complicated debate that the only argument we hear about privacy is the argument between celebrities’ lawyers and tabloid editors – a struggle which recalls the joke about the Iran–Iraq war that ‘It’s a pity they can’t both lose.’ As we must deal with celebrities before we can move on, the best solution would be for the courts to offer public figures protection, but to override their privacy rights and allow publication if there is a public interest, even a small public interest, in their exposure. To do that we need judges who instinctively value free debate and are alert to the dangers of the powerful and wealthy manipulating the law. If such judges are impossible to find – and they may be, as we have seen – we should restrict privacy rights for all public figures, as the Americans do.
3 Respect is the enemy of tolerance
The loud calls from the religious for censorship in the name of ‘respect’ reveal the fatuity of modern faith. The religious do not say that they are defending the truth from libellous attack, because in their hearts they know that the truth of the holy books cannot be defended. Instead, like celebrities’ lawyers trying to hide secrets, they threaten the gains made in the struggle for religious toleration by saying that those who ask searching questions of religion must be punished for invading the privacy of the pious.
Religious toleration freed men and women from the blasphemy laws and religious tests for office that Church and state enforced. It allowed argument, apostasy, free-thinking, satire, science and fearless criticism – freedom of religion and freedom from religion. The demand to ‘respect’ religion is an attempt to push back the gains of the Enlightenment by forbidding the essential arguments that religious toleration allowed.
4 If you are frightened, at least have the guts to say so
Once one did not write the word ‘liberal’ and add ‘hypocrite’. Since the Rushdie Affair, the reflex has become automatic. The worst aspect of the fear the ayatollahs spread was that Western intellectuals were afraid of admitting that they were afraid. If they had been honest, they would have forced society to confront the fact of censorship. As it was, their silence made the enemies of liberalism stronger.
5 Once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane
The slide from religious fanatics calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie because he had written a blasphemous novel, to murdering Salmaan Taseer merely for opposing the death penalty for blasphemy, shows how appeasement feeds the beast it seeks to tame. All dictatorial systems, secular and religious, have a capacity to go postal: to move from attacks on their enemies which can be rationally explained to random, almost meaningless assaults on the smallest transgressions. It is best to stop them before they get started.
6 If you have the chance to enact one law …
… make it the First Amendment. For all the crimes and corruptions of American democracy, the stipulation that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances’ is the best guarantor of freedom yet written.
7 Democracy does not end at the office door
Demands for elected worker-directors and stronger protections for whistleblowers are always justifiable, because they restrict the power of the plutocracy. The banking crisis revealed that they could also protect national security. Sensible countries should treat banks as if they were hostile foreign powers, and enable, protect and honour those who reveal the threats they pose to wider society.
8 The wealthy have means enough to defend themselves, they do not need the law to add to them
Free speech has advanced by a process of declaring subjects too important for states to censor. The American revolutionaries of 1776 said the law had no right to interfere in religious debates. The victories of liberalism and the struggle against the European dictatorships led to the acceptance by democracies that no one should regulate political ideas. The battles of the Civil Rights movement in the American South established that public figures in the United States could not seek the law’s protection unless they were victims of ‘malicious’ attack – that is, of assaults from critics who showed a reckless disregard for the truth. Europe should import that protection, and ensure it covers business as well as politics. Given the power of plutocratic wealth and the dangers the financial system poses to modern democracies, the law should not allow CEOs, corporations and financiers the right to use their considerable wealth to limit free discussion of their affairs.
9 Free-speaking societies are rare …
… so protect them, and seek to extend the liberties they offer. Do not imitate the Dutch state and the liberal intellectuals who turned on Ayaan Hirsi Ali for speaking her mind, or the readiness of WikiLeaks to aid the Belarusian dictatorship. If rights are good enough for you, then they are good enough for everyone else.
10 Beware of anyone who begins a sentence with, ‘There’s no such thing as absolute free speech, so …’
… for they will end it by saying something scandalous. There are legitimate limits on free speech. Governments and companies are entitled to keep secrets, as are individuals. There is a need for a libel law, although on American not English lines, and laws against direct incitement to crimes, rather than vague charges against the incitements of various hatreds. But John Stuart Mill’s principle that censorship should be applied only in extreme circumstances remains the best guide to follow. The example of the British legal profession’s assault on scientists shows that when society gives censors wide and vague powers they never confine themselves to deserving targets. They are not snipers but machine-gunners. Allow them to fire at will, and they will hit anything that moves.
11 Location, location, location
It is not what you say, but where you say it. Most who try to censor want total control, but will settle for the effective control brought by isolating and punishing critics. The freedom the Net brings is illusory if it confines writers to working under pseudonyms in obscure corners of the Web. Writers who wish to be heard must break from the fringe into the mainstream by arguing for their ideas in the open. If they live in a dictatorship or a democracy with oppressive laws, they will find that on their own the new technologies offer few ways around the old restrictions on free debate.
12 The Net cannot set you free
Only politics can do that.