Are you passionate about freedom of expression? Do you want to write for an award-winning, internationally renowned magazine and website, which has published the works of Aung San Suu Kyi, Salman Rushdie and Arthur Miller? Then enter Index on Censorship’s student blogging competition!

The winning entry will be published in Index on Censorship magazine, a celebrated, agenda-setting international affairs publication. It will be posted on our popular and influential website, which attracts contributors and readers from around the world. Index is one of the leading international go-to sources for hard-hitting coverage of the biggest threats and challenges to freedom of expression today. This competition is a fantastic opportunity for any aspiring writer to reach a global, diverse and informed audience.

The winner will also be awarded £100, be invited to attend the launch party of our latest magazine in London, get to network with leading figures from international media and human rights organisations, and will receive a one-year subscription to Index on Censorship magazine.

To be in with a chance of winning, send your thoughts on the vital human right that guides our work across the world, from the UK to Brazil to Azerbaijan. Write a 500-word blog post on the following topic:

“What is the biggest challenge facing freedom of expression in the world today?

This can cover old-fashioned repression, threats to digital freedom, religious clampdown or barriers to access to freedom of expression, focusing on any region or country around the world.”

The competition is open to all first year undergraduate students in the UK, and the winning entry will be determined by a panel of distinguished judges including Index Chair Jonathan Dimbleby. To enter, submit your blog post to competiton@indexoncensorship.org by 31 May 2013.

The post Index on Censorship Student Blogging Competition appeared first on Index on Censorship.

In August [2007], the 58-year-old actor and writer Chris Langham was found guilty of downloading 15 videos and pictures of child pornography (graphic and violent enough to fit the characterisation of all child pornography as child abuse). Two weeks earlier, five young British-Asian men — one was a school-leaver from London, four were students at Bradford University — were sentenced to various prison terms. They had been found guilty of possessing material for terrorist purposes (mostly downloaded from websites) that glorified Islamic terrorism, martyrdom and holy war.

Besides being suitable candidates for moral panics, these two cases have little in common. But they raised similar public issues: about the causal role and power of the mass media and especially the internet; demands for stronger regulation and control, especially through the criminal law; and, of course, serious questions about the limits of liberal tolerance and freedom of expression. Other common problems include finding viable definitions — of “pornography” (and grading its seriousness on a five-point scale, like classes of dangerous drugs) or “incitement” — and the technical obstacles to monitoring and controlling the sources of internet material.

Behind these familiar debates, there lie vital background assumptions — seldom made explicit – about the links between thinking and doing. In the holistic view, there is no clear difference between image and action. The production of a pornographic video (with its standard depiction of women as sexual objects) and the use of these images (whether in fantasy, “ordinary” sexuality or sexual abuse and rape) are part of the same social reality. We don’t find one without the other or else the one leads inexorably to the other. There is a symbiosis between the producer, source and nature of the message (whether pornography or religious fanaticism) — and the receiver, consumer or “offender”. A seamless web of values, roles and relationships binds production and consumption. In the case of porn, the image/action connection goes further: the very thing itself is made up of the reproduction of images. No representation, no pornography.

The separatist view, on the other hand, draws a clear distinction between the thought (or image) and the deed. Thus Langham had watched and downloaded images of child pornography, but he had not actively created or distributed these, nor was he guilty of sexually assaulting a child. The Bradford jihadists watched, read, discussed and agreed with poisonous incitements to mass killing; but they had not committed any acts of violence. (The 17-year-old schoolboy did get as far as leaving his parents a note that he was off to fight as a soldier of Islam and would see them next in the garden of paradise).

These opposing views run through the debate about both modes of legal control — first, to prohibit, censor or regulate supply and/or second, to criminalise demand (notably, by making possession illegal). The philosopher Mary Warnock used the Langham case to reassert the traditional liberal separatism between thought and action (Observer, 5 August 2007). Watching pornographic internet pictures of child abuse, she argues, does not necessarily entail that one is a paedophile.

Terrified as they are of paedophilia, most people do assume — as they would not for adult porn — that viewers who enjoy watching those images, will practise what is depicted. She concludes:

. . . though we feel the strongest moral repugnance both towards those who make and those who watch the images we should not use the force of law against a man’s thoughts but only against his actions.

In moral and legal terms, this is a tenable application of the traditional liberal position. But as a theory it looks a little threadbare compared with sophisticated feminist versions of holism. And it can hardly be used for an activist social policy to combat the depredations of the free market.

The whole project of protecting the individual right to self-expression must look quite anachronistic in the internet world. The sheer amount of people, money, technology and global networks that are needed to create an interface of millions of messages exchanged each minute can hardly be grasped, let alone controlled by the liberal model of civil liberties. We can almost literally “see” the rights of a government critic in Zimbabwe being violated as a radio broadcast is jammed. But where exactly in cyberspace are the free expressions of an underground website?

Some imagination is also needed about matters of motive and intent. The creators and distributors of the jihadi message obviously intended to attract, convert and recruit just the type of people they targeted — and get them primed to act (or actually plan to act) in just the ways they wanted. Producers of child pornography do not necessarily intend their viewers to be or become child abusers. They only want the audience to be stimulated enough to purchase more and more porn. They are too amoral to care about other possible outcomes and they can operate without restrictions, making profits in a largely unregulated market. In the legal sense this is a strict liability offence — neither motives nor consequences matter. There can be no defence, that is, in terms of good intentions, nor does the prosecution have to prove actual harm or increased risk.

The same logic is applied to the consumer. The jury in the Chris Langham trial rejected his motivational stories (doing research; reliving his own victimisation). They agreed with the prosecuting barrister Richard Barraclough QC:

The statement he made to the police was nothing but hypocrisy and cant. Each of his statements is a lie. He downloaded these images. They didn’t happen automatically; he chose them. That makes him guilty in law. It doesn’t matter why he did it.

It may not matter in court. But motives surely do matter in considering the likely effects of legal controls. Compare the response of ideological (convictional) offenders who proudly justify their action and reject the legitimacy of the law with those offenders who tell “sad tales”, offer excuses, feel stigmatised and profess to be ashamed of their action.

Furthermore, because the law is such a blunt instrument of social control, it cannot register the wider social effects of mass, anonymous and cheap access to the internet. Such effects — whether in the case of pornography or ideological violence — do not occur directly and immediately. Increases in rates of sexual violence, for example, cannot be proved to be caused by internet porn consumption. But only the most unimaginative separatist view, the most literal legalism or the most orthodox libertarianism can ignore the more general sexualisation of our culture. In a sense, it is too late for any empirical study of the “effects” of any medium, such as internet porn. There is no “before” from which to study an “after”. The full “pornification” thesis (Pamela Paul’s vision of the porno-sphere moving into the public sphere) is muddled and exaggerated, but there can be little doubt that as images become more accessible, affordable and anonymous, they also become more acceptable.

But how do these images influence the action of any particular individual?

Imagine the causal steps that lead to the breaking of moral and legal rules as something like religious conversion. For some converts, the new spiritual conviction seems to come from within; the role of other people (friends, counsellors, missionaries) and cultural texts (the Bible, the Koran, conversion videos) is only to confirm the initial commitment. Yet other people have not yet reached this stage; they are still standing at the “invitational edge”. For them, new friends, a prayer meeting in the local mosque, the mass rally attended out of curiosity, the website entered just about by chance, the university discussion group — any of these might tip you over the edge. There are yet other people who have the “right” backgrounds and opportunities — but have not shown even the beginnings of commitment. They indeed have to be converted or turned on by those “external” messages or sources.

In the Bradford jihadists’ case, the judge explicitly tried to remove the offences from the discourse about freedom of speech. The defendants were being punished for “being prepared” to train in Pakistan to fight British soldiers in Afghanistan.

Five men who were jailed in 2007 for being found in possession of jihadist literature. Their conviction was quashed in 2008.

Why had they broken the law?

Because in my judgment you were intoxicated by the extremist nature of the material that each of you collected, shared and discussed . . . So carried away by the material were you that each of you crossed the line. That is exactly what the people who peddle this material want to achieve and exactly what you did.

The judge was right to evoke the metaphor of crossing the line. The language and procedures of the law require this clarity. Just a step away from the legal model, however, the metaphor becomes difficult to sustain. In particular, there is little consensus about why certain lines should be drawn in criminal terms.

Is the justification primarily deterrence (preventing worse future dangers to society), justice (people should have to pay a price for this), or revulsion about the material itself?

For legal purposes, the standard liberal line between words and deeds might still be drawn. But this does not require tired and overused cliches about “thought control”. The post-modern surveillance state may indeed be invading the boundaries of privacy, but it does not concern itself too much with people’s thoughts about morality and sexuality. These thoughts are “controlled” more by global market forces, operating not in the secret underworld of internet porn, but right in the open on prime-time TV. Talk shows, reality TV, teenage drama: these are the sites where moral lines about sexuality are being redrawn.

As for ideological violence, no one can pretend that the debate is about the integrity of a private sphere (where you live as you please) and a public sphere (where you can express what you like as long as it does not libel anyone or incite hatred). The continuing legacy of last century’s ideological violence — state crimes such as genocide, torture and mass killing; massive ethnic and religious slaughter; terrorism and suicide bombing — does not easily fit the emblematic vision of earnest citizens calmly discussing the abstract right to condone the use of violence.

Debates about internet pornography and violence are landmines in the current struggle for the survival of liberalism itself.

Stan Cohen, who died on 7 January 2013, was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and a contributor to Index on Censorship magazine

This article appeared in Index on Censorship magazine, volume 36, number 4 (2007)

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn

This is the first ever publication in English of verse by Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, written while the author was detained in the Gulag. An extract from a longer autobiographical work composed in 1950-53, it was published in the first issue of Index on Censorship magazine in March 1972.

God Keep Me from Going Mad (translated by Michael Scammell)

There never was, nor will be, a world of brightness!
A frozen footcloth is the scarf that binds my face.
Fights over porridge, the ganger’s constant griping
And day follows day follows day, and no end to this dreary fate.

My feeble pick strikes sparks from the frozen earth.
And the sun stares down unblinking from the sky.
But the world is here! And will be! The daily round
Suffices. But man is not to be prisoned in the day.
To write! To write now, without delay,
Not in heated wrath, but with cool and clear understanding.
The millstones of my thoughts can hardly turn,
Too rare the flicker of light in my aching soul.
Yes, tight is the circle around us tautly drawn,
But my verses will burst their bonds and freely roam
And I can guard, perhaps, beyond their reach,
In rhythmic harmony this hard-won gift of speech.

And then they can grope my body in vain —
‘Here I am. All yours. Look hard. Not a line. . .
Our indestructible memory, by wonder divine,
Is beyond the reach of your butcher’s hands!’

My labour of love! Year after year with me you will grow,
Year after year you will tread the prisoner’s path.
The day will come when you warm not me alone,
Nor me alone embrace with a shiver of wrath.
Let the stanzas throb — but no whisper let slip,
Let them hammer away — not a twitch of the lip,
Let your eyes not gleam in another’s presence
And let no-one see, let no-one see
You put pencil to paper.
From every corner I am stalked by prison —
God keep me from going mad!

I do not write my verses for idle pleasure,
Nor from a sense of energy to burn.
Nor out of mischief, to evade their searches,
Do I carry them past my captors in my brain.
The free flow of my verse is dearly bought,
I have paid a cruel price for my poet’s rights:
The barren sacrifice of all her youth
And ten cold solitary years for my wife —

The unuttered cries of children still unborn,
My mother’s death, toiling in gaunt starvation,
The madness of prison cells, midnight interrogations,
Autumn’s sticky red clay in an opencast mine,
The secret, slow and silent erosive force
Of winters laying bricks, of summers feeding the furnace —
Oh, if this were but the sum of the price paid for my verse!
But those others paid the price with their lives,
Immured in the silence of Solovki, drowned in thunder of waves,
Or shot without trial in Vorkuta’s polar night.

Love and warmth and their executed cries
Have combined in my breast to carve
The receptive metre of this sorrowful tale,
These few poor thousand incapacious lines.
Oh, hopeless labour! Can you really pay the price?
Do you think to redeem the pledge with a single life?
For what an age has my country been so poor
In women’s happy laughter, so very rich
In poets’ lamentations!
Verse verse — for all that we have lost,
A drop of scented resin in the razed forest!
But this is all I live for! On its wings
I transport my feeble body through prison walls
And one day, in distant exile dim,
Biding my time, I will free my tortured memory from its thrall:
On paper, birchbark, in a blackened bottle rolled,
I will consign my tale to the forest leaves,
Or to a drift of shifting snow.

But what if beforehand they give me poisoned bread?
Or if darkness beclouds my mind at last?
Oh, let me die there! Let it not be here!
God keep me from going mad!

Zarganar

Burmese comic, dissident and poet Zarganar was imprisoned for speaking out against the military junta in its handling of the Cyclone Nargis crisis in May 2008. Last year he, along with dozens of other political prisoners, was released Myitkyina jail in northern Burma by the Burmese government.

The following poem appeared as part of a profile of Zarganar in Beyond Bars, a 2010 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.

Untitled (translated by Vicky Bowman)

It’s lucky my forehead is flat
Since my arm must often rest there.
Beneath it shines a light I must invite
From a moon I cannot see
In Myitkyina.

To mark our 40th birthday, on 19 November we are partnering with Poet in the City for a special celebration of Index’s remarkable literary heritage. More here

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Academics worldwide face economic and political attacks that restrict their freedom to challenge convention, says Jo Glanville

This piece was originally published on Times Higher Education

More than 30 years ago, the Index on Censorship published a special issue on academic freedom titled “Scholarship and its enemies”. It included a report on the persecution of scientists in the Soviet Union, an article about the harassment of scholars in Czechoslovakia, a feature detailing how Bantu education in South Africa politicised black students and an account of university education in Libya under the rule of Mu’ammer Gaddafi. Since those once monolithic regimes have now fallen, it is ironic that the article that has dated the least and is even prophetic in its vision of the future is a portrait of the threat to universities in the UK written back in 1981. Anthony Arblaster and Steven Lukes warned that academia, and the freedom of scholars, “is under constant and growing pressure from its paymasters, the local education authorities and, above all, central government. The general tendency of these pressures is towards a crude and debased utilitarianism which sees education as an industry, or a production line whose purpose is to ‘turn out’ persons equipped with the various kinds of skills which the economy and current employment opportunities require”.

A generation on, in the 40th anniversary year of the Index, we have returned to the subject of academic freedom in a special issue, “Censors on campus“. This includes an essay by Thomas Docherty that gives a stark outline of the consequences of the past 30 years on universities in the UK since the first significant cuts to higher education funding took place. It is a sobering sequel to Arblaster and Lukes’ analysis: “the perception of academics as accountable to the requirements of the government of the day rather than the demands of intellectual inquiry has become entrenched: our main priority is to serve business and to do whatever government decides is necessary for the economy”.

All three writers recognise the importance of universities for fostering ideas that dissent from the mainstream and the dangers for democracy as a whole when that space is threatened. For Arblaster and Lukes, that freedom depends on the principle that all decisions and judgements are made on academic or educational grounds; for Docherty, it is a licence that is essential for an open society.

As the international cases published in the special issue illustrate, around the world academics are often at the forefront of challenging authoritarianism and orthodoxy both in their research and in direct political activism. Their protection – and the threats that they face – should receive as much attention as attacks on the press.

Yet although there are many organisations and international bodies standing up for journalists, the defence of academic freedom trails behind. The classification of our various freedoms into special interest groups – whether press or academia – is perhaps part of the problem. It is time to recognise that the protection of academic freedom is as fundamental for democracy as the safeguarding of the press – it is, after all, freedom of expression for the whole of society that is at stake.

Turkey is a particularly strong example of the vital role played by academics and how vulnerable they remain to intimidation. As the distinguished author and translator Maureen Freely demonstrates in her report for Index, the pressure on universities, students and scholars is growing. Academics who dare to explore taboo topics that challenge the nationalist mythology, topics that may range from the Armenian genocide to Atatürk, may damage their careers or even face prosecution. One notorious current case is that of the academic Büşra Ersanlı, who is facing prosecution over links to an “illegal organisation”. She is believed to have been targeted because of her association with the BDP, the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, which has seats in the national assembly. As Freely reports, new networks and campaign groups are now emerging to defend students as well as their teachers.

In Thailand, academics are challenging one of the most notorious chills on free speech: the lese-majesty law that criminalises insult to the king. It carries a minimum jail sentence of three years. A group of young law academics at Thammasat University is courageously leading a campaign to reform the law: they have been banned from holding meetings at their own university, and their spokesman, the celebrated lawyer Worachet Pakeerut, was assaulted on campus earlier this year.

These are scholars whose work takes them into the heart of public life, daring to raise questions that challenge the national identity of their culture.

Although the risks facing scholars at home may be less extreme, the same principle is at stake: the space and the licence to challenge convention. Any government that reduces that freedom, whether on economic or political grounds, shrinks the possibilities for a truly open society.

Jo Glanville is outgoing editor of Index on Censorship.

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According to the Quran, it was on a Tuesday that Allah created darkness. Last 11 September, when suicide-pilots were crashing commercial airliners into crowded American buildings, I did not have to look to the calendar to see what day it was: Dark Tuesday was casting its long shadow across Manhattan and along the Potomac River. I was also not surprised that despite the seven or so trillion dollars we have spent since 1950 on what is euphemistically called “Defence”, there would have been no advance warning from the FBI or CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency.

While the Bushites have been eagerly preparing for the last war but two — missiles from North Korea, clearly marked with flags, would rain down on Portland, Oregon, only to be intercepted by our missile-shield balloons — the foxy Osama bin Laden knew that all he needed for his holy war on the infidel were flyers willing to kill themselves along with those random passengers who happened to be aboard hijacked airliners.  Also, like so many of those born to wealth, Osama is not one to throw money about.  Apparently, the airline tickets of the 19 known dead hijackers were paid through a credit card.  I suspect that United and American Airlines will never be reimbursed by American Express whose New York offices Osama — inadvertently? — hit.

On the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, a passenger telephoned out to say that he and a dozen or so other men — several of them athletes — were going to attack the hijackers. ‘Let’s roll!’ he shouted. A scuffle. A scream. Silence. But the plane, allegedly aimed at the White House, ended up in a field near Pittsburgh.  We have always had wise and brave civilians.  It is the military and the politicians and the media that one frets about.  After all, we have not encountered suicide bombers since the kamikazes, as we called them in the Pacific where I was idly a soldier in World War II.

Japan was the enemy then. Now, bin Laden …The Muslims …The Pakistanis …Step in line.

The telephone rings. A distraught voice from the United States. “Berry Berenson‘s dead.  She was on Flight …” The world was getting surreal.  Arabs.  Plastic knives.  The beautiful Berry.  What on earth did any of these elements have in common other than an unexpected appointment in Samarra with that restless traveller Death?

The telephone keeps ringing. In summer I live south of Naples, Italy. Italian newspapers, TV, radio, want comment. So do 1. 1 have written lately about Pearl Harbor. Now I get the same question over and over: isn’t this exactly like Sunday morning 7 December 1941? No, it’s not, I say. As far as we now know, we had no warning of last Tuesday’s attack. Of course, our government has many, many secrets which our enemies always seem to know about in advance but our people are not told of until years later, if at all. President Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to attack us at Pearl Harbor. I describe the various steps he took in a book, The Golden Age. We now know what was on his mind: coming to England’s aid against Japan’s ally, Hitler, a virtuous plot that ended triumphantly for the human race. But what was — is — on bin Laden’s mind?

For several decades there has been an unrelenting demonisation of the Muslim world in the American media. Since I am a loyal American, I am not supposed to tell you why this has taken place but then it is not usual for us to examine why anything happens other than to accuse others of motiveless malignity. “We are good,” announced a deep-thinker on American television, “They are evil,” which wraps that one up in a neat package.  But it was Bush himself who put, as it were, the bow on the package in an address to a joint session of Congress where he shared with them — as well as all of us somewhere over the Beltway — his profound knowledge of Islam’s wiles and ways: “They hate what they see right here in this Chamber.”

A million Americans nodded in front of their TV sets. “Their leaders are self-appointed.  They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” At this plangent moment what Americans’ gorge did not rise like a Florida chad to the bait?

Should the 44-year-old Saudi Arabian bin Laden be the prime mover, we know surprisingly little about him.  We can assume that he favours the Palestinians in their uprising against the European- and American-born Israelis, intent, many of them, on establishing a theocratic state in what was to have been a common holy land for Jews, Muslims and Christians.  But if Osama ever wept tears for Arafat, they have left little trace.  So why do he and millions of other Muslims hate us?

Let us deal first with the six-foot seven-inch Osama who enters history in 1979 as a guerrilla warrior working alongside the CIA to defend Afghanistan against the invading Soviets. Was he anti-communist? Irrelevant question. He is anti-infidel in the land of the Prophet.

Described as fabulously wealthy, Osama is worth “only” a few million dollars, according to a relative.  It was his father who created a fabulous fortune with a construction company that specialised in building palaces for the Saudi royal family. That company is now worth several billion dollars, presumably shared by Osama’s 54 brothers and sisters.  Although he speaks perfect English, he was entirely educated in the Saudi capital, Jeddah; he has never travelled outside the Arabian peninsula. Several siblings live in the Boston area and give large sums to Harvard.

We are told that much of his family appears to have disowned him while many of his assets in the Saudi kingdom have been frozen.

Where does Osama’s money now come from? He is a superb fund-raiser for Allah but only within the Arab world; contrary to legend, he has taken no CIA money. He is also a superb organiser within Afghanistan. In 1998, he warned the Saudi king that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait.

Osama assumed that after his own victories as a guerrilla against the Russians, he and his organisation would be used by the Saudis to stop the Iraqis. To Osama’s horror, King Fahd sent for the Americans: thus were infidels established on the sacred sands of Mohammed. “This was”, he said, “the most shocking moment of my life.” ‘Infidel”, in his sense, does not mean anything of great moral consequence, like cheating sexually on your partner; rather, it means lack of faith in Allah, the one God, and in his Prophet.

Osama persuaded 4,000 Saudis to go to Afghanistan for military training by his group.  In 1991, Osama moved on to Sudan.  In 1994, when the Saudis withdrew his citizenship, Osama was already a legendary figure in the Islamic world and so, like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, he could tell the royal Saudis, “I banish you. There is a world elsewhere.” Unfortunately, that world is us.

In a 12-page “declaration of war”, Osama presented himself as a potential liberator of the Muslim world from the great Satan of modern corruption, the United States.

When Clinton lobbed a missile at a Sudanese aspirin factory, Osama blew up two of our embassies in Africa, put a hole in the side of an American warship off Yemen, and so on to the events of Tuesday, 11 September.

Now President George W Bush, in retaliation, has promised us not only a ‘new war’ but a secret war. That is, not secret to Osama but only to us who pay for and fight it.  ”This administration will not talk about any plans we may or may not have,” said Bush.  ”We’re going to find these evil-doers …and we’re going to hold them accountable” along with the other devils who have given Osama shelter in order to teach them the one lesson that we ourselves have never been able to learn: in history, as in physics, there is no action without reaction.  Or, as Edward S Herman puts it, “One of the most durable features of the US culture is the inability or refusal to recognise US crimes.” When Osama was four years old, I arrived in Cairo for a conversation with Nasser to appear in Look magazine.  I was received by Mohammed Heikal, Nasser’s chief adviser.  Nasser himself was not to be seen.  He was at the Barricade, his retreat on the Nile.  Later, I found out that a plot to murder him had just failed and he was in well-guarded seclusion.  Heikal spoke perfect English; he was sardonic, cynical.

“We are studying the Quran for hints on birth control.” He sighed.

“Not helpful?”

“Not very. But we keep looking for a text.” We talked off and on for a week. Nasser wanted to modernise Egypt.  But there was a reactionary, religious element … Another sigh. Then a surprise. “We’ve found something very odd, the young village boys — the bright ones that we are educating to be engineers, chemists and so on — are turning religious on us.”

“Right-wing?”

“Very.” Heikal was a spiritual son of our 18th century Enlightenment.  I thought of Heikal on Dark Tuesday when one of his modernised Arab generation had, in the name of Islam, struck at what had been, 40 years earlier, Nasser’s model for a modern state.  Yet Osama seemed, from all accounts, no more than a practising, as opposed to zealous, Muslim.  Ironically, he was trained as an engineer.

Understandably, he dislikes the United States as symbol and as fact. But when our clients, the Saudi royal family, allowed American troops to occupy the Prophet’s holy land, Osama named the fundamental enemy “the Crusader-Zionist Alliance”. Thus, in a phrase, he defined himself and reminded his critics that he is a Wahhabi Muslim, a Puritan activist not unlike our Falwell-Robertson zanies, only serious. He would go to war against the United States, “the head of the serpent”. Even more ambitiously, he would rid all the Muslim states of their western-supported regimes, starting with that of his native land. The word “Crusader” was the giveaway.  In the eyes of many Muslims, the Christian West, currently in alliance with Zionism, has for 1,000 years tried to dominate the lands of the Umma, the true believers. That is why Osama is seen by so many simple folk as the true heir to Saladin, the great warrior king who defeated Richard of England and the western crusaders.

Who was Saladin? Dates 1138—1193. He was an Iraqi Kurd [born in Takrit, Saddam Hussein's home village, in what is now Iraq]. In the century before his birth, western Christians had established a kingdom at Jerusalem, to the horror of the Islamic Faithful.  Much as the United States used the Gulf War as pretext for our current occupation of Saudi Arabia, Saladin raised armies to drive out the Crusaders. He conquered Egypt, annexed Syria and finally smashed the Kingdom of Jerusalem in a religious war that pitted Mohammedan against Christian. He united and ‘purified’ the Muslim world, and though Richard Lionheart was the better general, in the end he gave up and went home.  As one historian put it, Saladin “typified the Mohammedan utter self-surrender to a sacred cause.” But he left no government behind him, no political system because, as he himself said: “My troops will do nothing save when I ride at their head …” Now his spirit has returned with a vengeance.

The Bush administration, though eerily inept in all but its principal task, which is to exempt the rich from taxes, has casually torn up most of the treaties to which civilised nations subscribe — like the Kyoto Accords or the nuclear missile agreement with Russia.  As the Bushites go about their relentless plundering of the Treasury and now, thanks to Osama, Social Security (a supposedly untouchable trust fund) which like Lucky Strike green has gone to war, they have also allowed the FBI and CIA either to run amok or not budge at all — leaving us, the very first ‘indispensable’ and at popular request last global empire, rather like the Wizard of Oz doing his odd pretend-magic tricks while hoping not to be found out. Latest Bushism to the world: “Either you are with us or you are with the Terrorists.” That’s known as asking for it.

To be fair, one cannot entirely blame the current Oval One for our incoherence. Though his predecessors have generally had rather higher IQs than his, they, too, assiduously served the one per cent that owns the country while allowing everyone else to drift.  Particularly culpable was Bill Clinton. Although the most able chief executive since FDR, Clinton, in his frantic pursuit of election victories, set in place the trigger for a police state which his successor is now happily squeezing.

Police state? What’s that all about? In April 1996, one year after the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton signed into law the AntiTerrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, a so-called “conference bill” in which many grubby hands played a part including the bill’s co-sponsor, Senate majority leader Bob Dole. Although Clinton, in order to win elections, did many unwise and opportunistic things, like Charles II he seldom ever said an unwise one. But faced with opposition to anti-terrorism legislation — which not only gives the attorney-general the power to use the armed services against the civilian population, neatly nullifying the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, but also, selectively, suspends habeas corpus, the heart of Anglo-American liberty — Clinton attacked his critics as “unpatriotic”. Then, wrapped in the flag, he spoke from the throne: “There is nothing patriotic about our pretending that you can love your country but despise your government.” This is breathtaking since it includes, at one time or another, most of us. Put another way, was a German in 1939 who said that he detested the Nazi dictatorship unpatriotic?

There have been ominous signs that our fragile liberties have been dramatically at risk since the 1970s when the white-shirt-and-tie FBI reinvented itself from a corps of “generalists” trained in law and accounting into a confrontational “Special Weapons and Tactics” (aka SWAT) Green Beret-style army of warriors who like to dress up in camouflage or black ninja clothing and, depending on the caper, the odd ski mask.  In the early 80s, an FBI super-SWAT team, the Hostage 270 Rescue Team, was formed.  As so often happens in United States-speak, this group specialised not in freeing hostages or saving lives but in murderous attacks on groups that offended them, like the Branch Davidians — evangelical Christians who were living peaceably in their own compound at Waco, Texas, until an FBI SWAT team, illegally using army tanks, killed 82 of them, including 25 children.  This was 1993.

Post-Tuesday, SWAT teams can now be used to go after suspect Arab Americans or, indeed, anyone who might be guilty of terrorism, a word without legal definition (how can you fight terrorism by suspending habeas corpus since those who want their corpuses released from prison are already locked up?).  But in the post-Oklahoma City trauma, Clinton said that those who did not support his draconian legislation were terrorist co-conspirators who wanted to turn “America into a safe house for terrorists”.  If the cool Clinton could so froth, what are we to expect from the overheated Bush post-Tuesday?

Incidentally, those who were shocked by Bush the Younger’s shout that we are now “at war” with Osama and those parts of the Muslim world that support him should have quickly put on their collective thinking caps.  Since a nation can only be at war with another nation state, why did our smouldering if not yet burning bush come up with such a phrase? Think hard.  This will count against your final grade. Give up? Well, most insurance companies have a rider that they need not pay for damage done by “an act of war”.

Although the men and women around Bush know nothing of war and less of our Constitution, they understand fund-raising.  For this wartime exclusion, Hartford Life would soon be breaking open its piggy bank to finance Republicans for years to come.  But it was the mean-spirited Washington Post that pointed out that, under US case law, only a sovereign nation, not a bunch of radicals, can commit an “act of war”.  Good try, W. This now means that we the people, with our tax money, will be allowed to bail out the insurance companies, a rare privilege not afforded to just any old generation.

Although the American people have no direct means of influencing their government, their ‘opinions’ are occasionally sampled through polls. According to a November 1995 CNN-Time poll, 55 per cent of the people believe:

The federal government has become so powerful that it poses a threat to the rights of ordinary citizens.

Three days after Dark Tuesday, 74 per cent said they thought:

It would be necessary for Americans to give up some of their personal freedoms.

86 per cent favoured guards and metal detectors at public buildings and events.  Thus, as the police state settles comfortably in place, one can imagine Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld studying these figures, transfixed with joy.

“It’s what they always wanted, Dick.”

“And to think we never knew, Don.”

“Thanks to those liberals, Dick.”

“We’ll get those bastards now, Don.”

It seems forgotten by our amnesiac media that we once energetically supported Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s war against Iran, and so he thought, not unnaturally, that we wouldn’t mind his taking over Kuwait’s filling stations.  Overnight, our employee became Satan — and so remains, as we torment his people in the hope that they will rise up and overthrow him — as the Cubans were supposed, in their US-imposed poverty, to dismiss Castro a half-century ago, whose only crime was refusal to allow the Kennedy brothers to murder him in their so-called Operation Mongoose. Our imperial disdain for the lesser breeds did not go unnoticed by the latest educated generation of Saudi Arabians, and by their evolving leader, Osama bin Laden, whose moment came in 2001 when a weak American president took office in questionable circumstances.

The New York Times is the principal dispenser of opinion received from corporate America.  It generally stands tall, or tries to. Even so, as of 13 September, the NYT’s editorial columns were all slightly off-key.

Under the heading “Demands of Leadership” the NYT was upbeat, sort of. It’s going to be OK if you work hard and keep your eye on the ball, Mr President. Apparently Bush is “facing multiple challenges, but his most important job is a simple matter of leadership.” Thank God.

Not only is that all it takes, but it’s simple, too! For a moment… The NYT then slips into the way things look as opposed to the way they ought to look.

The Administration spent much of yesterday trying to overcome the impression that Mr Bush showed weakness when he did not return to Washington after the terrorists struck.

But from what I could tell no one cared, while some of us felt marginally safer that the national silly-billy was trapped in his Nebraska bunker.

Patiently, the NYT spells it out for Bush and for us, too:

In the days ahead, Mr Bush may be asking the nation to support military actions that many citizens, particularly those with relations in the service, will find alarming.  He must show that he knows what he is doing.

Well, that’s a bullseye. If only FDR had got letters like that from Arthur Krock at the old NYT. Finally, Anthony Lewis thinks it wise to eschew Bushite unilateralism in favour of cooperation with other nations in order to contain Tuesday’s darkness by understanding its origin while ceasing our provocations of cultures opposed to us and our arrangements.  Lewis, unusually for a NewYork Times writer, favours peace now. So do I. But then we are old and have been to the wars and value our fast-diminishing freedoms unlike those jingoes now beating their tom-toms in Times Square in favour of an all-out war for other Americans to fight.

As usual, the political columnist who has made the most sense of all this is William Pfaff in the International Herald Tribune (17 September 2001).

Unlike the provincial war-lovers at the New York Times, he is appalled by the spectacle of an American president who declined to serve his country in Vietnam howling for war against not a nation nor even a religion but one man and his accomplices, a category that will ever widen.

Pfaff:

“The riposte of a civilised nation, one that believes in good, in human society and opposes evil, has to be narrowly focused and, above all, intelligent.

“Missiles are blunt weapons.  Those terrorists are smart enough to make others bear the price for what they have done, and to exploit the results.

“A maddened US response that hurts still others is what they want: it will fuel the hatred that already fires the self-righteousness about their criminal acts against the innocent.

“What the United States needs is cold reconsideration of how it has arrived at this pass.  It needs, even more, to foresee disasters that might lie in the future.”

War is the no-win, all-lose option. The time has come to put the good Kofi Annan to use. As glorious as total revenge will be for our war-lovers, a truce between Saladin and the Crusader Zionists is in the interest of the entire human race. Long before the dread monotheists got their hands on history’s neck, we had been taught how to handle feuds by none other than the god Apollo as dramatised by Aeschylus in The Eumenides (a polite Greek term for the Furies who keep us daily company on CNN).  Orestes, for the sin of matricide, cannot rid himself of the Furies who hound him wherever he goes.  He appeals to the god Apollo who tells him to go to the UN — also known as the citizens’ assembly at Athens — which he does and is acquitted on the grounds that blood feuds must be ended or they will smoulder for ever, generation after generation, and great towers shall turn to flame and incinerate us all until “The thirsty dust shall never more suck up the darkly steaming blood . . .  and vengeance crying death for death! But man with man and state with state shall vow the pledge of common hate and common friendship, that for man has oft made blessing out of ban, be ours until all time.”

Let Annan mediate between East and West before there is nothing left of either of us to salvage. The awesome physical damage Osama and company did us on Dark Tuesday is as nothing compared to the knockout blow to our vanishing liberties — the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1991 combined with the recent request to Congress for additional special powers to wire-tap without judicial order; to deport lawful permanent residents, visitors and undocumented immigrants without due process, and so on.  Even that loyal company town paper the Washington Post is alarmed:

Justice Department is making extraordinary use of its powers to arrest and detain individuals, taking the unusual step of jailing hundreds of people on minor . . . violations. The lawyers and legal scholars . . .  said they could not recall a time when so many people had been arrested and held without bond on charges — particularly minor charges — related to the case at hand.

This is pre-Osama: “Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and associations; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.” The tone is familiar. It is from Hitler’s 1933 speech calling for “an Enabling Act” for “the protection of the People and the State” after the catastrophic Reichstag fire that the Nazis had secretly lit.

Only one congresswoman, Barbara Lee of California, voted against the additional powers granted the president. Meanwhile, a NYT-CBS poll notes that only six per cent now oppose military action while a substantial majority favour war ‘even if many thousands of innocent civilians are killed’. Most of this majority are far too young to recall World War II, Korea, even Vietnam.

Simultaneously, Bush’s approval rating has soared from around 50 per cent to 91 per cent.

Traditionally, in war, the president is totemic like the flag. When Kennedy got his highest rating after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs, he observed, characteristically: “It would seem that the worse you fuck up in this job the more popular you get.”

Bush, father and son, may yet make it to Mount Rushmore though it might be cheaper to redo the handsome Barbara Bush’s lookalike, George Washington, by adding two strings of Teclas to his limestone neck, in memoriam, as it were.

Finally, the physical damage Osama and friends can do us — terrible as it has been thus far — is as nothing to what he is doing to our liberties. Once alienated, an “inalienable right” is apt to be for ever lost, in which case we are no longer even remotely the last best hope of earth but merely a seedy imperial state whose citizens are kept in line by SWAT teams and whose way of death, not life, is universally imitated.

Since VJ Day 1945 (“Victory over Japan” and the end of World War II), we have been engaged in what the great historian Charles A Beard called “perpetual war for perpetual peace”.  I have occasionally referred to our “enemy of the month club”: each month a new horrendous enemy at whom we must strike before he destroys us.  I have been accused of exaggeration, so here’s the Scoreboard from Kosovo (1999) to Berlin Airlift (1948-49).  You will note that the compilers, Federation of American Scientists, record a number of our wars as “ongoing”, even though many of us have forgotten about them.  We are given under “Name” many fanciful Defense Department titles like “Urgent Fury”, which was Reagan’s attack on the island of Grenada, a month-long caper that General Haig disloyally said could have been handled more briefly by the Provincetown police department. In these several hundred wars against communism, terrorism, drugs or sometimes nothing much, between Pearl Harbor and Tuesday 11 September 2001, we always struck the first blow.

This piece appeared on Index on Censorship magazine, volume 31, number 2 (April, 2002), issue 203: Filling the Silence

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As a general rule, when a private company says that its ruthlessly tight protection against copyright infringement is for public benefit, my skin starts to itch. Sometimes at least you can understand the rationale: if we all stop buying music and pinch it off the internet, there will undoubtedly be fewer musicians making enough money to stay in the music-making business, and that would be rotten. The charts will be packed out with trust-fund babies and bankers having a mid-life crisis (in my house, we call them U2).

But the way to stop this happening is probably not to threaten anyone who’s ever had broadband and an iPod with a lengthy jail sentence and a bazillion dollar fine, because that is simply antagonistic, and makes them forget how much they like musicians in their dislike of record companies. And while you’re at it, you remind the rest of us that we hate global corporations too.

The same is true of what appears to be the most heavily copyrighted event the world has ever seen: the 2012 Olympics. Now, you may have been thinking that Locog, the London Olympic organisers, have been playing a long game, with their piss-poor logo, weirdly condomic mascots and vile 80s’ graffiti font. We scoffed as each one was released, little realising that this was surely the strongest protection against counterfeit items: who could possibly want to fake something so intrinsically crappy?

Nonetheless, Locog takes its copyright position very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it has released a 61-page document of guidelines to explain how we can all not infringe their rights. They begin by stating that they hope all the information given will be used in good faith, which makes it all the odder that they let smart-arse journalists anywhere near it. While each page concludes with a footer stating that it is no substitute for legal advice, it does offer two separate flowcharts, and some Olympic background.

Given how much of the Olympic background is really quite dodgy and racist, I was hoping for a good read. But there is no mention of the Nazi background of the Olympic torch (the torch relay first took place in Berlin, 1936, and has nothing to do with ancient Greece, beyond the fact that Hitler liked to associate himself with the ancient world, because it seemed to validate him).

There’s also no mention of the dubious colour-scheme origins of the Olympic rings, which were once meant to symbolise directly the continents involved: blue for Europe, green for Australia (nice and uncontroversial), red for America (oh, like the native Americans? Wait, this is less controversial, right?), yellow for Asia (now, hang on) and black for Africa (okey dokey, then). The executive committee of the International Olympic Committee removed the paragraph explaining this from its booklet in 1951. But again, sadly no mention in the Olympic background info this year.

What they do mention is how many, many ways you could breach the Olympic copyright, even if you weren’t trying. “Controlled phrases”, in Locog parlance, include ‘”Games, two thousand and twelve, 2012, and twenty twelve” (that’s list A), and “Gold, silver, bronze, London, medals, sponsors and summer” (that’s list B). Combining words from either or both lists might give rise to a ‘Listed expression’, which is another thing you’re not supposed to be doing.

Don’t feel that Orwell has descended, however. Locog makes exceptions (possibly – they’re listed as ‘defences’, just so you know you’re in the wrong before you start). Gratifyingly, you can use words associated with the Olympics if it’s perfectly clear you aren’t trying to have anything to do with them. So, to quote their example, an antique store could advertise an “Original Marble Olympian Statue, circa 500 BC”, and that would probably be fine.

And if you have a company name which sounds a bit Olympicky, that’s okay too, so long as you existed before the Olympics and don’t pretend that you have anything to do with them. The example they give for this is my favourite bit of the whole document (page 17, in case you were thinking I stopped early). They suggest that if a pen manufacturer had trademarked the name ‘Olympens’ that would probably be okay. Seriously? Olympens? Suddenly, the amazing rubbishness of brand names that contestants on The Apprentice come up with all makes sense. Was Olympens really the best anyone could come up with? They couldn’t put aside four more seconds and invent a company that sells ice picks for climbing in Greek mountains?

But it’s not just the logos of the Olympics, or words that might loosely have anything to do with them, which are subject to these controls. Just to clarify: “An infringing association can be created by the use of any ‘representation’. This may be an image, graphic design, sound, or word (spoken or written) etc” (their emphasis). What, you may be wondering, is the sound of the Olympics? The gentle flow of tenners as they sink into an open drain?

Locog are keen to point out, as I said back at the start, that they are doing all of this for our benefit. If their sponsors aren’t protected, then they might pull out. And if they do that, there will be a big fat chasm in the Olympics budget, and you and I will be left with the bill.

At no point does it seem to have occurred to them, in their mesmerising arrogance, that every London council tax payer is also one of their sponsors, and has been for years. It also hasn’t occurred to them that they could always have simply spent less on their massive school sports day, instead of tanking billions and then telling us we should count ourselves lucky that McDonalds, Coca-Cola and Adidas will pick up a tiny bit of the tab.

Natalie Haynes is a comedian and writer. Her books include The Ancient Guide to Modern Life (Profile Books) and The Great Escape (Simon & Schuster). This article originally appeared in Index on Censorship magazine’s Sport On Trial issue

More London 2012:

What?!? Now we’re not even allowed to link to the Olympics website?

Olympic organisers shut down “Space hijackers” protest Twitter account

In a league of its own

Plus read more on Sport v human rights in Index on Censorship magazine’s Sports issue

The post Locog: the ultimate bad sport appeared first on Index on Censorship.