In the past few years, criminal prosecution of artists and new laws have made it clear for those who criticise the Kremlin or Russian Orthodox Church in their creative work, will face consequences for portraying either of these institutions negatively.

A Russian artist came under fire for depicting members of Pussy Riot as religious icons

Just last week, the State Duma passed two controversial laws in the first hearing. One forbids obscene language in movies, books, TV, and radio during mass public events. The other stipulates criminal punishment — including five years in prison — for “insulting believers’ feelings”. Both laws, as far as human rights activists are concerned, limit artists’ freedom of expression, and encourage self-censorship.

Index spoke to three notable artists to find out how the art community deals with self-censorship, and the ever-increasing restrictions on freedom of expression in Russia.

Artyom Loskutov, an artist from Novosibirsk, is famous for holding “monstrations” — flash mobs with absurd slogans like “Tanya, don’t cry” and “Who’s there?”. In 2009, he was arrested on drug possession charges, but he claims that the marijuana was planted on him by police. A blood test proved that he had not taken any drugs, and his fingerprints were not found on the package. Three years on, he faced three administrative cases, and paid a 1000 rouble fine for creating icon-like images of Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina and placing them on billboards. He was accused of insulting believers. He is currently appealing the court ruling in the European Court of Human Rights.

The artist told Index that the cases against him are acts of censorship, but vows to remain defiant and continue with his work:

The icons idea concerned two kinds of mothers: one mother is honoured as a saint, the two others — Tolokonnikova and Alekhina — were thrown in prison. The authorities, including the court, are becoming more insane, and one wouldn’t want to cause persecutions. But I can’t say that  given that, I refuse to implement any of my plots. In the 90s my generation felt that we had nothing, except free speech, and all the 2000s attempts to take it away meet nothing but incomprehension

In 2010, The prosecutor’s office  in Moscow’s Bassmany district examined the works of Moscow-based artist Lena Hades,  “Chimera of Mysterious Russian Soul” and “Welcome to Russia”. Russian nationalists appealed to the authorities claiming these paintings insult Russians. The case did not go to court, but Hades told Index that Russian galleries feared exhibiting her paintings after the incident.

“Galleries are afraid of financial sanctions,” Hades says, “Although 95 per cent of my paintings are about philosophy rather than about social events, they are only exhibited in Tretyakov Gallery and Moscow Museum of Modern Art”.

Despite reduced chances of her work being exhibited, Hades still painted Pussy Riot’s members, and went on a 25-day hunger strike against their prosecution. The artist is no fan of self-censorship, even if it comes at a cost. According to her, no artist that responds to reality can accept self-censorship:

This is not courage, this is aristocratic luxury of doing what you want. Self-censorship is more harmful for a modern Russian artist than censorship. He is frightened of scaring away galleries and buyers and prefers to paint landscapes with cows — anything far enough from real social life

Artist Boris Zhutovsky has a long-standing relationship with censorship. In 1962, he was slammed by then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who banned work by Zhutovsky and his colleagues. For several years following the incident, the artist faced difficulties in finding employment, and his work was not exhibited in the USSR.

Zhutovsky continues to court controversy today: in the past few years he has painted the trials of Russia’s most well-known political prisoners, businessmen Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, who were first convicted in 2005. He explained Russia’s culture of self-censorship to Index:

Self-censorship is based on fear, and the amplitude of this fear has changed throughout my life. In the times of Stalin, it was the fear of the Gulag and execution. In the times of Khruschev it was the fear of loosing a job or a country – a person could be forced to leave the Soviet Union. After Perestroika the fear shrank, and now the fear which nourishes self-censorship is the fear to anger your boss

He is optimistic that a younger generation of artists will not accept self-censorship as a standard, as the the era of Putin is far from that of Stalin, but only time will tell.

The post Self-censorship’s chill on artistic freedom in Russia appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Mark Boardman/www.mark-boardman.com

Dear Nada,

I regard free speech as a fundamental good, the fullest extension of which is necessary for democratic life and for the development of other liberties. Others view speech as a luxury rather than as a necessity, or at least as merely one right among others, and not a particularly important one. Speech from this perspective needs to be restrained not as an exception but as the norm.

The answer to whether religious and cultural sensibilities should ever limit free expression depends upon which of these ways we think of free speech. For those, like me, who look upon free speech as a fundamental good, no degree of cultural or religious discomfort can be reason for censorship. There is no free speech without the ability to offendreligious and cultural sensibilities.

For those for whom free speech is more a luxury than a necessity, censorship is a vital tool in maintaining social peace and order. Perhaps the key argument made in defence of the idea of censorship to protect cultural and religious sensibilities is that speech must necessarily be less free in a plural society. In such a society, so the argument runs, we need to police public discourse about different cultures and beliefs both to minimise friction and to protect the dignity of individuals, particularly from minority communities. As the sociologist Tariq Modood has put it, “if people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism”.

I take the opposite view. It is precisely because we do live in a plural society that we need the fullest extension possible of free speech. In such societies it is both inevitable and important that people offend the sensibilities of others. Inevitable, because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable. And they should be openly resolved, rather than suppressed in the name of “respect” or “tolerance”.

But more than this: the giving of offence is not just inevitable, but also important. Any kind of social change or social progress means offending some deeply-held sensibilities. Or to put it another way: “You can’t say that!” is all too often the response of those in power to having their power challenged. The notion that it is wrong to offend cultural or religious sensibilities suggests that certain beliefs are so important that they should be put beyond the possibility of being insulted or caricatured or even questioned. The importance of the principle of free speech is precisely that it provides a permanent challenge to the idea that some questions are beyond contention, and hence acts as a permanent challenge to authority. The right to “subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism” is the bedrock of an open, diverse society, and the basis of promoting justice and liberties in such societies. Once we give up such a right we constrain our ability to challenge those in power, and therefore to challenge injustice.

The question we should ask ourselves, therefore, is not “should religious and cultural sensibilities ever limit free expression?” It is, rather, “should we ever allow religious and cultural sensibilities to limit our ability to challenge power and authority?”

Best wishes,

Kenan

Mark Boardman/www.mark-boardman.com

Dear Kenan,

I too regard free speech as a fundamental good and as necessary. On the surface, thus, the simple and direct answer to the question of whether religious and cultural sensibilities should ever limit free expression should be an unequivocal NO! However, the reality is that the question itself is problematic. While free expression, and let’s think of art in this specific case, will always push the limits and “reveal the hidden”, consideration and sensitivity, including religious and cultural sensibility, should not be inherently in opposition. By positioning it as such, the answer can only be reactive. I thus disagree with your argument.

A quick note on “censorship”. Yes, we all hate the word and find it very offensive. It is a word loaded with oppression, but the reality is that censorship in some form exists in every facet of life, personal and public. It is not that one needs to restrict speech in a plural society but that this plurality needs to find a peaceful way of co-existing with respect and acceptance, as much as possible — not tolerance; I personally abhor the word tolerance and find that it generally masks hatred and disdain. No belief is above criticism and nothing should limit our ability to challenge power and authority.

I suppose one needs to decide first the point of this criticism/free expression. Does it have a specific message or reason, and how best to deliver it — or is it simply someone’s personal free expression in the absolute? And if it is someone’s right to free expression, then why is it privileged above someone else’s right — religious and cultural sensibility being someone’s right to expression as well?

For example, and I will use art again, there is a problem when art/the artist is privileged as “genius”, with rights above other citizens — except not really, since the artist is subject to other limitations that may not be religious or cultural, like those of the tradition of expression, funding, law and so on. This is not to say that a religion should dictate expression. We should remember, though, that the marvel of what we call Islamic art was achieved within full respect of Islamic religious sensibilities, but also pushed the limits and critiqued simplicity in interpreting these sensibilities.

Perhaps my view here is less idealistic and more practical, but I see many unnecessary attacks on all sides that do not accomplish anything other than insult and inflame. All I’m saying is that expression is always achieved through negotiations, including limitations.

All the best,

Nada

Dear Nada,

I’m afraid that I was no clearer at the end of your letter than I was at the beginning about your actual stance on free speech. You say you ‘regard free speech as a fundamental good’ and that the answer to “whether religious and cultural sensibilities should ever limit free expression should be an unequivocal NO!”  You then, however, go on seemingly to qualify that unequivocal stance but without actually specifying what it is that you wish to qualify. Where should the line be drawn when it comes to the issue of what is and is not legitimate free speech? Who should draw that line? And on what basis? These are the critical questions that need answering. You write: “It is not that one needs to restrict speech in a plural society but that this plurality needs to find a peaceful way of co-existing with respect and acceptance”. It’s a wonderful sentiment, but what does it actually mean in practice? Should Salman Rushdie not have written The Satanic Verses so that he could find “a peaceful way of coexisting with respect and acceptance”? Was the Birmingham Rep right to drop Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti after protests from Sikhs? Should Jerry Springer: The Opera ever have been staged (or broadcast)?

You suggest that “one needs to decide first the point of this criticism/free expression. Does it have a specific message or reason, and how best to deliver it — or is it simply someone’s personal free expression in the absolute?” Again, I am unclear as to the point you’re making here. Are you suggesting here that speech is only legitimate if it has “a specific message or reason”? If so,who decides whether it does? During the controversy over The Satanic Verses, the philosopher Shabbir Akhtar distinguished between “sound historical criticism” and “scurrilously imaginative writing”, and insisted that Rushdie’s novel fell on the wrong side of the line. Do you agree with him? If not, why not? You ask: “If it is someone’s right to free expression, then why is it privileged above someone else’s right — religious and cultural sensibility being someone’s right to expression as well?”  This seems to me a meaningless question. A “sensibility” is not a “right”, still less a “right to expression”. If your point is that all people, whatever their religious or cultural beliefs, should have the right to express those beliefs, then I agree with you. That is the core of my argument. What they do not have is the “right” to prevent anybody expressing their views because those views might offend their “sensibilities”.

A final point: to defend the right of X to speak as he or she wishes is not the same as defending the wisdom of X using speech in a particular fashion, still less the same as defending the content of his or her speech. Take, for instance, The Innocence of Muslims, the risibly crude and bigoted anti-Muslim video that provoked so much controversy and violence last year. I would defend the right of such a film to be made. But I would also question the wisdom of making it, and would strongly challenge the sentiments expressed in it. There is a distinction to be drawn, in other words, between the right to something and the wisdom of exercising that right in particular ways. It is a distinction that critics of free speech too often fail to understand.

Best,

Kenan

Dear Kenan,

Nicely said! I believe we are ultimately saying the same thing. It is that “distinction” that you outline in your last paragraph that I call a negotiation between all sides, cultures, etc. My answer is not clear because the issue is not simple! I am saying that it is not a black and white binary divide nor can one “draw a line”. And yes, “who should draw that line? and on what basis?” is critical and essential. I believe that should be reached through negotiation. The “wisdom” of something to exist is as important as its right to exist. But there is also the question of responsibility. Free speech cannot be “inherently good” or bad. The person who utters that speech must claim responsibility for its use and effects. The examples you cite above are not all equal. Yes, they all have the right to exist. But let’s think a bit about the Danish cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed as another example. Were they not an attack aimed to inflame Muslim communities? Was it not part of Islamophobia?

Was the aim not to ridicule and play off people’s fears and prejudices? How were they a critique of Islam? What was the point? It is not that “it is morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures” as you once said, but the how and why are just as important as the right to cause that offence. I agree with you that the fear of consequences has become a limitation, but that isperhaps because free speech has been abused.

Perhaps I am looking at this from a different point of view. As an educator, I often face the situation, equally here in the US and in the Middle East, of how to argue a point that has become of specific cultural/religious/political sensitivity to my students. If I offend them here, they will stop listening; in the Middle East, I will not be allowed to continue. What would I gain by doing that? By negotiation I test the limits and push gently. At least in academia, I think we are at a point where we have to teach our students to not get offended by an opposing opinion and to be able to accept various opinions and to be able to accept criticism. I don’t think I can achieve that through shock alone!

Best, Nada

Kenan Malik is a writer and broadcaster. His latest book is From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy (Atlantic Books)

Nada Shabout is associate professor of art education and art history at the University of North Texas and director of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Institute

This article appears in Fallout: free speech and the economic crisis. Click here for subscription options and more.

The post Should religious or cultural sensibilities ever limit free expression? appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Against a backdrop of heavy austerity measures in Greece, free speech and the right to protest are being both challenged and undermined. The policies are the result of agreements between the government and the so-called troika, made up of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. Since 2010, steps taken to restore fiscal balance have led to the impoverishment of large segments of society and unemployment has reached new highs: 26.8 per cent in October 2012. At the same time, the rise of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, with an agenda of targeting immigrants, homosexuals and “dissidents” of all kinds, has created palpable social tensions. Police repress protests and political activity by a range of groups, including anarchists and leftists, a fact that has been widely documented. These tactics have been regarded by many as evidence that the government is adopting an authoritarian stance when it comes to criticism and dissent.

The current government, run by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s conservative New Democracy Party, took office in June 2012. In a report published in July 2012, Police Violence in Greece: Not just “Isolated Incidents”, Amnesty International stated:

The failure of the Greek authorities to effectively address violations of human rights by police has made victims of such violations reluctant to report them. … Between 2009 and the first months of 2012, numerous allegations have been received regarding excessive use of force, including the use of chemical irritants against peaceful or largely peaceful demonstrators, and the use of stun grenades in a manner that violates international standards.

In the report, Amnesty made “urgent recommendations to the Greek authorities”, urging them to ensure that police “exercise restraint and identify themselves clearly during demonstrations” and calling for them to improve “safeguards for those in custody and creating a truly independent and effective police complaints mechanism”. The mainstream media — owned mainly by business leaders seen as having a cosy relationship with politicians — have censored or fired journalists who have attempted to speak out about the costly bailout agreements with the troika.

Those who have reported on allegations of police brutality, such as Kostas Arvanitis and Marilena Katsimi of the Greek state-owned public radio and television broadcasting corporation ERT have also been targeted. On 9 October 2012, Thanos Dimadis, a correspondent for Greek TV and radio station SKAI, reported that bailout payments had been only “partial” and carried out “under a regime of strict economic surveillance”. Later that day, he received instructions from SKAI TV news director Christos Panagopoulos not to include that information in the afternoon and evening news reports. The text of his story was removed from SKAI TV’s website. Dimadis’s report was annoying for the government, which was keen to prevent details about the bailout from becoming public. Payments from the troika had been suspended since June, after a partial tranche was released. The authorities were worried that the public would believe that payments were conditional on even more stringent austerity measures. Dimadis complained to SKAI’s news directors, threatening to resign if they did not back up his report. He eventually quit.

Dimadis told me that senior management at SKAI argued that the reason they withdrew his report was that the prime minister’s office had dismissed it as false. Moreover, Dimadis’s reactionwas described by SKAI as “over the top”.

Censoring the news

The government’s modus operandi is best illustrated by the Kostas Vaxevanis case. Vaxevanis, an investigative journalist and publisher of Hot Doc magazine, was arrested on 28 October 2012 for publishing the names of over 2000 Greek citizens who held Swiss bank accounts, dubbed the “Lagarde list”. The story focused on alleged tax evasion by wealthy Greeks during a time of economic crisis.

“A few months ago, before the release of the ‘Lagarde list’ and my aggressive arrest, there was an organised attempt to destroy my professional reputation: a publication presenting a fake receipt attempted to incriminate me as being on the payroll of the National Intelligence Service (EYP). I realised I was under heavy surveillance and one night I was ambushed by strangers at my home,”Vaxevanis told me in an interview.

During our discussion, on 26 December 2012, Vaxevanis said free speech in Greece was coming under attack yet again: “It’s not something new. When you have ongoing dealings between politicians and businessmen who own media groups, then it comes as no surprise that journalists are driven to self-censorship. Take a look, for example, at the non-existent coverage of the Reuters story on the Piraeus Bank case. You have such a big story, but what you see in the newspapers instead is an advertisement by the bank.”

On 1 November, Vaxevanis was acquitted and cleared on changes of violating privacy laws. But two weeks later, the prosecutor’s office ordered a retrial, claiming the original verdict was “legally flawed”. He could face up to two years’ imprisonment if he is sentenced. In April 2012, Reuters reported on an investigation into documents, including financial statements and property records, relating to Michalis Sallas, executive chairman of Piraeus Bank, and his wife, Sophia Staikou. The press report said “the couple may also be emblematic of the lack of transparency and weak corporate governance that have fuelled Greece’s financial problems”.

But according to journalist Apostolis Fotiadis, no major national or international media outlet reported on the lawsuit filed by Piraeus Bank against Reuters, though the New York Times anda couple of independent journalists attended the trial, including Fotiadis. The ruling is still pending.

On 29 October 2012, a popular morning talk show on the Greek state broadcasting corporation, ERT, was suddenly suspended, following a decision by ERT’s general director of news, Aimilios Liatsos. Shortly before the show was dropped, Kostas Arvanitis, co-presenter of the programme, and his colleague Marilena Katsimi had made comments on air about the minister of public order’s response to an article published in the British newspaper the Guardian written by Helena Smith.

Arvanitis told me:

I’ve been working as a journalist for 25 years. I’ve never experienced anything like this — not to this extent and with such intensity, at least. I consider what happened as aggressive meddling by the political system. It’s becoming more and more clear: every question that is different, every perspective that is different is considered provocative. You can understand what’s happening if you take a careful look at the media coverage of strikes.

Influential columnists and unsigned editorials very often neglect the reasons lower and middle working classes decide to go on strike. Instead of shedding light on their requests, these outlets prefer to present the strikes as instances of “abusing the public space” or “disturbing public peace”. This is the typical official government response as well. In the broader context, of course, this approach fails to report on the growing pressure on workers — on those who still have a job but with reduced salaries, and on those without one.

A Guardian article written by Maria Margaronis was published on 9 October and mentioned allegations of police brutality against protesters. It also referred to and confirmed an earlier article,published on 28 September, written by Helena Smith, that quoted ‘analysts, activists and lawyers’ as saying that the “far-right Golden Dawn party is increasingly assuming the role of law enforcement officers on the streets of the bankrupt country, with mounting evidence that Athenians are being openly directed by police to seek help from the neo-Nazi group”.

Margaronis also wrote:

Fifteen anti-fascist protesters arrested in Athens during a clash with supporters of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn have said they were tortured in the Attica General Police Directorate (GADA) — the Athens equivalent of Scotland Yard — and subjected to what their lawyer describes as an Abu Ghraib-style humiliation. If it hadn’t been for the Guardian stories, it is highly unlikely that Golden Dawn’s purported connection with the police would have reached a foreign audience — or the Greek public. The fact that these claims never made the Greek press and that Arvanitis was censored for simply commenting on one of the articles shows just how prevalent censorship is in Greece today.

Dimitris Katsaris is a lawyer for four of the protesters who alleged that they were tortured in GADA after they were arrested during the 30 October protest. He says the way the situation has been handled is a clear “indication of censorship … interviews with the anti-fascists took place in a climate of terror; at the end, the policemen tried to grab me and push me away while I was complaining to them. All of this has been recorded.” However, the censorship didn’t stop there.

Ignoring the truth

Minister of Public Order Nikos Dendias claimed on SKAI TV talk show New Folders on 16 October that the Guardian report on police brutality was false, and threatened to sue the British paper if no proof of torture was found. He questioned the source of the photographs in Margaronis’s article — which showed an injured protester — and claimed that since the anti-fascists hadn’t gone on record with their names and reports, and hadn’t filed a lawsuit against the police, the Guardian was not justified in publishing the story.

Dendias also denied assertions that the arrested protesters were afraid to go on record because they had been threatened by police or extremist Golden Dawn supporters. According to Katsaris, although SKAI and the New Folders’ presenter Alexis Papahelas were already in possession of the photographs indicating police brutality at the time they interviewed Dendias, they did not report on the evidence or broadcast the photographs; had it not been for SYRIZA MP Dimitris Tsoukalis’s intervention on the show, the photos wouldn’t have been shown on air. “From the moment the Guardian’s report was published,” Katsaris says, “I was in contact with New Folders’ editor-in-chief. A week before the show I was providing him photos and evidence that proved torture by the police.” Katsaris says he called the editor-in-chief and asked him to intervene, but after many calls, he was told there was “‘no sufficient airtime” to provide the other side of the case. “So I could not contrast the ministers’ claims. I even asked them, given the material they had, to question the minister in a fair journalistic manner. They didn’t.”

It seems that every time a story about political actions by anti-fascist protesters unfolds, the censorship machinery of the government and Golden Dawn is set in motion. Niko Ago, an Albanian national who had been working as a journalist in Greece for 20 years, faced deportation after publishing a report about alleged criminal activity by Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris, who is a member of parliament. Ago revealed that Kasidiaris was facing charges for allegedly participating in a 2007 attack on a postgraduate student and for illegal possession of a firearm .Since then, Ago has been receiving threatening emails containing defamatory and racist comments, some of which he published, including one that said ”Fuck you, Albanian … all you fucking Albanians are going to get what you deserve.”

Muzzling grassroots dissent

A great deal of pressure has also been brought to bear on independent, non-corporate media collectives or individuals who offer grassroots coverage. On 20 December 2012 and on 9 January 2013, police operations were carried out at the Villa Amalias squat in Athens, which has been an important meeting place for alternative political movements for the last 23 years, and at the Radiozones of Subversive Expression, an Athens-based radio station at the University of Economics and Business (ASOEE). Anarchists, leftists and political dissidents used both sites to organise labour, anti-fascist and antiracist rallies. As part of the operations connected with the ASOEE raid, in late December, anti-riot squads and police targeted immigrant street vendors originally from Nigeria, Morocco and Bangladesh who were selling pirated CDs and wooden animal figurines, as well as those who were regarded as supposedly condemning Greece to an economic decline, as the Radiozones website put it. The government, as well as Golden Dawn, tends to regard the economic activities of immigrants as detrimental to the national economy and as a threat to local workers.

Last October, during German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Greece, nearly 100 arrests took place, as Avgi newspaper reported. During the 6-7 November general strike, a group of parliamentarians from SYRIZA denounced the massive presence of undercover police on the streets of Athens. According to the coalition, they were both acting as provocateurs among peaceful protesters and arresting people who simply looked “suspicious”. The policy of  pre-emptive arrests has been repeatedly called unconstitutional by human rights organisations, including the Hellenic League for Human Rights.

Tomasz Grzyb/Demotix

During the annual Athens’ Polytechnic School rally on 17 November, dozens of pre-emptive arrests were reported on the website of the weekly political newspaper Kontra and activist websites documented many individual complaints. Indymedia Athens, the local collective of the international grassroots and activists network, published two complaints from citizens arrested on the day of the rally. In both cases, individuals were detained before the demonstration and were kept in custody for five hours without being allowed to contact a lawyer.

Mainstream media failed to report the events, while the government officially ignored complaints. Most news on the events came from blogs and free expression activists.

Online censorship

This systematic abuse is also taking place in the online environment. After posting a Facebook page that ridiculed a well-known Greek Orthodox monk, in late September 2012, a 27-year-old man was arrested on charges of‘”malicious blasphemy and religious insult”. Many online activists and commentators reflected that the page, called Elder Pastitsios the Pastafarian (which intentionally combines the name of the monk with a popular Greek food), angered members of Golden Dawn, who called for the man’s arrest under Greece’s anti-blasphemy laws. Free expression advocates responded, with the hashtag #FreeGeronPastitios trending on Twitter, and a petition addressed to parliament calling for the immediate release of the Facebook user was circulated online Vassilis Sotiropoulos, a lawyer and blogger specialising in internet legislation, writes:

“The legislature refuses to address the issue of internet censorship, thereby allowing law enforcers (prosecutors, police officers, judges and lawyers) to freely interpret and utilise the existing legal tools. This phenomenon has sometimes led to misunderstandings, which restrict individual rights of freedom of expression and privacy. Sotiropoulos added that the case of Elder Pastitsios provided perhaps the first example in Greece of an internet company disclosing information to the government in order to identify an individual accused of ‘alleged offences relating to religious satire’.

When considering freedom of speech as a universal human right, it is important to comprehend the social and economic context of our times. Currently, the political and economic elites, in Greece but elsewhere in Europe as well, are repositioning themselves within a capitalist system that is undergoing a continuous transformation.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, William I Robinson, Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, argued that we are currently living through a phase of capitalism where “nation-state constraints” no longer apply. He stated that the “the strength of popular and working class movements around the world, in the wake of the global rebellions of the 1960s and the 1970s”, are now being effectively and successfully undermined.

Historically, during periods when there have been attempts to devalue the working class, there have also been challenges to the fundamental right to voice dissent, which has had a direct impact on efforts to improve living conditions. The current economic crisis, then, fits this model; it can also be used as an effective tool for the far right and those using fascist rhetoric to attack immigrants and workers.

Freedom of speech and protest in Greece must, then, be seen in very specific terms. The right to free expression is being systematically and effectively challenged by formidable political and economic agendas. It is crucial that activists, journalists and those being censored and abused continue to make their voices heard.

Christos Syllas is a freelance journalist in Athens. He tweets from @csyllas

This article appears in Fallout: free speech and the economic crisis. Click here for subscription options and more.

The post Free speech takes a beating in Greece appeared first on Index on Censorship.

As we prepare for Index’s annual freedom of expression awards, where we celebrate some of the world’s most courageous free speech heroes, we are delighted to announce the redesign of Index on Censorship magazine, published by SAGE.  In addition to the in-depth journalism we’ve always placed at the heart of Index on Censorship, the magazine will feature a wider range of lively opinion snapshots, debates, views from the ground and interviews. A

“The magazine’s fresh new look reflects Index’s increasingly international outlook and role in setting the agenda for freedom of expression,” said Index Chief Executive Kirsty Hughes.

The new design was created by Matthew Hasteley, who said:

“Tackling a brief to modernise a magazine of Index’s heritage is a task you approach with a great degree of care and respect. The magazine balances the weight of its past accomplishments with its current, ongoing struggle against censorship around the globe, and the design need to reflect that tension — honouring the gravity of its editorial content.”

The latest issue, launched today, looks at new threats to free expression posed by the economic crisis, from restrictions on reporting and demonstrations to the rise of extremism. Is a decline in trust and a climate of self-censorship dominating the political, cultural and media landscape?

Christos Syllas looks at the threats to journalists and activists in crisis-stricken Greece and Spanish journalist Juan Luis Sánchez reports on the Spainish government’s moves towards criminalising one of the most powerful movements in recent years. The issue also features Natalie Haynes on political comedy and Nick Cohen on the secretive habits of big business and banking.

Our “In Focus” section will explore Index’s global themes, from digital censorship, government censorship and surveillance to religious and cultural pressures, restrictive laws and access to information. This issue also features Diran Adebayo on Twitter and the sporting hero and Dominique Lazanski on the future for online freedom.

If you would like an copy for review, please contact Pam Cowburn: pam@indexoncensorship.org

Click here to subscribe.

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A gag order issued by an Israeli court soon after put an end to any reporting on the case, or even reporting of the order itself. “Prisoner X” became a byword in the Israeli media for yet one more of the kind of security-related stories that no-one quite knows the truth of, and probably never will.

Nothing more was heard until this week, when an Australian TV documentary claimed that the man in question was one Ben Zygier, a 34-year-old father-of-two and an Australian citizen who had moved to Israel a decade earlier.

Zygier, who called himself Ben Alon in Israel, was apparently held in the cell — built to hold Yigal Amir, the assassin of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin — for a number of months before he was found hanged, and his body flown to Melbourne a week later. His father Geoffrey, a grandee of the Jewish community there, has refused to speak to the media regarding his son.

Military censorship and wide-reaching gag orders are a fact of life for Israeli journalists. But this gag order was absolute. Articles which appeared on a number of Israeli websites yesterday noting the Australian programme were soon removed.

Even more extraordinary was the meeting called that afternoon by the Prime Minister’s office convening the so-called “Editors’ Committee”, a grouping set up in the early years of the state through which senior media figures could be briefed on secret information if they agreed to not publish it.

Historically this was a sort of gentleman’s agreement between the hacks and the establishment, who in the nascent days of Israel were understood to be more or less on the same side. Now, the annual meeting between the PM and the Editors’ Committee has become largely a matter of show, open to the scrutiny of other journalists. Self-censorship is managed more obliquely.

The Prisoner X situation was so extraordinary that a number of MKs used parliamentary privilege yesterday to ask the outgoing Justice Minister, Yaakov Ne’eman about the Australian reports.  Zahava Gal-On, head of the left-wing Meretz faction pouring scorn on the implied complicity of the Israeli media.

“I want to hear your stance on the fact that journalists volunteer to censor information at the government’s request,” she said. “Is it proper that the Prime Minister’s Office invited the Editors’ Committee to prevent news from being publicised? Today, we hear that in a country that claims to be a civilized democracy, journalists cooperate with the government, and that anonymous prisoners, who no one knew existed, commit suicide.”

The gag order has now been softened, perhaps due to the MKs’ questions,  and Israeli media are now reporting on the Australian story. But it’s the press rather than politicians who should be charged with exposing this kind of event.

There is an argument to be made that there is a need for some level of censorship to protect national security. But the censors need to choose their battles.

It’s stupid and self-destructive to try and suppress a story after it appears on a foreign media outlet. The suppression will inevitably serves to draw additional attention to the story.

The danger is that security becomes its own justification for censorship with a creeping reach.

Daniella Peled is editor at the Institute of War and Peace Reporting and writes widely on the Middle East

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In 2005 Flemming Rose commissioned the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed that sparked protests and riots across the world.

In an exclusive book extract, Rose explains why bans on hate speech across Europe are based on a false understanding of its role in the Holocaust

Besides the issue of self-censorship, the debate ensuing from the [Danish] cartoons revealed a number of fractures in European culture and self-understanding. One of these arose from the trauma of the Second World War, an event Europe at all costs wished to avoid repeating. The lesson learned from the Jewish Holocaust was that words could kill, and hateful words would beget hateful actions. It was widely held that if only the Weimar government had clamped down on the National Socialists’ verbal persecution of the Jews in the years prior to Hitler’s rise to power, or if the Nazis had been prevented from pursuing their propaganda of hatred following 1933, then the Holocaust would never have happened. Proponents of this view saw a parallel between unfettered freedom of speech, demonisation of the Jews in Nazi propaganda, and their subsequent extinction in the concentration camps. It was the same train of thought that prompted Denmark’s former foreign minister, Per Stig Møller, to warn in 2009 that free speech could be abused to incite violence. “We see it today in the message being sent out by Osama bin Laden. And we saw it in Germany, where anti-Semitic rhetoric eventually led to die Endlösung, the Final Solution, by which six million Jews were killed,” he wrote in a newspaper article.

The assertion that Nazi propaganda had played a significant role in mobilising anti-Jewish sentiment is irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned was to stretch a point. Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic sparking off violence and calls for Jews to be deprived of all rights was one thing. Another was Nazi apartheid, the exclusion of Jews from German society under Hitler in the 1930s, the annulment of Jewish civil rights, the Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, and the pogroms. Still another was the Holocaust. What unites them, however, is that at no point did freedom of speech exist unhindered in Germany in the period in question.

In the wake of the Holocaust, European democracies concluded that a ban on hate speech could prevent, or at least contain, racist violence and killings. The Allies duly enforced legislation to that effect on Germany and Austria in the immediate aftermath of war, believing it to be insurance against a repeat Holocaust. History, however, provided no evidence by which to legitimise such reasoning. Nonetheless, it was a logic that formed the basis of international efforts towards the protection of human rights in the post-war decades. Jewish organisations also played an active role in the process. Presumably, they had little idea of how far it would lead.

Hate speech in authoritarian regimes

The ball began rolling with the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1965, which entered into force a year later, and the UN Convention on Racial Discrimination of 1965, which took effect in 1969. Committees were set up by the UN to monitor the extent to which member states upheld the conventions. A couple of decades previously, following its inception in 1949, the Council of Europe had taken steps towards establishing the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights, the world’s first human rights treaty, taking effect in 1953. The European Court of Human Rights was encharged by the Council of Europe with monitoring and dealing with complaints by citizens who believed their rights according to the Convention to have been violated within a member state. In 1998, the institution was made permanent. The number of members of the Council of Europe grew in the wake of the Cold War to 47 countries. A commensurate rise occurred in the number of complaints to the Court: from 138 in 1955, the figure sky-rocketed to some 41,000 in 2005. The Court was not a court of appeal. It was not empowered to nullify the ruling of courts of law at the national level, but it could order a member state to align its practice with the Convention in the case that it ruled in favour of a plaintiff.

This was a quite momentous and indeed laudable development. For the first time, individuals were accorded global rights transgressing national boundaries. After the millennium, however, the constraints on free speech enforced by the conventions on national legislations were to become a significant instrument for grievance fundamentalists and for authoritarian regimes which made use of them to justify oppression of alternative thinkers and of ethnic and religious minorities. This tended to occur with particular reference to two articles: Article 20, paragraph 2 of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and Article 4 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

The first of these runs as follows: “Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.” The second, taking as its point of departure a rather broad definition of racial discrimination, declared that the state: “Shall declare an offence punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, incitement to racial discrimination [. . .] against any race or group of persons of another colour or ethnic origin.” Moreover, states were obliged to prohibit organisations and propaganda activities promoting or inciting racial discrimination, just as participation in such organisations or activities was to be made punishable by law.

The wording was awkward and technical, though the intention was clear: words and actions were to be considered parallel. There was to be no principle difference between saying something discriminatory and performing discriminatory actions. With time, definitions of racism and discrimination widened, the distinction between words and actions becoming commensurately more blurred. With a public sector growing by the year, the welfare state was afforded wide-reaching privileges and the responsibility of ensuring a new form of equality among citizens. Individuals were no longer simply to enjoy equal opportunities, but were to be ensured equal results. In the welfare state, there were to be no differences, and the rights of the individual were to give way to those of the community.

Grievance lobbies and insult

Things came to a head with immigration to Europe from the Islamic world in particular. European welfare states suddenly found themselves under pressure. The new diversity, the gaps that emerged in cultures and religions and ways of living meant on the one hand that the welfare state had to impose demands on its new citizens to make them adapt to the norms of the society and thereby ensure a continued community of values. On the other hand, the welfare state was forced to take measures against those of its indigenous citizens who expressed discontent with these new demographic developments and who did so in a language it considered to be a threat to social stability and the right not to be subjected to utterances of a discriminatory nature. Wide-reaching freedom of speech essentially ran against the grain of the ideology of the welfare state in a multicultural society.

The grievance lobby in the UN, the EU and the human rights industry was directed by a notion that criminalisation of racist utterances, so-called hate speech, would lead to racism being eradicated. They drew up a succession of reports urging member states to prosecute and sentence perpetrators of hate speech to a much greater degree than before. The grievance lobby wanted the definition of racism expanded so as to encompass still more groups within society. Their whole perspective was driven by the notion of insult: theirs was a world all about identifying the victims of freedom of speech and those guilty of its abuse. Those who defended the offended could adorn themselves with the halos of justice. If they who offended were found guilty and punished, a good deed had been done for a better world.

The modern dispute as to the boundaries of free speech began with the Nuremberg trials of 1945- 46 in which 24 Nazis stood accused for their roles in the genocide of the Second World War. The trials established that there were clear ties between the Nazis’ mobilisation of the media, which in words and pictures had demonised and blackened the character of the Jews, and the subsequent Holocaust. Julius Streicher, former editor of the anti-Semitic tabloid Der Stürmer, was among those the tribunal condemned to death. During the process, Streicher was singled out as “Jew-Baiter Number One”. The judgment against him ran:

“In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism and incited the German people to active persecution [. . .] Streicher’s incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds in connection with war crimes as defined by the Charter, and constitutes a crime against humanity.”

This take on the genesis of the Holocaust formed the basis of an understanding of the relationship between words and actions that led increasingly to the outlawing of verbal affront. What was ignored in such cases, however, was the fact that Streicher’s and other Nazis’ Jew-baiting occurred in a society utterly devoid of freedom of speech: under Hitler, no freedom existed by which to counter the witch-hunt against the Jewish community. Germany was ruled by a tyranny of silence.

The premise came out of an idea characterising totalitarian societies laid out in George Orwell’s masterful novel 1984. The verbal hygiene of the totalitarian state was to ensure the development of the ideal society. Words established what they denoted; banning mention of entities and phenomena meant they would cease to exist. Thus, language became an instrument for creating the world in one’s own image: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

Nazi Germany and free speech

In the Soviet Union, the machinery of propaganda vanished away nationalism; ethnic and religious tensions –– with the exception of isolated, post-capitalist pockets that would soon be swallowed up by communism –– were likewise non-existent. In books and films, art and the media, the magic eraser of the censor wiped out whatever didn’t fit the Marxist-Leninist version of reality. Party Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev believed so devoutly in the orally hygienic, beautified image that at first he was unable to grasp what was happening as national separatist movements rose up to eventually condemn the Soviet Union to history’s dump. The notion that social evils could be eradicated by prohibiting certain kinds of utterance was completely in tune with the self-image of Soviet ideology. In a dictatorship, no principle distinction exists between words and actions.

The claim that the Holocaust was the result of Nazi “abuse of freedom of speech” failed to distinguish between the totalitarian society, in which no freedoms existed by which to counter, ridicule and expose racist propaganda, and, by contrast, the open, democratic society whose citizens were at liberty to say whatever they wanted to uncover the lies of National Socialism, a society in which the public space was an open market of competing ideas and in which intimidation of individuals and groups within society never went unchallenged.

In Weimar Germany, insulting communities of faith –– Protestant, Catholic or Jew –– was a punishable offence commanding up to three years’ imprisonment. Similarly, the dissemination of false rumour with the intention of degrading or showing contempt for other individuals could result in two years. Incitement to class warfare or acts of violence towards other social classes was also prohibited by law, likewise punishable by up to two years behind bars. It was a piece of legislation to which the Jewish community often sought recourse in order to defend themselves against anti-Semitic attacks. Anti-Semites countered, occasionally with success, by claiming their attacks on Jews were not incitement to class hatred, but were instead aimed at the Jewish “race” and therefore not an offence.

The notion that freedom of speech was unconstrained in Weimar Germany was a fallacy. The reality of the matter was that political violence flourished without intervention by the authorities. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for their anti-Semitic utterances. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and preventing anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public relations machinery for Streicher’s efforts, affording him the kind of attention he never would have found had his racist utterances been made in a climate of free and open debate. Only weeks after Streicher was sentenced to two months imprisonment for anti-Semitism, the Nazis trebled their share of the vote at the state legislature election in Thuringia. One of the charges brought against Streicher and his associate, Karl Holz, concerned Der Stürmer having construed a number of unsolved murders as ritual killings perpetrated by Jews. The second concerned claims published in the paper that the Jewish faith permitted perjury before non-Jewish courts.

Bernhard Weiss, Vice-President of the Berlin police, regularly dragged Goebbels into court on charges of anti-Semitism. In all these cases brought against the future head of Nazi propaganda, the prosecution came out on top, yet according to one observer, in the public eye Weiss consistently ended up looking more like the loser, as Goebbels’ anti-Semitic invective found a platform in the public process.

“The Vice-President of police may have been better served by simply allowing the Nazi attacks to echo away in silence,” mused Dietz Bering in an anthology on the Jews of the Weimar Republic.

In April 1932, Nazis plastered the city of Nuremberg with posters proclaiming Die Juden sind unser Unglück! (The Jews are our misfortune). It was the motto of Der Stürmer. To begin with, police refused to remove them, despite a formal complaint being lodged by the Jewish Central Committee. The argument was that the posters could not be considered an incitement to violence, but when the Central Committee went to the authorities in Munich the posters were removed. In October of the same year, a young non-Jewish girl in the northern part of the country died when her Jewish boyfriend tried to help her perform an abortion. The young man tried to get rid of the body by cutting it into pieces and scattering them over a wide rural area. For Der Stürmer, it was a case made in heaven, but when the paper appeared with a detailed description of the events construed as a Jewish ritual murder, the issue was confiscated and the editor responsible later convicted of causing religious affront.

In the period 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer was either confiscated or its editors taken to court on no fewer than 36 separate occasions. In 1928, the paper and its staff were the subjects of five litigations in the space of 11 days. Proceedings, however, gave the general public the impression that Streicher was more significant than was the case. Those instances where Streicher was sentenced to terms of imprisonment were a golden opportunity for him to portray himself as a victim and martyr. The more charges he faced, the greater became the admiration of his occasions on which he was sent to jail, Streicher was accompanied on his way by hundreds of sympathisers in what looked like his triumphal entry into martyrdom. In 1930, he was greeted by thousands of fans outside the prison, among them Hitler himself. The German courts became an important platform for Streicher’s campaign against the Jews. Some observers suggested that the cases brought against him prompted critics of the Nazis to relax complacently in the faith that the judicial system alone was capable of combating National Socialism.

According to historian Dennis E Showalter, author of a book about Streicher and Der Stürmer during the Weimar Republic, the judicial system found itself ill-equipped to stem the tide of anti-Semitism, though its shortcomings were by no means attributable to a lack of legislation or Nazi bias. ‘The familiar cliché that Weimar’s legal system was not particularly interested in protecting Jews, and avoided doing so when it could, requires significant revision [. . .] The regional legal system included active and potential Nazi sympathisers. Yet in general, the courts of northern Bavaria sustained the Jewish legal position even in one of Nazism’s strongholds,” Showalter stated.

In the view of Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), in the Weimar Republic in the time leading up to Hitler’s claiming power in 1933, cases were regularly brought against individuals on account of anti-Semitic speech. “Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law. Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech [. . .] As subsequent history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it,” Bovory writes in his 1988 book When Freedoms Collide: The Case for Civil Liberties.

The widely made claim that hate speech against the Jews was a primary factor of the Holocaust has no empirical support. In fact, one might forcefully argue that what paved the way for Holocaust was the ban on hate speech, in so far as it handed Streicher and other Nazis a glorious opportunity to bait the Jewish community in the German courtrooms and in a national press, which otherwise would have spared them precious little ink. For the democrats of the Weimar Republic, a far more effective strategy would have been to address Nazi propaganda in free and open public debate, but in Europe between the wars confidence in free speech was running low.

This article appears in 40 years of Index on Censorship which marks the organisation’s 40th anniversary with a star line-up of the most outstanding activists, journalists and authors. Click here for subscription options and more

This is an edited extract from Flemming Rose’s book The Tyranny of Silence. It is its first publication in English.

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But nothing illustrated better how dangerous the situation was than a meeting with a group of reporters in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon last May. There was mistrust, fear and expectation. One reporter was paranoid when a colleague kept the list of participants in the meeting with him; another one asked a colleague not to take pictures of those present. And a third said he would be quizzed by local drug traffickers about his trip to Monterrey. Those from Monterrey listened carefully to what those in Matamoros and Ciudad Victoria, two cities on the US Mexico border, were saying. One of the reporters from Monterrey told me, “It looks like we could become like them.”

In May, we at the Fundacion MEPI de Periodismo de Investigacion, an independent investigative center based in Mexico City, were just beginning our probe into the media and violence “Mexico and the Spiral of Silence”, and were hoping to focus on the individual cases of threatened journalists. In July, the kidnapping of a group of journalists brought the story to a head. Because we were not ready to release our finding, we held back the report and decided to look deeper, the issue required more introspection. In the end we came out with a more targeted report that identified a few truths:

Traffickers have a clear public relations outlook and see the press and other forms of mass communication as an important part of their business.

The masters at this are the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, two drug groups that started in the eastern states of Taumalipas, on the US/Mexico border and have controlled the local media with an iron hand. Their style is being copied by others like La Familia a cartel that operates in the state of Michoacan. The Zetas leadership is ex military and have implemented military techniques in the way they fight the government, but more importantly the way they engage the press.

With the split between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas, their former enforcers, the hard-line style against the media has spread throughout Mexico creating virtual black news holes. While there are no good or bad drug cartels, some more established drug organisations like the Sinaloa Cartel have preferred to force the media to do what it wants through unwritten accords or a sort of détente. In Tijuana, the local cartel engaged early on in the high profile murders of several reporters, and a head on confrontation with the weekly Zeta, but as of lately this cartel has taken a lower profile approach, partly because of attacks by both Mexican and US police, but also because as a Tijuana journalist said, “they know we won’t back down.”

Today I understand the hesitation of reporters during the May meeting in Monterrey. There is widespread fear that the profession has been penetrated by the cartels. In some cases it is true, but in others is part of the new psy ops or psychological operations that the cartels have used to spread fear and mistrust amongst the press corps.

Click to see MEPI’s map of the impact of drug violence in news coverage

More details are listed in the report which can be found in Spanish in our website fundacionmepi.org , or a short story based on our study in the propublica.org website.

Ana Arana is Index on Censorship’s Mexico editor and director of the Fundación Mexicana de Periodismo de Investigación

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