Today, headlines from around the world resonate with the news that there are nearly six million Spanish citizens currently unemployed. Spaniards are in the process of losing their quality of life, along with their access to health, education and even food. The number of homeless people is rising and cutbacks and “reforms” continue without respite.

How is it possible for the country to accept that over half its population of under 25-year-olds are unemployed? How does a society sustain itself with over a million members living in households where not so much as a euro comes in by way of a monthly salary? How sick is a society when the only social group not to lose its purchasing power in recent years are the retired and when there are more than 150 home evictions per day? What is the impact of such a profound crisis on freedom of expression?

As could have been foreseen, street protests have only increased in size and intensity since the start of the crisis in 2008. And authorities have responded in equal measure.

Evictions are one of the most dramatic consequences of the economic and financial crisis — there are more than 150 home evictions per day in Spain. Jose Luis Cuesta / Demotix

The turning point was 15 May 2011, when — summoned by organisations such as Juventud sin future (Youth without a future), Democracia real YA! (Real democracy NOW!) and about 200 smaller citizen platforms — thousands of protesters occupied plazas and streets in 58 cities, starting with Puerta del Sol in Madrid. They claimed they weren’t being represented by traditional politics; they demanded a radical change in society. Immediately, the media linked the protests to the Icelandic rallies of 2009, to the 2011 revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and to the movement set out in the best-selling book Indignez-vous! by Stéphane Hessel, a French Resistance hero, concentration camp survivor and co-author of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Indignez-vous! (Time for Outrage!) rails against apathy and argues that anger and indignation can be a powerful motive for change. The protesters became known as the Indignados movement, or 15M, and became a global symbol.

A survey published by RTVE (Spanish public TV) reported on 6 August 2011 that, since 15 May 2011, between 6 and 8.5 million citizens had participated in the 15M movement, visited the campsites where protesters gathered, joined assemblies or took part in the demonstrations organised by Democracia real YA!

On assuming office in December 2011, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy unleashed a seemingly unstoppable agenda of cuts intended to slim down Spain’s welfare state. It had to be defended. The protection of and provision for society had been secure for decades, but now it was regarded by Rajoy’s party as a luxury, and by the opposition as a key political victory that had to be won. For grassroots activists, it provoked an even stronger reaction, led by 15M.

As one reform followed another in waves, the 15M movement discovered who its allies were: state employees and civil servants who now perceived public services — basic health, education, assistance to immigrants and disabled people in vulnerable situations — to be at great risk, along with their own jobs. Civil servants became a target for conservative media. They were slow,they were “lazy”, they were “privileged”, they abused the system. A type of Orwellian Newspeak was being born. Spain has over three million state employees and the tales spun by the media talked endlessly of an over-abundance of public sector workers, in spite of the fact that, according to the International Labour Organisation, the percentage of public sector employees, compared to the overall workforce, is lower than that of some 15 other European countries.

An “indignado” struggles to escape from a policemen during riots in Barcelona’s main square (Plaça Catalunya) during ‘Movimiento 15M’ — The occupy movement in Spain. Juanfra Alvarez / Demotix

Seeing that the regenerated social movements, along with trade unions and public sector employees, were uniting against government policies, it was virtually guaranteed that the streets would be permanently filled with protesters. “Labour reforms are going be at the cost of a [general] strike,” Rajoy practically bragged in January 2012, unaware that the television cameras were on him as he had an informal chat with his Finnish counterpart, Jyrki Katainen, on the fringes of a Council of the European Union meeting. Rajoy’s government has lived through two brutal general strikes that have affected the entire country and thousands of demonstrations. In Madrid alone, at least ten demonstrations are recorded daily.

Doctors, underground train and bus drivers, journalists, judges, district attorneys, lawyers, teachers, firefighters … every day a demonstration, almost never assembled by a trade union, but which can regularly count on the support of other movements, always connected through online social networks.

Police brutality

To every action there is always equal reaction on the opposite side. Excessive behaviour on the part of the police is hardly new, even at the least officially organised smaller demonstrations taking place in Spain. In their annual review of human rights across the world, Amnesty International has been recording police abuses of power in the country for some time. But in the course of the last two years, both political discourse and police heavy-handedness have increased to such an extent that public protest has been virtually criminalised.

In previous times, police only charged the crowds after dark, once the number of protesters had diminished and only those considered to be the most radical stayed behind. But recent months have seen police charge into town squares filled with families protesting peacefully.

The 15M movement emerged in a relatively peaceful environment. The first reports of major brutality by police were during a march to support miners from northern Spain in June 2012. On 11 July, a small group of troublemakers set off fireworks (an act that on earlier occasions would have raised tensions but not led to anything more disruptive), resulting in the deployment of hundreds of police, who, moving at full speed, shoved, hit and used truncheons against anyone in their way, many of whom sought refuge in the shops and bars that were still open. Seventy-six people were injured and seven were arrested.

Similar episodes took place outside the Congress building in September 2012, when the slightest provocation resulted in a massive police charge, with officers lashing out indiscriminately, firing off rubber bullets and pursuing individuals even inside train and underground stations, whether or not they had participated in the demonstrations. The media reported that 64 people were injured and that 35 had been arrested. Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz declared the police had acted ‘magnificently’ and that ‘some demonstrators’ had used ‘excessive violence’.

Such an excess of police zeal gives rise to intermittently absurd situations. Feli Velasquez was stopped in the doorway of her own court hearing. She had been brought before the judge for having joined in one of the daily protests against the fact that, on average, 517 people are made homeless every day in Spain. As she entered the courthouse, a small group of people gathered in the doorway to support Feli and her colleagues. She was detained for participating in a gathering “without official approval”.

Repression has not always been physical: at times, it has taken the form of a political or economic deterrent, criminalising the act of protest. Members of local government in Madrid have indulged in phrases such as “extreme right-wing”, “extreme left-wing”, “illegal demonstration” or “coup d’etat”, soundbites that the press are often reluctant to question. This is clearly a strategy to typecast those who call for demonstrations as always violent, and one that seeks to damage the movement’s immense success in and reputation for attracting the support of people from all backgrounds. Prime Minister Rajoy has often praised those “normal ‘ people who “remain at home”.

Once the demonstration has taken place, the strategy of dissuasion goes on: in December more than 300 individuals received a fine of €500 euros (US$656) for nothing more than having attended a protest on 27 October against the 2013 budget. According to information published by Spanish state news agency EFE, they constituted 10 per cent of the participants. The legal pretext was that the authorities had not been notified in advance of the gathering, a ruling that could have been applied exclusively to the organisers and not to the protesters as a whole.

A demonstration through the streets of Madrid in Spain Square to Puerta del Sol to protest against the European financial markets. Alejandro Martínez Vélez / Demotix

As journalists, we have taken to wearing high visibility identity jackets and helmets. We’ve not quite reached the stage of wearing gas masks, as now happens in Greece. Yet. However, there have never been so many cameras, both professional and amateur, photographing everything — every police action, or reaction on the part of the protesters. Despite all this, and despite being clearly visible, there is no lack of examples of journalists being beaten, wounded or detained over the course of the past two years.

It has often been impossible to find out who is responsible for the brutality: the law states that police officers must identify themselves, displaying relevant information on their lapels. But riot police have on several occasions removed insignias from their uniforms or else covered them up with other articles of clothing as soon as they come into direct contact with demonstrators. The outrage on behalf of both the public and the media regarding the concealment of police identification numbers has evoked no political response whatsoever.

Has public protest become a crime?

In practice, the opposite has occurred: the Director General of Police, Ignacio Cosidó, let slip during a session of parliament that the Ministry of the Interior was looking into prohibiting the recording of police actions that could then be shown over the internet. It was a way of seeing how the idea was received and intended to cause alarm rather than lead to actual implementation. Still, even mention of it demonstrated a clear threat to press freedom in Spain.

Former minister of the interior and current president of the Grupo Popular (the governing Popular Party)in the European Parliament Mayor Jaime Oreja endorsed it on numerous occasions, commenting that it was “crazy that it was possible to view all these problems of public order on television because it only incited people to demonstrate all the more”. Although Cosidó moderated his remarks later on, dozens of journalists and commentators reacted to the director general’s statement with anger and vociferous debate.

The new penal code, to be introduced later in 2013, is more than just a threat. It will make passive, peaceful resistance — for example, chaining yourself to a door so you cannot be forcibly removed, or throwing yourself to the floor while being forcibly evicted from your home —  into a serious crime against the authorities, equivalent to the public disorder of violence on the street. There has even been discussion about a clause permitting legal action against those who use the internet to encourage people to attend demonstrations that could potentially result in violence.

The endless ways to discredit, harass and criminalise citizen protest has direct opposition online. Social networks have become dramatically re-politicised since 15 May 2011. It was then that the seeds of indignation were sewn. They have developed into a vigilant citizen lobby, a furious but peaceful movement informed by a sense of outrage and distrust of power. Social movements give validity to the rearguard, to the intellectual construction of a model that resists both attacks and criminalisation. The network has confidence in itself as an underground labyrinth, well adapted to slip loose from the reins of power.

Further cutbacks are predicted, along with further economic adjustments, and more austerity, in the course of this year. No doubt they will come accompanied by further demonstrations.

Juan Luis Sánchez is a Spanish journalist and deputy editor of eldiario.es. He tweets from @juanlusanchez

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

The post Spain: The formidable voices of the plazas appeared first on Index on Censorship.

“Always Franco” sculpture (Demotix)

“Always Franco” raised a few eyebrows when it was exhibited in Madrid last February. The sculpture of the Spanish dictator jammed inside a Coca Cola fridge, in his characteristic green military uniform and dark sunglasses, was apparently too much for some nostalgic souls.

The artist, Eugenio Merino, is being taken to court by Francisco Franco National Foundation (FNFF) — an organisation dedicated to “disseminating the memory and work” of Franco.

Last February, FNFF vice-president Jaime Alonso visited ARCO — the modern art fair in Madrid where the work was being exhibited — escorted by a notary, to take pictures of the work. The sculpture was “grotesque”, he declared, and an attempt against “someone’s dignity”, someone who “couldn’t defend himself because he is dead”.

“This work generates hatred and confrontation” said Alsonso, quoted by El Mundo. “You can think what you want of Franco, but taunting people is simply not acceptable.”

“ARCO took place in February. In July, I received the lawsuit, and on February 21 2013, I will go to court,” says Merino in an email interview.

FNFF  is suing him for damaging their honour, identity or image indirectly through harmful conduct. They want Merino to pay 18,000 euro in compensation.

It appears that Merino is not going to get a lot of institutional backing, “the director of the art fair (Carlos Urroz) has not even sent me an email to offer his help against this attack to the freedom of speech (sic),” says Merino.

Index tried to get Urroz’s version of events, but our email went unanswered.

Apparently in response to the FNFF’s complaints, José María Álvarez del Manzano, President of the IFEMA — which is the institution where the fair takes place — sent them a soothing letter.

In the letter sent while the exhibition was still in situ, he said that “personally… I find this an indignity, because representing any human being like that, independently of the personality of General Franco (sic), is absolutely inadmissible. Above all, I think the author only pretended, in principle, to draw people’s attention.” He went on to say that as much as he liked to remove the work from the fair, it would grant “unmerited” attention to Merino’s work.

After staging a coup against the Republican government, Franco was the authoritarian head of state of Spain from the end of the Civil War (1936-39)  until he died peacefully of old age in 1975.

Memories, only for some

Even though Spain passed laws in 2007 to remember and repay the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship that ensued — the Historical Memory Law — it looks like evoking Franco’s times is still not easy in Spain.

Trying to fill a legal vacuum left by the law, in 2008, “superjudge” Baltasar Garzon opened an inquiry into alleged crimes against humanity during the Spanish Civil War and after, and exhumed 19 victims’ remains.

However he found plenty of obstacles and enemies. A 1977 general amnesty had pardoned all criminal offenses with a political purpose previous to 1976 and these offenses were almost 70 years old, prior to the conception of “crimes against humanity”.  In 2009, an organisation called “Manos limpias” (Clean Hands) filed a lawsuit against him, and a few months later, Garzon was indicted by the Spanish Supreme Court for prevarication, or breaching his legal duty.

Weekly meeting to remember Franco’s victims in the Puerta del Sol, Madrid [NathaliePaco - Demotix]

At the end, Garzon dropped the investigation, was barred from judicial activity (with pay) and  stood trial. At the beginning of 2012, the Spanish Supreme Court found Garzon innocent on these charges.

Meanwhile, anthropologist Francisco Etxeberria and a team of forensic experts had continued digging up mass graves from the Civil War period. As Etxeberria said in an interview with this writer in 2010, most of the victims’ remains that have been unearthed so far were from the Republican side.

“We have also been asked to investigate right-wing people killed by the Republicans” he said. But there are few such cases left to investigate, since the Franco regime did so itself after the war ended. Furthermore, there is no comparison between the victims on the two sides, in either quantitative or qualitative terms.”

About the case against Garzon, Etxeberria commented: “It looks like we’re sliding backwards. In Spain there is no risk of a return to dictatorship, but this is a sad development that brings to mind pre-constitutional times. Actually, the victims’ families had sought judicial support and safeguards to provide legal guarantees for the investigation that was launched.”

According to Etxeberria, the Historical Memory Law was an attempt to “move from truth to reparations, but no one wants to get involved in the justice aspect.” No one, that is, except for Judge Garzon  who launched the unprecedented and short-lived legal inquiry of 2008.

“The three rights of victims are truth, justice and reparations, and these have not been forthcoming” in the case of the roughly 200,000 victims of murder and forced disappearance during the war, he concluded. Historians have put together lists of up to 130,000 people killed in areas not near the front lines. These crimes involved forced disappearance, to which no statute of limitations applies.

“In the past two weeks, we have opened new graves and recovered more remains —  says Etxeberria now in an email interview with INDEX. There is no institutional support whatsoever, but we will continue doing what we can with the resources of the (Basque Country) University and the investigative teams we have. Currently, we have already discovered 300 mass graves and recovered more than 5,000 bodies. There are (private) commemoration ceremonies every week… This means that we go on and that there is still public interest.”

Etxeberria mentions the book Jueces, pero parciales. La pervivencia del franquismo en el poder judicial (Judges, but partial. The endurance of  Franquismo in the judiciary), by Carlos Jimenez Villarejo (prosecutor) y Antonio Doñate (judge). “(The authors) demonstrate why the courts don’t have an interest in investigating these crimes. Judges have been involved in only 10 of all the exhumations so far,” he says.

Franquismo is a term used to refer to Franco’s regime and his government style, which combined right-wing thinking, traditional Catholicism and economic self-reliance.

The glorification of Franco continues today

Organised by FNFF, “120 years after, Francisco Franco, present!” is the slogan a tribute to the dictator to be celebrated on 2 December  in Madrid. Critics have pointed out that the event is to take place in public facilities and that FNFF receives public funding too, as does the dictator’s monumental burial vault.

It is ironic that while excavations of mass burials of Civil War victims proceed with virtually no financial support and rely on the work of dozens of volunteers from around the world, the victims of franquismo continue paying with their taxes for the maintenance of Franco’s grandiose mausoleum in the “Valley of the Fallen”, conceived by Franco himself to honour those who fell during the Civil War. About 10 per cent of the construction workforce were convicts, some of them political prisoners.

The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory has recently demanded the Spanish government to put a stop to it and invite Franco’s family to take charge of his remains, as it the case in Italy with Benito Mussolini’s.

“There is a contradiction in the political class, because they say these are times of remembrance and they talk about ‘the duty of memory’ for everything except for the ‘francoist’ crimes”, says Etxeberria. “For the right, saying this divides citizens’ suffices.”

It looks like in today’s Spain there is still little room for either free artistic exploration of the Civil War and the dictatorship that followed or full remembrance and reparation for its victims.

Miren Gutierrez is Editorial Director of Index

The post Spain: Historical amnesia on display appeared first on Index on Censorship.

In February 1663, the London printer John Twyn waited in Newgate prison for his execution, the unique horror of being hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, the place known today as Marble Arch. This medieval agony was the recently restored monarch King Charles II’s terrifying lesson to his subjects: do not write, or print, treason against the state.

Even more cruel, Twyn’s offence was merely to have printed an anonymous pamphlet justifying the people’s right to rebellion, “mettlesome stuff” according to the state censor (the King’s Surveyor of the Press). No one suggested that Twyn had written this treason, only that he had transformed it from manuscript to print. Perhaps he hadn’t even read it. Never mind: he was sentenced to death.

Pressed both to admit his offence and reveal the name of the pamphlet’s anonymous author (and thereby save his own life), Twyn refused. In words of breathtaking courage that echo down the centuries, he told the prison chaplain that “it was not his principle to betray the Author”. Shortly afterwards, Twyn went to his doom. His head was placed on a spike over Ludgate, and his dismembered body distributed round other city gates.

Words can be weapons, and the pen challenges the sword. Writers, and printers, “the troublers of the poor world’s peace”, in Shakespeare’s phrase, have always seemed a danger to the state. Across Europe, for the first three centuries of the printing press, questions of religion and politics were usually settled by the authorities of the day with rare and explicit savagery. As John Mullan has shown in his excellent monograph Anonymity, the safest course for the dissident writer was a pseudonymous or anonymous cloak of identity.

Eventually, the Romantic assertion of the heroic individual’s place in the world at the beginning of the 19th century ended this prudent convention, but slowly. The scandalous first two Cantos of Don Juan were printed without naming either Lord Byron or his publisher, John Murray. Despite the risks, the poet soon found fame irresistible. “Own that I am the author,” he instructed Murray, “I will never shrink.” By the reign of the fourth George, Britain’s liberal democracy was never likely to eviscerate, hang or decapitate a transgressive writer, though some terrible penalties did remain on the statute book for decades to come.

Abroad in Europe, as repressive states, notably Tsarist Russia, grew harsher, the fate of writers worsened, but hardly varied. The essential predicament was unchanged from John Twyn’s day. Putting black on white, words on the page, as accurately and truthfully as one could, would never fail to make trouble with vested interests, arterio-sclerotic authorities and evil despotisms. Dostoevsky was marched before a firing squad, but reprieved. The distinguished list of writers, before the Cold War, who died for their art includes Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel, possibly the greatest loss of all.

Writers and despotic regimes

By the middle of the 20th century there was, in the words of Graham Greene, a fairly general recognition that “it had always been in the interests of the State to poison the psychological wells, to encourage cat-calls, to restrict human sympathy. It makes government easier when people shout Gallilean, Papist, Fascist, Communist.” In the same essay, on “the virtues of disloyalty”, Greene expressed the writer’s credo in an age of growing state control. “The writer is driven by his own vocation,” he said, “to be a Protestant in a Catholic society, a Catholic in a Protestant one, to see the virtues of the Capitalist in a Communist society, of the Communist in a Capitalist state.” Greene concludes this celebration of opposition by quoting Tom Paine: “We must guard even our enemies against injustice.”

Confronted by the intractable collision of the creative individual of fiery conscience with the frozen monolith of the powers that be, there is one essential question: What Is to Be Done? In 1968, the poet Stephen Spender, sickened and dismayed by reports of literary repression in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Brazil and South Africa (as well as several recently decolonised African states), responded to the spirit of a revolutionary year. He decided to organise a fight-back, setting the pen against the sword, based in London.

George Orwell had already pointed out, in his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature”, that “literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian”. In fact, it was the totalitarian regime of the USSR, and its trial of Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, that proved the tipping-point for Spender. He was joined by Pavel Litvinov, the Soviet scientist, dissident and human rights activist, who wrote an open letter asking if it might not be possible to form in England an organisation of intellectuals who would make it their business to publish information about what was happening to their censored, suppressed and imprisoned colleagues abroad. Litvinov was inspired by the fates of fellow Russians, but he insisted that such an organisation should operate internationally and not just concern itself with victims of Soviet oppression, though their plight was possibly the worst in those dark days of the Cold War.

Spender, who was exceedingly well-connected, organised a telegram of support in response to Litvinov’s appeal, signed by an awesome roll-call of the great: Cecil Day-Lewis, Yehudi Menuhin, WH Auden, Henry Moore, AJ Ayer, Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley, Mary McCarthy, JB Priestley and his wife Jacquetta Hawkes, Paul Scofield, Igor Stravinsky, Stuart Hampshire, Maurice Bowra and George Orwell’s widow, Sonia. These, and subsequently many others, declared they would “help in any way possible”.

This initiative led, in turn, to the formation of the Council of WSI (Writers and Scholars International), whose founding members included David Astor, editor of the Observer, Elizabeth Longford, Roland Penrose, Louis Blom-Cooper and Spender himself. Index on Censorship was born when Michael Scammell, an expert on Russia, came up with the idea of founding a magazine. Thus was the ongoing battle for ‘intellectual freedom’ moved onto new terrain best suited to writers and scholars — the printed word published in a little magazine. Soon, the advantages and benefits of fighting oppression from a dedicated bastion of free expression became obvious to both sides, free and unfree alike.

A clarion voice in the fight for free speech

Index, whose first issue appeared in 1972, declared that its aim was to “record and analyse all forms of inroads into freedom of expression”. Further, it would “examine the censorship
situation in individual countries” and would publish “censored material in the journal”. In the long and bloody history of the fight for intellectual freedom there had been many impassioned statements of principle about the writer’s role as a piece of grit in the engine of the state. No one, however, had ever thought to jam a whole toolbox into the machinery of power, and place a fully-funded institution (such as WSI) in direct opposition to the repressive intentions of despotic regimes. This was the unique and historic importance of Index. But its success was not a foregone conclusion. Spender, its founder, was fully alert to the potential for windbaggery and failure inherent in such a venture. There was, he wrote, “the risk that the magazine will become simply a bulletin of frustration”.

Actually, the opposite came to pass. Index became a clarion voice in the cause of free expression. The abuses of freedom worldwide in the 1970s were so appalling and so widespread that the magazine rapidly found itself in the frontline of campaigns against repression and censorship in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Latin America and South Africa. Alongside Amnesty International and the PEN Club, Index gave vivid expression to the truth that “censorship” today takes many cruel forms: writers who are sent to labour camps, or blackmailed by threats to their families, or harassed into silence and isolation.

Perhaps the most important thing Index did, from the beginning, was to universalise an issue that was in peril of becoming a special interest: freedom was not “a luxury enjoyed by bourgeois individualists”. Along with self-expression, it was a human right, and an instrument of human consciousness that should be fought for worldwide.

Historically, the classic polemical statement against censorship, John Milton’s Areopagitica, a pamphlet against the Licensing Order of 1643, had focused on the English Parliament’s threat to a free press. Milton, writing in the midst of Civil War, was less worried about blood than ink: “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image,” he writes, “but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.” Three centuries later, Index would concern itself with both the breath of the oppressed writer but also the lifeblood of liberty, namely, free expression.

In an astonishingly short time, barely a generation, from 1972 to 1989, the magazine established itself as a force to be reckoned with. At first, it took up the issue that had inspired its beginnings: Soviet oppression. In defence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Index published part of a long, autobiographical poem, “God Keep Me from Going Mad”, composed in 1950-53 while Solzhenitsyn was serving a sentence in a labour camp in North Kazakhstan, the setting for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This was followed by a scoop in 1973, the unexpurgated text of an interview Solzhenitsyn had given to AP and Le Monde in which the writer revealed that “preparations are being made to have me killed in a motor accident”.

Václav Havel, Solzhenitsyn and the Iron Curtain

The importance of this document, one of the writer’s very rare accounts of his predicament, is that it described in horrifying and particular detail the true nature of the Soviet regime’s campaign against him, especially the constant surveillance and the unrelenting menace of the state’s agents. Solzhenitsyn was also able to draw attention to the persecution of Andrei Sakharov. In the bleakest depths of the Cold War, taking up the cause of Russia’s dissident community made the difference between international recognition and utter oblivion.

As the magazine grew in confidence, it began to focus on other, related injustices behind the Iron Curtain, notably in Czechoslovakia (as it was). It was among the first to publish the banned playwright Václav Havel in English. In 1976, a retrospective on Czechoslovakia eight years after the Soviet invasion of Prague described how Havel was being “constantly harassed and persecuted by the authorities”, the beginning (as it turned out) of a long assault on Havel’s liberty.

When Charter 77 was formed the following year, Index became a vital link in the chain of communication between the samizdat literary community in Prague and the wider world. The exiled Czech journalist George Theiner, who succeeded Michael Scammell as editor, strengthened this link. Context and continuity, the steady accumulation of a body of work and opinion, are vital ingredients in any effective campaign on behalf of oppressed writers. Index now provided both a sober and authoritative framework for its protest and also, through the office in London, a team of journalists dedicated to monitoring the devious and sinister machinations of oppressive regimes worldwide.

In the 1980s, the magazine spread its wings. There were exposés of repression in Latin America and persecution in Africa (Kenya, Nigeria). Roa Bastos, who had suffered so badly in Paraguay, found a new champion. Nadine Gordimer, who had supported Index from the beginning, published a story about the romantic dilemmas of a secret policeman in South Africa. In Europe, Samuel Beckett became so engaged with the plight of Václav Havel that he dedicated a short play, “Catastrophe”, to his fellow playwright and allowed Index to publish it in its pages, another notable scoop. By the end of the 1980s, the idea of standing up for the abstract idea of ‘intellectual freedom’ by reporting censorship and publishing banned writing had become a recognised part of the common discourse within the libertarian community.

The influence of Index on the literary world has been at once subtle and impossible to overstate. In my mind, there is no doubt that its example became an inspiration to those British publishers, like Faber, Penguin and Picador, who (especially in the 1970s and 1980s) published banned or oppressed writers such as Milan Kundera, Václav Havel and Josef Skvorecky. The literature that came from behind the Iron Curtain added a new dimension to the reading of the West. Translations of novels like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting were so exceptional that the book would briefly become, ex officio, as it were, almost a part of the Anglo-American literary tradition.

The institutional importance of Index is hard to overstate because, in the words of André Gide, good sentiments do not usually generate good literature. Just because a writer is committed to fighting injustice in his or her society, there’s no guarantee that his or her work will have artistic value. But once the role of literature as “witness” is established in the minds of the public, it makes it more difficult to dissociate literary merit and the social or political value of the text. Index provided a forum for banned writers to demonstrate the role of literature, both good and less good, as unsubmissive, contrarian, transcendent and instinctively transgressive.

Perhaps it was as well that the Index model was so firmly set by Spender and its founders. After 1989, the strength and security of WSI (notwithstanding a constant search for sponsors) was crucial. The fall of the Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union gave every indication that the raison d’être of Index — opposing Soviet oppression — had been trumped by History.

New frontiers for free expression — and censorship

In fact, the reverse was the case. Writers and free expression continued to be persecuted worldwide. Russia did not cease to be despotic with the disbanding of the KGB. In some ways, the condition of everyday life for Russian writers grew significantly worse, and certainly far more dangerous. The war in Chechnya gave the authorities a new pretext to crush free journalism. Anna Politovskaya became just one of many who turned to Index to make her plight better understood in the West.

With the millennium, meanwhile, the rise of the internet and the IT revolution inherent in the development of digital communications offered a new challenge. The old barriers to state control were coming down. Frontiers that had once been impenetrable were suddenly porous. Secret policemen could continue to terrorise writers, printers and publishers, but it was much harder to stop the free flow of information on the worldwide web. What place would Index have in the new world order of “free” content shaped by Google, Wikipedia and Amazon? The answer, of course, is as a research institution, a memory bank and a continuing moral example, along with publishing online as well as in print.

Index in the new century has made the fight for “intellectual freedom” normative as well as liberating. WSI remains the tool of one very simple, good idea. Its historical board members are unchanged: Milton, Paine, Wilkes, Zola and, possibly, Orwell. Index knows that such an achievement is not lightly won. The history of state repression shows that the individual writer and artist and scholar is vulnerable on his own. He, or she, needs the committed support of independent organisations that cannot be crushed by state terror. Furthermore, the plight of writers especially should not be at the mercy of intellectual fashion or the caprice of a Twitter feed. Free expression needs its gatekeepers: publishers, editors, booksellers, and independent columnists. And this community needs a place to meet, a forum for ideas and debate. This is what Index provides. More serious than Twitter; better organised than Facebook, it’s a forum that can exploit the social media, but not become its prisoner.

In the 21st century, this can be virtual, articulated through Google or Wikipedia. But it also needs to be orchestrated by people, standing apart from fashionable trends, who understand the nuances of the fight for intellectual freedom and who know what they are talking about. This, in a sentence, is the unique Index proposition: ideas honestly and freely expressed and writers worldwide uninhibited by the censorship of the mind or tyrannical restrictions on the printed word.

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

Robert McCrum is an associate editor of the Observer. He has been a member of the advisory board of Index on Censorship since 1983

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