24 Mar 2021 | 50 years of Index
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”116444″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Philosopher Stuart Hampshire knew evil was real. He had seen it, written about it and, perhaps, it had driven him to do something about it.
He was 25 by the time the Second World War broke out and he spent his formative years in a position in military intelligence.
His job was to interrogate, and it was this that brought him face to face with Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the high-ranking Austrian SS officer who was a key figure in the Holocaust.
Nancy Cartwright, Hampshire’s second wife and fellow philosopher, told Index, “He interviewed, as a young man, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. I think that had a real effect.”
Cartwright suggested that much of Stuart Hampshire’s personality reflected the work he was passionate about and he surrounded himself with revered thinkers and writers, including his closest friend, the political theorist Isaiah Berlin.
He was well-liked by his peers and was deemed to be warm-hearted and polite. Or, as Cartwright fondly describes him, “terribly English”.
As Cartwright remembered, he would sometimes sit in restaurants with Nancy and their two daughters and make up stories about the people sitting next to them, imagining who they were and what they were about in detail.
Stories, clearly, were important to him and people and the challenges they faced were significant too.
“I think he had a vivid sense of what it was like to be someone else. He could think of himself as being someone else,” said Emma Rothschild, the economic historian and Hampshire’s goddaughter – although this was never formalised at a font.
Hampshire was seen as a “cautious, honest and meticulous thinker” according to the philosopher Jane O’Grady, writing his obituary in The Guardian.
Free speech ranked highly among his values.
Cartwright said: “He had a sense that there is real evil and it needs to be combated. I think that was relevant to his work on Index. He was as much concerned about the people being censored and what was happening to them as he was about the issue in general.”
Hampshire, author of the acclaimed book Thought and Action, was a keen supporter of the post-war Labour government but never referred to it as such, instead preferring to say “the good Mr Attlee”.
“He always was distressed at inequality and poverty,” said Cartwright and he welcomed the wealth of social changes that Attlee oversaw: the foundation of the National Health Service and the expansion of the welfare state.
Hampshire also played a role in the implementation of the Marshall Plan, the financial rebuilding of Europe after the Second World War.
After the war, he became a senior research fellow at New College, Oxford before taking a domestic bursarship at his alma mater of All Souls. He later joined Princeton in its Department of Philosophy.
By the time the idea for the Writers and Scholars Education Trust, and Index, was being discussed, he had returned to Oxford as warden of Wadham College. Backing the idea of the trust and Index was natural to him.
“He was so keen on Index and it doing important things,” said Cartwright.
Emma Rothschild said his character was well-suited to setting up a free speech magazine.
“He was extremely involved with and excited about starting Index and I remember vividly seeing the first issues. It was one of his important steps into public life. He had been very involved in the great world of politics and international relations during and after the Second World War and then had been a bit more remote from it,” she said.
“I think Index was his way of moving back into large public questions. It was something he was extremely excited about and at the same time he found thinking about public life very stimulating for his philosophical writing.”
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24 Mar 2021 | 50 years of Index
Elizabeth Longford’s involvement as one of the founders of Index on Censorship should come as no surprise. By the time she signed the deeds of the charity she was established as a prominent newspaper columnist and biographer and had become a regular on the radio programme Any Questions as what would now be called a celebrity pundit. Driven by a socialism forged in the Depression and her deep Catholic faith, she had an unswerving instinct for defending the underdog, despite her privileged background and her later fame as a royal biographer.
She was born Elizabeth Harman into a family of doctors and spent a comfortable childhood in Harley Street, London. At Oxford she was part of a gilded generation of intellectuals that included philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Gaitskell, who later became leader of the Labour Party, and poet Stephen Spender, her co-founder at Index. It was at Oxford too that she met her husband Frank Pakenham, later Lord Longford, describing him as “like a Greek God”.
After university, she went to work for the Workers’ Educational Trust in Stoke, where her socialism took root. She later said: “Stoke became as much a part of me in 1931 as Oxford had been for the past four years. The working-class ethos had become my own”.
When her husband took a post as a politics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, Elizabeth joined the local Labour Party and stood, unsuccessfully, as a candidate in Cheltenham in 1935. She admitted to an “addiction to motherhood”, but after bearing the last of her eight children, she again stood as a Labour candidate in 1950, this time in Oxford, but never did become an MP.
She had become a Catholic in 1946, following the earlier conversion of her husband. Her daughter, the historian Antonia Fraser, told Index Elizabeth was particularly affected by the treatment of the Catholic Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty by the Communist authorities in Hungary. Mindszenty was a vocal opponent of Communism, who was the subject of a show trial in 1949. He was released from prison during the Hungarian uprising of 1956, but after the Soviet invasion crushed the revolution he was forced to flee to the American embassy in Budapest, where he lived until 1971. He was finally allowed to leave Hungary for exile in Vienna around the time that Index was founded.
Elizabeth’s career as writer began in the 1950s, when she was invited by Lord Beaverbrook to write a column on the Sunday Express. She later also wrote for the News of the World and the Sunday Times, usually on domestic subjects such as parenthood.
She was in her fifties when she turned to historical biography. Her first bestseller was Victoria RI, published in 1964 and she went on to write an acclaimed two-volume life of Wellington and works on Churchill, eminent Victorian women, Byron and the house of Windsor. She was the biographer of both the Queen and the Queen Mother.
She wrote her autobiography, The Pebbled Shore, to mark her 80th birthday in 1986 but did not stop there. Royal Throne, published in 1993, designed as a reflection on the future of the royal family coincided with the Queen’s “annus horribilis” when Charles and Diana separated. She remained, in later life, a staunch supporter of the monarchy.
Elizabeth Longford sat at the head of a dynasty of writers: her son Thomas Pakenham, daughters Antonia Fraser, Rachel Billington and Judith Kazantzis and granddaughters Eliza Packenham, Flora Fraser, Rebeca Fraser and Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni.
The one great tragedy of Elizabeth’s life was the loss of her daughter, Catherine Pakenham, in a car crash in 1969. The Catherine Pakenham prize for young women journalists was established in her memory.
Her own legacy is marked by the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography.
But her legacy is also Index on Censorship, which continues to fight for the principles of freedom of expression and liberty of thought which she held so dear.
Flora Fraser, chair of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, writes: “My grandmother believed passionately in the mission of Index on Censorship to highlight the work of fellow writers and scholars, wherever in the world they faced obstacles to freedom of expression.”
24 Mar 2021 | 50 years of Index
Stephen Spender (1909-1995) was a British poet, essayist and human rights advocate. He was born in London to journalist Harold Spender and the painter and poet Violet Hilda Schuster.
Spender studied at University College, Oxford but emerged without a degree. He spent his time writing poetry, along with the likes of W H Auden and Cecil Day Lewis, and his poems touched upon the most pressing social and political issues of the age.
Spender’s role in establishing Writers and Scholars International, and subsequently Index on Censorship, is inextricably bound with that of dissidence in the Soviet Union.
On the 12 January 1968, western radio stations broadcast an open letter, addressed to the ‘world public,’ from the Soviet dissidents Larisa Bogoraz and Pavel Litvinov. The letter had been written to draw attention to the so-called “Trial of Four” conducted by the Soviet authorities against the writers Ginzburg, Galanskov, Dobrovolsky and Lahkova for their involvement in samizdat, the secret copying and distribution of censored writing.
The following day Spender read the letter in The Times. Immediately moved by the appeal, and its elucidation on the legal persecution of writers in the USSR, he called upon a number of his friends, including Auden, philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell and composer Igor Stravinsky, to draft a response to express their support.
Although Spender’s telegram didn’t reach Litvinov or Bogoraz directly, Litvinov heard the message through a radio broadcast, and subsequently used the transnational samizdat smuggling networks to express his gratitude.
On 8 August, two weeks before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Litvinov wrote to Spender. In it he outlined a proposition: the creation in England of an organisation that would be devoted to defending free expression, wherever its repression may occur.
With the help of the philosopher Stuart Hampshire, Spender created a committee, Writers and Scholars International, made up of a number of prominent academics, journalists and writers.
It was this that led to the creation of Index on Censorship magazine, with the translator Michael Scammel, as Editor-in-Chief. The magazine was to function in accordance with Litvinov’s suggestions; it would be dedicated to creating an ‘Index’ on those, in whatever country they may be, who find their free speech to be stifled.
Throughout his life, Spender was steadfast in his concern for the principles of free expression, and of social inequality. He spent a brief spell, “a few weeks”, according to his 1949 essay in The God That Failed, with the British Communist party in 1936. Spender described both his enrolment in the Communist Party and his leaving it as being both inextricably linked with the Spanish Civil War; the former in terms of joining the ranks in the fight against fascism, and the latter after witnessing the Red Terror of the Soviet-influenced Communists in Spain.
He maintained a consistent anti-Stalinist left position throughout his life, and remained concerned with the consequences of the “disease of capitalism”, as he put it, thus circumventing the frenzied bipolarity of the Cold War atmosphere to remain an ally of the voiceless and oppressed. When Ramparts revealed in 1966 that the CIA had been funding the Congress of Cultural Freedom, and thus their money had equally gone towards Spender’s own journal, Encounter, he quit the Congress in disgust. When the Litvinov-Bogoraz appeal appeared shortly after this scandal, it galvanised Spender into new action.
In the first issue of Index on Censorship magazine Spender wrote an essay entitled With Concern For Those Not Free in which he outlined why Index was so necessary:
“I think that doing this is not just an act of charity. It is a way of facilitating and extending an international consciousness, traversing political boundaries…censorship and acts of persecution. The world is moving in two directions: one is towards the narrowing of distances through travel, increasing interchange…the other is towards the shutting down of frontiers, the ever more jealous surveillance by governments and police of individual freedom. The opposites are fear and openness; and in being concerned with the situation of those who are deprived of their freedoms one is taking the side of openness.”
23 Mar 2021 | News and features, Slapps, Statements, Sweden
Twenty-four organisations express their solidarity with the Swedish business and finance publication, Realtid, its editor, and the two journalists being sued for defamation in London. Realtid are due before the High Court tomorrow for a two-day remote hearing that will decide whether England and Wales is the appropriate jurisdiction for the case to be heard.
Realtid is being sued by Swedish businessman, Svante Kumlin, and his group of companies Eco Energy World (EEW), for eight articles that they published last year. Realtid had been investigating EEW ahead of an impending stock market launch in Norway, a matter of clear public interest. Prior to publication, the journalists contacted Kumlin and EEW to request an interview and reply, but neither were provided. In November 2020, Kumlin and EEW filed a defamation lawsuit at the High Court in London against Realtid, its editor-in-chief, and the two reporters behind the investigations.
“We are concerned about the use of litigation tactics to intimidate journalists into silence,” five international freedom of expression and media freedom organisations wrote in a statement last December, which condemned the legal action and deemed it a strategic lawsuit against public participation (Slapp). Slapps are a form of vexatious legal action used to silence public watchdogs, including journalists.
The hearing is expected to conclude at lunchtime on Thursday 25 March, but the judgement that will decide whether England and Wales is an appropriate jurisdiction for the case to be heard is likely to be reserved for a later date. Although Realtid is a Swedish-language outlet based in Sweden and Kumlin is domiciled in Monaco, Kumlin and EEW claim to have “significant business interests” in England that, they claim, provide sufficient grounds for the case being brought in the UK.
Ahead of the hearing we, the undersigned organisations, express our solidarity with Realtid. We are extremely concerned that this Slapp appears to be an effort to discredit the journalists and force them to remove their investigative articles.
Signed:
Index on Censorship
ARTICLE 19
Civil Liberties Union for Europe (Liberties)
European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF)
IFEX
International Press Institute
OBC Transeuropa
Reporters without borders (RSF)
National Union of Journalists in the UK and Ireland (NUJ)
Justice for Journalists Foundation
Swedish Union of Journalists
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
Mighty Earth
PEN International
European Federation of Journalists (EFJ)
English PEN
Swedish PEN
Blueprint for Free Speech
Protect
Media Defence
International Media Support
The Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation
Global Witness
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