Index Index

What is the Index Index? The Index Index is a pilot project that uses innovative machine learning techniques to map the free expression landscape across the globe to gain a clearer country-by-country view of the state of free expression across academic, digital and...

Contents – The battle for Ukraine: Artists, journalists and dissidents respond

The summer issue of Index magazine concentrated its efforts on the developing situation between Russia and Ukraine and consequential effects around Europe and the world.

We decided to give voice to journalists, artists and dissidents who chose to respond to this ruthless war. At the same time, we didn’t forget other attacks on freedoms that haven’t been covered around the globe as much as they should.[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=”Up front”][vc_column_text]Joining Ukraine’s battle for freedom, by Jemimah Steinfeld: We must stand with the bold and brave against Putin.

The Index: A global tour of free expression, departing from the poll booth and arriving at the journalists reporting under Taliban rule.[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=”Features”][vc_column_text]Fifty years of pride and prejudice, by Peter Tatchell: Following the rise and
corporate fall of London’s march for LGBT rights, will grassroots voices rise again?

India’s meaty issue, by Aishwarya Jagani: When a burger comes with a side of oppression.

Cartoon, by Ben Jennings: Art imitates life, caveman style.

My three years of hell in an Uyghur ‘re-education’ camp, by Gulbahar Hatiwaj and Rahima Mahmut: As the world stays silent, hear the truth from inside China’s brutal concentration camps.

One step ahead of the game, by Chen Dan: Media criticism of the Chinese government is all part of the power play.

Welcome to the kingdom of impunity, by Michael Deibert: The landscape is dangerous for journalists in Haiti. Murders and kidnappings are a daily risk.

Politically corrected? By Issa Sikiti da Silva: The banned words the Kenyan
government doesn’t want to hear in this election year.[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=”Special report: The battle for Ukraine”][vc_column_text]Losing battle for truth in Russian lecture halls, by Ilya Matveev: The war has put a new strain on academic freedom. A Russian lecturer laments his lost classroom.

Don’t be afraid to say two plus two is four, by Mark Frary and Alla Gutnikova: As a convicted student journalist speaks out for freedom, do Russian dissidents once again face the gulag?

Emotional baggage, by Slavenka Drakulic: How it feels to pack up a life in Ukraine and become a refugee.

Back to the future, by Martin Bright: The world has been turned
upside down for Ukrainian reporters, and this is their new landscape.

On not being shot, by John Sweeney: Amidst the Kremlin-wrought
wreckage, do we need a new era of journalism?

Russia’s trojan horse moves closer to Europe, by Viktória Serdult: In Hungary, Putin’s right-hand man and Europe’s right-wing firebrand wins again.

Turkey’s newfound russophilia, by Kaya Genç: Putinism is seeping into Turkey, and it spells trouble for future freedoms.

Divided by age and a tv screen, by Hanna Komar: How do you make sure your
family see the truth when they’re blinded by Kremlin propaganda? A Belarus activist speaks out.

Culture in the cross hairs, by Andrey Kurkov: Decades after Soviet rule, Ukrainian culture is once again under threat, as are the lives behind the creative expression.

Bordering on media control, by Kseniya Tarasevich: False information about
Ukraine finds fertile breeding ground in Poland.

Treat tragedies of the Ukraine war with dignity, by Olesya Khromeychuk: The grieving hearts left behind when death becomes news fodder.

Worth a gamble, by Jemimah Steinfeld: When telling the truth is a crime, turn to a criminal spam operation.[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=”Comment”][vc_column_text]

Cancelling Russian culture is today’s moral imperative, by Marina Pesenti: Putin is using culture to extend his reach. We must say a hard no to this soft power play.

Cancel Putin, not culture, by Maria Sorenson: Banning Russian artists assumes
that they are all collaborators of the Russian state and goes against artistic freedoms.

Beware the ‘civilisation’ battle, by Emily Couch: Why Europe must reject
anti-Asian racism to fully stand with Ukraine.

The silent minority, by Ruth Smeeth: A tribute to those whose work never saw the light of day.[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=”Culture”][vc_column_text]‘The light is no longer the light it used to be’, by Lyuba Yakimchuk: The poet on children being indoctrinated and the elderly disorientated in Russia-occupied Ukraine.

A cassandra worth heeding, by Dominic Cavendish: Murdered Russian journalist
Anna Politkovskaya, whose dispatches from Chechnya should be put in the spotlight.

Poetic injustice, by Stephen Komarnyckyj: History is repeating itself
on the pages penned by Ukrainian writers.

Banking on Russia’s poetic spirit, by Maria Bloshteyn and Yulia Fridman: A “piggy bank” of Russian poetry is fighting on the right side of Putin’s war.

Metaphors and madness, by Eduardo Halfon: In Guatemala, truth is best expressed through fiction.

Metal shows its mettle, by Guilherme Osinski: A heavy metal band labelled
“satanic” by Iran is free from prison and taking back the microphone.

America’s coming crucible, by Jo-Ann Mort: Women in the USA might soon be in the dark about their own bodies.

Exclusive: New short story from award-winning writer Lisa Appignanesi

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”The award-winning writer speaks to Rachael Jolley about the inspiration for her new short story, written exclusively for Index, which looks at the idea of ageing, and disappearing memories, and how it plays out during lockdown.”][vc_column_text]

British-Canadian writer Lisa Appignanesi has found lockdown a difficult time to write, but despite this she has created a new short story exclusively for Index.

Appignanesi, a screenwriter, academic and novelist, said: “It’s very hard to move within the instability of the time to something imaginative.”

Her story, Lockdown, focuses on an older man, Arthur, who reflects on his past in Vienna during the period between the two world wars.

Appignanesi has a long relationship with the Austrian city.

“I’ve done an awful lot of work on Viennese literature and, indeed, on Freud, so Vienna always feels very, very close to me and I lived there for a year,” she said.

“Vienna is a fascinating place. It was a great city – first of all head of an empire with many, many immigrant groupings in it, and then when it lost its imperial status in World War I it was a very impoverished city.”

She says the period of lockdown focused her mind on the restrictions imposed upon the elderly. “I have long thought about what happens to the mind within the body, people’s relationship to time in that sense. You grow old and stuff happens to your body and, initially at least, it doesn’t seem to affect your mental capacity and the way you grow through time as you are living it.”

She is also interested in the idea of people being present in different ways and how, for instance, the potential anonymity and the disembodied nature of Twitter means that people can unleash their anger differently from how they would if they were in the room with someone.

“Some of the rampant emotions of our time, particularly anger,” she said, “were to do with the fact that people on Twitter are not only anonymous but they are disembodied.”

In an article for this magazine in 2010, Appignanesi wrote: “The speed of communication the internet permits, its blindness to geography, seems to have stoked the fires of prohibition. The freer and easier it is for ideas to spread, the more punitive the powers that wish to silence or censor become.”

Appignanesi, a long-time campaigner for freedom of expression, was born in post-war Poland as Elżbieta Borensztejn. Her Jewish parents had what she has described with understatement as “a difficult war”, hiding under different aliases to escape arrest. The family moved then to Paris, which she remembers, and later to Montreal, Canada. She once told BBC Radio 3 that she “grew up with the ghosts of those that died in the concentration camps”. Given the family history, it is no wonder she worries about authoritarian governments and restrictions on speech.

She is now concerned about how governments are changing the rules of freedom of expression while the world is distracted by Covid-19, and the threats that may manifest themselves. “Your attention is distracted by something – something happens behind the scenes, and usually the same people are doing the distraction. This time it was the virus.”

One news item that grabbed her attention recently was about the closure of Guatemala’s police archives (see page 27), a library of information about the country’s civil war. Her concern is that “those archives are about the disappearances of people under the dictatorships, which were lethal”.

As others track governments who want to control the national story, Appignanesi says we must learn from history.

“It’s very important for our documents in Britain to be interpreted in different ways, and supplemented by stories we don’t know.

“There are always new histories to discover.”

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_icon icon_fontawesome=”fas fa-quote-left” color=”custom” custom_color=”#dd0d0d”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_custom_heading text=”The freer and easier it is for ideas to spread, the more punitive the powers that wish to silence or censor become.”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Lockdown by Lisa Appignanesi:

Arthur was old. Very old. So old that when the word “lockdown” had made its way onto the radio news he was listening to with only half an ear – and even that half tuned to inner voices – he had thought they were talking about him.

It seemed the world was joining him now. In lockdown.

But the whole country had been in metaphorical lockdown for some time, he reflected, its politicians preventing every connection between a fragmented people except angry sparks or empty boasts.

Lockdown was a perfect word to describe his present condition: confined to his cell for his own good by a greater authority. If he promised not to riot, he was allowed out for exercise at regular intervals.

Yet the notion of exercise took all the pleasure out of movement. He preferred to think of it as a walk, better still, a passeggiata. He always dressed carefully for the occasion – a suit, perhaps a silk waistcoat, a bow tie. The joy of a stroll was in part that people looked at, and greeted, each other – even smiled. So no stretchy joggers and sweatshirts for him of the kind his grandchildren wore. He liked form. He had always been something of a dandy, though these days, as he heaved what seemed to be boulders rather than legs along the streets, it was harder to turn a casual half smile on the world and appreciate its offerings. But then his senses, too, were in all but lockdown. His new glasses had him stumbling, the ground far closer than where he had last left it, as if he had shrunk back to childhood and well below what was once an adequate height for a man of his generation.

His first grandson had once asked him if he was named after King Arthur since he had a round table and Arthur hadn’t liked to contradict him – but the only table that had featured in his own childhood had been the one at the Professor’s house in Vienna. He played happily under that while the adults talked and occasionally the Professor would put a hand below the edge of the tablecloth and tousle his hair, then pat him as he did his dogs. He liked the Professor, who gave his name a proper ‘T’ – Artur. In fact, it was the writer who was called the professor’s “doppelgänger” who was responsible for Arthur’s name.

Doppelgänger was a word he learned early. Another, heard from beneath the table, was Zensur. He had thought that had the word hour in it, had thought maybe it meant ten o’clock, zehn Uhr. Amidst the chatter of the adult voices, he saw TEN blotting out all the hours that came before, a censoring hour.

Maybe that’s why he had this odd relationship to time now, as he reached his midnight. He was convinced that at this late age he finally understood, was indeed living, what Einstein had meant about time slowing in the presence of heavy objects. Arthur was so light now, his bones s0 hollowed out, that time didn’t slow for him. It sped.

Or maybe its racing effect was linked to the fact that there was so little of time left that what had once been full and slow was now racing towards an end. The thought of death could no longer be censored or repressed. No bonfire could destroy it. But then it hadn’t really worked for the books either. They had sprung up in other editions and elsewhere.

Arthur had been born in Berlin just weeks after the great conflagration of books the Nazis had staged and only a few months after the Reichstag fire. His mother had been walking near the Staatsoper on the night of the book burning. She had loved Arthur Schnitzler’s work and had known him a little, so he had become little Arthur.

It was as well the Professor was still alive or he might have become Siggy, since his books were in that bonfire too.

Was that why he had spent his life in books and collected so many in the process? He looked up at the study’s walls lined in first editions, one side leather bound, the other brighter in their contemporaneity.

“Arthur?”

He checked that the voice was real and forced himself into the present.

In the doorway stood the young woman he liked to think of as his companion, though his granddaughter, Mia, had called her – in insisting on the need for her – an au pair plus. Stella was certainly more than his equal, not only as tall as he once had been but with poise and a razor-sharp intelligence he sometimes thought could penetrate his thoughts without him needing to speak.

So she knew he liked the fact she was decorous and she hadn’t – at least not yet – upbraided him for it, as his granddaughter would. Stella was completing a PhD at Cambridge, and with a rueful smile admitted that she had been completing it for an unconscionable while, which most recently had included divorcing her husband. That was why she found herself in need of a room and an extra wage. No one had imagined lockdown.

Now she wanted him up and ready to begin the Sisyphean task of the morning passeggiata.

His study door opened onto a terrace and from there down into communal gardens, a square where the trees today were in full glorious flower. He was a lucky man. Doubly lucky that his granddaughter had somehow gifted him this magnificent creature.

“We’re going to begin today,” Stella said when they paused for him to catch breath beneath the flowering cherry. The sky between its branches was a Mediterranean blue. The blackbirds were in full throat. The young Americans with their twin toddlers weren’t out yet.

“I’m not ready.” Arthur heard the plaintive high pitch in his own voice and rushed to blur it in a cough.

If you wish to read the rest of the extract, click here.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”3/4″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Lisa Appignanesi is an award-winning writer and campaigner for free expression. She is the author of many books including Memory and Desire, Losing the Dead and The Memory Man.

Rachael Jolley is the former editor-in-chief of Index on Censorship magazine. She tweets @londoninsider. This article is part of the latest edition of Index on Censorship’s autumn 2020 issue, entitled The disappeared: how people, books and ideas are taken away.

Look out for the new edition in bookshops, and don’t miss our Index on Censorship podcast, with special guests, on Soundcloud.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_custom_heading text=”Listen”][vc_column_text]The autumn 2020 magazine podcast featuring Hong Kong-based journalist Oliver Farry, who discusses the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in the region

LISTEN HERE[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_custom_heading text=”Subscribe”][vc_column_text]In print, online. In your mailbox, on your iPad.

Subscription options from £18 or just £1.49 in the App Store for a digital issue.

Every subscriber helps support Index on Censorship’s projects around the world.

SUBSCRIBE NOW[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]

SUPPORT INDEX'S WORK