Xiaolu Guo is a fiction writer, filmmaker and political activist. Robert McCrum is an associate editor of The Observer. Stephen Grey is an investigative journalist and author. Ismail Einashe is a journalist and researcher. (Photo: Sean Gallagher / Index on Censorship)
Are the challenges of censorship, subterfuge and propaganda greater or lesser than they were in previous decades? Who are modern technological advances really empowering? It was a full house last night at the Frontline Club for the launch of Spies, Secrets and Lies — Index on Censorship’s Autumn 2015 issue — and a lively debate on censorship then and now.
The panel — chaired by Index on Censorship magazine editor Rachael Jolley — included award-winning investigative journalist and author Stephen Grey; fiction writer, filmmaker and political activist Xiaolu Guo; associate editor of The Observer Robert McCrum; and freelance journalist, researcher and an associate editor at foreign affairs magazine Warscapes, Ismail Einashe.
In 2010, when Grey was trying to work out how he and Julian Assange could get the Iraq war logs into Britain without being blocked along the way, he invited Assange to a panel at City University London moderated by former Index on Censorship chair Jonathan Dimbleby. “We thought the British government would never stop anyone coming to a censorship debate in London,” says Grey. And it worked.
.@StephenGrey introducing our event. Talking about trying to get Julian Assange into country for an index event years ago #indexfrontline
“The river of information that came out of Wikileaks -- and subsequently Snowden, in a more restricted way -- is just one facet of this explosion of free knowledge and rapid messaging that defines our world today, to which our politics and security services have yet to adapt,” says Grey.
But how does this situation differ from the flow of information during the Cold War?
Most obviously, technological advances have changed the way we operate. Harking back to his early days at Index on Censorship in the 1970s, McCrum told of how his first trip to Czechoslovakia was with a carrier bag of bananas in which he smuggled editions of the magazine (Full story in the latest magazine, paywall). Today, the ease of moving documents has made tackling censorship less labourious.
Robert McCrum on how when the magazine was founded, there was a clear enemy in Cold War. there were clearer lines #indexfrontline
Index was founded to defend literary freedom during the Cold War. “Now we’re trying to defend freedom of speech and freedom of thought across the globe,” says McCrum.
Take China, where state surveillance is a daily occurrence. “Since the internet started in China 20 years ago, it created great freedom,” says Guo. “But it also promoted overwhelming state control and at the moment, there's at least 2 million internet police.” While no government has a monopoly on cyber surveillance, China’s efforts are certainly more advanced, she explains.
Discussing whether there is more or less censorship today, Einashe says that in Africa we can clearly see there is more. “Freedom House says that the democratic gains you had in the continent in the early 2000s have now reversed, so you have a situation where things are becoming less democratic and states are becoming less free.”
But our focus shouldn’t just be on far away places, he explains. Even in the West we see censorship on a daily basis, including here in the UK. In recent weeks, we've seen the banning of Homegrown, a play about the radicalisation of young people and the seductive power of Isis. We also saw the secular activist Maryam Namazie banned from speaking at Warwick University's student union, since resolved, for fear she would incite hatred against Muslims.
So has censorship really changed? Flicking through a copy of the latest Index magazine, it's very difficult to tell, says Grey.
On one hand, we have more openness and transparency than during the Cold War. “We also have an age of mass surveillance, where communication is there to be mined and monitored,” he says.
Professor Chris Frost, Tim Hetherington Fellowship winner Josie Timms and Judith Hetherington. (Photo: Sean Gallagher / Index on Censorship)
Tim Hetherington was a British photojournalist, most famous for his award-winning documentary Restrepo about the war in Afghanistan. He was killed in 2011 by shrapnel from artillery fired by Libyan forces while covering the Libyan civil war.
I have been away, with thankfully intermittent internet access limiting my access to top quality prime minister/pig-related punning, so apologies if you see your fantastic pun replicated here. Entirely unintentional.
If you’ve been even more away than me, a quick recap of the story that will never die: Conservative peer Lord Ashscroft, he of the polls, has brought out a book — along with the Sunday Times’ Isabel Oakeshott — about Prime Minister David Cameron. Among the accusations levelled at Cameron are that Conservative colleagues see Libya as “his Iraq”, that he attempted to get a friend off criminal charges and that he listened to Supertramp.
No one cares about any of that stuff at all. The one thing everyone is, frankly, still cracking up about was the revelation in Monday’s Daily Mail (which is serialising the book) that Cameron, while at university, took part in an initiation ceremony for a drinking club which involved putting the parts of a prime minister we shouldn’t think about in a pig’s head. The head, it should be noted, was not attached to a live animal.
This is obviously enormously odd, and hilarious. I’m not about to get po-faced about sexual deviance, or how Cameron is screwing the country even more than he did that pig head, or, as I have seen, ponder the dark occult symbolism of our elite universities. Because, really, it’s not symbolic of anything apart from students being utter, utter clowns.
That is, of course, assuming that it is true. Something that is by no means certain. The source for the allegation is apparently an Oxford contemporary of Cameron’s who is now an MP, who reckons he has seen a photograph of a compromised future prime minister engaging with the hog’s head.
Now, “a bloke I know reckons he saw a photo” may be a decent threshold of proof for a pub anecdote (bonus points if the bloke is upgraded from mere bloke to “my brother’s friend” lending a real tangibility): but this is not presented as a pub anecdote, and as a presentation of proof, it doesn’t really do: it would never stand up in court, as the pig said to the aspiring Piers Gaveston member.
Given that, should David Cameron sue? Tricky business. Fine things that our new libel laws now are, does one really want a court case hinging on whether or not one performed indecencies on swine flesh a lifetime ago? Even if you win, do you want to go down in history as the Prime Minister who definitely didn’t have sex with a dead pig? One may as well buy a t-shirt with “not a wrong ‘un, honest” written on it.
In an interesting Guardian article, Damian McBride, a former spin doctor for Cameron’s predecessor Gordon Brown, wonders why Cameron’s people have not issued an official dismissal of “Piggate”, or any of the other allegation in the Ashcroft/Oakeshott book, pointing out that “In the absence of an instant bucket of water, the story has caught fire over the past two days. Not only that, it’s allowed other newspapers to declare open season on Cameron’s private life, as we see from today’s ‘coke parties’ splash in the Sun.”
I can understand McBride’s point, but I do think that Cameron’s people did the right thing here, mostly because if they start engaging with the specific allegations in the book, sooner or later they come round to having to confirm or deny the porcine partnering. We’re back to square one.
Where’s the free speech rub in this, I hear you ask? Well, there’s the simple fact that you have to be able to take as well as give in these matters. During Jeremy Corbyn’s ascendance to power as Labour leader, many of his followers complained daily of the outrageous “smears” of the dread MSM. In his leadership acceptance speech, Corbyn himself complained of the “most appalling levels of abuse from some of our media over the past three months” apparently suffered by him and his family during his campaign, which seemed to amount to some reheated speculation about the cause for a split from a previous partner and the shocking, shocking revelation that he ate baked beans out of a tin. Before you write in, questioning Corbyn’s public declarations and political associations is a necessary and important function of the press. People who complained about Corbyn’s apparent abuse now seem totally OK repeating allegations made by a wealthy Conservative peer in the pages of the Daily Mail. Which is fine, but just be aware of the mismatch. (To his credit, Corbyn appears to have entirely avoided the topic, though Cameron was lucky that there was no PMQs this week due to conference season).
Public figures will be open to scorn, ridicule, abuse and more. Their every move, from even before they aspired to power, will be pored over for clues and significance (as has been done by, for example, the New Statesman’s Laurie Penny with Cameron’s curious incident avec le cochon). It may happen, as we grow into an age where no one is embarrassable anymore, because they’ve already put everything on Instagram, that these stories will no longer make any sense. But for now they still happen, and on balance, it is good that they do.
When it comes to public figures, we should err away from caution. The extremely wealthy Ashcroft’s intervention with this string of what the KGB used to call Kompromat against Cameron is not perhaps the best example of the old speak-truth-to-power schtick (it’s more power calling other power names because it didn’t get what it wanted — a cabinet post, allegedly), but nonetheless, being rude about powerful people is very important and even cathartic — ask any cartoonist.
The rush of schweinficker jokes may have done little more than lifted the autumn gloom, but it’s strangely satisfying that in a democracy we can openly mock our leaders, safe in the knowledge that whatever they do, they’ll only make it worse for themselves.
In conjunction with the Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2015, we will be publishing a series of articles that complement many of the upcoming debates and discussions. We are offering these articles from Index on Censorship magazine for free (normally they are held within our paid-for archive) as part of our partnership with the festival. Below is an article by children’s book author Norma Klein, on the censorship of children’s books, taken from the spring 1987 issue. It’s a great starting point for those who plan to attend the Banned books: controversy between the covers session at the festival this year.
I used to feel distinguished, almost honoured, when my young books were singled out to be censored. Now, alas, censorship has become so common in the children’s book field in America that almost no one is left unscathed. Some of the most conservative writers are being attacked; it’s reached a point of ludicrousness which, for me, was symbolised by my most recent encounter with ‘the other side’ in Gwinett county, Georgia, in April 1986.
Usually, my books are attacked for their sexual content. The two school board meetings I had attended in the early 1980s, one in Oregon, one in the State of Washington, had centred on two books for older teens, It’s Okay if You Don’t Love Me, a book about two 18- year-olds having a love affair, and Breaking Up, a novel about a 15-year-old girl who discovers her mother is gay. I might add parenthetically that these books have just been published in England for the first time by Pan Books in a new series aimed at teenagers, ‘Horizons’. Already, as in America, they are selling well and already, as in America, I have been told of indignant parents storming into bookstores and objecting to certain passages. It seems that things are not very different in other countries.
What was unusual about the Gwinnett county case was that the book selected to be attacked was one of my early ones, Confessions of an Only Child, about an eight-year-old girl. The offending sentence was one where the girl’s father is putting up wallpaper. Here it is in its entirety:
‘God damn it,’ Dad said as the wallpaper swung around and whacked him in the face.
When the paperback publisher of Confessions first heard of the attack, he attempted to defend the book in the following way:
Abrasive words are sometimes used by writers to add definition to a character or a story; they give the reader an understanding of the situation or kind of person speaking, but are not meant to be words which the reader should use or admire. It is our belief that the family relationships are so positive in this book that they far outweigh the use of realistic language.
My attacker, Theresa Wilson, a stunning blonde, had been heartened by her success in having another book she objected to, Deanie by Judy Blume, removed from the shelves. Her first attempt to remove my book was defeated by a 10-member review panel consisting of six parents, three teachers and a librarian. Ms Wilson claimed to have ‘stumbled’ upon the offending passage one afternoon while in the Beaver Ridge library looking for books that contain material to which she might object. In her thirties, she has no profession and, in a sense, being a censor has led to her becoming a local celebrity; she now, whether her attacks succeed or fail, appears regularly on TV and radio and is covered widely in local newspapers. The 10-member panel voted to keep Confessions on the shelves; only one person voted to keep it on a restricted shelf. ‘The consensus is that the book had literary merit for the age group intended,’ said principal Becky Hopcraft.
Free Thinking! A unique partnership in 2015, Cambridge Festival of Ideas are working with Index on Censorship to offer in-depth articles and follow-up pieces from leading artists, writers and activists on all of our headline events.
In the latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine Spies, secrets and lies: How yesterday’s and today’s censors compare, we look at nations around the world, from South Korea to Argentina, and discuss if the worst excesses of censorship have passed or whether new techniques and technology make it even more difficult for the public to attain information. Subscribe to the magazine.
Incidentally, Ms Wilson said she didn’t object to my heroine’s mother saying, ‘Ye Gods,’ in the next line, because she does not believe ‘Gods’ refers to the Christian god. She wants every book containing the word ‘damn’ restricted from Gwinnett elementary schools. She cited a US Supreme Court ruling against hostility toward religion and said the use of God Damn in Confessions indicated a ‘hostility toward Christianity’.
All this, the initial attack on my book and its initial success in being retained on the shelves, helped to achieve an important result — the founding of a group called Gwinnett Citizens for Freedom in Education. Initially a small group, it now has nearly 500 members. Its president, Lorna Cox, said she was amazed at the diversity of the group’s members, proving that liberals in America are not, as some right-wingers insist, an elitist minority. ‘We’ve got people who didn’t graduate from high school,’ Ms Cox said, ‘college graduates, doctors, professionals, and people who aren’t even affiliated with a school but have a deep, burning desire to be involved in education.’ The group participates in workshops to learn more about censorship at the local and national levels and contacts school administrators each week to learn about potential book bannings.
As in the cases involving It’s Okay if You Don’t Love Me, and Breaking Up, my travel expenses to Georgia were paid by the author’s organisation, PEN. They have a Freedom to Read committee with a fund for cases like this. My own reason for attending these meetings is that I feel having the author appear and help argue the case not only gives heart to the local anti-censorship organisations involved, such as Gwinnett Citizens for Freedom in Education, but may focus national attention on the case. Perhaps it was co- incidental, but CBS did appear in the courtroom to cover the debate for a TV segment on ‘secular humanism’.
Before flying to Georgia I was interviewed by phone. I was quoted as saying, ‘I’m not a religious person… To me the phrase god damn has no more negative a connotation than the expression, Oh gosh. I added that I attributed the swing toward censorship in America to the conservative mood of the Reagan administration. When I arrived, I was told by two of my supporters that the negative reference to Reagan was a mistake. ‘Everyone is for him down here,’ they said. I have to add parenthetically that one of the reasons I write the kinds of books I do and am, perhaps ingenuously, surprised at the reaction they provoke, is due to the fact that I’ve lived all my life in New York City and know personally only liberal people. I’ve never met anyone who voted for Reagan; I am always amazed when the Republicans win an election. But it’s probably similar that in a two-week stay in London’ in the spring of 1986,1 didn’t meet anyone who was for Margaret Thatcher either. This may, however, give me a kind of inner freedom from certain restrictions, due simply to underestimating the power of the right.
The school board meeting I attended was crowded with supporters from both sides. It was conducted as a kind of mock trial. Both sides were allowed to question anyone from the other side about anything that was relevant to the case. I was pleased and relieved that every time Ms Wilson tried to bring the questioning around to my own personal religious beliefs, she was told that was not relevant to the book. In a perverse way I found her performance at the trial fascinatiing. She alternately flirted with, and tried to antagonise, the three-member school board which consisted of two men and a woman. Luckily for me, her case was weak and she overstepped the bounds of tolerance — even within a conservative, religious community — by telling the school board members that if they didn’t ban my book, they would, on Judgment Day, go straight to Hell. ‘One day each and every one of you will stand before God almighty and you will answer to how’you believe, how you voted, how you stand.’ Evidently this threat did not frighten anyone sufficiently.
The closest Ms Wilson got to making me come forward and state my personal beliefs was when she asked if I considered myself to be ‘above God’. I responded, ‘I assume that’s a rhetorical question.’ She laughed nervously and said she didn’t know what ‘rhetorical’ meant.
Confessions of an Only Child is about a family in which the mother gets pregnant and loses her baby. It shows how this affects the heroine who was enjoying her only child status. In deciding that Confessions had ‘redeeming educational value’, one of the board members, Louise Radloff, stated, ‘I think this book has much literary merit and it shows an open discussion within the family’. I had argued in my presentation that I felt that books could be an avenue to open discussion… a way to bring parents and children closer together, that simply having a book available was not forcing it on anyone.
What amazed me, though, was that in their closing remarks, though each school board member re-iterated the literary values of my book, all three said that, indeed, the phrase ‘God damn’, was offensive and should have been left out. One board member said he, thank heaven, had never used that word. Another said he had used it once, at the age of 10 and had been beaten so severely by his parents for this that he had never used it again. I am utterly unable to judge the sincerity of these remarks. What I did feel was the pressure on everyone living in these suburban communities to conform to what is felt to be a general set of beliefs. People are terribly afraid to come out and say they are feminists, atheists, or even, God forbid, Democrats.
In a sense this is a success story. Not only will my book remain on the shelves, but the Gwinnett Citizens for Freedom in Education feel heartened that the positive publicity they received will help them in future battles. But Theresa Wilson is, seemingly, not daunted. She’s already after another book, Go Ask Alice. ‘I don’t love publicity,’ she said when interviewed on a local radio show the day after the hearing. ‘I love showing the glory of God.’ Sadly, even the local people who are against her regard her as good copy. Although she had lost her case, she was brought forward to be on the radio show with me and most of the time was spent, not debating the issues involved, but in baiting her with peculiar call-in questions from the audience. What a pity. But still, no matter how absurd and tiny this one case is, I feel I would do it again for my own books and would encourage other authors to do the same. Passivity and inaction only encourages censorship groups even more. I think now they are beginning to realise they will, at least, have a fight on their hands.
Reporting the Third World
World leaders, or their top ministers, in an effort to arrive at something we call ‘balanced coverage’. Most Third World leaders feel you are either for ’em or against ’em and there is not much middle ground to walk upon. Some, as in Saudi Arabia, just don’t want to talk to the Western press. I can remember one visit to the Saudi kingdom in early 1981 when four American correspondents — from the New York Times, Time magazine, the Associated Press, and myself from The Washington Post — jointly applied for an interview with either King Khalid or Crown Prince Fahd. Each of us knew it was unlikely either would bother with an interview for just one publication, but here was a broad segment of the US print media asking collectively for an interview. After waiting around for two weeks, we collectively gave up and left.
One major problem for American correspondents is the near total ignorance of Third World leaders about how the Western media work and how to use them for their own ends. While the correspondent may regard his or her request for an interview with a leader or top minister as a chance to air their views, they seem to look upon it as a huge favour which they are uncertain will be rewarded in any way.
Other forms of indirect censorship come in control over a correspondent’s access to the story or means of communication. Israel restricted, or at least tried to restrict, access to southern Lebanon after its invasion in June 1982 to those it felt were sympathetic to its cause or important to convince of its view. The policy never really worked because correspondents could always get into Israeli-occupied territory from the north through one back road or another. But it got more difficult as time went on. The Israeli attempt at restricting access to southern Lebanon was hardly the worst example of this kind of censorship I experienced in nearly two decades of working in the Third World, however. Covering the war between Iran and Iraq was, and remains, far more difficult. In four years, I never once got a visa to Iran. I got to Baghdad several times, but imagine my surprise the first time customs officials seized my typewriter at the airport and told me I would have to get special permission from the Information Ministry to bring it in. (At the airport in Tripoli there was a roomful of confiscated typewriters the last time I visited there in September 1984.) Whether one was allowed to the Iraqi war front depended on either an Iraqi victory or a lull in the war. As for permission to travel into Iraqi Kurdistan, it was never granted to any Western correspondent I can think of in the four-to-five years I was covering the Middle East.
The other game Iraqi information officials play is attempting to censor your coverage of the war. When I first went there, there was a Ministry of Information official sitting at the hotel who had to okay your copy or you could not send it out by phone or telex. This kind of direct censorship of copy was rare in my experience, however. Other than Israel, where military news is supposed to pass through the censor’s office, and Iraq and Libya, I can think of no examples where I had to submit my copy before sending it.
Are the techniques of indirect censorship getting worse? In the areas of the world where I have worked, I am not sure. If Syria has become worse, Iraq is probably better today. Egypt has definitely got better, and so had Kuwait until recently. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has restricted access to a far greater degree in the past two years, and Bahrain has become more sensitive. South Africa has taken a turn for the worse. Countries that were always difficult to cover, such as Zaire, Malawi, Ethiopia and Angola, remain more or less the same.
As economic problems have got worse or rulers have felt a greater threat to their regimes, Third World governments seem to be tightening up when it comes to outside press coverage.
If this is indeed the underlying principle governing the degree of press censorship, then the problem may be more cyclical than linear, getting worse or better according to the political and economic health of a country or the special challenges it is facing at that time.
Who believes it?
‘That is how the theory goes: Restrict the press to supportive comment, and a country’s life will be calmer and better. But experience and reason suggest that the opposite will happen. Faulty government policies, if they are not subject to real criticism, grow worse. Autocrats become more autocratic. Can anyone believe that repression of criticism leads to efficiency in a society, to new ideas?’
Join us on 25 October at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2015 for Question Everything an unconventional, unwieldy and disruptive day of talks, art and ideas featuring a broad range of speakers drawn from popular culture, the arts and academia. Moderated by Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg.
Tim Hetherington’s mission to create a better understanding of the world cast him in many roles: photojournalist, filmmaker, human rights advocate, artist and a leading thinker in media innovation. He was killed in Libya by a mortar in in April 2011. (Photo: Tim Hetherington Trust)
New journalism graduate Josie Timms has been awarded the first Liverpool John Moores University/Tim Hetherington Fellowship, in conjunction with Index on Censorship.
The fellowship, which was launched this year by the three organizations, will offer the winning journalism graduate a full-time one-year contract to join the editorial team at Index on Censorship magazine and website.
“Tim spent his whole life challenging limitations on expression, including a period of time spent as an investigator for the United Nations Security Council’s Liberia Sanctions Committee. The opportunity to introduce new talent to work in this vital field is unmissable and we wholeheartedly join with LJMU and Index to promote the values of free speech and political expression,” Stephen Mayes, executive director of the Tim Hetherington Trust, said.
The new annual fellowship, named after photojournalist, filmmaker and artist Tim Hetherington, includes the opportunity for the prize winner to report on national and international free expression issues in Index’s award-winning quarterly magazine and website. The fellow will work closely with creative writers and artists in countries where they experience censorship from governments, religious groups and others.
“The Index team, and the new fellow, research and write international stories from conflict zones that reflect Tim Hetherington’s commitment to human rights and free expression,” Rachael Jolley, editor of Index on Censorship magazine, said.
Timms, the winner of the fellowship, said: “I am thrilled to have been offered the fellowship and the Index on Censorship post. I have worked very hard throughout university and it is great to see that this has paid off by being offered this role. I am looking forward to starting the internship and to begin what I hope to be a long and successful career in journalism.”
Speaking for LJMU, Steve Harrison, senior lecturer in journalism at LJMU, said, “The link with Index on Censorship and the Tim Hetherington Trust help broaden our students’ appreciation of the value of freedom of expression and why it is worth fighting for.”
Timms will be formally presented with her fellowship award at an Index debate in October 2015.
