17 Feb 2015
By Thomas A. Bass
Today Index on Censorship continues publishing Swamp of the Assassins by American academic and journalist Thomas Bass, who takes a detailed look at the Kafkaesque experience of publishing his biography of Pham Xuan An in Vietnam.
The first installment was published on Feb 2 and can be read here.
It is a sunny morning in July 2012 when my daughter Maude and I set out to meet Duong Thu Huong, Vietnam’s best-known novelist, who is currently living in exile in the 13th arrondisement of Paris, the city’s Chinatown, southeast of the Seine. I know from talking to her on the telephone that Madame Thu Huong speaks heavily-accented French, rich in vocabulary, but weak in grammar. She says she learned French in prison, during seven months of solitary confinement in 1991. After falling out of favor as the “fille bien aimée par le Parti” (the darling of the Communist Party), she was arrested for “selling secret documents to foreigners,” the documents being, in this case, the manuscript for her fourth work of fiction, Novel Without a Name. Allowed to have one book with her in prison, Huong chose a French dictionary. Hence the rich vocabulary and wobbly grammar.
My daughter lives in Paris and speaks fluent French. She will help translate, but I have also brought her along as a witness in case the interview gets tricky. Huong lives alone in a two-room apartment on the ninth floor of a modern building with a car dealership on the ground floor. She works at night, writing from midnight to six in the morning, sleeps until noon, and then spends the rest of the day on “la lutte.” The French word for struggle usually entails a political platform on the left, but, in this case, la lutte describes Huong’s fight against the Vietnamese Communist Party. Huong refers to herself as a “sans papier,” an illegal immigrant. Her passport was stolen in Marseille a few years ago, and neither the Vietnamese nor French government has offered to replace it. During the “Sarkozy mandarinate,” as she dismissively refers to the right-wing government of Nicolas Sarkozy, she was afraid to leave her apartment, for fear of being picked up on the street and deported. For Huong, one of the benefits of voting Sarkozy out of office was the fact that the new government gave her a French carte d’identité, although she still has no passport.
Huong is a lively woman, with flashing black eyes and shoulder-length hair, dyed blue—the same color as her eye shadow, the pillows on her sofa, her blouse, and jeans. Her round face is smooth and even-featured, with tattooed eyebrows and rouged lips that break often into a winning smile. She has the hands of a musician, with long, tapered fingers that have begun to curl with arthritis, but her girlish charm and colored hair make her look younger than someone born in 1947. Seated in the salle de séjour that doubles as her office, she plies us with cherries, sliced pineapple, tea, and chocolate.
Huong is a natural-born story-teller. She answers my questions in discursive loops that reach back through hundreds of years of Vietnamese history. We begin by talking about her family, which sets the scene and dictates everything that follows in a Vietnamese narrative. A “beloved daughter of the Communist Party” might be expected to have working class roots, but Huong, born in a village north of Hanoi, is the granddaughter of a mandarin landowner. Her family lost its wealth and status by getting in trouble, first with the French, for manufacturing rice wine without paying the necessary fees to the colonial government, and then with the Communists, for being bourgeois landowners during the agrarian reforms of the1950s.
Her grandmother, Le Thi Cam, sold half the family land to bail out of prison an alcoholic uncle. (The hapless male saved by a noble female is a common trope in Huong’s fiction.). Huong’s father fought in the maquis against the French and led a troop of engineers in General Giap’s signal corps, but the General did nothing to save Huong’s father during Vietnam’s Maoist-inspired land campaign. In 1954, he was sent to a labor camp in the mountains. (This will become another trope in Huong’s fiction—Party ideologues protecting their own prerogatives, while throwing their loyal followers to the mob.)
After losing their land, Le Thi Cam and three of her four sons moved to south Vietnam. Huong’s father, the youngest, worked for the post office after he got out of prison. Her mother taught in a primary school. In spite of the ardor with which Huong joined her classmates in chanting “Down with the landowners!” she was penalized for her class background. Not allowed to learn foreign languages or go to university, she enrolled in art school and then dropped out in 1967, at the age of twenty, to join a Communist youth brigade. She played accordion in a troupe of female singers and dancers who were sent to the military front to raise morale. Out of her art school class of eighty, Huong tells us that two others survived the war, one with no arms and the other crazy from shell shock.
Huong spent seven years in the jungles and tunnels north of the 17th Parallel, the dividing line between the opposing armies and the most heavily bombed part of Vietnam. A girl crouching next to her was killed by a bomb that left Huong deaf in her right ear. Her fiancé was also killed. In 1968 Huong married a fellow student from the Ministry of Culture Arts College. She gave birth to a son, Minh, in 1970, and a daughter, Ha, in 1972. “He was not talented enough to perform at the front,” she says dismissively of her husband, whom she divorced in 1982. (Her unhappy marriage provided Huong with another theme that runs through her writing. Wars are fought by good men who die young. The Party hacks with special privileges survive, while the unlucky women who marry them will either suffer in silence or revolt against these men who oppress them.)
After the war Huong began writing screenplays for propaganda films and working as a “nègre,” a ghostwriter, for communist generals penning their memoirs. Five of her scripts were made into forgettable movies by the Hanoi Fiction Film Studio. She wrote anti-Chinese tracts while serving as a combatant-reporter during Vietnam’s war with China in 1979. She was admitted to the Communist Party in 1985 and traveled to the Soviet Union the following year in a delegation of screenwriters. She also began publishing fiction, beginning with a short work called Journey Into Childhood (1985). Her first full-length novel, Beyond Illusions (1987), tells the story of a woman’s disillusionment with her marriage, which parallels her falling out of love with the Communist Party. In bed—in government—unworthy men plague women everywhere. The novel sold as many as a hundred thousand copies before it was banned.
According to Nina McPherson, who for a decade worked as Huong’s English translator into English, the artist first tangled with Vietnam’s censors in 1982, when one of her screenplays was suppressed. Huong protested at a Writers Union congress, but banning orders against her work remained in place until 1985. Perhaps as a result of joining the Communist Party, Huong was allowed to publish her writing for the next two years, until her novel Paradise of the Blind, an attack on Vietnam’s Maoist land reform campaign, was banned in 1988. Paradise—the first Vietnamese novel published in the United States in English—tells the story of a young woman who labors as a “guest worker” at a textile factory in the Soviet Union. The book attacks Party hacks who use their political connections to traffic in consumer goods. It also attacks the government officials who implemented Ho Chi Minh’s disastrous agrarian campaign. Equally radical is Huong’s redefinition of the Vietnam war, which, by this time, she has come to see not as a holy crusade against Western invaders, but as an internecine struggle among north and south Vietnamese family members.
Huong publishes one more novel in Vietnam, The Lost Life (1989), before the censors began moving against her with increasing ferocity. She is expelled from the Party in 1990 and arrested in 1991. This ends her career as a novelist published in her own country. Her next three books, Novel Without a Name (1991), Memories of a Pure Spring (2000), and No Man’s Land (2002), will appear only in foreign editions. None of her books is legally sold today in Vietnam, with the exception of some stories that the government bowdlerized and republished in 1997. (This allows them to claim with a straight face that the author is not censored in Vietnam.) The dance of the censors, with works allowed to appear in print and then removed from bookstore shelves and then reprinted in altered form, shadows all of Vietnam’s writers, but none more than Duong Thu Huong. Beginning with Novel Without a Name, she has published her works in French, English, and overseas Vietnamese editions, but not in Vietnam. The sole exception is her eighth novel, The Zenith (2009), which Huong allowed to be released in a Vietnamese edition on the web. The book has been read online by a half million readers, says Huong of this novel about the murder of Ho Chi Minh’s wife in 1958 by the Vietnamese Communist Party, who wanted the “father” of the country to preserve his purity.
“My British agent tells me I shouldn’t release any more books on the web,” she says. Apparently, he was displeased by the lost sales. “My life is dedicated to the fight against communism,” she says. “Writing is in second place, and I leave everything having to do with that to my agent.” For someone who dismisses her writing, Huong is remarkably prolific. Her ninth novel, Sanctuary of the Heart, published in France in 2011, tells the story of a Vietnamese gigolo kept in a luxurious villa by a wealthy businesswoman. Her tenth novel, The Hills of Eucalyptus, published in 2014, is the story of a homosexual man imprisoned and sentenced to forced labor.
Today, Huong has an international and generally appreciative audience. In 1991, for example, she was awarded France’s Prix Femina. In the words of one critic, “She is unmatched in her ability to capture the small, telling details of everyday life.” Other readers are more critical. Reviewer Brendan Wolfe calls her style “intensely sentimental and unfashionably melodramatic.” Vietnamese American poet Linh Dinh, who appreciates “Huong’s literary gifts sans soapbox,” describes how her “fine descriptive passages are perverted by a heavy-handed political subtext. Its bias can be traced to the war, in which both North and South demonized each other.”
Huong would say that Linh Dinh and her other critics have missed the point. She cares more about politics than literature. Her life is dedicated to the struggle for social justice and democracy, a global campaign that employs novelists but values them foremost as propagandists. “We want to see a democratic government in Vietnam,” she says. “Our example is Korea. Here you have the same people, the same history, until the people are cut in half. In the north, under communism, the people live like wild animals in caves. In the south, you have a relatively powerful and prosperous country. This is how you liberate people, how you change society for the better. Our struggle in Vietnam is similar. It is very difficult, but one must not abandon hope.”
Phan Huy Duong, the exiled Vietnamese writer living in Paris who for a decade was Huong’s translator into French, says of the author that “she was the first writer who dared to criticize the Vietnamese land reform campaigns and the degradation of intellectual life in Vietnam under the communists.” The Maoist campaigns, lasting from 1951 to 1953, were followed in 1956 by the repression of intellectuals and artists—a dark period in Vietnamese history that ended, albeit briefly, only with the onset of the doi moi “Renovation” movement in 1986.
Unfortunately, doi moi, quickly gave way to the paranoia of today’s censorious regime. “Vietnamese literature is in a grave state,” says Duong. “The people in power have developed a mafia of corruption” that allows only for the publication of propaganda and third-rate authors imported from the West.
“It is the old resistance fighters like Bao Ninh and Duong Thu Huong who frighten the government, because they speak the language of the people,” he says. “These writers are the only ones who can bring Vietnamese literature and culture back to life.”
“Duong Thu Huong shows that the power of the communists resides solely in violence,” he concludes. “First, the popular violence against colonialism. Then the violence against the Vietnamese people themselves. … Duong Thu Huong is respected because she says out loud what everyone else in Vietnam only says to themselves.”
Apart from her novels and speeches at Party congresses, Huong’s most politically subversive act was a film, “The Sanctuary of Despair,” which she began shooting in 1986. Huong had discovered in the mountains near Tan Ky, at the narrow waist of Vietnam above the 17th parallel, a concentration camp holding seven hundred North Vietnamese soldiers. This “gulag-style psychiatric camp,” as Nina McPherson describes it, was filthy with excrement and disease-wracked prisoners who looked like walking cadavers.
Huong began filming in the camp. “It was a movie about soldiers driven crazy by the war,” she says. “They were thrown in a concentration camp in the forest to hide the fact that they had been driven crazy. They were treated like criminals. The authorities are hypocrites. They want to hide these facts. The soldiers were pissing and crapping everywhere. The place was filthy. The nurses and doctors had become crazy along with the soldiers. They, too, were prisoners.”
“This was the most atrocious, the most stupid war in our history,” she says. “This is why everything written about the war by the Vietnamese is nothing but propaganda, while the real history is hidden. All my friends were killed in the war. Others were driven insane. I am the only one who has returned to bear witness.”
“We are a people deprived of hope, “she says. “We yearn for freedom and are given only enough to survive. We are condemned to unhappiness. This destiny weighs on me. It crushes me. This is why I made this film. I would finish it and wait for the right moment to release it.”
Huong’s film was being processed at a lab in Saigon when government agents broke into the facility in 1988 and destroyed the negatives with acid. Officials moved to expel Huong from the Party, and, by the time she was arrested in 1991, Communist Party Secretary Nguyen Van Linh was referring to Huong as “con di cua dang,” “the Party’s whore,” a denigrating reference to everything she had done since working as a female performer at the front.
 Duong Thu Huong (Photo: Thomas Bass) |
After spending seven months in solitary confinement in a high-security prison for political prisoners, Huong was released through the intercession of Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the former French president. “The French government also paid the Vietnamese a large bribe,” she says. Made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1994, Huong was given political asylum in France in 2006. This is also the year she appeared on stage at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Praised by war novelist Robert Stone and cheered by the crowd, Huong, after introducing herself as a “criminal,” launched a fierce attack on governmental stupidity and corruption.
By the time I find her in Paris’s Chinatown in 2012, the French government has shifted from right to left, but her scorn for the French president (“that little mandarin Sarkozy”) is as piquant as that for the communist rulers back in Vietnam. “I was like a dish rag, a prisoner in my house,” she says of her life as “a sans papier” (an illegal immigrant) in France. Now that the French government has given her an identity card, “I’m as good as the street sweepers,” she says. “I have my working papers. I can circulate in France, but I can’t leave the country.”
Her feud with the French government is part of a larger feud that Huong has been waging with former friends and colleagues. “I detest Vietnamese men,” she says at the end of a story about why she has fallen out with her French translator, Pham Huy Duong. Huong has also fallen out with her American translator, Nina McPherson. Huong tells us that she is a member of no political party and not close to her fellow refugees or French hosts. Her friends, she says, are Americans or Australians, who, unlike the French, are not “too sophisticated.” “I am sorry for your daughter who has to work here,” she says.
Now that she has broken with her former translators and friends, Huong has nothing to do but write, producing a book every couple of years and becoming almost as quirky and famous as that other great Franco-Vietnamese writer, Marguerite Duras. Indistinguishable by now are the biographical details in Huong’s life and the recurring tropes in her novels. Women are ensnared through “the drug of love” by men unworthy of them. Sexual jealousy divides the world into possessed and possessors. Instead of socialist harmony we live in a fallen state of greed and hypocrisy. The solitary hero is the author speaking truth to power. To comfort herself in the loneliness of this struggle, Huong tells herself stories, late at night, when the ghosts of her dead friends return to talk to her. Expelled from her country, cut off from the translators who made her famous, disillusioned with the French political mandarins, a lonely woman with blue hair and tattooed eyebrows sits in front of me, a brave, even heroic figure who is creating out of her loneliness a partial and one-sided, but also a noble vision of what Vietnam could be.
We are headed into our third hour of conversation, when I broach the subject of plagiarism. Especially in their first twenty pages, Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War and Duong Thu Huong’s Novel Without a Name are remarkably similar. Both novels tell the story of a twenty-eight-year-old soldier fighting in the Central Highlands. One book opens in the Jungle of Screaming Souls, the other in the Gorge of Lost Souls. The infantryman hero encounters innocent girls mutilated by marauding troops, a dead orangutan with human characteristics, and narcotic flowers blooming in a hallucinatory forest. While Bao Ninh’s novel burns with the intensity of lived experience, Duong Thu Huong’s work often falls into set pieces with “soap box” dialogue.
Roneo copies of The Sorrow of War began circulating around Hanoi in 1989. A year later, what Nina McPherson calls the “hastily titled” Novel Without a Name, was sent to small overseas publishers in France and the United States. The best-selling author of three novels was rushing her fourth book into print, while a thirty-seven-year-old former soldier was trying to finish his thesis at the Nguyen Du Writers School.
“Scenes in your novel resemble scenes from Bao Ninh’s book,” I say. Before I can continue, Huong sits bolt upright on the sofa. Her face hardens. She adopts the formal French that inserts monsieur into its declarations. “Yes, this is true,” she says about the similarities between the two texts. “We were writing our books at the same time. Each of us was approaching the same subject from different directions.”
“But you wrote your book after the appearance of Bao Ninh’s novel,” I say, mentioning the date at the end of her manuscript, which says it was finished in “Hanoi, December 11, 1990.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I only read his book many years later, here in France. I never read it in Vietnam. I am not close to Bao Ninh. We live in different worlds. I am a committed dissident, while he leads a normal life.”
Then Huong tells me a story about meeting Bao Ninh. The story is composed of Huong’s customary elements. It reveals a weak man overwhelmed by fear, but it has a surprise ending.
“When Bao Ninh visited me in Paris last year, I asked him, ‘Why is this book the only thing you have written in your life?’
“‘It is because of my wife,’ he said. ‘She was worried about the safety of our family.’ To protect his son and allow him to study in the United States, he rejected his other son. Literature is a child also. We give birth to it. He had to refuse this child out of fear for his family. It’s sad. This may be hard for you to understand, but he had to turn his back on his own book. The police tortured him by threatening his family.
“‘This was a mistake,’ he confessed. ‘It was wrong of me to do this. I regret it. I should have done things differently. You have to forgive me. I did it for my wife, so my son could finish his studies and travel overseas.”
“This is the inevitable bargain for every Vietnamese writer,” Huong says.
After talking for more than four hours, after drinking endless cups of tea and being plied with cherries and cashews, we are given as a parting gift not one but two boxes of chocolates. I am reminded of the fact that in Vietnam a gift is not a gift. It is an obligation.
“I believe you are a true journalist, a journalist who can interview gangsters and criminals,” she says on parting. “I myself feel like a sort of criminal who has just had her past history examined.”
“I’m sorry for making you feel like a criminal,” I say.
Back on the street, my daughter and I begin searching for a florist. I will be the next man in her life to send Duong Thu Huong his apologies, along with a large bouquet of flowers.
Part 13: Cyberspace country
This twelveth installment of the serialisation of Swamp of the Assassins by Thomas A. Bass was posted on February 17, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
13 Feb 2015
By Thomas A. Bass
Today Index on Censorship continues publishing Swamp of the Assassins by American academic and journalist Thomas Bass, who takes a detailed look at the Kafkaesque experience of publishing his biography of Pham Xuan An in Vietnam.
The first installment was published on Feb 2 and can be read here.
It is a steamy night in June when I meet Bao Ninh at his house in Hanoi, where we will spend the evening chatting and sweating over green tea. Located in an old part of the city, the house has the usual barred gate opening into a covered patio filled with motorbikes. Behind the bikes lies a narrow room with yellowed walls lit by neon tubes. The room is furnished with a black couch, a couple of chairs, and a coffee table holding lychees, biscuits, and our bitter tea. I am accompanied to this meeting by my Vietnamese assistant and another young woman who is serving as our translator.
Ninh strikes me as hyper-cautious, with the kind of wariness one develops after many years spent trying to avoid people who want to kill you. Curled in a chair, ready to spring, his body looks as if it has muscles that have forgotten how to relax. When it enters my mind I can’t shake the idea that he has eyes in the back of his head. It is a large head, crowned with silver hair. Ninh’s eyebrows sweep over glancing black eyes, above sunken cheeks and a drooping mustache. Wearing a brown, short-sleeved shirt and black trousers, he chain smokes Camel Lights through smoke-stained fingers. A fan blows on us as we sit in the yellow gloom.
The next thing I notice about Ninh are his feet. He is barefoot, with wide, spatulate toes gripping the linoleum. Sunburned and flat, these are the feet of someone who spent years walking in rubber sandals, made out of old truck tires, down jungle paths with a backpack on his shoulders and an AK 47 in his hand. These are the feet of a peasant warrior whose physical needs have been stripped to a bare minimum. As he stares at me through his narrowed eyes, I realize that I am traveling heavy, with notebooks, digital recorders, and two assistants, while Ninh is still traveling light.
This first visit falls on National Journalists’ Day, which is celebrated mainly through bottoms-up drinking with one’s fellow cadre. Ever since his career as an author got derailed, after the denunciation campaign that began in the early 1990s, Ninh has supported himself writing a column for Literature newspaper (Bao Van Nghe), published by the Vietnamese Writers Union. “In principle, I have to go to work every day, but I am an old man, so I stay at home instead of going to the office,” says the author, who at the time was fifty-six. “I write an article a week. My last piece was on the countryside, about illiteracy among rural kids who are so poor that they have never been taught to read.”
After years of penning his inoffensive columns for Literature, Ninh was allowed to publish a short story collection in 2002 and another collection in 2005 called Daydreaming During a Traffic Jam. “As is usual in Vietnam, the publisher printed two or three thousand copies of Daydreaming and then allowed the book to go out of print,” he says. “You will have a hard time finding it now. I don’t even have a copy.” One story in the volume was translated and published in English as “Savage Winds.” “The title refers to the wind that blows in the Central Highlands,” he says. The rest of the stories remain untranslated. When I ask him if he minds his literary obscurity, Ninh shrugs. “I only care about the royalties,” he says.
In 2006, Ninh was also allowed to release a Vietnamese version of The Sorrow of War, for which he was paid a few thousand dollars. “The book has been translated and published in ten countries,” he says. “I don’t know anything about these translations. People tell me that sometimes parts of the text have been left out.” Again, he tells me how much he appreciates the royalties from these foreign publications.
“I have written two unpublished novels,” he says, when I broach the subject of censorship. “I do not intend to publish them.” The first, called “A Plain of Grass” (“Thao Nguyen”), is about a platoon of soldiers who capture a Montagnard village in the Vietnamese Highlands. Here they find a white missionary who has filed down his teeth like a Montagnard and gone native. What do the soldiers do with their half-white, half-Montagnard captive—kill him, set him free, or ship him to Hanoi? The question divides the unit, and they begin fighting among themselves. “The central character is a Catholic priest,” says Ninh. “The story is set during the war, when times were very different than they are now. We were ardent communists back then.”
“The second novel is about the interrelation of cultures and people, about the mixing of cultures. It, too, is about the war,” he says. The final, yet-to-be-named volume in Ninh’s trilogy is the most incendiary. It tells the story of South Vietnamese prisoners of war who have been sent to a POW camp in the north. (I have been told that the camp is located in Ho Chi Minh’s natal province of Nghe An.) Since most of the village men have died in the war, the local women mate with the southern soldiers and produce a new Vietnamese race, blended from Ho Chi Minh northerners and defeated southerners.
“The novel deals with soldiers, President Thieu’s soldiers,” says Ninh, referring to soldiers in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. “After the war they are arrested and sent to the north, to undergo a kind of brainwashing. Ten years later they are released.”
“My son has a girlfriend, who is the daughter of a Republican soldier,” he says, confirming that the new, blended Vietnam is already here. His son at the time is working in Hanoi for an American investment firm. “It is safe to have money now,” says Ninh. He mentions that his son appeared recently on TV, in a program about Vietnamese youth, and how he is helping to organize a film festival in Hanoi. “It’s strange to me how Vietnamese youth like American movies,” he says. “Americans and Vietnamese have something in common. We Vietnamese are often mistaken for Chinese, but we are very different. We are more open than the Chinese, more like Americans.”
Ninh returns to narrating the plot of his novel. “The soldiers are brought to the north.”
“To Nghe An province?” I ask.
 Bao Ninh at his house in Hanoi (Photo: Thomas Bass)
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“I didn’t say that,” Ninh says, narrowing his eyes and retreating behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. Everyone knows that if he mentions Nghe An province, the book will be read as a commentary on Ho Chi Minh. He wants to drop the subject. “It is too difficult to understand,” he says. I urge him to continue.
“They are sent to a labor camp, in a residential area. Some northern women get pregnant. The soldiers are released and go to America. Then they return from America, to visit the women and their children.”
“So at this point the soldiers are viet kieu,” I suggest, using the term for exiled Vietnamese.
“You are right, but the Vietnamese people don’t like the term viet kieu,” he says. “This originated from the Chinese, and now you Americans use the term, but we prefer to say nguoi viet hai ngoai, overseas Vietnamese, which is more precise.”
“Do the soldiers stay in Vietnam?”
“Are they happy?” Bao Ninh replies. “It depends. Life in America is easier. They keep their American nationality. This is a fable about the history of Vietnam. It was written a couple of years ago. I do not intend to publish this now. For me, writing is more important than publishing. This is a story from the past.”
“Usually I never talk about my books, only with my closest friends,” he says. “I wrote the novel from my personal interests. I wrote about Vietnamese soldiers who worked with Americans. I tried to find out special things about Republican soldiers. I tried to understand them.”
“Did you succeed?”
“No one can understand another person fully,” he says. “I believe I understood them. It took me a long time, actually from the end of the war until now. I have traveled to the south a lot. I stayed in the south for several months after the end of the war. Many of my relatives live in the south. My younger sister, a teacher, lives there. It’s easier to earn money in Saigon than in Hanoi.”
As if to skirt away from a sensitive subject, Ninh says, “I haven’t finished writing the book yet. I spend most of my time drinking with friends.”
“Drinking what?” I ask.
He leans over and writes in my notebook “bia hoi,” draft beer, and then jokingly gestures toward my colleagues, “This is not a suitable subject for your translator,” he says.
“Middle-aged people like me are undisciplined,” he says. “I write at night, for three to four hours, starting after 10:00 p.m. I was born in the Year of the Cat, and cats don’t sleep at night. Writing is not an occupation here in Vietnam. It is a hobby. You don’t earn any money for it.”
My final question concerns Duong Thu Huong, one of whose books, Novel Without a Name, contains a number of passages resembling his own work. Ninh avoids the question. “There’s a lot of false information about her, saying she isn’t respectable, which isn’t true,” he says. “I have read all of her books, even those not allowed to be published in Vietnam because she is anti-communist.” To get my question answered, he suggests I go to Paris and ask Duong Thu Huong herself.
Part 11: The black cloud
This tenth installment of the serialisation of Swamp of the Assassins by Thomas A. Bass was posted on February 13, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
9 Feb 2015
By Thomas A. Bass
Today Index on Censorship continues publishing Swamp of the Assassins by American academic and journalist Thomas Bass, who takes a detailed look at the Kafkaesque experience of publishing his biography of Pham Xuan An in Vietnam.
The first installment was published on Feb 2 and can be read here.
The next morning, taking a taxi to the Cau Giay district on the west side of town, I pass several of the lakes that dot downtown Hanoi to arrive at a tree-line boulevard where Nha Nam, my publisher, fills an old building with louvered windows that open onto iron-fronted balconies. Already by ten in the morning a gray blanket of heat and humidity has draped itself over the city. Nha Nam’s ground-floor bookshop is filled with translations of Proust, Kundera, and Nabokov, and I am pleased to find a stack of my own books displayed next to Lolita. I introduce myself to the receptionist and am led upstairs to meet Nguyen Nhat Anh, chairman of the company, and Vu Hoang Giang, his vice-director and partner. I had actually met Giang the night before. Without my knowing that he would be there, he had attended a lecture I gave at the Hanoi Cinematheque and introduced himself afterwards. As the chairman of Nha Nam presents me with a bouquet of purple lotus blossoms, I fear that my remarks the previous evening may have been too candid.
Nguyen Nhat Anh, a slender man in a black tee shirt, jeans, and sandals, looks more like a coffee shop habitué than the editor of a major publishing company. Known for his literary nose, he works at a desk covered with books and manuscripts piled ten deep. His partner, Giang, wearing an open-necked polo shirt, is a tall, handsome fellow with a ready smile and a small tattoo decorating his right wrist. I imagine they have divided the corporate turf between them, with Anh responsible for scholarship and Giang for sales. Later I learn that a lot of the manuscripts piled on Anh’s desk are actually publishing contracts, while Giang has his own literary interests, and, in fact, he was the person who finally arranged to got my book published.
Thu Yen, the editor with whom I have been sparring for the last few years, has not been invited to this meeting. She remains at her desk in the contracts department, while another translator has been hired for the occasion—a young Vietnamese woman, a former office manager at an American law firm. As the scholarly Anh and smiling Giang discuss the nuances of Vietnamese publishing, the young woman’s translations get shorter and shorter, until finally she seems on the verge of giving up completely. Fortunately, I have brought my own translator, and we will spend several hours later that afternoon reconstructing the conversation.
I take a seat on the couch in Anh’s office. Outside the louvered windows, the cicadas in the trees are making a fearsome racket. Giang has already warned me an in email about the “tight and rather heavy-handed censorship system of state-owned publishers in Vietnam. This you may not fully imagine.” I am offered a cup of green tea and then we launch into a discussion of censorship, how it is handled generally in Vietnam and particularly in my case.
Anh takes the lead, giving lengthy, formal answers to my questions, until Giang takes over when the boss heads to the espresso machine next to his desk and brews himself a cup of coffee. I am tempted to ask for one myself but decide to be polite and stick with tea. Anh describes how the censors dictate even the smallest details. He gives as an example the fact that political figures must have honorifics. One is not allowed to refer to the founder of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as Ho Chi Minh. He has to be Bac Ho—Uncle Ho—which inscribes him simultaneously into Vietnamese family structure and history.
“Censorship is a very tough question,” says Anh. “We don’t really have a system or set of rules for how it’s handled. All we know is that lots of publishers didn’t dare to publish your book.”
The jalousie doors and windows in Anh’s office open onto a porch overlooking the street, but they remain closed against the heat. Other than his desk, groaning under its layer of books, and a coffee table, piled with yet more books, the room holds nothing more than the couch on which I am sitting and bare green walls.
“Because another book had been published on the same subject, we thought this improved our chances,” he says. “We were sure we could get your book in print.”
I ask Anh why he chose a northerner to translate my book, someone who missed the nuances and even the jokes told by its southern hero.
“The differences are like music,” he says. “Singers sing the same songs but give them different interpretations. When we translated Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, we tried to keep it honest to the southern dialect. But in your case, we thought we were dealing with a political book, a work of non-fiction. The people who read these books are northerners, and you have to make the text understandable for them.”
I ask Anh and Giang to talk in more detail about censoring my book. They describe the by now well-known process, which begins with the translation, commissioned from someone who knows how the game is played. Then the book goes to the editor, who removes all the “sensitive” material.
“How does he know what to remove?”
Nha Nam Vice Director Vu Hoang Giang and Chairman Nguyen Nhat Anh (Photo: Thomas Bass)
“The process is dangerous, dangerous to the author, but also dangerous to the publisher,” says Anh. By this point in the conversation, he has kicked off his sandals and is cooling his bare feet on the tile floor. Overhead, a fan swirls tepid air around the room. Temperatures in Hanoi this spring are spiking over a hundred.
Anh tells me the story of a book of poems the company published in 2006 by an author named Tran Dan. Dan’s work has been banned in Vietnam since the 1950s, when he was involved in the nhan van giai pham affair. This was Vietnam’s version of Mao’s cultural revolution, a purging of writers, artists, and musicians who were blacklisted, imprisoned, and banned for fifty years. One of these artists was Van Cao, who, in 1945, had composed Vietnam’s national anthem. From 1957 until 1986, Vietnamese found themselves in the peculiar position of being allowed to play but not sing Van Cao’s anthem. Only when the words were changed was the song once again performed. Van Cao himself had long ago stopped composing, thereby joining the ranks of Vietnamese artists—hundreds of them, from the 1950s to the present—who have been driven into silence or exile.
With Mao long dead and his cultural revolution discredited, Nha Nam thought it was safe to bring the poet Tran Dan back into print. They had obtained a publishing license from a state-owned company in Danang and printed some of his poems when all hell broke loose. “The police came to the book fair and seized all our books,” says Anh. “Then they raided our offices and destroyed more books. This was terrifying for us. We thought we were going to be closed down and put out of business.”
“What went wrong?” I ask.
Anh lowers his voice and mentions the name of an agency named A25.
“Now it’s A87,” Giang says, correcting him.
Governmental departments that begin with the letter “A,” which stands for “an ninh,” meaning “security,” are legion, and A25—now known as A87—is the one that deals with publishers.
“In any case, it’s Cultural Security, cuc an ninh van hoa,” says Anh.
“What’s their address?” I ask.
“They don’t have an address,” he says, implying they are everywhere. The two men discuss among themselves in terse sentences what went wrong. None of their interchange is translated.
“There is no single organization in charge of censorship,” says Anh. “There are a lot of people involved.” Again, he mentions the Ministry of Public Security.
Giang mentions the Ministry of Information and Communication. “This is the office in charge of publishing,” he says.
Anh adds to this list the national police and other organizations. “It’s like a cloud,” he says. “They are everywhere.”
“Usually they don’t arrest editors,” he says. “This can happen to writers, but editors generally know in advance when they’re going to run into trouble.”
I ask them to speak in more detail about the censorship involved in publishing my book. This is when I hear for the first time about Nguyen The Vinh. Vinh is the man who produced the final list of cuts to my book and secured its publishing license. From their description of him, I get the idea that Vinh is a heavy-weight in the publishing world. The former director of various companies, he now works as an editor at Hong Duc, the state-owned publisher attached to the Ministry of Information and Communication. This company not only gave my book its publishing license, it also put its logo on the title page. Actually, the book has two logos on the title page: Nha Nam’s trudging water buffalo, with a book-reading buffalo boy (or girl) on its back, and Hong Duc’s white H inscribed inside a black D.
I learn another interesting fact about Vinh. He was the editor who secured the publishing license for Professor Berman’s Perfect Spy. The Vietnamese translation of this book was supposed to grease the skids for mine, and who better to perform this feat than the man who had already done it before.
As Anh busies himself making his cup of espresso, Giang takes over the narrative. “Your book was rejected by five or six publishers,” he says. “Other publishers who looked at it wanted to interfere a lot, changing the content. They kept asking to cut more and more. We resisted these changes, until finally Nguyen The Vinh agreed to publish it.”
“And what changes did he demand?” I ask.
Anh is pacing behind his desk. A frown darkens Giang’s face. “When you talk to him, you shouldn’t be too hard in your questions,” he says. “It could affect Vinh and the chances for your book to remain on sale.”
“Who asked Vinh to get involved?” I ask.
“Giang approached him,” says Anh. I can see that these men are nervous about talking to me in such detail. By now, both of them are sitting with their arms crossed over their chests.
“The publishers at Hong Duc wanted to write a forward to your book,” says Anh. “We rejected this idea.”
I can imagine how Hong Duc’s introduction would have reworked the standard tropes about Pham Xuan An as a “perfect” spy, an impeccable Communist cadre, who, nonetheless, garnered fulsome praise from his Western admirers. I am grateful to my editors for saving me this embarrassment.
“It was Vinh who took personal responsibility for publishing your book,” says Anh.
“You mean it can still be censored?”
Your book could be seized tomorrow,” he says. “No one knows where the trouble could come from. We have yet to see any negative signs, but someone can always find ‘sensitive’ items in a book.”
“What subjects would you like me to avoid talking about while I am in Vietnam?” I ask.
“Please remember that Vinh has his reputation and career on the line,” says Anh.
By now everyone knows my opinion of censorship—the cowardly business by which the powerful lie to the weak in order to protect their self-interest. I have no need to repeat myself.
“You shouldn’t be too direct with Vinh,” says Anh. “He was acting on directions from the publisher.”
“You should also know that your book is a living thing,” says Giang. “It can be published again, with material that was cut in the first edition added back in later editions.”
I assure Anh and Giang that I will do my best not to offend anyone. They know that an uncensored Vietnamese version of my book will be released later on the web.
“Right now we have no standards in Vietnam,” says Giang. “We don’t know our rights, and we don’t know from what direction the censorship is coming. But our system is changing. We hope you understand that we can improve. We can do better. We are learning how to function in the world of international publishing.”
“If your book is republished, we want to put back in the details that were cut,” he says. “You have a positive perception of Vietnam. People know this. So we’re asking for you to be patient. Give us some time to work things out. People appreciate you as an expert on Vietnam, a critic, sometimes a tough critic, but a fair one. Vietnamology—maybe that’s the right word for what you do.”
“How many ‘hard’ books do you publish each year?” I ask.
“In our career we are always working with difficult books,” says Anh. “This comes with the territory. But your book was a special case. It was the most difficult. I wanted to give up. I thought it was hopeless. I’m hot headed, and this was just too hard. I threw up my hands. ‘This book is never going to be published!’ I said. But my colleagues are more patient than I am. ‘Wait,’ they told me. ‘There is still a chance.’ It was thanks to Giang and Thu Yen that your book saw the light of day. They were patient. They persisted.”
“I felt like a hostage between two warring armies,” says Anh. “I was being fired on from two directions. The author was resisting cuts. The censors were demanding cuts. There are authors who know how this system works, Milan Kundera for example. He has lived under censorship. When we published his books, he understood our problems and agreed to let us do what we had to do. It would have been helpful if you had been more reassuring.”
“On behalf of the publisher, we want to tell you that we’re happy your book has been published,” says Giang. I suspect he’s feeling sorry about my having been compared unfavorably to Milan Kundera. Actually, I’m amused that a refugee from communist Czechoslovakia would prove tractable to being censored in communist Vietnam.
“This is not the first time that Vietnam and the United States have engaged in difficult negotiations,” I say. Anh and Giang appreciate the joke. “I’m glad we arrived at a happy conclusion.” We shake hands, and then I am asked to sit at Anh’s desk to sign copies of my book for members of Nha Nam’s staff. Apparently, everyone in the company wants a copy—perhaps before the book disappears from the shelves. All throughout lunch hour people keep drifting into Anh’s office with yet more copies for me to sign.
Part 7: Perfect spy?
This sixth installment of the serialisation of Swamp of the Assassins by Thomas A. Bass was posted on February 9, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
28 Jan 2015 | mobile, News, United Kingdom
Galileo is “vehemently suspect by this Holy office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the centre of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the centre of the world…”
Sentencing at the Inquisition of Galileo,
22 June 1633
Every philosopher, prophet, scientist and great political and social reformer of their day has started as a heretic. Mohammad blasphemed against the polytheist social order of Mecca, Jesus against the monotheistic legalese of the Temple, and Moses before them against the idols of the Children of Israel. The right to heresy, to blasphemy, and to speak against prevalent dogma is as sacred and divine as any act of prayer. If our hard earned liberty, our desire to be irreverent of the old and to question the new, can be reduced to one, basic and indispensable right: it must be the right to free speech. Our freedom to speak represents our freedom to think, our freedom to think our ability to create, innovate and progress. You cannot kill an idea, but you can certainly kill a person for expressing it. For if liberty means anything at all, it is the right to express oneself without being killed for it.
The importance of internalised liberalism in contemporary British society has come to represent a cornerstone of modern Liberal Democrat thinking.1 This paper aims to extend that notion by arguing that liberalism is an idea that should be actively, universally and externally asserted, among, between and across communities, cultures and borders. A certain neoorientalism has crept upon us, partly in reaction to the failed militarism of the neo-conservative years, but mainly attributable to historical self-critical attitudes towards the British Empire. This neo-orientalism interprets liberalism as a Western construct ill-fitting to non-Western cultures. Struggling, dissenting liberals within minority community contexts find that they have no greater enemy than these neo-orientalists who lend credence to the idea that they are somehow an inauthentic expression of their ‘native’ culture. This view, while embracing moral relativity, reduces other cultures to lazy, romanticised and static cliches. Far worse, it ends up not just tolerating but actively promoting illiberal practices in the name of assumed cultural authenticity, even where such promoted practices are in fact ahistoric, inauthentic neo-fundamentalisms.
There is a great betrayal of minorities-withinminorities afoot. The price of this betrayal in modern Britain is monocultural ghettos that stifle minority opportunities by acquiescing to the silencing of innovative voices, in the name of this assumed cultural authenticity. Only by the universal reassertion of free speech will those silent voices stand any chance of being heard. Free speech is not a ‘Western’ ideal but a human one.
Globalisation and identity
Rapid globalisation has helped to erode national identity. Encouraged by innovations in international travel and communications, we have witnessed instead the rise of lateral transnational identities that reach across borders, rather than within them, to find affinity. Consequently, previously isolated pockets of parochialisms are connecting, providing a sense of belonging to global causes beyond geographical boundaries.
A common fear is that living in multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies leads to the disintegration of one’s own culture. Some, especially those from minority communities, feel the need to protect themselves against this threat by ardently clinging on to, and exaggerating, a narrow form of their ethnic or religious identity. ‘Cultural differences’ are therefore emphasised and ring-fenced more than they otherwise would be.
Of course it is possible to do this in a healthy way, and many do. But some modern cultural insecurities have warped to form a broad anti-establishment sentiment in Britain. Victimhood is used as means to create a sense of besiegement, leading to highly exclusionary identity formations. The rise of identity politics and reactionary political or religious ideological trends across Europe can be said to be inspired
by this fear of losing one’s identity, and sense of belonging, via globalisation.
It is usually the case that those who are most passionately against the status quo are the most active at proselytising, and so it has come to pass that it is the political extremes – Far Right, Anarchist and Islamist – who have best exploited this ability to build exclusionary, transnational identities. Here, globalisation can be said to have ‘sharpened the differences and increased cultural confrontations’2 in Europe rather than creating integrated, multicultural melting pots.
Cultural relativity
In response to tension created by the rise in reactionary political trends, liberal society has understandably been inclined to reduce the risk of conflict. Words, images and actions that could be deemed offensive by certain sections of a community, especially a religious community, are subsequently avoided by us in apprehension, worried such actions may create an unwanted reaction. In essence, unhealthy taboos that ideally need to be broken are simply further entrenched. In some cases these taboos are actively and tragically enforced in the guise of defending diversity.
In what would now be considered a preposterous – and thankfully illegal – measure, in 1993 the London Borough of Brent proposed a motion to make Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) legal. The motion called for FGM to be classed as a “right specifically for African families who want to carry on their tradition whilst living in this country”. Ann John, a local Brent councillor at the time, successfully opposed this motion and tabled her own amendment in which she called FGM “barbaric” and said it was “no more a valid cultural tradition than is cannibalism”. But this was the 1990s, the decade of unhinged state-sponsored monocultural ghettoisation, unfortunately named multiculturalism. Subsequently, for her heresy Ann suffered a tirade of abuse and threats. She was called a “colonialist missionary” who “thinks she knows what is best for Africans” and even threatened with mutilation herself. It took until 2014 for Brent Council to finally teach FGM prevention in all its schools. Yet according to statistics cited by the government’s Department for International Development (DfID), over 20,000 girls under the age of 15 are still at risk of FGM in the UK every year.3
At the time of writing, Britain is yet to witness one successful conviction for this reprehensible practice. Ann John has an explanation for this, interviewed in 2014 she “believes her treatment scared off other people from speaking out against FGM for years out of a fear of being called racist”.4
As with homophobia, the cultural war against FGM is slowly being won in Britain. But the fact that many still feel unable to make negative judgements about other practices found in alternative cultures, and our own, is deeply problematic. We liberals will be rightly judged by the extent of our concern for the weakest among us. In today’s Britain, the weakest among us are often assumed to be minority communities. In fact, the weakest are those minorities-within-minorities for whom the legal right to exit from their communities’ constraints amounts to nothing before the enforcement of cultural and religious shaming. Those most vulnerable would include dissenting religious sects, feminists, LGBT and apostates, all of whom may question the prevailing dogma within their group identity. Liberalism in this instance is duty bound to unhesitatingly support the dissenting individual over the group, the heretic over the orthodox, innovation over stagnation and free speech over offence. Or, as John Maynard Keynes would say, to “appear unorthodox, troublesome, dangerous, disobedient to them that begat us”.5
Instead, what is often the case is that prevailing neo-orientalist thinking would either remain silent, or criticise those who do seek to challenge dogma, for ‘causing offence’. An assumption is made here about what ‘authenticity’ in a given culture is. Subsequent actions and advice, policy or otherwise, are patronisingly given on the basis of this assumption.
Confirmation bias leads to seeking reaffirmation for this assumption from the very ‘community leaders’ who stand most to gain by reaffirming it. Few stop to ask why it is assumed that Britain’s three million Muslims, the vast majority of whom are not religious, would wish to engage the public through Citizen Khan6 like conservative figures.7
Not only is this assumption lazy, but it suggests that each culture is effectively a homogenous, static group; the members of which think the same way and would all be equally offended by the same thing, none of whom can speak as individuals, but like native savages would require ‘chiefs’ to speak on their collective behalf. If seeking unity in politics is fascism, then seeking unity in religion is theocracy. Liberalism cherishes internal diversity in both.
When such cultural relativity becomes the norm, more progressive and liberal elements within minority religious communities or cultural groups in particular are betrayed, only then to be besieged by all sides. Through this reductionist quest for cultural ‘authenticity’, anything deemed Western is incrementally excluded by our neo-orientalists as inauthentic, until only the most conservative, dogmatic and regressive voices remain – which are, ironically, entirely a product of modernity in themselves.
Alas, this search for authenticity is a battle that only fundamentalists and fascists can win. Bigotry is not merely generalising a culture, religion or race for hate. Those who generalise a culture, religion or race in order to display a patronising love, more befitting to a pet, must also be considered bigots. And only the most regressive forces stand to gain by exaggerating their culture, religion or race, either in defiance or compliance to bigots. Liberalism must seek out the individual, not the stereotype. Because such reductionist approaches are nothing but an outdated superiority complex that should have died along with the Empire.8 Because to deem the ‘poor natives’ as being too primitive to grasp liberalism, and to subsequently hold them to and judge them by a lower standard, is a poverty of expectation.
Let us take the example of the Law Society of England and Wales. In early 2014, the Law Society, a necessarily secular institution, published a practice note advising solicitors on how to draft wills in accordance with “Sharia Law”; except there is no single version of Sharia, and in Arabic, Sharia is a noun, not an adjective to describe the noun ‘law’. These guidelines included assertions that “Sharia Law” endorses the disinheritance of apostates and adopted children, and discriminates against women. It is true that English Common Law allows for inheritance to be decided in any way that pleases the testator. The concern here however is why the Law Society felt entitled not only to intervene in an intra-religious debate about the nature and applicability of Islam today, but that when doing so it picked the most regressive form of medievalism and promoted it as ‘authentic’ Islam,9 thus betraying, and further isolating, liberal reforming Muslims from the outset.10
The publication of cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten are a case in point. It was only when the press started approaching certain ‘community leaders’ that an angry response became apparent, especially since only religious imams were approached.11
Likewise, I recently tweeted an innocuous stick figure, not drawn by me, of an image called ‘Mo’ saying “Hi” to an image called ‘Jesus’. The image called ‘Jesus’ said in reply, “How ya doin?”. I did so because, as a Muslim, I felt it was necessary to make the point that I was not offended by a benign cartoon in light of media portrayals of all Muslims as overly-sensitive. I did so in the aftermath of a live TV debate on the subject. Ironically, and while I vehemently disagree with the veil, my intervention came in the context of attempting to defend the rights of a veiled Muslim woman who had just been told that her veil ‘offends’ people. After asserting her own right to wear what she likes, this lady retorted to a man next to her that he however could not wear his tee-shirt with the above described stick figure labelled ‘Mo’, because it offends her. My reply was that people are free to take offence at how I dress, but they are not free to insist that I dress in a way that does not offend them. This principle applies to all, fairly. I then retweeted that I was not offended by this stick figure labelled ‘Mo’. Blasphemy is in the eye of the beholder. I was subsequently inundated with a torrent of abuse and violent threats by some vocal but reactionary Muslims. More telling was the chastisement by many non-Muslim neo-orientalists who accused me of being insensitive to ‘Muslim feelings’, as if I myself was not one of these Muslims with some ‘feelings’ I needed to express.
And then came the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
Taking the easy route by condemning the radical for causing unnecessary trouble is overwhelmingly tempting, and incredibly lazy. Liberals would instinctively see the birth pangs of progress through such heresy. Cultural relativism has created an absurd situation whereby minorities-within-minorities are no longer free to move intra-cultural debates forward. I recall once as a child that a passerby approached a gay couple on the street and told them not to hold hands in public, asking the gay couple “are you deliberately trying to offend us?” I rest my case.
The inconvenient minority
And so that great lynchpin of liberty, freedom of speech, as defined by Article 19 of the UDHR,12 is being eroded by exclusionary group identities. These groups struggle to compete over who is more offended, and who is more entitled. Civil society is now expected to self-censor and the term ‘tolerance’, as explained by Flemming Rose, is ‘no longer about the ability to tolerate things for which we do not care, but more about the ability to keep quiet and refrain from saying things that others may not care to hear’.13
This brings me to the term ‘Islamophobia’, often deployed – even against other Muslims – as a shield against any criticism, and as a muzzle on free speech. If heresy is to be celebrated, it follows that no idea, no matter how ‘deeply held’, is given special status. For there will always be an equally ‘deeply held’ belief in opposition to it. Hatred motivated specifically to target Muslims, people like me, must be condemned.
But to confuse this hatred with satirising, questioning, researching, reforming, contextualising or historicising Islam, or any other faith or dogma, is as good as returning to Galileo’s Inquisition. It follows, therefore, that any liberal naturally concerned with a fair society must be the first to openly defend against the erosion of free speech, especially when deceptively done in the name of minority rights.
Amidst a wave of self-doubt, blasphemy laws, though formally abolished in the UK, are effectively being revived by a cultural climate that purports to be liberal yet upholds illiberalism. Ultimately, restrictions on freedom of speech achieve only one thing – the domination of regressive ideals. Reactionaries are the first to take offence, and the first to demand punitive action against those who they deem offensive. In this way we actively empower illiberal dogma in the name of ‘diversity’, while abandoning vulnerable activists within minorities in the name of ‘respect for difference’.
Neo-orientalist reticence is in part driven by genuine concern of a racist backlash against minority communities by right wing bigots. Britain has become a place where white racists and Christian fundamentalists ally to the Right on domestic issues, while Islamists and Muslim fundamentalists ally to the Left on foreign policy issues. Both groups are able to co-opt the political rhetoric of each political wing to fuel their narrative of victimhood. Both are able to intimidate the ‘other’. Though this fear of racism is genuine – I have personally had to endure being violently targeted by racists over a prolonged period – ignoring Islamist extremism in the name of respect for difference will only fuel racism more by
feeding the Far Right’s victimhood narrative. Both extremes are in perfect symbiosis, feeding off each other to justify their respective grievances. But the difference between fairness and tribalism is the difference between choosing principles and choosing sides. Only a liberal torch can consistently shine through the fog of Far Right and Islamist extremisms and assert itself with any level of consistency.
George Orwell said, “The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends on public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them…” To Orwell’s admirable concern for inconvenient minorities, I would only add one idea: the cost of betraying people’s right to heresy is that inconvenient minorities-withinminorities are, in fact, the very first to be persecuted.
Maajid Nawaz is author of his autobiographical story Radical, Chairman of the counter-extremism organisation Quilliam, and a Liberal Democrat Parliamentary candidate for London’s Hampstead and Kilburn. The author would like to thank Hannah Larn and Ghaffar Hussain for their help. Maajid Nawaz can be contacted on Twitter @MaajidNawaz. The opinions expressed in this guest post are the author’s own.
This article was originally published in Centre Forum. It is reposted here with the author’s permission.
Footnotes:
1. David Laws and Paul Marshall (eds), ‘The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism’, London, 2004
2. Erika Harris, Nationalism: Theories and Cases, Edinburgh, 2009
3. Improving the Lives of Girls and Women in the World’s Poorest Countries, DfID
4. Evening Standard, ‘Ann John: I was branded a colonialist for fighting against ‘barbaric’ FGM’, Anna Davis, 28 March 2014.
5. John Maynard Keyes, ‘Am I a Liberal?’, Liberal Summer School, August 1 1925
6. Citizen Khan, BBC One sitcom, written and played by Adil Ray
7. See Amartya Sen: ‘Identity and Violence’ Allen Lane, London 2006
8. For further reading see Edward W. Said, ‘Orientalism’, 1978
9. See the Law Society, Sharia succession rules, 13th March 2014 and a response by the Lawyers Secular Society (LSS) ‘The Law Society should stay out of the theology business’
10. Only after some laudable campaigning, not least from the Lawyer’s Secular Society and One Law for All, among others, did the Law Society eventually – and quietly – drop this practice note.
11. See Kenan Malik’s Enemies of free speech, Index on Censorship, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2012.
12. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’.
13. Flemming Rose, cultural editor of the Danish newspaper JyllandsPosten, in Kenan Malik’s essay Enemies of free speech, Index on Censorship, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2012.
