On Friday the 3rd June I had the pleasure to attend the Christopher Hitchens Memorial Lecture which this year was being given by David Aaronovitch on the subject of freedom of speech.
Mr Aaronovitch is one of those speakers and writers who although I disagree with much of their politics, are engaging in both print and in person. I can’t say I share many of Mr Aaronovitch’s Leftist views, especially some of his views on immigration, but on the subject of the right to speak freely without fear of arrest, he is without a doubt bang on.
He started his talk by speaking about Chris Hitchens, his atheism, his sense of mischievousness and how Mr Aaronovitch would have dearly loved to have heard what Hitchens would have said about Donald Trump. He touched on the matter of the evangelist Larry Taunton and said Hitchens probably guessed that Taunton would publish a book about him after his death and therefore led him along for a laugh.
Mr Aaronovitch said that Christopher Hitchens was also an expert on George Orwell and related the story that it was TS Eliot who turned down Orwell’s book ‘Animal Farm’ because not enough of the Faber and Faber board at the time believed in the book or its message. When the book was finally published said Mr Aaronovitch, the book was released with Orwell’s now world famous quote on liberty printed in the frontispiece. These words are: ‘Liberty, if it is to mean anything at all, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.’ Mr Aaronovitch said that being able to tell people the stuff that they don’t want to hear or which is designed to be inoffensive is not liberty. The problems do not come he said from telling people the stuff that they do want to hear, but telling them stuff that they don’t want to hear or which might make them uncomfortable.
David Aaronovitch then went on to give details of some of the appalling restrictions on free speech and outrageous examples of censorship that are taking place in US and British universities. He mentioned how a professor at Yale university was hounded out of her job because she objected, very politely it must be said, to some po-faced PC knobwittery about inappropriate Halloween outfits coming out of the university’s diversity establishment. He put this moral panic about Halloween into context by saying that there have sometimes been similar unfounded moral panics about Halloween and this is yet another one.
He then went on to say that this incident gave a lot of concern to the College Republicans and they had a debate on the issue and on the matter of free speech. One speaker made the comment that the politically correct types had gone overboard and said: “It’s not like an Indian village has been wiped out is it?’ This sent the politically correct types in to overdrive and it showed quite clearly as Mr Aaronovitch said the ‘absolute intolerance of Yale’.
Then Mr Aaronovitch spoke of the problems at Missou College where the far Left managed to force out the college Dean. It was Missou that gave us the brilliantly hypocrisy of a Professor of Mass Media calling for ‘muscle’ to remove a journalist from where they were Constitutionally entitled to be.
He then moved back to this side of the proverbial ‘pond’ and spoke about the situation at Leeds University where every external speaker had to have his or her details and the details of what they were going to talk about examined by a ‘health and safety committee’. This is appalling. So weak and unwilling to be exposed to new and challenging ideas have our students become that a contrary opinion is treated as a ‘health and safety’ problem.
It is indeed absolutely mad when someone like Germaine Greer, a pioneer feminist and a person who like the rest of deserves the right to speak, has found herself banned from speaking at British universities. Her ‘crime’? Well, the reason she has been banned is because she refuses to accept the agenda of the transgender movement and believes that people who have surgery to transition from male to female are ‘not women’ and that those submitting themselves to gender reassignment procedures are ‘doing violence’ to themselves. You may or may not agree with Ms Greer, but she should have a right to speak. There is something creepy and not right that a small number of loud and sometimes violent trans activists can shut down opinions that run counter to their own narrative.
Mr Aaronovitch then went on to examine the phenomenon of those who he described as promoting a culture of ‘vindictive protection’ and said that there has grown a ‘punitive outrage at opinions that are held by others’. Such people he said also had a tendency to ‘catastrophise’ everything and anything. That I felt was an interesting point and I wondered how many people would let such a person who catastrophises everything run anything for them? I reckon not many but there appear to be far too many of such people having too much of an influence on what the rest of us can say or even think. Mr Aaronovitch described those who engage in vindictive protection and who see every thing as a disaster as those who have an ‘exaggerated fear of what might happen if people had free speech’. He also said that there are certain people who go out of their way to encounter views that they find offensive in order to be offended so they can tell others, including the police who are tasked with administering ‘hate speech’ laws, just how damned offended they were.
The ludicrousness and oppressiveness of Britain’s hate speech laws and the speech restrictions in the Communications Acts and the Public Order Acts were also highlighted by Mr Aaronovitch. He specifically mentioned the case of Paul Grange of Worcester who wore a t-shirt which said that the Hillsborough stadium disaster was merely ‘vermin clearance’. He wore this shirt to a pub and the landlord took exception to it and barred him from the establishment. This is where the matter should have ended, by being banned from pub. The problem is, this is Britain a land where free speech is increasingly restricted and where people can be arrested merely because someone is ‘offended’ by something. This idiot, who should have been merely barred from the pub and called a twat, instead ended up by being arrested by West Mercia Police and kept in custody.
Mr Aaronovitch said that people in some circumstances may need to hear stuff that is uncomfortable and challenging. He also said that restrictions on free speech may even rebound on those who implement them. He gave the example of Holocaust denial and said that outside of Germany this is causing problems as it is merely feeding the paranoia and conspiracy theorist mindset of the sort of anti-Semitic lunatics who deny the Shoah.
My, Editor’s, own personal opinion is that these lunatics need to be argued with and countered with demonstrable fact. I can understand Germany feeling that it requires Holocaust denial legislation but elsewhere I believe that it may be questionable, especially if it having unintended consequences. I prefer to know where my genuine far right Jew hating nutcases are so I can argue with them, it would be much more worrying if they were driven underground to wank off over their pictures of Adolf and fester unseen and unchallenged.
Mr Aaronovitch pointed out a striking similarity between those who wished to be authoritarian when it comes to speech and those who convert to strict religious paths. He said that the desire by a free speech authoritarian for certainty is very similar to a woman he encountered who had converted to Islam. She said that in Islam ‘I don’t need to think, in here I can have absolute certainty, without any doubt.’
Mr Aaronovitch’s lecture covered some of the more obvious challenges to free speech in the UK and beyond. He said that the Rushdie Affair was a short sharp shock to the idea that the concept of free speech was one that was progressing through the years. The reaction of Muslims to Rushdie s book the Satanic Verses, was a great shock to the British complacency about freedom of speech.
Mr Aaronovitch reiterated that there should be no right for people to be offended or hurt by what people say and that people should not end up in prison for expressing opinions or using words that are clearly not intended or able to incite violence. ‘Public outrage’ he said ‘should not land people in prison’.
This excellent lecture was then followed by an all too short Q and A session and I was delighted and honoured that I was permitted to ask a question of Mr Aaronovitch. I asked him if he thought that there should be a British equivalent of the constitutional guarantee of free speech that the American Bill of Rights gives. I was very pleased to find out that he does agree with me that the right to speak ones mind needs to be protected.
As soon as I saw on the Hay Festival programme that David Aaronovitch was going to give the Hitch Memorial Lecture then I knew that this is what I wanted to see. It’s always nice to hear people who may be opposite to me politically, but who still believe that we all have fundamental rights, including the right to speak that which is on our minds.
I would definitely take the opportunity, if I had it, to hear David Aaronovitch speaking on this subject again.
