"Political Correctness"

[blandy]

3 hours ago, sexbelowsound said:

people ahead of us who refused to sign their petition were branded as 'racists'.

This sort of bullying and anti-discourse was rife at that place and I was just a student.....It's something that stuck with me even too this day. 

Bonkers innit? I wonder if at least some of those numpties might have kind of not yet had fully rounded opinions and views and ways of understanding the world at that point in time. I mean as people mature they kind of get a better understanding of the world and stuff, and lose some of the (bluntly idiotic) "views" they espoused when they were younger. Or they might just have been dickheads.

[sexbelowsound]

38 minutes ago, blandy said:

Bonkers innit? I wonder if at least some of those numpties might have kind of not yet had fully rounded opinions and views and ways of understanding the world at that point in time. I mean as people mature they kind of get a better understanding of the world and stuff, and lose some of the (bluntly idiotic) "views" they espoused when they were younger. Or they might just have been dickheads.

Yeah. I wonder if they were just getting a little excited. All I was trying to do was get a bloody sandwich hahahaha 

[coda]

There was that university (home to a school of journalism ) in London which voted to ban The Sun, Daily Mail and Express. I don't know if the lecturers encourage this or if they're scared of their students.

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

19 hours ago, peterms said:

Trump & Le Pen are making political mileage by mirroring & amplifying opinions that already exist in swathes of mainstream society

The opinions,  I wonder if they are created by mostly media influence or actual experiences.  

If it is the media then surely it can be reversed ? If it's actual experiences then that alone should be fair to form an opinion from it I suppose as it's real to them?

Also,  if it exists in the a large segment of mainstream society,  how the **** did nobody see it coming and take action ?

Not sure if these are good questions or not but it seems we slept walked into it.  

 

 

[peterms]

18 minutes ago, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

The opinions,  I wonder if they are created by mostly media influence or actual experiences.  

If it is the media then surely it can be reversed ? If it's actual experiences then that alone should be fair to form an opinion from it I suppose as it's real to them?

Also,  if it exists in the a large segment of mainstream society,  how the **** did nobody see it coming and take action ?

Not sure if these are good questions or not but it seems we slept walked into it. 

(The quote was from @Awol by the way)

I was reading an interesting series of blogs on all this by someone who is a scifi writer and a druid (really) and who comments a lot on what is called in the US the "flyover states".

This is an example.

Quote

...Barring any of the incidents that could throw the election into the House of Representatives, we’ll know by this time next week whether the bipartisan consensus that’s been welded firmly in place in American politics since the election of George W. Bush will stay intact for the next four years. That consensus, for those of my readers who haven’t been paying attention, supports massive giveaways to big corporations and the already affluent, punitive austerity for the poor, malign neglect for the nation’s infrastructure, the destruction of the American working class through federal subsidies for automation and offshoring and tacit acceptance of mass illegal immigration as a means of driving down wages, and a monomaniacally confrontational foreign policy obsessed with the domination of the Middle East by raw military force. Those are the policies that George W. Bush and Barack Obama pursued through four presidential terms, and they’re the policies that Hillary Clinton has supported throughout her political career.

 

Donald Trump, by contrast, has been arguing against several core elements of that consensus since the beginning of his run for office. Specifically, he’s calling for a reversal of federal policies that support offshoring of jobs, the enforcement of US immigration law, and a less rigidly confrontational stance toward Russia over the war in Syria. It’s been popular all through the current campaign for Clinton’s supporters to insist that nobody actually cares about these issues, and that Trump’s supporters must by definition be motivated by hateful values instead, but that rhetorical gimmick has been a standard thoughstopper on the left for many years now, and it simply won’t wash. The reason why Trump was able to sweep aside the other GOP candidates, and has a shot at winning next week’s election despite the unanimous opposition of this nation’s political class, is that he’s the first presidential candidate in a generation to admit that the issues just mentioned actually matter.

 

That was a ticket to the nomination, in turn, because outside the bicoastal echo chamber of the affluent, the US economy has been in freefall for years.  I suspect that a great many financially comfortable people in today’s America have no idea just how bad things have gotten here in the flyover states. The recovery of the last eight years has only benefited the upper 20% or so by income of the population; the rest have been left to get by on declining real wages, while simultaneously having to face skyrocketing rents driven by federal policies that prop up the real estate market, and stunning increases in medical costs driven by Obama’s embarrassingly misnamed “Affordable Care Act.” It’s no accident that death rates from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning are soaring just now among working class white people. These are my neighbors, the people I talk with in laundromats and lodge meetings, and they’re being driven to the wall.

 

Most of the time, affluent liberals who are quick to emote about the sufferings of poor children in conveniently distant corners of the Third World like to brush aside the issues I’ve just raised as irrelevancies. I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I’ve heard people insist that the American working class hasn’t been destroyed, that its destruction doesn’t matter, or that it was the fault of the working classes themselves. (I’ve occasionally heard people attempt to claim all three of these things at once.) On those occasions when the mainstream left deigns to recognize the situation I’ve sketched out, it’s usually in the terms Hillary Clinton used in her infamous “basket of deplorables” speech, in which she admitted that there were people who hadn’t benefited from the recovery and “we need to do something for them.” That the people in question might deserve to have a voice in what’s done for them, or to them, is not part of the vocabulary of the affluent American left.

 

That’s why, if you pay a visit to the town where I live, you’ll find Trump signs all over the place—and you’ll find the highest concentration of them in the poor neighborhood just south of my home, a bleak rundown zone where there’s a church every few blocks and an abandoned house every few doors, and where the people tipping back beers on a porch of a summer evening rarely all have the same skin color. They know exactly what they need, and what tens of thousands of other economically devastated American communities need: enough full-time jobs at decent wages to give them the chance to lift their families out of poverty. They understand that need, and discuss it in detail among themselves, with a clarity you’ll rarely find in the media. (It’s a source of wry amusement to me that the best coverage of the situation on the ground here in the flyover states appeared, not in any of America’s newspapers of record, nor in any of its allegedly serious magazines, but in a raucous NSFW online humor magazine.)

 

What’s more, the working class people who point to a lack of jobs as the cause of middle America’s economic collapse are dead right.  The reason why those tens of thousands of American communities are economically devastated is that too few people have enough income to support the small businesses and local economies that used to thrive there. The money that used to keep main streets bustling across the United States, the wages that used to be handed out on Friday afternoons to millions of Americans who’d spent the previous week putting in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, have been siphoned off to inflate the profits of a handful of huge corporations to absurd levels and cater to the kleptocratic feeding frenzy that’s made multimillion-dollar bonuses a matter of course at the top of the corporate food chain. It really is as simple as that. The Trump voters in the neighborhood south of my home may not have a handle on all the details, but they know that their survival depends on getting some of that money flowing back into paychecks to be spent in their community.

 

It’s an open question whether they’re going to get that if Donald Trump wins the election, and a great many of his supporters know this perfectly well.  It’s as certain as anything can be, though, that they’re not going to get it from Hillary Clinton. The economic policy she’s touted in her speeches, to the extent that this isn’t just the sort of campaign rhetoric that will pass its pull date the moment the last vote is counted, focuses on improving opportunities for the middle class—the people, in other words, who have already reaped the lion’s share of those economic benefits that didn’t go straight into the pockets of the rich. To the working classes, she offers nothing but a repetition of the same empty slogans and disposable promises. What’s more, they know this, and another round of empty slogans and disposable promises isn’t going to change that...

His core idea is that what he calls "the bicoastal echo chamber of the affluent" doesn't pay much attention to what has happened across much of the US.  Most of the attention is focussed on the two coasts where most people live, and the national media and others tend to pass from one coast to another (hence "flyover states") paying little attention to what's happening in the vast land mass in between.

So in answer to your question, perhaps there is an underlying reality of loss of jobs and loss of income, security and status, which is keenly felt locally, which the more liberal national media don't talk about much, and which the right wing media and bloggers pick up and use to fuel animosity against outsiders and immigrants as well as the perceived liberal elite, as though they rather than global capitalists are the source of the problem.

The idea of political correctness feeds very easily into this, in that if people feel that their concerns are not being addressed, in fact actively ignored, and if they are also chided for their resentment and the way they express their frustration, they will quickly become angry.  It's a demagogue's dream.

There are echoes here of the situation in parts of the UK.

Other commentators have remarked on how much US media attention is about cities, but the issues in small towns, where employment has often been via one large core manufacturer rather than the more open service economy that thrives in cities, are very different.  Since large scale employment via manufacturing isn't going to return to these areas, there's not an immediately obvious solution that works in the real world as opposed to campaign rhetoric.  It could get very unpleasant.

[BOF]

I suppose it's as good here as anywhere.

Prepare to tiptoe around generation snowflake in the workplace

Quote

Prepare to tiptoe around generation snowflake in the workplace

Companies need to get prepared for young employees who will take offence at anything

Last week I was asked to give a talk about generation snowflake. This was at a breakfast organised by a recruitment company called GTI Solutions and the idea was that I would provide an urban anthropologist’s take on this new tribe for the benefit of their corporate clients, most of whom are thinking about how to recruit them and, once they’ve got them, how to keep them happy. This has given me an idea about a new consultancy service I could provide.

The main challenge thrown up by employing these new graduates, it seems to me, is that they won’t be particularly good at communicating with members of other generations in the workplace. One of the hallmarks of the ‘me, me, me generation’ is that they’re marooned in a kind of no man’s land between adolescence and adulthood. I say ‘no man’s land’, but perhaps ‘safe space’ is a better description because they clearly like being there. Why do they refuse to take the final step into adulthood? Partly because their immersion in social media since the year dot has accustomed them to just communicating with their peers. It’s difficult to grow up if you have no idea how to talk to grown-ups.

That, at any rate, is the theory of Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardises Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30).

‘Never before in history have people been able to grow up and reach age 23 so dominated by peers,’ he told Time magazine. ‘To develop intellectually you’ve got to relate to older people, older things: 17-year-olds never grow up if they’re just hanging around other 17-year-olds.’

Quite plausible, and it means that when these ‘kidults’ arrive in the workplace they will have difficulty making themselves understood. Indeed, they probably won’t be able to fully grasp what it is their seniors are saying to them either. It’ll be like the United Nations, except without the simultaneous translation. And the snowflakes will be speaking Esperanto.

So how can I help? Well, that isn’t a million miles from my experience working for Vanity Fair in the Condé Nast building on Madison Avenue in the mid-1990s. As a youngish Fleet Street hack surrounded by middle-aged Americans, I often found myself talking at cross purposes to my workmates. That was particularly true if I ever tried to make anyone laugh.

For instance, on my first day at work I was in the lift waiting to be transported to the 11th floor when an attractive Vogue fashion editor standing next to me tried to hold the doors open for her friend. They slammed shut, almost trapping her hand, and I turned to her and said, ‘They’re fashion sensitive. If you’re not wearing Prada or Gucci they will take your arm off.’ She gave me a baffled look: ‘But I am wearing Prada.’

After I’d made a couple more of these unsuccessful attempts at flirtatious banter, someone left a copy of Condé Nast’s ‘Sexual Harassment Policy’ on my desk. ‘It has long been the policy of Condé Nast to maintain a professional working environment for all its employees, free of any form of discrimination or harassment,’ it said. The next bit was underlined in red felt-tip pen: ‘A joke considered amusing by one may be offensive to another.’

I found out just how true those words were when I hired a strippergram to surprise a male colleague on his birthday on what turned out to be Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Talk about cultural miscommunication. Anyway, the point is that my experiences in the Condé Nast building in the 1990s, struggling to make myself understood to the generation immediately above me, will be similar to that of snowflakes in the workplace, except it won’t just be members of generation X they’ll have to work alongside, but boomers as well.

The situation is complicated by the fact that I kept giving offence, whereas generation snowflake will take offence. Instead of them worrying about saying the wrong thing to people my age, it’ll be middle-aged men like me worrying about saying the wrong thing to them. We’ll be sandwiched between a disapproving older generation and an even more disapproving younger generation. Which, come to think of it, is a bit like being a parent.

So that’s my consultancy idea: I’ll advise corporate clients, at vast expense, how to manage the miscommunication that’s bound to occur when these Peter Pans turn up in their offices. Any takers?

 

[StefanAVFC]

What a load of shite.

[sexbelowsound]

Where has this generation snowflake phrase come from?

[KHV]

Just now, sexbelowsound said:

Where has this generation snowflake phrase come from?

I was wondering that myself

[sexbelowsound]

The guy who wrote that book sounds like he has some sort of social disorder and therefore thinks that everyone interacts with others in that way.

Stripper gram at work? always a smart move.

[Davkaus]

34 minutes ago, sexbelowsound said:

The guy who wrote that book sounds like he has some sort of social disorder and therefore thinks that everyone interacts with others in that way.

Stripper gram at work? always a smart move.

It's a parody, right? I mean, I find it hard to tell because I have the default position of viewing journalists with contempt, but it has to be, right?

 

Quote

Where has this generation snowflake phrase come from?

The words and actions of most student unions in the last few years, and the likes of the special non-binary gender cliques on Tumblr, I imagine. 

I don't think it's unique to the generation currently at or just leaving uni. Every generation has had things "you're not allowed to joke about", or views you can't talk about. You never used to be able to say **** on TV, for ****'s sake.The subject matter may change, but there's always going to be people telling you what you can and can't say. Sticks and stones, really bad people.

I'll never forget the first time a young woman with dreadlocks asked me if I assumed her gender. I thought she was joking. She wasn't joking.

Edited December 6, 2016 by Davkaus

[chrisp65]

31 minutes ago, sexbelowsound said:

The guy who wrote that book sounds like he has some sort of social disorder and therefore thinks that everyone interacts with others in that way.

Stripper gram at work? always a smart move.

what BOF didn't put in the quote, but does link to on the, er, link is that it was written by professional right wing troll retard Toby Young

that's pretty much all you need to know

I'm offended by the existence of Toby Young.

[sexbelowsound]

1 minute ago, chrisp65 said:

what BOF didn't put in the quote, but does link to on the, er, link is that it was written by professional right wing troll retard Toby Young

that's pretty much all you need to know

I'm offended by the existence of Toby Young.

Ah, well he trolled me pretty good.  Saying that though i'm 31 so it wasn't aimed at me.

Edited December 6, 2016 by sexbelowsound

[StefanAVFC]

The biggest irony of this right wing labeling of 'generation snowflake' is that  these people get 'triggered' when you call them bigots for having bigoted views.

[choffer]

1 hour ago, chrisp65 said:

what BOF didn't put in the quote, but does link to on the, er, link is that it was written by professional right wing troll retard Toby Young

At the risk of sounding like a smartarse, I briefly skimmed BOF's post and thought to myself "sounds just like that twunt, Toby Young". I think it was mostly the tone but possibly also the Conde Nast reference. He really is a toad of a man.

[chrisp65]

Just now, choffer said:

At the risk of sounding like a smartarse, I briefly skimmed BOF's post and thought to myself "sounds just like that twunt, Toby Young". I think it was mostly the tone but possibly also the Conde Nast reference. He really is a toad of a man.

ditto, fellow saddo

I recognised it and went looking for the name

what a sad pair of individuals we are 

 

[Morley_crosses_to_Withe]

1 hour ago, Davkaus said:

I'll never forget the first time a young woman with dreadlocks asked me if I assumed her gender. I thought she was joking. She wasn't joking.

Aha! You've just assumed her gender. How do you know she wasn't one of the 57 other genders!? I'm off to Twitter to express my outrage. 

[snowychap]

27 minutes ago, choffer said:

At the risk of sounding like a smartarse, I briefly skimmed BOF's post and thought to myself "sounds just like that twunt, Toby Young". I think it was mostly the tone but possibly also the Conde Nast reference. He really is a toad of a man.

And from next month he'll be in charge of the free schools charity:

Quote

Toby Young, the author, journalist and original poster boy for the free schools movement has been named as the new director of the government-backed charity, New Schools Network (NSN).

...more on link

 

[BOF]

I'm not familiar with Toby Young and I was going to say that if you can see past his choice of language you can see some interesting points being made (clearly he thinks it equally important to wind people up as to make his point).

Here's a much more credible and respected author making similar points.

Quote

The age of outrage

Why are we so quick to take offence? The Private Eye editor on Orwell, Trump and the death of debate in post-truth politics.

By Ian Hislop

 

Anyone who thinks that “post-truth politics” is anything new needs to be reminded that George Orwell was writing about this phenomenon 70 years before Donald Trump.

Audiences listening to President-Elect Trump’s extraordinary disregard for anything resembling objective truth – and his astonishing ability to proclaim the absolute opposite today of what he said yesterday – will be forcibly reminded of the slogans that George Orwell gave to his political ­dictators: Black is White, War is Peace, ­Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength (the last of which turned out to be true in the US election). But any journalist trying to work out what the speeches actually mean, amidst the mad syntax and all the repetition (“gonna happen, gonna happen”), cannot help but fall back on Orwell’s contention that “political chaos is connected with the decay of language”. And the sight of Trump praising Secretary Clinton for her years of public service in his post-election victory speech while the crowd was still chanting his campaign catchphrase of “Lock her up” was surely a perfect example of Doublethink.

No wonder Trump is an admirer of Vladimir Putin, who is an admirer of the Soviet strongmen whom Orwell satirised so well. These echoes from the past are very strong in America at present but there are plenty of them reverberating through British and European politics as well. Our Foreign Secretary managed to accuse other European leaders of a “whinge-o-rama” when they issued qualified statements of congratulation to the new president-elect, even though he himself had previously accused Trump of being “nuts”. Black is White, Remain is Leave, a Wall is a Fence, two plus two equals five: but Brexit means Brexit.

You may find this reassuring, in that we have been here before and survived – or distressing to think that we are regressing to a grimmer Orwellian age. But one of the worrying developments attached to these “post-truth” political figures is the increasing intolerance in public debate of dissent – or even disagreement – about what objective truth might be.

A great deal has been written recently about the influence of social media in helping people to become trapped in their own echo chambers, talking only to those who reinforce their views and dismissing not only other opinions, but also facts offered by those who disagree with them. When confronted by a dissenting voice, people get offended and then angry. They do not want to argue, they want the debate to be shut down. Trump supporters are furious with anyone who expresses reservations about their candidate. Pro-Brexit supporters are furious with anyone who expresses doubts about the way the process of leaving the European Union is going.

I edit the magazine Private Eye, which I sometimes think Orwell would have dismissed as “a tuppeny boys’ fortnightly”, and after the recent legal challenge to the government about Article 50 being put before parliament, we published the cover reproduced on page 25.

It was a fairly obvious joke, a variant of the “wheels coming off” gag. But it led to a large postbag of complaints, including a letter from a man who said he thought the cover was “repulsive”. He also said he wanted to come around and smash up the office and then shove our smug opinions so far up our arses that we choked our guts out.

There was one from a vicar, too, who told me that it was time to accept the victory of the majority of the people and to stop complaining. Acceptance was a virtue, he said. I wrote back and told him that this argument was a bit much, coming from a church that had begun with a minority of 12. (Or, on Good Friday, a minority of one.)

This has become a trend in those who complain: the magazine should be shouted down or, better still, closed down. In the light of this it was interesting to read again what Orwell said in his diary long before internet trolls had been invented:

 

We are all drowning in filth. When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends.

 

This was in 1942, when the arguments were about war and peace, life and death, and there were real fascists and Stalinists around rather than, say, people who disagree with you about the possibility of reconciling freedom of movement with access to the single European market.

Orwell also made clear, in an essay called “As I Please” in Tribune in 1944, that what we think of as the new online tendency to call everyone who disagrees with you a fascist is nothing new. He wrote then:

 

It will be seen that, as used, the word “Fascism” is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee [a Tory group], the 1941 Committee [a left-liberal group], Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

 

When Orwell writes like this about the level of public debate, one is unsure whether to feel relieved at the sense of déjà vu or worried about the possibility of history repeating itself, not as farce, but as tragedy again.

The mood and tone of public opinion is an important force in the way our society and our media function. Orwell wrote about this in an essay called “Freedom of the Park”, published in Tribune in December 1945. Five people had been arrested outside Hyde Park for selling pacifist and anarchist publications. Orwell was worried that, though they had been allowed to publish and sell these periodicals throughout the entire Second World War, there had been a shift in public opinion that meant that the police felt confident to arrest these people for “obstruction” and no one seemed to mind this curtailment of freedom of speech except him. He wrote:

 

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.

 

This is certainly true for the press today, whose reputation in the past few years has swung violently between the lows of phone-hacking and the highs of exposing MPs’ expenses. In 2011 I remember at one point a football crowd shouting out the name of Ryan Giggs, who had a so-called superinjunction in place forbidding anyone to mention that he was cheating on his wife and also forbidding anyone to mention the fact that he had taken out a superinjunction. He was named on Twitter 75,000 times. It seemed clear that public opinion had decided that his private life should be made public. The freedom of the press was briefly popular. Later the same year it was revealed that the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked by the News of the World, along with those of a number of high-profile celebrities, and the public decided that actually journalists were all scumbags and the government should get Lord Leveson to sort them out. Those who maintained that the problem was that the existing laws (on trespass, contempt, etc) were not enforced because of an unhealthy relationship between the police, the press and the politicians were not given much credence.

In a proposed preface to his 1945 novel, Animal Farm, Orwell wrote: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

This is the quotation that will accompany the new statue of Orwell that has now been commissioned by the BBC and which will stand as a sort of rebuke to the corporation whenever it fails to live up to it. The BBC show on which I appear regularly, Have I Got News for You, has been described simultaneously in the online comments section as “overprivileged, right-wing Tory boys sneering at the working class ” and “lefty, metropolitan liberal elite having a Labour luvvie whinge-fest”. Disturbing numbers of complainants feel that making jokes about the new president-elect should not be allowed, since he has won the election. Humour is not meant to be political, assert the would-be censors – unless it attacks the people who lost the vote: then it is impartial and neutral. This role for comedy would have surprised Orwell, who was keen on jokes. He wrote of Charles Dickens:

 

A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea. Dickens is able to go on being funny because he is in revolt against authority, and authority is always there to be laughed at. There is always room for one more custard pie.

 

I think there is also room for a custard pie or two to be thrown against those who claim to be outsiders, against authority and “the system”, and use this as a way to take power. The American billionaire property developer who is the champion of those dispossessed by global capitalism seems a reasonable target for a joke. Just like his British friend, the ex-public-school boy City trader-turned-critic of the Home Counties elite.

The emblematic quotation on liberty is from a preface that was not published until 1972 in the Times Literary Supplement. A preface about freedom of speech that was censored? It is almost too neatly Orwellian to be true, and in fact no one seems to know exactly why it did not appear. Suffice to say that it is fascinating to read Orwell complaining that a novel which we all now assume to be a masterpiece – accurate about the nature of revolution and dictatorship and perfect for teaching to children in schools – was once considered to be unacceptably, offensively satirical.

The target of the satire was deemed to be our wartime allies the Russians. It is difficult to imagine a time, pre-Putin, pre-Cold War, when they were not seen as the enemy. But of course the Trump presidency may change all that. Oceania may not be at war with Eurasia any more. Or it may always have been at war with Eastasia. It is difficult to guess, but in those days the prevailing opinion was that it was “not done” to be rude about the Russians.

Interestingly there is now a significant faction on the British left, allied with the current leader of the Labour Party, who share this view.

 

The right to tell people what they do not want to hear is still the basis of freedom of expression. If that sounds like I am stating the obvious – I am. But, in my defence, Orwell once wrote in a review of a book by Bertrand Russell published in the Adelphi magazine in January 1939:

 

. . . we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

 

Orwell himself managed to come round to a position of accepting that an author could write well and truthfully about a subject even if one disapproved of the author’s politics: both Kipling and Swift were allowed to be right even though they were not left enough. So I am hoping that we can allow Orwell to be right about the principles of freedom of expression.

In the unpublished preface to Animal Farm he writes:

 

The issue involved here is quite a simple one: Is every opinion, however unpopular – however foolish, even – entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say “Yes”. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, “How about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?”, and the answer more often than not will be “No”. In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses.

 

One can test oneself by substituting contemporary names for Stalin and seeing how you feel. Putin? Assange? Mandela? Obama? Snowden? Hillary Clinton? Angela Merkel? Prince Harry? Mother Teresa? Camila Batmanghelidjh? The Pope? David Bowie? Martin Luther King? The Queen?

Orwell was always confident that the populist response would be in favour of everyone being allowed their own views. That might be different now. If you were to substitute the name “Trump” or “Farage” and ask the question, you might not get such a liberal response. You might get a version of: “Get over it! Suck it up! You lost the vote! What bit of ‘democracy’ do you not understand?”

Orwell quotes from Voltaire (the attribution is now contested): “I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Most of us would agree with the sentiment, but there is a worrying trend in universities that is filtering through into the media and the rest of society. Wanting a “safe space” in which you do not have to hear views that might upset you and demanding trigger warnings about works of art that might display attitudes which you find offensive are both part of an attempt to redefine as complex and negotiable what Orwell thought was simple and non-negotiable. And this creates problems.

Cartoon: "Voltaire goes to uni", by Russell and originally published in Private Eye.

We ran a guide in Private Eye as to what a formal debate in future universities might look like.

 

The proposer puts forward a motion to the House.

The opposer agrees with the proposer’s motion.

The proposer wholeheartedly agrees that the opposer was right to support the motion.

The opposer agrees that the proposer couldn’t be more right about agreeing that they were both right to support the motion.

When the debate is opened up to the floor, the audience puts it to the proposer and the opposer that it isn’t really a debate if everyone is just agreeing with each other.

The proposer and the opposer immediately agree to call security and have the audience ejected from the debating hall.

And so it goes on, until the motion is carried unanimously.

 

This was dismissed as “sneering” and, inevitably, “fascist” by a number of student commentators. Yet it was only a restatement of something that Orwell wrote in the unpublished preface:

 

. . . everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way. Both capitalist democracy and the western versions of socialism have till recently taken that principle for granted. Our Government, as I have already pointed out, still makes some show of respecting it.

 

This is not always the case nowadays. It is always worth a comparison with the attitudes of other countries that we do not wish to emulate. The EU’s failure to confront President Erdogan’s closure of newspapers and arrests of journalists in Turkey because it wants his help to solve the refugee crisis is one such obvious example. An old German law to prosecute those making fun of foreign leaders was invoked by Erdogan and backed by Mrs Merkel. This led Private Eye to run a competition for Turkish jokes. My favourites were:

 

“Knock knock!”

“Who’s there.”

“The secret police.”

 

What do you call a satirist in Turkey?

An ambulance.

 

As Orwell wrote in even more dangerous times, again in the proposed preface:

 

. . . the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the [Ministry of Information] or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion.

 

I return to stating the obvious, because it seems to be less and less obvious to some of the current generation. This is particularly true for those who have recently become politically engaged for the first time. Voters energised by Ukip and the EU referendum debate, or by the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, or by the resurgence of Scottish nationalism or by the triumph of Trump, have the zeal of the newly converted. This is all very admirable, and a wake-up call to their opponents – the Tartan Tories and the Remoaners and the NeoBlairites and the Washington Liberal Elite – but it is not admirable when it is accompanied by an overpowering desire to silence any criticism of their ideas, policies and leading personalities. Perhaps the supporters of the mainstream parties have simply become accustomed to the idea over the decades, but I have found in Private Eye that there is not much fury from the Tory, New Labour or Liberal camps when their leaders or policies are criticised, often in much harsher ways than the newer, populist movements.

 

 

So, when Private Eye suggested that some of the claims that the Scottish National Party was making for the future of an independent Scotland might be exaggerated, there were one or two readers who quoted Orwell’s distinction between patriotism being the love of one’s country and nationalism being the hatred of others – but on the whole it was mostly: “When if ever will you ignorant pricks on the Eye be sharp enough to burst your smug London bubble?”

Those who disagreed with the SNP were beneath contempt if English and traitors if Scottish. This was matched by the sheer fury of the Corbyn loyalists at coverage of his problems with opposition in his own party. When we suggested that there might be something a bit fishy about his video on the lack of seats on the train to Newcastle, responses included: “I had hoped Private Eye was outside the media matrix. Have you handed over control to Rupert Murdoch?”

Their anger was a match for that of the Ukippers when we briefly ran a strip called At Home With the Ukippers and then made a few jokes about their leader Mr Farage: “Leave it out, will you? Just how much of grant/top up/dole payment do you lot get from the EU anyway? Are you even a British publication?”

In 1948, in an essay in the Socialist Leader, Orwell wrote:

 

Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.

 

In other words, the defence of freedom of speech and expression is not just special pleading by journalists, writers, commentators and satirists, but a more widespread conviction that it protects “the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of Western civilisation”.

In gloomy times, there was one letter to Private Eye that I found offered some cheer – a willingness to accept opposing viewpoints and some confirmation of a belief in the common sense of Orwell’s common man or woman. In response to the cartoon below, our correspondent wrote:

 

Dear sir,

I suffer from a bipolar condition and when I saw your cartoon I was absolutely disgusted. I looked at it a few days later and thought it was hilarious.

 

 

[Xela]

35 minutes ago, Morley_crosses_to_Withe said:

Aha! You've just assumed her gender. How do you know she wasn't one of the 57 other genders!? I'm off to Twitter to express my outrage. 

I believe the correct pronoun is 'xe'

You can find all the relevant info on my tumblr page