Off Centre | Timidity over free speech is a gift to political authoritarians
Criticising China for its attempts control free speech ignores what is happening in the universities of the UK and the USA: concepts such as “microaggression” seem tailor-made for regimes like China’s
Two political hemispheres, two very public commotions.
In Beijing the other week, camera crews and foreign diplomats were harrassed, pushed and punched by police outside a courtroom where the civil rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang stood accused of “inciting ethnic hatred”, and of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” His charges relate to posts he left on social media which were critical of the Chinese government, including one in which he questioned its “excessively violent” crackdown on Uighurs in Xinjiang province. Looking on, foreign powers tutted, then went back to not caring terribly much.
Earlier in December, a humanist group at Goldsmiths University in London welcomed the activist Maryam Namazie to speak at an event. An Iranian woman who fled that country after renouncing Islam, Namazie has nevertheless consistently challenged “the erroneous conflation between Islam, Islamism and Muslims” and lobbied for British Muslim women to be afforded proper protection in family courts. To the Goldsmiths Islamic Society however, she was persona non grata. Having previously hosted Hamza Tzortzis, a man who advocates the beheading of apostates, has likened homosexuality to cannibalism and regards free speech as un-Islamic, it declared Namazie’s presence on campus to be a “violation of [their] space”. Members showed up to intimidate her, turning off her projector and shouting her down.
The response of the university was to put the humanist group under investigation – almost as cowardly an action as the decision of the students’ union at the University of Warwick, which in the autumn blocked a visit from Namazie on the grounds that her presence might offend Muslim students, only to relent when academics protested. Meanwhile, the Feminist and LGBTQ+ Societies at Goldsmiths enacted their own astonishing feats of gutless intellectual timidity in voicing solidarity with those offended by Namazie. The latter organisation explained that: “If [the speakers felt] intimidated, we urge them to look at the underpinnings of their ideology. We find that personal and social harm enacted in the name of ‘free speech’ is foul, and detrimental to the wellbeing of students and staff on campus.”
To attempt to draw parallels between what goes on in places like China and the narrowing of the parameters of free speech in the west is to invite guffaws.
To attempt to draw parallels between what goes on in places like China and the narrowing of the parameters of free speech in the west is to invite guffaws. For many bright people, it is enough to say that there is no such thing as absolute free speech, and that anyway it’s usually those on “the right” who complain that they’re being censored – and their views are nasty, so who cares? Those of us who value free speech as the starting point for most other freedoms worth having are the kind of people who “bang on”. The only response is to take things slowly from the top and explain why this stuff matters at all.
