Abstract
In 1992, Index received a letter from one of its major funders in the US. It thanked us for our invaluable work in bringing the Cold War to a satisfactory conclusion and recommended we use the remaining funds in the kitty to wind up in an orderly manner: ‘Thank you for everything you have done over the years. Go home. There is no more censorship.’
The perception that Index was associated with the Cold War politics of the US stems, no doubt, from the relationship of Stephen Spender, one of Index’s founding fathers, with the CIA-funded magazine Encounter. Though he resigned as editor as soon as the source of funding was made explicit, the rumours surrounding Index persisted, even though it is apparent from the earliest issues that this was by no means the case.
In its first year, the magazine included searching articles on the military dictatorships then dominant in southern Europe, notably Greece, the repression of free expression by the quasi-dictatorship in Argentina and other Latin American states, and a monitor – ‘Index Index’, still an essential part of the magazine – which recorded infringements of free expression across the world. Censorship, evidently, was not confined to the eastern bloc.
The magazine was re-launched in May 1994 with a seminal piece by Ronald Dworkin, ‘New Map of Censorship’, that set the agenda for the coming years and, incidentally, scotched once and for all any lingering doubt as to Index’s political associations. As Dworkin implied in his essay, censorship is part of the human condition, wherever those in power reduce the marginalised and excluded to silence. And power resides not only with governments: racism, xenophobia, prejudice – against the Roma in much of Europe, for instance – effectively deny people a voice and a presence in society. Censorship does not end, it merely changes its guise and shifts location. As Dworkin wrote:
Index was founded in the conviction that freedom of speech, along with the allied freedoms of conscience and religion, are fundamental human rights … But that strong conviction is suddenly challenged not only by freedom’s oldest enemies – the despots and ruling thieves who fear it – but also by new enemies who claim to speak for justice not tyranny, and who point to other values we respect, including self-determination, equality and freedom from racial hatred and prejudice, as reasons why the right of free speech should now be demoted to a much lower grade of urgency and importance.
End of an era, but not the end of censorship. Tearing down the Berlin Wall, 1989
Credit: Sipa Press/Rex Features
As the century turned, we not only saw conflict on a wider scale, we watched silence fall in parts of the world we had always thought immune to censorship. In the wake of 9/11, it was not only the United States that imposed silence through such legislation as the Patriot Act. As the ‘war on terror’ got into its stride, it was used by countries as far away as Russia, many newly independent countries in Eastern Europe and even within the more established democracies to silence criticism and dissent. Political correctness, another US invention, the fear of imposing western values on multicultural societies, such as the UK, and the ‘hate speech’ that came to characterise religious debate imposed further restrictions on free expression. However worthy the motives behind such attitudes, the effect was all too familiar: the censorship of protest and unwelcome opinion. As Dworkin concluded:
When we compromise on freedom because we think our immediate goals more important, we are likely to find that the power to exploit the compromise is not in our hands after all, but in those of fanatical priests armed with fatwas and fanatical moralists with their own brand of hate.
It is this that Index uniquely continues to expose and criticise with the energy and conviction that marked its first issue 40 years ago. Not only in places such as China, ‘freedom’s oldest enemy’, but closer to home among those ‘who claim to speak for justice not tyranny’. ❒