It
may seem strange to many that republicans should
be found advocating free speech. Some would erroneously
contend that our involvement in political violence
was the epitome of everything but free speech. They
could further flag up the fact that the traditional
historical ensemble of republicanism has hardly
been edificed on the concept. Indeed Sinn Fein's
bogus opposition to the Dublin Government's Broadcasting
Ban was not an isolated phenomenon. Frank Ryan once
infamously asserted in the 1930s: 'as long as we
have fists and boots, there will be no free speech
for traitors'. The pluralistic notion that treachery
lies in the eye of the beholder and is in many cases
a matter of dates seemingly had little place in
Ryan's formidable intellect.
Such
streaks of republican authoritarianism have prompted
the observation from one academic that 'ex-IRA leaders
in power in independent Ireland often became enthusiastic
censors, in what was possibly a related expression
of anti-intellectualism and dislike of mental freedom'.
Perhaps this is what inevitably results from opposition
to authoritarianism - the latter reconstitutes itself
in former opponents, and freedom-seeking poachers
rush off with indecent haste to become shackling
gamekeepers.
But
what relevance does this have for us here in Ireland
where the Northern parties have reached agreement
'on economic strategy which has so far enabled the
Executive parties to continue to hold together,
even when seemingly irreconcilable differences on
other matters have looked likely to bring the edifice
down'; and in the South where the economy is booming?
Is the issue of free speech not merely the abstract
concern of those once described as 'terminally disgruntled
about everything'?
We
need look no further than the political discourse
pertaining to the equality agenda in the North where
the focus remains emphatically cross-community rather
than intra-community in that discourse centres on
minimising inequality between the two Northern communities.
Little is said about socio-economic antagonisms
that exist within the separate communities. There
is seemingly greater disadvantage within each community
than there is between the two blocs. Both Brian
Feeney and Eamonn McCann have drawn attention to
our centre-right government at Stormont which seems
intent on keeping matters as such. In the Republic,
despite the roar of the Celtic Tiger, we find what
Liz Curtis depicts as 'the land of saints and scholars
(becoming) the land of slaves to dollars.' Consequently,
we are confronted with a report which claims that
there would be 6,000 fewer deaths among people aged
under 65 every year if social inequalities were
eliminated.
In
a world where a totalising phenomenon of globalisation
seemingly holds sway we may be excused for concluding
that our politicians, on economic matters at any
rate, look increasingly like the late Czech poet
Miroslav Holub's 'crowd of dwarfs in the King's
palace'.
And
it comes as small comfort that what passes for the
Left in Ireland may rejoice at the rejection of
the Nice Treaty. Yet the all too familiar trends
of Europeanisation are evidently already at work
in Ireland in a manner which leads us to think 'Nice
is dead - long live Nice'. Can it be truly said
that - given the expressed concerns of John Gormley
about 'now living in a culture of silence and acquiescence'
- we are not already busy emulating the following?
The French political class stress the 'coherence
and rationality' of policies rather than the need
to build consent for them, while the British Labour
Party is in a 'process of constant, gentle strangulation
that's done in the name of consensus and the unity
of the party and winning the next general election.'
And all the while looming ominously on the political
horizon is Austria which in the view of Konrad Becker
'doesn't have a very big tradition of dissenting
democratic structures and I'm very worried about
the consequences'. Worry he should.
Of
course the vast majority of people here either support
or accept the prevailing situation. It is their
right to decide for themselves what regime of truth
they shall align with. As Mike Garde argues 'people
have the right to believe in anything they like,
but they also have the right to information which
enables them to make an informed choice'.
Against
this it would be highly imprudent to doubt the existence
of what a recent Irish Times writer described as
'the increasingly sophisticated news and information
control on the part of the political establishment'.
Commenting on Thatcherite privatisation ripping
through the Northern economy Eamonn McCann said
'If there has been public discussion of this proposed
radical change ... many of us have missed it'. In
the South a situation exists, described by Professor
Kathleen Lynch, where 'there has been a neutralisation
of public discourse and debate. A language of sameness
prevails'.
In
a filtered or emasculated intellectual environment
it does not follow that alignment to prevailing
political and economic arrangements is necessarily
good. Hannah Arendt observed that 'ordinary decent
moral people adapted to Nazism with ease as soon
as it became the established order.' While no one
would argue that there is a comparison between Ireland
and Nazism there is always a need to deconstruct
and contest. In the culture of secrecy and filtered
information transparency is hated and feared by
those whom closure serves.
This
underlines the democratic function of free speech.
Censorship is rarely employed for the sole purpose
of prohibiting speech. Its overriding objective
is to prevent people hearing. Yet hear they must.
For whatever political and moral theories exist
to rationalise the current state of affairs, in
the words of an Independent columnist, 'they will
be inextricably tangled with political arrangements,
so that the morality of any society by and large
protects the powerful'.
Hilary
Wainwright's observation, therefore, on the British
Labour Party should not go amiss:
As
is the way of all reforms that are not pressed for
by a powerful and vigilant movement, secret wheeling
and dealing has put pluralism on ice....politics
without pluralism: essentially a court from which
courtiers are sent out to gauge the feelings of
the peasants and then organise pageants to show
that the king has their innermost needs at heart.
(there is a need for) an unsilenceable political
force, a persistent day-to-day focal point in public
debate.'
Even
were such a force to be created and such a debate
to occur and, which combined, managed to overcome
that 'language of sameness' referred to by Professor
Lynch, of what use would it be if it is determined
by our inhabiting:
a
culture of lies, the one law of which is that everybody,
all the time, must pretend they are telling the
truth …We have finally and fully adopted a
world view in which there is no such thing as truth,
only an infinitely modifiable system of competing
discourses.
No
doubt this is where the traditional, but thankfully
irrelevant, Left would lead us with their notions
of vanguardism and self-serving claims to exclusive
ownership of yet another truth which they have been
historically tasked to inflict upon the rest of
us. And yet can we seriously dispute the need for
an alternative discourse? For Michel Foucault 'discourse
can be ... a point of resistance and a starting
point for an opposing strategy'. That alone suffices
to explain the need for free speech. Given the degree
of closure from where else shall an alternative
discourse emerge?
Are
we who seek to remain republican, while differing
seriously with other republicans, to acquiesce in
both the language of sameness and the regime of
filtered information for the sake of solidarity
with the exploitative communalist politics that
now prevail; all the while ignoring the stricture
of Theodore Adorno against the 'throttling of thought'
that 'solidarity can call on us to subordinate not
only individual interests but even our better insight'?
Do we really seek that comforting comradeship of
'a closed community with a closed mind'? Comforting
because, as Adolf Eichmann found, 'a life of obedience,
led by orders, instructions, decrees and directives,
is a very comfortable one in which one's creative
thinking is diminished'. If so then forget about
change. As the historian A.J.P. Taylor claims:
conformity
may give you a quiet life ... but all change in
history, all advance, comes from the nonconformist.
If there had been no troublemakers, no Dissenters,
we should still be living in caves'
Manuel
Tome, a general secretary of Frelimo has argued
that 'nobody has the right to silence a voice that
was speaking out against the ills of society'. Yet
as Erich Fromm pointed out those who speak the truth
'mobilise the resistance of those who repress it'.
Nevertheless, throughout history people have always
come forward to prick the balloons of censorship.
'My duty is to speak out,' Emile Zola wrote. 'I
do not want to be an accomplice'. Taslima Nasreen
protested that 'I will not let myself be reduced
to silence...Don't I have a moral responsibility
to raise a voice in protest?' And oddly but admirably
for one from his tradition, the Marxist mathematician
Dirk Struik refused 'to place his fertile mind at
the disposal of governmental technocrats'.
The
anti censorship journalist Tom McGurk once argued
that 'exile becomes both the essential physical
and imaginative distance for the writer'. He could
have added that it can also amount to social suicide.
Yet in a society where 'politics and power are Darwinian
zones where only the strong survive' those writers
who are 'outside the inner circles and who are beholden
to no one can act as important critical voices,
or as advocates for those who otherwise would not
be heard.'
In
a society where the prevailing chant resonates with
Thatcherite stridency 'there is no alternative',
it is clear that the powerful's opposition to critique
is not based on what they perceive as the absence
of a prescriptive strategic alternative. A descriptive
critique alone is enough to upset them. Because
somewhere in there lies the seed that starts people
thinking differently. And in an era where the repression
of difference is a strategic objective of the powerful,
it is imperative that republican writers do not
succumb to the temptations of a quiet life. Silence
is complicity.
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