Two recent cases Down Under show how dangerous
Twittermobs can be.
By BRENDAN O’NEILL
One of the curious things about the
twenty-first-century West is that it feels deeply censorious even though,
historically speaking, there isn’t a huge amount of state censorship. Yes, many
Western societies have anti-‘hate speech’ laws, debate-choking defamation
statutes, and a host of methods for regulating the raucous press, all of which
limit how daring or just downright offensive we can be. But we don’t exactly
live under nightmarish Orwellian regimes that pass laws explicitly designed to
silence political opinions, or to punish anti-Christ iconoclasm, or to
criminalise people found in possession of indecent novels or art. How do we
explain the existence of an almost unprecedented culture of censoriousness in
the absence of too much old-style state censorship?
It’s because censorship has been outsourced to the
mob. Censorship is alive and well; it’s just that today it is enforced, not so
much by brute law and the copper’s boot, but by mobs of self-styled guardians
of acceptable thought.
The illiberal job that was once done by the state and
its offshoots - the policing of thought and the punishment of outré speech - is
now increasingly done by informal intolerant networks. Outsourcing has been all
the rage among Western states in recent years. They’ve outsourced
responsibility for aspects of policing, for the guarding of prisoners, even for
the fighting of wars, as we saw with the use of mercenary outfits in the West’s
conquering of Iraq. Now, the moral authority to decree what can and can’t be
uttered in the public sphere has been outsourced, too, passed from the
government to moral lynch mobs, noisy cliques of non-state censors. The
relatively small amount of explicit state censorship today shouldn’t be taken
as a sign that we live in a more free society, but rather speaks to something
quite terrifying - that the state doesn’t really need to enact laws that police
our words at a time when there are so many mobs willing to do that dirty work
on its behalf.
In Australia over the past week, there have been two
striking examples of outsourced censoriousness, which reveal how this new
phenomenon works and how damaging it can be.
In the first case, a Georgian opera singer, Tamar
Iveri, was hounded out of Opera Australia (OA) after it was revealed she once
made homophobic comments on her Facebook page. Ms Iveri had been due to perform
in OA’s production of Otello,
which opens in Sydney next month. But then someone exposed that, a year ago,
she had said on FB that she was glad Georgian protesters had spat on Gay Pride
marchers in Tbilisi, and had asked the Georgian president not to let into
Georgia what she called the ‘West’s faecal masses’ - that is, homosexuals. Oz’s
left-leaners, small-L liberals and artsworld inhabitants decided that such a
person was not fit to perform in Australia, and so they used their considerable
influence - their newspaper columns, their social-networking pages, the
financial leverage of their patronage of the arts, which they made clear could
be withdrawn - to put pressure on OA to drop Ms Iveri. They won. Ms Iveri was
cast out, dumped by OA on the basis that her views were ‘unconscionable’. And
thus was Australian opera made morally pure once more.
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