Index on Censorship started at the front line of an ideological war
Dissidents, spies and the lies that came in from the cold
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CATEGORY: Magazine
Beijing’s fearless foe with God on his side
Jimmy Lai Chi-Ying, Hong Kong’s 74-year-old self-made billionaire, is a dissident. His cause is freedom. For championing this cause, he has been jailed since December 2020. One of the crimes he was found guilty of was lighting a candle in public to...
1972: Nixon went to China, BBC banned McCartney and Index was published
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] You may have heard that the 70s were different. In 1972, when the first issue of Index magazine was launched, no one knew that 20 years later there would be an influential economic bloc called the European Union....
Contents – Index at 50: The battles won, lost and currently raging
The spring issue of Index magazine is special. We are celebrating 50 years of history and to such a milestone we've decided to look back at the thorny path that brought us here. Editors from our five decades of life have accepted our invitation to...
Index at 50: The battles won, lost and currently raging
Volume 51.01 Spring 2022
No corruption please, we’re British
The UK has developed a parallel vocabulary to avoid labelling anyone with the c-word … until now, says Oliver Bullough
Hope in the darkness
Nathan Law, one of the leaders of Hong Kong’s protest movement, is convinced that the repression will not last forever. Here we publish an extract from his new book
“I wrote a play then lost my home, my husband and my trust”
Turkish playwright Meltem Arikan’s Mi Minör was blamed for the seminal Gezi Park protests that convulsed Istanbul
Censorship is still in the script
In June 2015, a national newspaper in Britain started a campaign to have a play banned. This surprised me for two reasons. One: clearly no one had told the Daily Mirror about the Theatre Act 1968, which abolished the state’s censorship of the stage...
Testament to the power of theatre as rebellion
The Belarus Free Theatre, whose 16 members have now gone into exile to escape the Lukashenka regime, are preparing to perform at the Barbican in London in 2022
A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.
The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.
The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.