Index on Censorship magazine is discussed in Times Literary Supplement podcast.
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Elaine Showalter on how extreme misogyny turned Clinton vs Trump into woman vs man; Jonathan Barnes on the long shadow of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’; Houman Barekat on 250 years of ‘Index on Censorship’ and the mutable and myriad threats to free speech; Lara Feigel on two books, by the late Sue Lloyd-Roberts and Lara Pawson, about violence and the sufferings of women around the world – how much progress is there? Download the Shades of Censorship podcast on iTunes
Battle of Ideas 2016 A weekend of thought-provoking public debate taking place on 22 and 23 October at the Barbican Centre. Join the main debates or satellite events.
Comedy and censorship: Are you kidding me? Is the fear of offence killing comedy? Jodie Ginsberg, Timandra Harkness, Will Franken, Tom Walker and Steve Bennett with chair Andrew Doyle.
From hate speech to cyber-bullying: Is social media too toxic?
What of the free speech of those harassed into silence by a stream of abuse? And what of the abuse itself, consisting, as it so often seems to, of fantasy punishments and name-calling? Is that speech worth defending?
I remember the happy clowns of my childhood when the family would sit in front of the TV during the festive holidays to delight at the magnificent performances of the colourful pranksters in Billy Smart’s Christmas Circus.
This sensibility of the clown as the fool, the butt or object of ridicule, loveable but sad, hiding a deep melancholy beneath the exaggerated forced smile was prevalent throughout the twentieth century and was a muse for poets and artists such as Picasso, Bruce Nauman and Uno Rondinone.
The image of the clown changed as I grew older. With glam rock in the 1970s came Leo Sayer’s clown phase and David Bowie’s Lindsay Kemp phase, which re-surfaced in his video for Ashes to Ashes.
But why has the clown now leapt from the realms of the circus, pantomime and contemporary art into our everyday reality? It may the lead up to Halloween but in suburban America the craze of the “creepy” or “killer clown” has reached hysterical proportions. Unsettling, scary individuals dressed as clowns are reported across the media in the USA terrorising the public.
According to Time the craze began in South Carolina in late August where clowns were allegedly spotted trying to lure children into the woods. These reports were unsubstantiated but through meme culture and the media, the frenzy has now gripped the UK. The hysteria has led to lynch mobs hunting down clowns and the banning of clown suits. I have friends and family who told me that school authorities have sent letters, emails and texts to parents warning them about clowns. A policeman even came to visit a school asking secondary school pupils to be on alert.
With the school authorities and the law further whipping up a moral panic about psychotic clowns on the loose, it’s no wonder that children with highly fertile imaginations are spooked and parents are feeling anxious. One twelve-year-old girl daren’t leave the house and sleeps in her parents’ bed. This story has become a familiar one. The panic has even led to the cancellation of a theatre group, The Clown Doctors (the actors wear red noses), who were due to perform in a children’s hospital in Newcastle because “the hospital security said they had been placed on a local hit list for the killer clown craze”.
Fancy dress shops have been asked by the police not to sell clown costumes to anyone suspicious and the NSPCC’s Childline received more than 120 calls from worried children. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and online news services are awash with impending doom that killer clowns are on the rampage in our communities. What the hell is going on?
Of course, young people love playing pranks on each other but any adult trying to scare children out of their wits by chasing them, or lurking in dark areas, shouldn’t be surprised if they get a punch on the red nose. However, proactively hunting down creepy clowns is stretching the horror narrative a step too far.
Clowns are ambivalent figures where sadness and humour intermingle, but as with most romantic dispositions, there is a dark side to the persona. French Romantic Poets such as Theophile Gautier, Gerard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire imagined a dark transformation from the happy face/sad visage of the Pierrot to a more tragic figure: “The mask began to give way to reveal a skull beneath, the presence of death.”
The transformation of the clown into the grotesque is indicative of the times we live in. We increasingly feel powerless, disconnected, anxious, paranoid, traumatised, in need of being protected, triggered by certain books, films, art and speech that make some people feel uncomfortable. In this world the clown has become the bogeyman, the outsider, the anti-social, anti-establishment figure of imminent doom, rather like Heath Ledger’s mesmeric portrayal of the nihilistic, terrorist Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.
This clown’s performance of terror in our everyday lives reveals the growing breakdown of public space as civil, social space. Sociality, the sphere of social intercourse, and sodality – the sense of fraternity and belonging to community in deep and multiple ways – are eroded and replaced by narcissistic attention seeking, exhibitionist tendencies.
The “killer clown” meme is the extreme selfie, demanding that we look at them, that perhaps beneath the grotesque clown mask he or she may have some hidden depths of quality, but sadly that is not the case. They are simply creeps.
Having said that, social media and public space should allow for a multiplicity of expressions. The tiny minority of extreme, aggressive clown’s performing outside of the frameworks of art, theatre, film, circus, the internet and Halloween cannot scream victimhood if they are given a hiding for being deliberately anti-social. However, most of the menace seems to be hyped up via meme culture, the media, hearsay and unsubstantiated stories. It’s how urban myths are created and the craze will eventually die down and fade away.
The greater question we should be asking ourselves is how is it that children, young people, adults and the authorities alike have come to be gripped by this public performance of perceived terror?[/vc_column_text][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1485724639176-d1dda485-42a7-8″ taxonomies=”8826″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Battle of Ideas 2016 A weekend of thought-provoking public debate taking place on 22 and 23 October at the Barbican Centre. Join the main debates or satellite events.
Comedy and censorship: Are you kidding me? Is the fear of offence killing comedy? Jodie Ginsberg, Timandra Harkness, Will Franken, Tom Walker and Steve Bennett with chair Andrew Doyle.
From hate speech to cyber-bullying: Is social media too toxic?
What of the free speech of those harassed into silence by a stream of abuse? And what of the abuse itself, consisting, as it so often seems to, of fantasy punishments and name-calling? Is that speech worth defending?
Earlier this year, Labour MP Yvette Cooper kicked off #ReclaimTheInternet, a cross-party campaign against misogynist abuse online.
The reception was mixed at best. Many people were excited and thankful for the initiative, and it isn’t hard to see why when you look the racist abuse and threats of violence being thrown at people for expressing an opinion online. Right on cue, the MPs behind the campaign have been subjected to a barrage of abuse (some legal, some not).
The impact of online abuse is poorly understood, and perhaps most poorly understood by those who do it, but the harm it can do is unquestionable. Research by The Guardian into abusive comments included interviews with journalists who spoke about an emotional and physical toll, though this can only scratch the surface. It isn’t difficult to find examples of people who have taken their own lives after campaigns of online harassment. Tragically, it is when the person subjected to abuse doesn’t have the platform to speak out against their harassment that we tend only to hear about it when headlines become epitaphs.
But for many, there was something sinister about #ReclaimTheInternet. The thought police were back. It’s one of the internet’s favourite narratives. There is a strong libertarian tradition online, particularly on social media, always watchful for attempts by overbearing states to impinge on free speech online.
One well-followed advocate for free speech on Twitter, @SkipLicker, was vehement in his opposition. “Free speech means freedom from Government censorship,” he tweeted. “Not freedom from ridicule because you talk bollocks.”
The thing is, he’s absolutely right: social media as a public forum has a vital role in our democracy. It is a public forum for debate, where hundreds of thousands of British citizens engage in politics. It is a platform for users to voice their political opinions, whatever the shade. It is a channel through which those who govern us can be taken to task. If you need more evidence about the democratic role social media can play, take a look at the countries which suppress it.
Ridicule, though. Not harassment.
A favourite cartoon that emerges whenever someone mentions abuse online is of a woman shovelling manure over a wall and then complaining when manure comes the other way. It’s quite funny, but it misses the point because frequently it isn’t an eye for an eye. If only it was: if for every opinion somebody saw online that they disagreed with, they responded in kind, the internet would be an (even more) brilliant place. But death threats aren’t responding in kind, and death threats aren’t “trolling”.
Over the last couple of years, the “internet troll” has emerged as a catch-all term for unpleasantness on the internet. Everything from sustained, sexually aggravated harassment to posting atheist arguments in a Christian chatroom is lumped together under an evocative, easily digestible insult.
This wasn’t always the case.
Plenty of the most dedicated trolls themselves lament the good old days when trolling was really trolling. Cleverly crafted images or phrases – offensive, controversial, but legal – stirred up horrified reactions. Trolls might work for weeks at a time, lurking in a forum or comments section, perfecting the perfect taunt that might start the biggest argument, then sit back and watch the carnage unfold. The very word emerged in the early 1990s from the idea of “trolling” a line with some juicy bait and seeing who bites.
Trolling is, in many ways, a firmly established British tradition. An episode of Brass Eye or a copy of the Private Eye should be enough to convince you of that. Nobody does satire like us Brits, and there’s still plenty of it online.
The examples of clever trolling are endless. In 2010, a neo-nazi march in Bavaria found themselves being “sponsored” for their walk with all the money going to anti-extremist organisations. Bananas were served as refreshments: “Mein Mampf! (My Munch!)”.
More recently, supporters of Bernie Sanders found themselves facing placard-touting trolls raising money for the victims of socialism at one of his rallies.
I have previously writtenin defence of trolling. It might be satirical. It might be expressing a controversial opinion or offensive remark, hoping to provoke a reaction. It might be Sunderland fans flying a 30ft banner over St James’ Park gloating at their rivals’ relegation.
I spoke to Old Holborn, one of Twitter’s longest-standing and most highly-followed free speech advocates once described by the Daily Mail as “Britain’s vilest troll”. Trolling, according to Old Holborn, “is the (not so) gentle art of carefully selecting an irresistible morsel of bait to seduce a willing prey into breaking their own freedom of speech censorship or personal values of good taste. It exposes hypocrisy, self-denial and the inner soul and values of the individual. If your opinions are laughable to some, expect some to publicly laugh at them.”
But trolling isn’t rape threats.
“Threats are not trolling,” writes Old Holborn. “Rape, violence and murder remain the basis of intimidation and are designed to silence. We worship robust banter, not the cold, obedient silence of terror. Laugh a little, prod, poke and provoke. We’re all the richer for genuine trolling.”
What happened to the trolls of yore? They’re still out there and they still play an important role in reminding us that offensive or unpleasant opinions that test the limits of free speech are vital in a society that prides itself on free public debate. In an age where students are demanding safe zones from opinions they disagree with and algorithms ensure we only see content we like, it’s vital we encounter stuff we don’t agree with.
But we have plenty of people who don’t deserve the title of troll. Hangers-on – wannabe trolls, perhaps – whose recourse to crude threats of violence or recourse to racist or misogynistic abuse bear no resemblance to the trolling of old. It’s a shame that trolling has come to mean this because it has muddied the waters on what is OK to say online and what isn’t. I would be surprised if those trolls who do look to provoke, ridicule and satirise didn’t feel the same, particularly as I know some have been the subject of death threats and threats to their families and children.
Free speech has been debated for centuries but it has never been an absolute right. Even the First Amendment, the Holy Grail, has limitations on what you’re allowed to say. Our own British law says that the standards of an “open and just multi-racial society” has no space for racially-aggravated abuse.
The free speech absolutist is out of step with the society they claim to advocate for.
And yet what do we do about encroachments? What do we do when justified criticism is silenced as “bullying” or “abusive” or “offensive”? How about when an epidemic of safe spaces outgrow any pretence to protection and become tools of censorship and suppression? Or when sharing a platform with somebody is suddenly tantamount to endorsing them, perhaps the most ludicrous and contradictory charge levelled at public figures lately?
We must call it out. We ought to continue to push against the borders of acceptability, embrace the offensive and celebrate the satirical. We must seek out and confront opposing viewpoints, ever more difficult in a world where algorithms and laziness drive us into echo chambers of consenting views.
But we ought to pick our battles.
We live in a world where the young are less comfortable than ever with free speech. Convincing them that we need to be allowed to racially abuse people online is a waste of breath and it risks alienating them further.
Instead, we need to speak to them of the importance of dissenting opinion. We need to explain how it differs from abuse. We need to stress the importance of the offensive and being offended. We need to encourage them to actually engage with something they disagree with and reject it, not stifle it before it speaks a word. Rather than reacting angrily to any attempt to make the internet a better place, those with libertarian beliefs might do well to pick their battles, to protect that which is most important.
We need to stand up for satire, for controversial opinions, for being offensive, for the good trolls. We don’t need to stand up for rape threats.
Alex Krasodomski-Jones is a researcher for the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media CASM at Demos, a British cross-party think tank.[/vc_column_text][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1485724379379-f195b0d0-ae74-5″ taxonomies=”8826″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Yeni Bir Şarkı Söylemek Lazım, Video, 2016, Işıl Eğrikavuk
Asena Günal is the program coordinator of Depo which is a center for arts and culture at Tophane, Istanbul. She is one of the co-founders of Siyah Bant, a research platform that documents censorship in the arts in Turkey.
“Is it just me? I don’t think so, but these days I’m in a state where I don’t know what to hold on to, what to do. I push myself to continue my work. Should I continue with art, or should I channel myself to more urgent things; that’s how suffocated I feel,” Hale Tenger, a prominent contemporary artist from Turkey, said in a roundtable discussion published in the Istanbul Art News.1 This pessimism reflects the general mood of artists and many other intellectuals in Turkey, a country that has experienced incidents so numerous in the past year that they could fill decades.
Since July 2015, almost 300 people have been killed and thousands wounded in various attacks by IS and the Kurdistan Freedom Eagles (TAK). After the elections in June 2015, in which the Kurdish party passed the 10% threshold and AKP lost its single party position, president Erdoğan pushed for another election. In November 2015, the AKP won the election and ended the peace process with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The government put severe limitations on the Kurdish and pro-peace opposition. A total of 2,212 academics, who signed a petition to condemn the state violence in the southeast of Turkey, have been targeted by Erdoğan, received threats, have been faced with criminal and disciplinary investigations, and four of them were detained and jailed for about a month. A growing number of academics have been dismissed or suspended, some were forced to resign and had to leave the country. Almost two thousand lawsuits have been filed against people alleged to have insulted the president online or offline.2
In January 2016, two members of the art community were arrested and then sued for participating in the peaceful demonstration “I am Walking for Peace” in Diyarbakır. The march was organised to protest state violence in the Kurdish region and ask for the restarting of the peace process. Artists Pınar Öğrenci and Atalay Yeni were arrested and then released conditionally. Their court cases still continue.
The impact of the recommencement of the war has made itself felt in various fields and ways. The cancellation of the exhibition “Post-Peace” in February 2016 shows the difficulty of expressing critical views on state policies. The exhibition curated by an Amsterdam-based curator Katia Krupennikova was cancelled by the institution Aksanat just five days before the opening, with the director citing the rising tension and the mourning after another bombing in Turkey as the reason. Given that other events went on as scheduled, many thought one of the video works in the exhibition, critical of the dirty war policies of the Turkish state against the Kurdish guerilla was considered risky by Aksanat.3 This was one of the incidents in which the state itself did not act, and actors in the artistic community took on this role. It created a discussion in the art scene about how to struggle in times of repression.4
In April 2016, the screen of the public art project YAMA on a hotel roof was shut down by the Istanbul municipality on the basis of an anonymous complaint, claiming that the work of artist Işıl Eğrikavuk, a video animation, projecting the slogan “Finish up your apple, Eve!”, insulted religious sensibilities. When pressed, the municipality cited “visual pollution” as the reason for discontinuing the screening. This turn illustrates a strategy by the national and local government to legitimise their acts of censorship as purely procedural and administrative actions. After Eğrikavuk made a statement, YAMA’s curator Övül Durmuşoğlu declared the project’s support for the artist. Durmuşoğlu organised a meeting to discuss the case and invited Egrikavuk, legal consultants and people from the art scene. In the following days, Eğrikavuk did a performance based on this restraint. Both the meeting and the performance attracted a wide audience.
Even before the coup attempt of 15 July, there was such an atmosphere where people were worried about terrorist attacks, human rights violations, and limitations on freedom of expression. The coup attempt left 246 citizens and 24 coup planners dead and a nation deeply traumatised. The Gülen movement is accused of being behind the last coup attempt. The coup attempt was followed by a State of Emergency which allowed the cabinet under the chairmanship of the president to issue decrees that have the force of law.5 Unsurprisingly, Erdoğan has been using the attempt as an opportunity to eliminate critical voices.
In the five days between the coup attempt and the declaration of State of Emergency on 20 July, many festivals, biennials and concerts were postponed or cancelled by their organisers. The Sinop Biennial (Sinopale) was postponed “due to recent events in Turkey”, the One Love Festival was cancelled “due to availability problems on the schedules of artists and groups”, many concerts of the Istanbul Jazz festival including a performance by Joan Baez was cancelled6, Muse cancelled its concert“due to recent capricious events” and Skunk Anansie did the same “in light of the recent extraordinary events”. One issue of the satirical magazine Leman was banned as it suggested that both soldiers and civilians involved in the country’s recent unsuccessful coup were pawns in a larger game.
After the coup attempt, Erdoğan called the people to “Democracy Watch”-meetings. The biggest and final meeting, was the one at Yenikapı on 7 August 2016.7 Erdoğan invited popular figures, like singers, actors, and actresses to join the meeting. Pop singer Sıla announced on social media that although she was against the coup she would not be part of such a “show” and would not participate in the big meeting in Yenikapı. Sıla was the only figure brave enough to make such a declaration and not step back. But this resulted in the cancellation of her concerts in five different cities. Many people supported her by sharing her music videos and their own photos with an album of Sıla online.
Theatre actor Genco Erkal’s company “Dostlar Tiyatrosu” was banned from performing a play based on the writings of Turkish communist poet Nazim Hikmet and Bertolt Brecht. It was going to be performed in the garden of Kadıköy High School but the school cancelled the contract due to security reasons. It was obvious that security was not the issue and the school was under pressure from the Ministry of Education because of Genco Erkal’s critical stance. After protests of the theater company and members of the main opposition party (CHP), who brought the case to the Parliament, the Governorate lifted the ban.
Municipal and state theaters have been under a tight grip for some time and there have been ongoing discussions about privatisation of these institutions. The State of Emergency not only aimed at Gülenists who were accused of being part of the planning of the coup but also many artists with apparent oppositional stance were affected. On 1 August, the Istanbul Municipality fired 20 people, including director Ragıp Yavuz, actor Kemal Kocatürk, and actress Sevinç Erbulak from the Municipal Theatre based on the decree law number 667 which was announced after the declaration of the State of Emergency. They were not even granted an explanation for why they lost their jobs, but only received a vague reference to supposedly having failed “the evaluation criteria”8. Obviously, they did not have any connection with coup plotters. Eleven of them have been reinstated in their former positions.
Besides bans and purges, the State of Emergency has enabled the government to re-regulate the organisational structure of the state. A new law that would bring the privatisation of State Theatre, State Opera and Ballet, Atatürk Cultural Center, and Turkish Historical Society was discussed in Parliament. Many people from the field of theatre, opera and ballet expressed their concern that the State of Emergency might be utilised to bring privatisation after years of discussion on instating an independent arts council.
It is now common for the members of the ruling party to randomly target artists, writers, or academics in order to intimidate wider cultural milieu. A recent example is from the field of contemporary arts: In September 2016, an AKP MP Bülent Turan targeted the curator of the Çanakkale Biennial Beral Madra and called on the Çanakkale Municipality (run by CHP) not to work with her. The accusation was being critical of Erdoğan, and hence -so the argument went further- being “pro-coup”. Madra became a target because of her critical tweets and Facebook posts. Being critical of Erdoğan has long been risky but now it is associated with being “pro-coup”. Beral Madra withdrew from her position as to not put the Biennial at risk. Then the organising institution announced that the biennial would be cancelled altogether. They were saddened by the current political atmosphere, which did not place art as a primary point of concern. The CHP-run municipality and many people from the art scene expressed concern over the cancellation, highlighting instead the potential of art to counter the authoritarian discourse of AKP and expressing their wishes for the Biennial to go ahead as planned.
Despite this rising authoritarianism and the pessimistic atmosphere, Turkey’s culture and art scene will continue its struggle. Last week there were many openings in different galleries around Istanbul and almost all of them were crowded. People from the art scene are in need of each other more than ever, aware of the vital importance of solidarity in times of hardship. Film, music, dance and performance festivals started to take place, their posters filling the streets. So I would like to finish with another quote from the same issue of Istanbul Art News, by Deniz Artun,9 the director of Ankara Galeri Nev, as I tend to share its optimistic sentiment: “I guess that art history has shown us time and again just how deep the traces left by exhibitions, artworks, artists emerging with ‘pertinacity’ will be; not those amidst freedoms and prosperity, but those coming forth among fears and uncertainties that are burdensome for all of us.”
September 2016, no. 34.
Although many have been dropped after the attempted coup d’état in a show of good will they nonetheless can be said to have had a chilling effect on oppositional voices.
Özge Ersoy discusses this incident in terms of the different approaches to responsibility, transparency, sensitivity, institutional self-censorship, and institutional sustainability. See her report on the relationship between artists, curators, and institutions in the context of artistic freedom in Turkey: http://www.siyahbant.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/SiyahBant_Arastirma_KuratoryelPratikler-1.pdf.
According to the Turkish Constitution, the Council of Ministers, which is led by the President, can declare a State of Emergency based on “widespread acts of violence aimed at the destruction of the free democratic order.” It must be approved by Parliament and allows the ministers to pass decrees that have the force of law, although they can be overruled by Parliament. It gives the state the right to derogate certain rights, including freedom of movement, expression and association, during times of war or a major public emergency.
Two opposition parties (CHP and MHP) were invited but the Kurdish opposition party (HDP) was not, showing the problematic character of the rhetoric of “democracy” and “national unity”.
