from the article, DA writes:
"But Mslexia’s formulation gave perfect shape to the problem that I’d been thinking about in these past few months as chairman of Index on Censorship, the free speech advocacy organisation. Why is it that some of the people who should be most protective of free speech and actual open debate are now almost hostile to it in practice?"
I was interested to hear of the organisation 'The Index of Censorship'
from their website:
"Index on Censorship is a nonprofit that campaigns for and defends free expression worldwide. We publish work by censored writers and artists, promote debate, and monitor threats to free speech.
We believe that everyone should be free to express themselves without fear of harm or persecution – no matter what their views.
Index’s aim is to raise awareness about threats to free expression and the value of free speech as the first step to tackling censorship."
www.indexoncensorship.org/what-we-do/
The Times article concludes:
"Increasingly the argument is made that in countries like Britain and the US an agitation for free speech is really an agitation for angry, powerful white men. It is supposedly a licence for them to abuse others.
But the problem is that this argument is both untrue in itself and unhistorical. In this country, as elsewhere, censorship has mostly been used against the inconvenient and the subversive, from the censored plays of Joe Orton 50 years ago to the Sikh woman author of the play Behzti, which was forced out of theatres in 2004. In the US in the McCarthy era, black and progressive playwrights and authors faced Mslexia-style de-sponsorship for being inconsistent with anti-red ethoses. And today, wherever you get a rising ethno-nationalist tide, from Poland to Russia via Turkey, it’s the non-patriotic minorities who end up gagged.
This freedom boat, I’ve realised over the past half decade, is the same boat for all of us, even if we sit in different parts. Sink it, and we’re all drowned. There’s no “but” after “open debate”."