FREE SPEECH

In general I try to write about beauty and goodness and kindness and love and knowledge and to support people who struggle to find their creativity…BUT today
I will allow myself to express the other side of the above emotional coin, the rage I feel.

When I teach people who are struggling to find the important themes in their lives, often they come down to ‘love’ or ‘hate’. I think that much of my love is also formed out of the hatred I feel for those who wish, day-by-day to hurt us. I don’t like being referred to as collateral damage. One of the things that is deeply disturbing to me is the Guardian’s exposure of this platform’s acceptance to make money from ultra-rightwing groups.

I feel I am living through the end scenes of a very poorly constructed but none the less damaging farce or English Panto*

What works?

Thanks to Brexit our economy is in the pits.
Thanks to this consumer society’s greedy owners, according to government statistics, 4.5 million (yes million) children go to bed every night, improperly fed…in this, the 6^th richest nation in the world…and these horrible stats go on…but as we know, we are to believe that all is well because the stocks and bond markets are rising (on the backs of the rest of us.)

Thanks to Putin and Orange and the rest of the psychopaths we have elected, we are witnessing a slow but steady decent into barbarism. As a species, why can we not remember “Never Forget”?

Listen to the wind being fanned from the endless out-of-control forest fires, from the nuclear bomb testing, from the gates swinging closed on layed-off workers, from the mouths of politicians and bureaucrats. Do the sounds of lies, paranoid fantasies and psychopathic rulers offend your humanity, your sense of being, of your desire to live a good, kind, moral, useful life?

I sit here, thinking of my beautiful grandchildren, recognising how Trump and MAGA and our own weak-kneed politicians here in the UK dig their heads further into their blanding rubbish heaps of distortions and lies while the many migrant’s intelligences, labour and other potential contributions to the economy are wasted** as they are maligned by the proto-fascist Farage and his band of disillusioned, undereducated, hate filled followers uttering their populist nonsense about national identity while insensibly having encouraged us to turn our backs as honoured member of the largest trading body in the world. And we find that this very platform hosts people who would happily kill others because of their skin’s pigments or their religious heritage, or their gender or their food or or or. Do you see the blundering contradictions of White Christian Nationalists hatred towards others in defence of their god of love? What subtlety in their liturgy am I missing?

What defence of their indefensible ideas - ideas? or really demented attitudes constructed on the backs of people who have been so deeply mistreated and put down by a clearly incapable economic system owned by a very small number of people that leaves swathes of unemployment or poor employment or underpaid employment while purposefully limiting children’s education, bombarding them with supposed fact (remembering that history is always written by the winners) instead of supporting their richer development through the arts and the teaching of critical thinking. What defence? Almost always the heroic humane democratic defence of FREE SPEECH.

Just reading Ai Weiwei’s ON CENSORSHIP. He should be everyone’s hero who loves and believes in freedom. He explains how the Chinese Communist Party’s use of censorship (and therefore the suppression of free speech) caused an intellectual desert to develop in the midst of that otherwise extraordinary transition in their country.

He wrote, “fundamentally, censorship is the natural enemy of human thought.”

He also points out that in the West, censorship is everywhere imposed in the education systems, in the popular culture and the news by the corporate owners and the bureaucratic structures which exist to manage the people rather than to help them.

What do we who object to handing right-wing extremist groups of violent murder promoting-holocaust causing-prison camp building-otherwise inchoate people a free pass to injure the rest of us by their presence on this platform? Do we walk away leaving the nest to them or to we stay and abide by the inane and compromising defence of ‘free speech’ that rallying cry of those who know damn well that all they do is to contravene the very thing that they claim to adore.? This leads me to the thought that we cannot live a moral life in an immoral world.

NOTES

*Pantomime informally called panto) is a type of musical comedy stage production designed for family entertainment, generally combining broad and topical humour with actors often cross dressing in a story more or less based on a well-known fairy tale, fable or folk tales
** around 14.2% of the British population are foreign born…is British culture so weak that we can fear it is being overrun by 14.2% of ‘others’?

Coming soon are the first 3 of my series of 12 films called PHOTOGRAPHY: Making Meaning which consists of numerous learning resources including a manual, another film, online discussions, written essays, pod casts with other artists and expositions of my photo stories. For those of you who are supporting my writing on Substack we are trying to arrange a way for you to have a significant discount for full access. Thank you