Banning things isn’t the way to confront the far-right
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Version 0 of 1. I would like a ban on banning things for a while. Or at least a rest. How many petitions a day is one meant to sign calling for someone or something to be banned? It is, I imagine, a full-time job. The call to ban Donald Trump from entering our country, as he has called for Muslims to be banned from entering his, is faintly ludicrous. His idiot sentiments have already “entered” Britain: they are at the top of news bulletins. He may be described as a hate preacher, and be detained by Theresa May, but this will not make his brand of fascism – fascism as in authoritarian nationalistic demagoguery – disappear. It may make us feel better or more decent to suggest such a creature is not welcome here, but the fact is, many such creatures already live among us. Unless one moves only in impeccably liberal circles, it is impossible not to hear opinions such as his all the time. They are parroted alongside anti-immigrant rhetoric and the insistence that we must be fenced in, that this country is “full up” and that we already can’t look after “our own”. Related: Donald Trump will not be barred from Britain despite Muslims outburst The danger of Trump, of course, is his wave of real support and a sense that the far right is rising not only in the US but right across Europe. Le Pen’s victory in France is deeply worrying. Even before the latest terror attacks, the response to the insecurity wrought by globalisation has been for many a kind of lockdown. Psychic borders are erected that divide the world into “us” and “them”. The demand for actual borders soon follows. Terror has the deliberate effect of amplifying this siege mentality. The fantasy of being cocooned in a dangerous world takes over. Each leader promises to restore order, to protect what is “theirs” from marauding hordes who are forever massed at the border, whether that border is Mexico or Calais. This image is frightening. There is no equivalent image of immigrants building an economy. As the world has opened up, the sense of a vast lawless space increases, bringing with it consistent demands for parts of it to be shut down. At any one time it is possible to read stuff online that other people campaign to ban. The unsayable is actually said with increasing monotony. With this has come a new censoriousness where people demand to be protected from hatefulness, often by some rather some benignly confused student body. The rows about no platforming reveal a weak intellectual space that has lost its confidence. In short, the liberal consensus ruptured a few years back and we are still reeling. The idea that it exists and remains powerful is absolutely necessary to someone like Trump, who needs “political correctness” to rail against. Political correctness, so hated by the right, turns out to be little more than a refusal to legitimate hate speech. It exists because actually it works as a code of manners that when breached still shocks us. And should shock us. When earlier this year, the Sun published some toxic waste by Katie Hopkins using the language of genocide to describe drowning refugees (“cockroaches”), there was a sharp intake of breath. The issue was not whether she was allowed to say such things – she is – but what a tabloid newspaper was doing publishing this poison. Was such language now an acceptable part of public discourse? The public answered with mass revulsion. The answer to Hopkins’ hate speech was more speech expressing that revulsion – not to ban her. Every time over the past couple of years when Nigel Farage has been caught saying something revolting, we are told his “mask has slipped”. He had better superglue it back on to his face as he explains why he thinks Trump has gone too far. For again, here is a man who depends on speaking “a truth” that he likes to present as censored by the mainstream. The vanity of a Farage or Trump is bizarrely tied up in this delusion of themselves as outsiders. It is patently ridiculous and hopefully, after Ukip’s collapse in Oldham, a pretence that many have seen through. Banning such figures, however, only gives credence to this pretence. Banning is a form of denial. Rationally, we know that the answer to the world’s major problems, whether climate change or the refugee crisis, involves co-operation across borders. Yet we fear this far-right politics of closing down encroaching. I understand the emotional response of wanting to ban its proponents but we are like children who squeeze our eyes tight shut and think we can’t be seen. The narrowing of thought, the demand for authorities to intervene, the dependence on all sorts of censorship, is not the way to confront the far right. It is indeed a mirror of the far-right. Sometimes we just have to be bigger than them. |