I have finally started reading The Great Dissent by Thomas Healy. It’s history of how United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes came to write a famous defence (or should I write defense?) of free speech in the case Abrams v. United States. It’s a fascinating account of how someone with entrenched conservative views changed his mind, and also a useful potted history of the concept of free speech. I’m making plenty of notes and bookmarking several passages. Continue reading
Category: Diary (Page 29 of 301)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
In a dark, personal and fascinating essay on Josef Mengele, my former colleague Jo Glanville sticks a pin in a very particular feeling experienced by those of us who work in human rights campaigning:
Had I developed an unhealthy attraction to stories of the most extreme inhumanity? I asked myself similar questions when I left journalism to work in human rights. I often used to discuss with my colleagues the adrenaline rush that would come when we heard about a new case of imprisonment, prosecution or worse, giving us the energy to take action, but it was disturbingly close to a sensation of excitement. Perhaps my motives were irrelevant, since the work was clearly necessary: whether researching historic human rights abuse or campaigning for current cases. But the intellectual thrill that can accompany investigating or campaigning against the darkest events, alongside a repulsion at the atrocities, continued to disturb me.
I call this thrill Ungerechtigkeitfreude – ‘Injustice joy.’ But I do not see it as a negative emotion. The feeling of excitment comes from the recognition that a particular human rights violation—one that sits squarely within the mandate of your organisation—offers a clear opportunity to make a case that could catalyse change. It is the recognition of an opportunity to spin an act of destruction and oppression into something positive.
I imagine that scholars of fascism, genocide, and its intersection at the Holocaust, have similar muddled feelings. As one accrues a deep historical understanding of how something terrible came about, one also gains the ability to recognise parallels in our own time and place. Which in turn offers the opportunity to sound the alarm and divert the problem.
It is a recognition that, while we have no power to change the past, we do have an opportunity, every day, to change the future for the better.
I have realised that asking ‘Is there a German compound noun for…’ is just my verbose way of saying ‘TFW’ #translation
— robertsharp59 (@robertsharp59) May 11, 2016
My erstwhile colleague Jessica Prendergrast has just published a fascinating post on the problems of social mobility in coastal towns and rural areas. Its a response to the Social Mobility Commission’s fifth ‘State of the Nation’ report. As one of the directors of the Onion Collective in Watchet, Somerset, Jess has been deeply involved in the development of community projects and social enterprises for many years.
Here’s an idea a bold government could implement: Continue reading
Across the pond, the Washington Post has exposed an attempted sting on its investigative journalism team. A right-wing group named Project Veritas sought to hoax the paper into printing false allegations about the sexual predator and GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore. Here’s the Washington Post story (its behind a paywall) and the Guardian US rehash.
A few notes on this. First, it’s emblematic of how profoundly damaged American democracy has become. Newspapers were always supposed to be, if not entirely neutral, then at least reliable arbiters of truth. This attempt by Project Veritas seeks to undermine that reliability. Had they succeeded, power and influence would have accrued to Donald Trump and those who enable him. Continue reading
Writing in the Guardian last week, Carole Cadwalladr lamented the way in which Twitter catalyses and facilitates global bullying. This prompted a short exchange between me David Heinemann from Index on Censorship. We noted the betrayed promise of free speech for all that social media offers, and what—or rather, who—might solve the problem.
Continue reading