Here’s the latest reasoning. Apparently, the letter sets an important benchmark that can in future be used to protect free speech by the left when we are threatened with being “cancelled” – as, for example, with the antisemitism smears that were used against anti-Zionist Jews and other critics of Israel in the British Labour party.Mr Taibbi, Mr Marcetic, Mr Greenwald, Mr Phillips and other (full or partial) defenders of the letter from the left have a point or several – but so do the detractors. And leftists (and I mean leftists; liberals can please themselves) need to get it through their heads: invariably, these sorts of speech policing (and the anti-“cancel culture” plaint, like the regular wanks about “civility” during the blogging era, is first and foremost a push to limit speech freedom, not expand it*) and every other sort, however they start, are eventually turned against the left. Even HUAC began as a committee for investigating Nazis; before the Thirties were even over they were hunting communists instead.
I should hardly need to point out how naive this argument is. It completely ignores how power works in our societies: who gets to decide what words mean and how principles are applied. This letter won’t help the left because “cancel culture” is being framed – by this letter, by Trump, by the media – as a “loony left” problem. It is a new iteration of the “politically correct gone mad” discourse, and it will be used in exactly the same way.
It won’t help Steven Salaita, sacked from a university job because he criticised Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza, or Chris Williamson, the Labour MP expelled because he defended the party’s record on being anti-racist.
The “cancel culture” furore isn’t interested in the fact that they were “cancelled”. Worse still, this moral panic turns the whole idea of cancelling on its head: it is Salaita and Williamson who are accused – and found guilty – of doing the cancelling, of cancelling Israel and Jews.
*Otherwise the letter would have focussed on the spineless institutions that sack people in response to the (supposed) clamour of the mob, rather than on the clamour itself. I also can’t help wondering if the signatories would have anything to say in defence of someone who had their life destroyed by Twitter not because of something they deliberately wrote in mainstream discourse, but because they were caught doing something mean and silly to a cat or making a joke that foolishly assumed idiots on the ‘net can detect irony. And if you’re not finding this issue complicated enough, feel free to read the parts of Mark Steel’s memoir where he talks about the left’s successful “deplatforming”, as the old folks say, of Neo-Nazis during the Eighties.
