Whose freedom?
From Dr Konstantin Bcizarov Sir: It was very sensible of Alastair MacGregor (July 14) to "leave others to refute " me if the best that he can do is to suggest that the merits of an argument depend on the name and racial origin of the person who puts it forward. There has been widespread agreement in academic circles with the editor of The Spectator's -View that the 'Sussex University incident in which Professor Huntington was prevented from speaking was a grotesque example of the suppression of freedom of speech, and of interference with a university's proper function of open discussion. Obviously there is some truth in this, but I was trying to point out that the issue is rather more compFicated, and that since neither the professor's academic position nor his ability to make his overtly political views heard on any but this one specific occasion were threatened, this might rather by regarded as an example of that increasingly widespread phenomenon, the political demonstration.
For instance, I recently went to a London theatre to see a Georgian dance company perform. I was pre vented from doing so by a group of Jews in the audience who had bought tickets for the sole purpose of staging a demonstration about the plight of Soviet Jews. It got publicity, which was presumably the aim, though in some ways it was also counter-productive, since most of the audience seemed profoundly irritated by it. I self had just devoted two forty-five minute programmes on Radio 3 to showing that the cultures of Georgia and Armenia were among the oldest and most distinctive in the world, and
my own interest in this performance
was purely cultural, as I imagine was that of all but the demonstrating sec tion of the audience. The idea behind such demonstrations is however that any cultural exchange which is per'mined by the Soviet government, however remote from politics or even from specifically Russian culture, as this one was, is fair game for political disruption. I think it is a specious ar gument, and I should have thought that such demonstrations (and this was but one of many) were quite as
• worthy of condemnation as the Sussex.
demonstration that has caused such an outcry, which was directed against Huntington's directly political advocacy of more mass-bombing of SouthEast Asia.
Bernard Levin, who is of course another well-known supporter of America's Vietnam war, has recently become something of a self-appointed expert on Russian Jews. I was wryly amused to find Levin in a recent ar ticle exhorting his readers "to listen, if they want to learn something, to me, Bernard from Camden Town, grand son of Yossl the Tailor ", before going on to reveal the extent of his mis information about the world of Sho lem Aleichem which he claimed to have heard about from his grand parents. For instance, " Hebrew was the language of the Scriptures, not for use in ordinary speech or writing, and Russian was an altogether foreign tongue." Unfortunately for Bernard from Camden Town and his third ,hand information, those of us who actually speak Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian will know that Sholem Aleichem wrote early works in all three Ian
guages, and that modern Hebrew literature really developed in Tsarist Russia. Indeed, so rich and flourishing was this literature that there are some good discussions of it in English-language works like David Patterson's The Hebrew Novel in Czarist Russia, which even Bernard Levin should be able to read. And this is what he is like when he claims special knowledge because his contacts are only third hand! No wonder Professor Trevor-Roper called the present time " an age of instant omniscience and journalistic slipslop." Meanwhile The Spectator has relapsed from its sudden burst of enthusiasm for freedom of speech to once again carrying an article in favour of censorship. 'Who killed David McManus?' According to W. J. Spring (July 14) not merely the young thug who actually did the deed but a wide cross-section of society, including film critics. Such arguments portraying criminals as victims of society are usually advanced from the opposite, libertarian viewpoint. It was also an argument advanced in defence of Nazi war criminals, but one rejected by the Allied prosecutors, who always insisted on personal responsibility. In any case, it is simply untrue to say that critics praised or discussed the film Clockwork Orange in purely aesthetic terms, erecting art into "an autonomous area where no social or moral judgements can enter." I heard Dilys Powell discussing it on the radio with Mary Whitehouse, and talking about the violence which is undoubtedly present in it. But the fact is that film critics did not see the film as an incitement to mindless violence, as W. J. Spring seems to want to present it. As for the would-be assassin of George Wallace, he could quite as well have had his thoughts watching most of the Tom and Jerry cartoons, which unlike Clockwork Orange can be criticised as being merely presentations rather than critiques of violence.
Moral dilemmas certainly are posed by violence, including the often mindless violence of political protestors like those at Sussex University. But an equally mindless censorship and authoritarianism is surely no answer. As I write I have just been watching Dr Jacob Bronowsk i standing in Auschwitz talking about the death of the human spirit when minds are closed by the assertion of dogma, and the constant need for irreverence, questioning and scepticism which is the greatest lesson both of modern physics and of the history of the modern world. I couldn't agree more.
Konstantin Bazarov
41 Wisteria Road, London SEI3
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