Adelaide and the crisis of free speech

The implosion of Australia's literary festival offers some harsh lessons.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

Earlier this week, Adelaide Writers’ Week fell apart. One of Australia’s biggest literary events collapsed in a clatter of censorship, boycotts and recrimination.

The implosion took place in full public view, with people watching all around the world. Among those people was me, sat at home, glimpsing it through my fingers. My reasons for that were both political and personal. I was supposed to be speaking at Adelaide. I had tickets booked. I had hotels organised. And now the whole thing was falling on its arse.

On the face of it, Adelaide looks like classic Israel-Gaza displacement activity - the continuation of the Middle East battle in whatever forum the participant happens to be operating in. And that is indeed basically what it was. But underneath all that were profound lessons: about free speech, about state involvement in cultural events, and about the role of sensitivity in public life. Adelaide is a salutary lesson.

It started on January 8th, when the Adelaide Festival Corporation excluded Randa Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian Australian, from the festival. It was one of the most poorly worded and conceived statements of its type that I have seen. The mistakes it made were egregious. They are actually so acute and obvious it is hard to describe them without wincing.

The statement began by describing the sense of shock and sadness following the shooting of 15 people at a Jewish festival at Bondi Beach in December. It then said:

“We have today advised scheduled writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah that the Board has formed the judgment that we do not wish to proceed with her scheduled appearance at next month’s Writers’ Week. Whilst we do not suggest in any way that Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s or her writings have any connection with the tragedy at Bondi, given her past statements we have formed the view that it would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her at this unprecedented time so soon after Bondi.”

Obviously the most pernicious crime here is to use the word ‘whilst’ instead of ‘while’, but outside of that there are several further incriminating elements. The first is that Abdel-Fattah was not being cancelled because of a specific statement she had made, but rather because of shadowy “past statements” which had not been specified. The second was that the cancellation was in response to statements she had made in the past, before she was invited, and would therefore have been known to organisers at the point that she was invited. The third was that this decision was not being taken on the basis of organisers’ moral judgement but ‘cultural sensitivity’.

All cancellations are not equal. I will oppose pretty much any cancellation, but they are not the same.

This managed to tick every box. First, someone being told they are being cancelled from speaking deserves to be notified about the precise statement they have made to trigger this action.

Last summer, there was an outcry over Bob Vylan’s chant of “death, death to the IDF” at Glastonbury. It was preposterous summer news desert tosh, but at least it had the virtue of being specific. We could lay out the statement and people could argue about its moral character. On the one hand, any chant with the word ‘death’ in it is irresponsible and inflammatory. On the other, the IDF is an organisation, not a people, so the insistence that it was genocidal was simply wrong. Both sides could battle that out meaningfully, because the statement was specified. Without that level of detail, there is no sense of a red line, no way of knowing what can or can not be said, no rational basis at all for contesting language, and everything instead dissolves into vague allusions about cultural sensitivity.

This same sense of moral clarity is required by the timeline of the cancellation. The decision to cancel someone for past statements after you have invited them is obviously illogical and unjust, pretty much by definition. There’s just no way to do it without making yourself look a twat. You either knew their previous statements when you originally invited them, or you should have done. Either way, the cancellation serves only to undermine your own respectability.

Perhaps the worst element of the statement is this reference to ‘cultural sensitivity’, which would later, in a January 13th statement, turn into a reference to the “continuing rapid shift in the national discourse”.

This kind of language is basically a refusal to engage in organisational standards. When organisers say something like that they are effectively throwing up their hands, saying that they cannot articulate what their code is for legitimate speech, and insisting that it is based on societal mores. But of course society does not have these codes any more than they do, so what this in fact means is that it is up to whoever shouts loudest. In this case, the voices against Abdel-Fattah shouted loudest, so they cancelled her, until the voices for Abdel-Fattah shouted loudest, at which point they apologised to her. This is no way to run anything. It’s a bellend jamboree.

The statement continued: “The Board has also now formally established a sub-committee to oversee the ongoing Board-led review, and guide decisions about Adelaide Writers’ Week in the near and longer terms. This includes ongoing engagement with relevant government agencies and the appointment and/or advice of external experts.”

This latter part of the statement was rarely mentioned in media coverage but it was, if anything, more serious than what had come before. Abdel-Fattah had been invited by the director of Adelaide writers’ week, the legendary Louise Adler. Her invitation was rescinded by the Adelaide festival board, over Adler’s head, against her wishes and despite her protests. Under the Adelaide Festival Corporation Act, the majority of board appointments are selected by the relevant minister. In other words, these are government appointments overruling editorial and creative voices.

These figures then intended to establish a “sub-committee” to “guide decisions”. Always beware of subcommittees. In any serious organisation they’re where the really important decisions are taken, away from prying eyes. In effect, the state was establishing dominion over that festival, deciding who could and could not be invited in future.

After the statement, things happened very quickly. The lack of detail around Abdel-Fattah’s statements made it as much an identity issue as a speech issue, suggesting strongly that she was disinvited because of her heritage. Writers pulled out in waves. Board members resigned. Adler quit. By Monday it was clear Writers Week was no longer viable. The whole event was cancelled. Yesterday, the Adelaide Festival Corporation put out two statements, one of them retracting the statement on Abdel-Fattah and the other apologising to Adler.

It was about as comprehensive a defeat as you will ever see, a complete and total collapse.

Abdel-Fattah is not a very good figurehead for free speech.

She has said that Zionists have “no claim or right to cultural safety”. She has said that “the goal is decolonisation and the end of this murderous Zionist colony”. Neither sentence warrants cancelling someone from an event. People are entitled to want to aggressively challenge Zionism. They are entitled to want the end of a Zionist state. Anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-semitism. But the language is obviously inflammatory. It is the language of someone who does not think clearly about how they communicate or who does not care.

In the hours after October 7th, Abdel-Fattah posted an image of a person parachuting within a Palestine flag - a reference presumably to the use of paragliders in the attack. She said this was before she understood the nature and severity of the attack, stating that “I had no idea about the death toll, I had no idea about what was happening on the ground”. She insisted that she did not “support the killing of civilians”. This is welcome, but it’s hard to understand what possible kind of attack she envisaged, what sort of Hamas operation can be conceived of which would be worth supporting or which would not be aimed at killing people.

For many people, that’s enough of a reason to bar her from attending. It was on the basis of this lobbying that Adelaidde retracted her invitation. Norman Schueler, of the Jewish Community Council for South Australia, said: “I think for everyone who has dropped out that it’s rather pathetic because that means they agree with what Dr Fattah is on about... Namely, that Israel should not exist.”

Deep sigh. I hate having to write out cliches, but we are clearly in such a dark place on this subject that we have to go back to elementary principles. That principle is as follows: I might hate what you say, but I’ll fight for your right to say it.

It’s a bit cringe. I do not often say it because I do not want to look like a tiresome centrist dad pissed on chardonnay. But it is a very good principle. It is also currently a profoundly unfashionable idea which hardly anyone seems ready to stand up for anymore. You do not need to agree with someone to defend their right to free speech. In fact, it is increasingly meaningless when someone does so. It is specifically when you oppose someone that your defence of their free speech becomes vital and beautiful. When you push down your personal dislike and commit to the political ideas which keep us all free.

Two years ago, Abdel-Fattah was one of ten academics who sent a letter to the Adelaide festival demanding the removal of New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman because of a piece he’d written using a protracted animal metaphor in the Middle East. In the piece, the US is an “old lion”, Iran is a “parasitoid wasp”, Lebanon is a caterpillar, Hezbollah “the eggs that hatch inside the host”. He concludes: “We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.”

You can read it here. It’s thoughtless, juvenile, half-arsed and utterly unenlightening. It is also plainly not anywhere near the level of justifying cancelling someone from an event. Only on the most severe possible reading could it be interpreted as a call for genocide or mass-extermination, or even as an act of dehumanisation. And yet this is precisely what Abdel-Fattah did.

It’s a view she stands by, even now. Friedman’s article had “compared various Arab and Muslim nations and groups to insects and vermin requiring eradication at a time when talk of ‘human animals’ was being used to justify wholesale slaughter in Gaza”, she told the BBC. “In contrast, I was cancelled because my presence and identity as a Palestinian was deemed ‘culturally insensitive’ and linked to the Bondi atrocity.”

She’s right that the two instances are qualitatively different. Her own cancellation was much worse. It involved no specific statement, referred to comments from the past and grounded itself in hazy ideas about cultural sensitivity. But it is telling that even now she cannot see the reality of how free speech operates. She has not yet realised that the culture of opposition to free speech which she represented two years ago is precisely what has been weaponised against her today.

This principle of equal application is key to free speech. In the 1640s, Charles I tried to silence his critics through a bludgeoning system of censorship, torture, imprisonment and death. He was defeated in the English Civil War, but radical figures were soon persecuted all over again, this time by their former Presbyterian allies. It was this second wave of censorship which triggered the first articulation of proto-liberalism, like John Milton’s Areopagitica and Richard Overton’s An Arrow Against All Tyrants.

One of their core insights was that rights were universal. Until now people argued for one group to be able to fight another group. But the radicals of this period began to argue for individual rights to be applied to everyone - not as a Protestant, a Baptist, or an Englishman, but as an individual.

This is the lesson we have lost. It is about the universality of our values. The great weakness of the current free speech debate is not that people fail to demand free speech. It is that they only ever demand it for their side. They claim to defend free speech when they or those like them are attacked. They renounce free speech when they see a way to attack their opponents.

That is the same story you see in country after country - on right and left, from supporters of Palestine to supporters of Israel, from those who oppose trans rights to those who demand them. It’s why you see MAGA types spend years talking about free speech and then insist ICE can murder people for criticising the administration. It’s why the right-wing press can rant and rave about cancel culture and then demand the BBC terminate TV programmes it doesn’t agree with. It’s why left-wing activists oppose legislation on policing protests but have nothing to say about barring speakers on campus. We now hear more about free speech than we ever did and yet it is weaker than ever. This is because it has been reduced to a weapon rather than a principle.

I can argue for this as a political value and it won’t make a damned bit of difference. So perhaps it is time to argue for it on the more compelling basis of self-interest. As the author Naomi Alderman pointed out: “Essentially I view all attacks on Palestinian writers and thinkers as a fun preview of what will be acceptable to do to Jewish writers and thinkers when anyone is annoyed/upset with Israel.”

After the events of the last few days, that fact must now be obvious and undeniable. It should be recognised by anyone, on all sides of any debate. Pick up that weapon if you like. Demand someone is cancelled from an event. But once you put it down, you better be prepared for someone else to pick it up and use it against you.

For too long now, opponents of free speech have had the advantage. They cajole, they lobby, they demand. Organisations start to buckle by default. Once the first letters come in, literary festivals become nervous, advertisers grow anxious.

Adelaide demonstrates that there is another type of jeopardy they should be aware of. There is another risk. If they buckle to demands for cancellation, their entire festival might collapse. The kickback can be so fast, and so severe, that their whole operation falls apart. It’s about time that people felt the danger of attacking free speech rather than supporting it.

Adelaide was a disaster for everyone concerned. But if anything good can come from it, it’s this. Future organisers should pay careful attention to what took place. They should keep it firmly in mind when they face demands to cancel a speaker in future. Because next time, unless they show some bravery, it’ll be their festival that implodes.

Odds and Sods

For the reasons outlined above, I am now in Australia for three weeks with nothing to do. If there’s an event you’re putting on that that you’d like me to appear at, contact me at ianduntmedia@gmail.com. If I feel I can contribute to it usefully, I’ll do it free of charge. I’m basically just looking for something to do at this point. The alternative is that I spend the time drinking all the Australian wine and no-one wants that. Actually, I want that, and this is very much the problem.

My schedule is as follows:

• Adelaide February 25th to 27th

• Sydney February 28th to March 4th

• Melbourne March 5th to 15th

No podcast of the newsletter this week - sorry. That mic I had finally just straight up fucking died. I have spent the last half hour trying to bring it back to life and failed. I’ll be back up and running with one next week.

My column for the i paper this week was on Elon Musk’s decision to turn a once flourishing social media site into a paedo app and the related decision of so many politicians and journalists to stay on there anyway, because they’re utterly spinless. You can read it here.

If you missed it I did an extra newsletter yesterday on the day that Robert Jenrick’s career left his fetid rotten body. You can read it here or follow my accidental live-tweets of the press conference here.

I’m in love with Assorted Crisis Events, the new comic by writer Deniz Camp and artist Eric Zawadzki. It’s almost embarrassing to say this, given how much attention it is getting in the comics world, but it really is impeccable work, with a masterly authorial voice from Camp and career-defining art from Zawadzki. It’s an anthology series set in a world where time has collapsed. This strange framing device seems to offer Camp an infinite variety of potential stories. He has managed to construct a stage in which he can tell a series of short stories about time.

It all feels vividly and aggressively now, in particular the sense of normal life operating alongside unending chaos. But the most beautiful stories are personal. One of them is about the life of a man who is only conscious of a decision after he has taken it. It is one of the most melancholic, affecting stories I have read in some time, a kind of cross between the Christopher Nolan film Memento and the Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá comic Daytripper. It summons up that sense you have sometimes of being absent in your own decision making, as if you are a passenger to the life choices you yourself have made.

By turns hilarious, poignant, exciting, head-scrambling and beautiful, this is the real stuff right here - one of those comics you end up handing to people who do not read comics. If you are one of those people, or even if you’re not, I would recommend you read it. You can buy it here.

Right that’s it this week, fuck off.