No platform – for whom?
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by
JVL
JVL Introduction
The issue of no platform for fascists and racists is of growing importance with the rise of the ethno-nationalist right in Britain and elsewhere.
In this review of David Renton’s important new book, Mike Phipps provides a thoughtful summary and review of the arguments about free speech and no platforming in recent decades.
This article was originally published by Labour Hub on Wed 4 Aug 2021. Read the original here.
No platform – for whom?
Mike Phipps reviews No Free Speech for Fascists: Exploring No Platform in History, Law and Politics, by David Renton, published by Routledge
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“Far more serious was the suppression of media reports of state brutality. There is no greater known example in the liberal west at this time than the events in France in October 1961. “A peaceful march through Paris of 30,000 demonstrators calling for freedom for the people of Algeria, who were living under curfew, was attacked by the police, who killed at least 120 people… Eyewitness accounts were kept out of the next-day’s papers while films covering the event were censored. Meetings to protest the killings were banned.”
I first read about the Paris massacre in an article in the Guardian on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary. It was truly shocking. I am still unable to decide whether I am more shocked by the massacre or the great success in covering it up. I think it is the latter.
Things can be covered up for years. In 2018, the BBC made a radio programme about the killing in Memphis of Martin Luther King. It claimed, without any evidence at all, that he was shot by James Earl Ray. I do not think that any members of the King family were interviewed. Is that, perhaps, because at least two of them believed he was innocent?