Cancel the Witch

One of the many depressing things about modern life is the arrival on our shores of cancel culture. Namely the idea that just because someone disagrees with you, you are entitled to go after them in their personal life by doxxing them , by bullying them into silence, no platforming them and if that doesn't work, going for their job, and making sure they can't work. It is a vile depresssing way to behave, and it shouldn't be allowed to happen in a modern liberal society. But it does, all the time. Someone somewhere takes offence to something an individual has said or done, they create a storm on social media, and before the "offender" has time to draw breath they are being handed their P45. Even more depressingly, time after time, the employer capitulates to the mob, without giving the person in question the right to reply.

We've seen it this week in the expulsion of Emma Nicholson from the Booker Committee for the sin seven years ago of voting against gay marriage. I have no idea if she is a homophobe, or why she took that decision (I know gay men who aren't happy about gay marriage), but if she had to go, why hasn't David Willets (who did the same thing) had to go? And why now? Was she any more homophobic last year than this? Good god, what kept the Booker so long to get rid of this viper in their midst? (This is very instructive as a reason why. I don't know how much truth there is in this, but once I got to her connection wtih JK Rowling and Lumos it seemed blazingly clear if it's true. https://wildwomanwritingclub.wordpress.com/2020/06/26/why-i-am-just-about-still-talking-to-men-about-misogyny/?fbclid=IwAR1aq9qm7aFM0fXfePF6HBSVrEsipsKcjiawfmsZK3UdumYb4GoqzqBBBXg)

We've also seen it of course in the trolling of JK Rowling since she had the temerity to question the narrative around who it is who actually menstruates. JK Rowling is fortunate to have had such a phenomenally successful career to date that her publisher and agent haven't abandoned her - I doubt that sales of Harry Potter will dip because some people feel offended their heroine has somehow not lived up to their expectations. But I still think she's incredibly brave to take the stand she has. People are trolling her viciously, and saying vile things that should never be said to anyone, let alone someone who has bravely recounted her own experience of sexual violence. As ever she uses her powerful platform to speak the truth, sanely and wisely in a world that from where I'm sitting seems to have gone stark staring mad. I salute her and honour her for doing it, for the sake of all those XX people (myself included) who feel we can only speak in the shadows.

This week one of those people was herself the focus of another hatefilled twitter pile on. Discovering that author Gillian Philip, part of the Erin Hunter writing team who write YA fantasy, was allegedly a transphobe for daring to speak up on behalf of JK Rowling and other XX people, a nasty small minded group of uber fans decided this wasn't on. Not only did they bombard her with threats and homophobic abuse in your usual bog standard twitter pile on, but they decided this wasn't enough. She had to go. they couldn't possibly have a transphobe writing their beloved books. So they bombarded her publisher with emails. And well. You can imagine the rest. Gillian is no longer part of the Erin Hunter team. She was unceremoniously booted out without a chance to present her side of the story.

Now I may be old fashioned, but I am accustomed to thinking that it is the business fo publishers to publish books that they think will sell, irrespective of who the writer is. And if you say, well they shouldn't publish anything by a murderer, hello, the Kray brothers? Like it or not, publishing is a business and it often digs very deep into the murk to sell copies. No one HAS to buy it they might say. Quite frankly if I had the choice between reading a book by an author I liked, while disagreeing with them on certain issues or one by a murderer, I know which I'd choose. Literature is full of books written by people who did dodgy stuff (Dickens and Hardy were appalling to their wives; Virginia Woolf was alleged to be antisemitic; Dylan Thomas was an alcoholic....the list is endless). If publishers then paid as much attention to their writers' personal lives as they do today, we wouldn't have much of a literary canon. It is not up to a group of disaffected readers to decide what should or shouldn't be published because they disagree about the writer's opinion. and in my view it is not the business of publishers to give into the mob.

If we start accepting that only "right" thinking people deserve to have their creativity expressed in the public sphere, whatever the issue, we are on a slippery slope towards censorship and erasure of "wrong" thinking. Remind you of anything? 1984 has always stood as a warning, but I don't think even Orwell could have imagined that the threat would come so substantially from the so called progessive liberal left. Me neither. But that is where we seem to be.

We are in danger of throwing free speech out of the window because people have lost the ability to detach their emotional response to a situation from their intellectual one. No one has a right to be offended, but we can all take offence. That is up to us. But we are all better for finding common ground and trying to forge better understanding with those whom we disagree. We should never forget Voltaire's maxim: "I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to say it." Not to do so will lead us into the abyss.

#Istandwith GillianPhilip

#IstandwithJKRowling