Arthur Miller, JK Rowling and the death of witch hunts
The radicalism has drained from the woke movement leaving only "the slime of a new bureaucracy"
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Remove the preconceptions that stop you seeing clearly, and it is hard to tell the difference between the arts in the UK and in a dictatorship.
In Russia and China, the authoritarian state is the oppressive force. In the West, the state won’t arrest you for breaking taboos, and for that we must be grateful, but perhaps not too pleased with ourselves.
Woke – or if you don’t like the word identitarian – movements rather than authoritarian governments can still force degrading confessions to ideological thought crimes.
Friends can still denounce each other, as if we were in America during the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s or China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Fear can still run through the arts, publishing, and the liberal press. And, as in true autocracies, the price of speaking out can still be the loss of your existing job and of any chance of alternative work in your chosen field.
So commonplace are the symptoms of fear we barely register them now. A few days ago, to quote an example that got next to no publicity, an “interdisciplinary artist” took it upon herself to go through the social media of David Greig, a Scottish playwright and theatre director, as if this were an entirely normal way to behave, which in the arts today I am afraid to say it is.
Her snooping paid off. She announced that Greig was guilty of “openly liking transphobic tweets": a career-destroying offence, as she must have known. But how transphobic did they need to be to finish Greig off?
One tweet Greig liked referred to “gender madness,” a sackable offence in the avant-garde, apparently. A second contrasted the police’s cruel arrest of an autistic girl, who had said that one of their officers looked like her "lesbian nana", with the cops’ light handling of transgender activist who allegedly punched a gender-critical feminist in the face.
So you can be sure I am not misreading this, here is the tweet Greig liked in full. He was damned for endorsing the sentiment that, “If you are a 16-year-old autistic girl who says someone looks like a lesbian you will be arrested and held in custody, but if you are a 26-year-old man who punches a woman twice at a women’s rights rally, you will just be cautioned."
And that was it. Understanding of people with disabilities in general and with autism in particular, is in short supply. Far from being praised, Greig was forced to issue a grovelling apology for his “careless and harmful Twitter actions”. He promised that he would speak to HR – the modern equivalent of taking instructions from the parish priest – and “discuss making organisation-wide training available to ensure we approach these matters sensitively."
Like so many other cases, the cancel campaign at the Edinburgh Festival illustrated how bizarre our culture is becoming. Let me count the ways.
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