Arthur Miller, McCarthyism and today’s woke witch hunts

Christmas reads (2)

Between Christmas and New Year, I am getting away from current affairs and updating pieces on writers and thinkers I admire.

Arthur Miller had direct experience of the McCarthyite persecution of American leftists in the 1950s. He compared his ordeal to the witch trials of the 1690s. We in turn can see the parallels with ideological coercion in our world today.

When I sat down to write in August 2023, I knew all I had to do was look at that day’s news to find examples of forced confessions for thought crimes.

And I wasn’t disappointed

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Remove your preconceptions, and it can be hard to tell the difference between the UK and 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 we should not be too pleased with ourselves.

Woke – or if you don’t like the word, identitarian – movements 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 mean losing your job and 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.

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’s career off?