Perhaps one of the more significant developments of 2024 has been the right’s final abandonment of any commitment to free speech. This has been a wonder to see, not because there is any great surprise about it, but simply because it is causing them such contradiction and agony. They hate doing it, but they can’t not. Argggghhhh!
The reason is Israel and Gaza of course. For years the right have been able to conduct, through News Corp and elsewhere, wars of psychological torment on people with views that weren’t of the mainstream, or who told jokes, or who did their basic jobs compiling prize shortlists. People such as Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Larissa Behrendt and Randa Abdel-Fattah. Gosh, some element seems incredibly familiar there.
They could thus use the power of dread — what’s going to be in the national press and airwaves this morning? — to silence people, while still banging on about “free minds, free markets”, snowflakes and so on. They enforced a distinction between words and acts necessary to a robust public liberalism. They rejected the progressivist notion that words could be judged as a bit like things, in their psychic impact on the vulnerable.
Now?
Well now they’re pretty happy with the snowflakes everywhere! It’s a white winter! The snowflakes are those who’ve been objecting to the vigour and assertiveness of the pro-Palestine movement, and their robust use of free speech. Initially that centred on the slogan, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and the map with a single entity occupying the current Israel and Palestine borders.
The phrase, as Jason Clare, member for one of the largest Muslim-population seats in the country, noted a few days ago, has multiple interpretations — an assertion howled down by the usual suspects in the echo chamber, Dennis Shanahan telling Peta Credlin that it was ludicrous to suggest such when “we all know [it] means the annihilation of Israel and the removal of Israel as a state”.
Two weeks earlier, Peter Dutton had suggested that an initial pro-Palestine demonstration in October 2023 could be compared to the Port Arthur massacre. He was backed up by Senator James Paterson, former IPA gunslinger on RN Breakfast days later.
This week we’ve seen a special on Sky News, with former next-PM Josh Frydenberg connecting reactions to the “river to the sea” slogan to the pain, horror and memory of the Holocaust (inevitably medicalised as “trauma”) and thus jamming up actual PM Albanese, founder of the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine, who agreed that the phrase was “violent”.
David Crowe, former News Corp fresh meat, now at Nine, in one of the most pathetic pieces, said that “intifada” may have several meanings, but it’s now associated with suicide bombers. “It is true that many interpret the term more broadly, but the link to those attacks is indisputable.” Other meanings? A term derived from the verb “nafada”, to “shake” or “shake off”?
Crowe literally wants to ban a Taylor Swift song. It’s hard to know which is more stupid for a journalist to believe, that there is no argument for violence (Zionist groups like the Irgun and their supporters called themselves “terrorists” approvingly), or that any word even partly associated with it should be banned.
Crowe also wanted “from the river to the sea” banned because it is antisemitic, “according to the Anti-Defamation League”. Well, we wouldn’t want to have to make up our own minds, would we? It’s typical of an organisation man like Crowe that he would want to know what the authorised interpretation was, rather than make up his own mind. The rest of us value our freedoms more.
What’s interesting about all this is the willingness of the right to do exactly what they (accurately) accuse progressives of: not only undermining the distinction between words and acts, but trying to enforce a single interpretation on a statement — “x is racist and can’t be read any other way” — and then weighting that with reference to the person most psychically wounded by such words.
Such a process has now become the right’s mode for dealing with the pro-Palestine movement. Not “we welcome their attacks so we can refute them and win the battle of ideas”, but the “contagion” model. In this model, words are not actual words, arguments not actually propositional statements, but mini-Trojan Horses that can enter the unsuspecting brain and create, without the process of actual thinking and deciding, a convert to the cause.
The contagion model applies to the message. It’s matched by a “symptom” model which applies to the messenger, which presumes they have not come to their opinion through reasoning and decision, but as an external sign of some other force: the desire to be cool or memetic, or that the recent campus-based protest-occupy movement is the product of “outside forces”.
The obvious effect of this sort of attack, beyond trying to discredit the pro-Palestine movement, is that it undermines the claims of liberalism, as regards the primacy of argument in the public sphere, the necessary centring on the propositional argument of the opponent, and the assumption of robustness in relation to strong contrary views.
For the right to undermine that is not nothing. And they’re only doing it because it’s precisely the argument that they’re losing. Among an ever greater section of the Western public, Israel simply has not made the case for military action with an open-ended civilian death toll.
For every generation except, I suspect, the very oldest, there are large numbers of people, left and non, who simply think that Israel is taking the piss, claiming an existential emergency, from a force that pretty much threw all its remaining political capital into the atrocious October 7 event, an attack using Toyotas and AK-47s, and leaving them with no follow up.
The younger people are even better informed about, and wired into, a world in which the European heroic narrative is contested, or critically eviscerated. It’s not just the new content they’re getting; it’s the form of their connection to the world. They’re not talking colonialism and decolonisation because some pink-haired teacher gave them an Angela Davis book in Year 11. They get it because a radically interconnected world gives them a global standpoint from which claims to justice can be assessed.
That’s what’s making the Zionist lobby and its right-wing supporters so crazy. They can’t see this process because they’re still thinking from within the world of newspapers and broadcasts, and bounded nations, and a hard and fast division between internal and external public spheres.
In other words, while they’re undermining the liberal public sphere with contagion models, they’re still thinking within it, regarding their arguments as the only “real” ones. Meanwhile the pro-Palestine movement has — as Richard King notes in the forthcoming issue of Arena — been the means by which the left has thrown off (“at last”) such questions of trauma, content warning, cultural appropriation and speech-as-violence (to a degree).
So it needs to be made obvious that the right are doing this. That’s where it came from initially after all. The notion of a wound given to the body politic and the royal Holy Family by the very questioning of its institutions has been thrown at social movements for change, since the 1800s and before, with the contagion model of “intellectuals” attached.
The right was always going to abandon its free speech primacy anyway. There may be a couple of classical liberals out there who’ll stick to their word-guns, but it’s a recipe for career failure. As world politics tightens to an emergency situation, the right are restaging the appeal to a “state of exception”, in which repression of an unlimited character can be licensed to save “freedom”.
Israel is the ideal vessel by which that transfer can be made, the historically unique plight of the Jews morally licensing the construction of any attack as a genocidal one. But it will be used as a more general license for repression, into which they will throw themselves enthusiastically.
What is distinctive is that those who roared with laughter at the sensitivities mobilised by 18C claims by non-white people are now deploying the same notions of trauma and hurt to curtail speech they don’t like. It is a new way of repressing radical demands, it will have ramifications, it will stuff them up completely, and we must exploit that to the maximum.
Has the right fully abandoned its commitment to free speech when it comes to Gaza? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
