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Showing posts with label Alfie Gallagher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alfie Gallagher. Show all posts
Alfie Gallagher 🔖 The third most frightening thing about Philip K Dick’s Valis is that it is largely autobiographical.


I realised this halfway through reading the novel when I came across a video recording of a lecture Dick gave to an incredulous audience at a sci-fi festival in Metz in 1977. Expounding on concepts such as orthogonal time, computer-programmed realities, parallel universes, and seemingly parallel selves, Dick clearly shared the fundamental doubt of his alter ego(s) in Valis – namely, what if the world itself is not the real world at all?

The second most frightening thing about the novel, for me at least, is that I have struggled with similar doubts myself. I have suffered from chronic mental illness since childhood and for a long time, one of my worst fears was that reality was not as it seemed, that malign forces were somehow manipulating the very fabric of existence from behind the scenes. It was unnerving to find parallels between my own experiences and Dick’s, especially his eerie suspicion that the mechanism of his bathroom light switch had somehow been changed and whether this suspicion was merely a cognitive distortion or in fact a sign of the artificiality of the phenomenological world.

Valis is a difficult read. It doesn’t contain much in the way of plot, and it ends without any clear resolution. There are fictional elements, but for the most part, the novel is a vehicle for Dick’s attempted explanations and extrapolations of his quasi-religious experiences in the early-to-mid 1970s. The novel is rich in philosophical and theological discourse. It demonstrates the awesome range of Dick’s erudition, blending classical Greek philosophy, Gnostic Christianity, Buddhism, and modern physics. The key theme of Valis is doubt. Dick never seems sure whether or not he is sane, and that is the most frightening thing of all.

⏭ Alfie Gallagher is a Sligo based blogger who can be found @ Left From The West.

Valis (1981)

Alfie Gallagher 🎥Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven is a painterly web of ironies. 


The title itself contrasts with the arduous and uncertain lives of the migrant workers that the film portrays. Its sounds and images are extraordinarily delicate and lyrical, yet at the same time, they depict a world of poverty, inequity, violence and deceit. The wheat fields on which the drama plays out might seem like a paradise, but the characters find themselves very far from heaven.

The simplicity of the plot belies the film’s deep ambiguity. Set in 1916, it tells the story of Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams), a young couple on the run from the law with Bill’s younger sister Linda (Linda Manz), as they hobo to Texas and find temporary work harvesting crops for a wealthy yet sickly farmer (Sam Shepard). Ground down by the remorseless labour in the fields, Bill attempts to grift the farmer by pressuring Abby into a false romance with him.

There is a stillness to the cinematography and a detachment to Malick’s style which does not admit easy moral judgments. The farmer is good-natured yet he has become extremely wealthy simply by owning the land on which others must slog; Bill exploits Abby yet he does so as much out of despair as out of avarice. A particularly bitter irony is Bill’s attempt to persuade her to marry the farmer – “I hate seeing you stooped over out there. Men looking at your ass like you’re a whore.” On this question – whether treachery in the bedroom is preferable to toil in the fields – the film remains as ambivalent as the twilight in which so much of it is set.

Days of Heaven may be interpreted as a meditation on inequality, how it degrades and dehumanises. It may also be appreciated simply as a gorgeous work of art whose scenes are like Impressionist paintings made dreamlike by the elegance of Ennio Morricone’s score. Indeed, the film rewards repeat viewings, for rarely have the factories and fields of America been so beguiling and so beautiful.

⏭ Alfie Gallagher is a Sligo based blogger who can be found @ Left From The West.

Days Of Heaven (1978)

Alfie Gallagher ðŸ”– I stumbled across Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals this summer, which I suppose is the bibliophilic equivalent of a boorish backpacker saying he stumbled across Ayers Rock on his holidays. 


It is nonetheless true though. I had read Rob Doyle’s audacious debut novel Here are the Young Men a few months ago; later, I began to dip into his Autobibliography, Doyle’s inimitable guide to the fifty books which shaped him. It was there I stumbled across Nietzsche’s Genealogy, or to be more accurate, I was left stumbling by Doyle’s gleeful description of a philosophical treatise that was also “among the greatest horror novels ever written.” Though I was both a philosophy and Nietzsche novice, I was hooked. I knew what I’d be reading next.

Arguably, my error was not in thinking that I could read Genealogy without any previous knowledge of Nietzsche, but in attempting to review the book from such an impoverished standpoint. What follows is a fledgling effort to understand and evaluate a fraction of Nietzsche’s sometimes dizzyingly dialectical if not downright contradictory thought. This review may well be supremely stupid, like taking a walk across a tsunami, but Genealogy proved far too beguiling a subject on which to remain silent. Indeed, without writing, it seems impossible to make sense of Genealogy at all! Thus, into the tempest I must step, even if I end up drowning in its intoxicating waters.

Genealogy is divided into three essays, each one a different prong of Nietzsche’s assault on morality and its evolution. In the first, Nietzsche upturns our understandings of good, bad, and evil. Employing etymological arguments as evidence, he contends that in ancient times, “good” was simply how the ruling warrior class – the “masters” – saw themselves. Hence “good” meant strong, noble, virile. The master class then named as “bad” all that was unlike and indeed beneath them – the poor, the weak, the “slaves”. Yet somehow this underclass achieved a covert, cognitive “slaves’ revolt”, reversing the entire aristocratic moral order and converting the masters to their own slave morality. 

Driven by the cunning of the weak and their vicious hatred of the strong, then stoked and harnessed by the priestly castes, this moral revolution culminated in Judeo-Christianity. The crucifixion of Christ was its ultimate paradox: God orchestrating his own torture and murder by man in order to redeem mankind. For Nietzsche, this enthralling idea was like a Darwinian meme. It spread across the Western world, infecting noble minds with the slave morality and leaving priests everywhere ascendant. In the slave moral system, “bad” is equated with “evil”, which refers to all the previously “good” qualities of the nobility: the rich, the powerful, and the strong are now the “evil enemies”. In a further reversal of aristocratic moral procedures, “good” is defined in contradistinction to what is evil rather than the other way around. To be good is therefore to be poor, impotent, weak, to be a slave. Worse still, Nietzsche caustically dismisses modern secular moral systems as mere godless offspring of Christian morality. Democrats and socialists, it seems, are merely the latest priestly caste, preaching the same resentful slave gospel of the many, not the few.

In the second part of Genealogy, Nietzsche contends that the process of civilisation and Christianisation, the “taming” of man to keep promises and obey the law, has robbed man of external outlets for his primordial animal instincts to delight in inflicting violence and cruelty. Thus, man turns inwards and lacerates himself for possessing these uncivilised instincts in the first place. It is in this internal mental torture chamber that man fashions the psychosurgical tools of guilt and bad conscience with which to perform vivisection of his own soul. It seems to Nietzsche that the animal ego’s one remaining pleasure in a civilised world is self-torture, when the beast may “beat itself against the bars of its cage”. Moreover, it is only this pleasure, “only the will for self-abuse, that provides the necessary conditions for the existence of altruism as a value.”

The final essay argues that the value of ascetic ideals is that they provide man with a meaning for his suffering. With Christianity, guilt became a feeling of indebtedness to God that could never possibly be paid back. Hence ascetic ideals, in the cunning hands of the priest, became the tools with which man makes sense of pain – paradoxically by inflicting even more of it on himself, by turning against life itself, by eventually longing for nothing but oblivion. Nietzsche further argues that the core desire at the heart of asceticism in general and in Christian morality in particular is an “irresistible demand for truth” and that Christianity therefore contains the seed of its own destruction. With typical élan, Nietzsche proclaims that “unconditional, honest atheism … is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two millennia of discipline in truth, which in the end forbids itself the lie implicit in the belief in God.” Atheistic philosophies and the practice of science are thus the natural, logical consequences of:

Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness taken ever more seriously … the confessor-subtly of the Christian conscience translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience, into intellectual integrity, at any price.

Astonishingly, Nietzsche appears to believe that this fanatical fixation with truth will ultimately destroy morality when the value of this desire for truth itself comes under scrutiny.

Nietzsche writes with such style and such enthusiasm on such peculiar preoccupations that there is always the temptation to eschew analysis and simply luxuriate in the heady elixir of his prose. This is particularly true when he is revelling in primordial festivals of cruelty, skewering the hypocritical vindictiveness of St Thomas Aquinas, and lambasting the meekness of us “domestic animals” – modern men. Even when sobriety prevails, the complexity of Genealogy militates against concise synopsis and critique. In the strands of arguments which I’ve outlined above, however, I find as much that is intriguing as is (seemingly) contradictory. Perhaps the main reason is that, apart from occasional references to etymological and anthropological research, Nietzsche grounds his theses on his own idiosyncratic assumptions about the evolution of human psychology.

Nietzsche clearly thinks that the potent, instinctive master morality of the “blond beasts of prey” is conducive to human flourishing, that “it is right to connect the well-being and the future of the human race with the absolute supremacy of aristocratic values”. Conversely, the slavish morality of the herd is “hostile to life” and will inevitably lead to man’s “regression and decline”. But Genealogy purports to be an evolutionary account of morality, so how is it that the latter unfit system of values not only supplants the former superior system but then thrives in its place? And is the “master race” all that masterly if its own morality proves so vulnerable to that of mere slaves? Indeed, with their potent cunning and resentment, don’t the lower classes possess strengths superior to anything the masters can muster? Nietzsche himself appears to acknowledge the inadequacy of the old nobility when he refers to emergence of priests as the moment when “man really becomes for the first time an interesting animal”.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche anticipates the eventual emergence of a superior kind of man who will “connect ‘bad conscience with all those unnatural inclinations … contrary to sense, instinct, nature and animal existence” and presumably bring about the destruction of morality that Nietzsche discusses towards the end of Genealogy. But since Nietzsche argues that our “fundamental … ancient, strong and human, all-to-human” instinct is to take “supreme pleasure” in the infliction of suffering on others, it is difficult to be in any way enthusiastic about the re-emancipation of man’s animal ego, never mind finding in it anything socially beneficial. It is more difficult still to accept that bad conscience is wholly deleterious for humanity if at the very least it “taught animal ‘man’ to be ashamed of all of his instincts” for “enmity, cruelty, the delight in persecution, in attack, destruction, pillage”. In the end, though Nietzsche himself rejects them, staid evolutionary accounts of the development of morals on the basis of their utility do seem far more plausible than the theses of Genealogy, however extraordinary and exhilarating the latter may be.

At the close of this review, I am uncertain of its worth. Perhaps it is possible for a novice to produce an incisive critique of On the Genealogy of Morals, but perhaps I am not that novice. I hadn’t written anything in three years before embarking on this review, and my confidence in my ability to write anything of substance was at its nadir. Paradoxically, it was the seeming impossibility of my tackling Genealogy that spurred me to write and to persist in the writing, especially when I felt utterly disorientated by the vertiginous waves of Nietzsche’s potent prose. For me, to write is to embrace uncertainty, to accept the probability of failure, and to take an unmerciful beating from myself. There is, though, an undeniable pleasure in my struggles with syntax and my desperate clawing for coherent thought. In writing at least, I am thus far more Nietzschean than I would care to admit. Indeed, I find myself returning inevitably to that monstrous leitmotif – the caged beast who delights in bashing himself against the bars.

Friedrich Nietzsche, 2013, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. Penguin Classics. ISBN-13: 978-0141195377

⏭ Alfie Gallagher is a Sligo based blogger who can be found @ Left From The West.

A Nietzsche Novice

Alfie Gallagher ✒ takes Ruth Dudley Edwards to task for defending the "Cowardice Of Anonymous Abuse."

It is depressing but sadly not surprising to see my dear friend Ruth Dudley Edwards once again defend the indefensible in her recent Newsletter apologia for Eoghan Harris. For many years, Ruth has rightly and courageously condemned the trolling of Sinn Féin’s critics by anonymous Twitter Shinnerbots. It is therefore all the more dispiriting to witness the mental gymnastics she now employs in order to condone Eoghan Harris's anonymous trolling of his journalist foes with a seemingly ever-growing army of anonymous Indobots.
 
The hypocrisy here is truly breath-taking. If Fintan O'Toole or Gene Kerrigan had used anonymous social media accounts to troll their political opponents, would Ruth deem it acceptable rather than odious behaviour? Would she be at all surprised if their employers considered such behaviour a breach of trust and indeed of basic journalistic ethics?

As Sarah McInerney rightly argued in her interview with Eoghan Harris, if the latter had wanted a larger yet legitimate platform to expound his views on Northern Ireland and Sinn Féin, he could have easily set up a Twitter account under his own name, even if this would involve input and assistance from others who wished to remain anonymous. Many public figures take this approach. He could also have started a blog and/or a podcast. However, the real reason Eoghan Harris chose not to exercise any of these options is patently obvious: he wanted to be abusive rather than informative, and he knew that the only way he could escape sanction for his conduct was anonymity.
 
Ruth believes that Eoghan Harris has been “silenced”, that both his sacking by the Sindo and the removal of his Indobots by Twitter together constitute “another major blow to free speech.” I think this is bullshit. I say this as an old-school libertarian leftist who understands why freedom of expression and civil liberties were historically cornerstone left-wing principles and why they always should be. Like Ruth, I too am concerned about the selective, censorial power of Big Tech. It is for these reasons that I oppose the permanent banning of Donald Trump from Facebook and Twitter.
 
If Eoghan Harris were permanently barred from using Twitter or Facebook platforms under his own name, then I would oppose that too. But that's not what happened here. On the contrary, Eoghan Harris chose the cowardice of anonymous abuse rather than the courage of publicly expressing his most visceral, vicious convictions. He chose the cloak of invisibility not to inform but to bully. To borrow Anthony McIntyre's incisive adage about anonymous online bullies, invisible people have invisible rights. That my friend Ruth cannot see this is, as I’ve said, depressing but sadly not surprising.

⏭ Alfie Gallagher is a Sligo based blogger.

Abusive Rather Than Informative

Alfie Gallagher calls out the sheer hypocrisy of former England goalkeeper in his parsimonious response to the death of soccer legend, Diego Maradona. 

 
There is something particularly pathetic about Peter Shilton using the death of the great Diego Maradona to spend almost an entire column in the Daily Mail condemning Maradona for having "no sportsmanship" because he refused to apologise for his Hand of God goal in that iconic World Cup quarter-final in 1986. I suppose his reaction should come as no surprise; it's merely the latest chapter in Shilton's 34-year-long whinge. 

Yet to any objective viewer who takes the time to watch the game in its entirety (it's easily accessible online), it's clear that there is gross hypocrisy in Shilton's sanctimonious denunciation of Maradona's "cheating" the England team out of a chance to play in a World Cup semi-final. 

Like most of his teammates, Shilton conveniently forgets that throughout the match, Maradona was the victim of a much more dangerous, brutish form of cheating than his handball goal: systematic, cynical and often brutally violent fouling.

Even before his Hand of God goal, Maradona had already suffered a late, hefty bodycheck; a vicious, lunging, two-footed tackle; and two nasty elbows to the head — all from England's centre-half Terry Fenwick alone. Fenwick would again swing his elbow into Maradona's head for a third time about ten minutes after Maradona's Goal of the Century, but incredibly the only sanction Fenwick would receive during the entire match was a yellow card for that ferocious tackle in the 9th minute.

Yet Fenwick was merely the worst of many culprits. Within the first 32 minutes, Maradona had been hacked down twice by Peter Reid, leveled by Peter Beardsley's two-footed tackle from behind, and cynically tripped up and sent flying by Steve Hodge just outside England's penalty area. Perhaps the most incredible thing about his glorious second goal is that none of the English defenders managed to foul Maradona before he rounded Shilton and scored.

Diego Maradona had his flaws and his demons, very much like his friend Paul Gascoigne, but I saw him as a lovable rogue as well as an artist with the ball. He made many mistakes in his life, but I would argue that the Hand of God is not one of them.

As I said to my friend Anthony McIntyre the other day, Both of Maradona's goals against England were works of staggering genius. Maradona's second goal was of course football poetry incarnate, but his first goal was an ingenious two-fingered riposte to the thuggery that he was forced to endure, not only in that quarter-final, but throughout his entire career, simply because cynical violence was not punished in football then as it is now. 

The Hand of God goal epitomises the two qualities I admired most in Maradona: his brilliance with the ball at his feet and then the impish cunning of the little barrio boy who learned his craft on the streets.
May Diego Maradona rest easy now, and may Peter Shilton forever suck lemons.



⏭ Alfie Gallagher is a Sligo based blogger.

Particularly Pathetic Peter

In Left From The West Alfie Gallagher interviews Anthony McIntyre about the Boston College Subpoena and the collapse of the British police case against Ivor Bell. 

Following the acquittal of Ivor Bell, I conducted this extensive interview with Anthony McIntyre exploring the trial, the judgment and the ongoing legal battle to prevent further PSNI access to the Boston College Belfast Project

Anthony McIntyre
Alfie Gallagher: When I first interviewed you about the Boston College Belfast Project oral history archive over five years ago, the PSNI had gained access to the archive and arrested Gerry Adams in connection with the murder of Jean McConville. Though Adams was released without charge, Ivor Bell faced prosecution for aiding and abetting her murder.

Having been deemed unfit to stand trial, Bell was eventually found not guilty in a non-criminal trial of facts in Belfast on 17 October 2019 after the judge in the case ruled that the tapes from the Boston College archive were "unreliable" and therefore legally inadmissible. How significant, in your view, is this verdict? What are its implications for you and the other interviewees?

Anthony McIntyre: Firstly, I very much welcome the acquittal of Bell. As I said to you in the previous interview, “I would sincerely hope my research would be thrown out in court for the very reason that it was never gathered for court.”

Implications? Impossible to tell. All else being equal, given the grounds cited by the judge for his ruling, the chances of any successful prosecution must be limited. Everybody, loyalists as well, were given the exact same assurances on confidentiality. But we are talking about the PSNI here and the large swathe of DUP influence that holds sway within it. A force determined to cover up the past yet pretending to address it through prosecutions. It is a sleight of hand.

Alfie Gallagher: Justice John O'Hara acquitted Ivor Bell, but he was withering in his criticism of the oral history project in general and your own research methods in particular. On the second page of his judgement, O'Hara highlights the discrepancy between the absolute guarantee of confidentiality in the interviewee's donation agreement and the much more qualified language of Project Director Ed Moloney's contract, which promises to protect an interviewee's tapes only "to the extent American law allows". The judge argues that this "false guarantee" enabled you to "improperly and dishonestly" induce "unreliable" confessions from the people you interviewed.

How do you respond to this accusation of dishonesty? How do you explain the discrepancy between the two contracts?

Anthony McIntyre: A read of Ed Moloney’s contract reveals that the reference “to the extent American law allows” failed to make explicit that this was a reference to the confidentiality aspect of the project, referring in more general terms to conditions. Nor did it say “only” to that extent. Had it done so this would have raised eyebrows. There were discussions with BC [Boston College] around Brendan Hughes’s added conditions and if I recall properly BC’s response was that while US law allowed the College copyright, he was not prevented from publishing his account independent of BC.

Moreover, as the donor contract was predicated on Ed Moloney’s contract, it followed that whatever was contained within it had to be permissible “to the extent American law allows"; otherwise to provide a contract not permissible “to the extent American law allows" would have been in clear breach of what was permissible. As it turned out, US law did not enable the donor contract but in fact restricted it and this should have been spelt out clearly by Boston College to all. The issue of confidentiality delayed the project for eight months. I had made it clear from the get-go that without unlimited confidentiality, it would not happen.

This is one of the problems with parsing the documents after the event when the mind is concentrated like never before. It opens a whole new raft of interpretations which we should have been more panoramic about back then. We live and learn if we manage to survive the experience.

Running parallel with the contracts were the continuous assurances from BC about the inviolable nature of the guarantees. I was at a meeting with BC accompanied by the person researching the loyalists and a difference of opinion arose. The BC professor was suggesting that the length of the embargo could be shortened to allow for greater access by researchers. When the loyalist researcher objected strongly that such a proposal encroached on the guarantee of absolute confidentiality he was told very firmly that the guarantee was “ironclad”. Ed Moloney had earlier insisted that the librarian get the donor contract approved by the BC lawyers. The librarian told Moloney he would do that and later confirmed that he had done so. It subsequently transpired through the Chronicle of Higher Education that he had not in fact gone to the lawyers. This is now all a matter of record.

I think Justice O’Hara has a point when he refers to the material being dishonestly induced. What he should have done was state where responsibility for the dishonesty lay. It certainly did not lie with me as I gave my own interviews as part of the project under the same conditions as every other participant. Which means my own too were dishonestly induced as I was operating under the same false guarantee and it was not dishonesty on the part of the person who interviewed me. I would have been off my rocker to have done interviews knowing that they were not fully protected by American law. The dishonesty was institutional.

I think we can get a measure of the dishonesty employed by BC who, once it had all gone belly-up opted to blame the research team for giving the guarantees, but it was unable to sustain that falsehood the more journalists delved into it. I was even accused in the Irish Times by BC of being responsible for the judicial decision to hand over all the republican interviews on the grounds that I had refused to sift through them for the purposes of assisting the judge in his deliberations on what was relevant to the investigation. There was never a chance of my assisting a police investigation. I would face prison first. BC was not prepared to do likewise. It wound up the clock and was not there when it struck.

In all of this, I remember being chilled by the conversation I had with the librarian immediately after the first subpoena was issued. He told me that while he was supportive, the attitude among many of the leading lights at the college was that it should not fight the subpoenas as the interviewees “were all terrorists.”

Alfie Gallagher: According to the investigation by the Chronicle of Higher Education which you mention above, email exchanges between Ed Moloney and Boston College librarian Robert O’Neill confirm that O’Neill himself drafted the interviewee donor agreement and that he promised Moloney he would run it by university counsel. He subsequently admitted that he never did so.

This is astonishingly negligent and dishonest. But surely it was careless of Ed Moloney to rely on Robert O'Neill's verbal assurances rather than written legal advice? You've said above that the entire project was delayed for eight months because of the issue of confidentiality. What precisely was the problem? How could it possibly have been resolved to your satisfaction other than by written proof that legal advice was sought?

Anthony McIntyre: It was wider than Moloney. I was always guided by the view that the fewer who knew the better, constantly probing BC on the tightness of the project. It was not prosecutions I was concerned about as I had accepted the assurances from BC about the nature of the guarantee. I was cautious in case people in Boston either genuinely sympathetic to Sinn Fein or taken in by it, discovered what was going on and blew it wide open. So, I guess I was a constant source of pressure to keep the circle small and tight. Yet none of that should have impacted on diligently legally anchoring the project.

Due diligence missed a step because of the institution we were engaged with, its integrity, history, involvement in the peace process, its law faculty, its influence and range of contacts. As the Loyalist researcher said, he felt BC was a truly serious player, it had to know what it was about, it was hardly going to get something so badly wrong, there was never an inkling of suspicion that it might make such a bad call. He was also in a meeting that I did not attend with the librarian where he was told that the whole venture was legally protected, that the police could not even get a “sneak-peek” never mind more serious access. He will confirm all of that for you. Consequently, we ended up scorched but have to take a hit for it.

The lengthy delay occurred after a meeting with the BC Librarian around June 2000. He didn’t have the confidence to give the assurances that were required. He was speculative rather than firm. He did say that the college would not accept anything into its vaults if there was any possibility of “legal repercussions.” That was it as far as I was concerned – a non-starter. Then after a lot of back and forth between him and Ed Moloney, the assurance was given. We could and should have asked for that specifically in writing but even had it been in writing we would still have been stung. The donor agreement seemed to be the “in writing” that was required and ultimately that turned out as not worth the paper it was written on.

At this time the mood music about the past was nothing like it is today. It had not become so weaponised to borrow an in-vogue term. Ultimately, I think BC were of the view that the British were not going to be as vindictive as they turned out to be, and made calculations based on that assessment rather than on what was legally doable. But even here, when the moment of reckoning came, BC had power and influence which it desisted from using, opting instead to seek judicial redress, and then hide behind the ruling of the courts and loudly proclaim, “We did all we could. We fought and we lost. Too bad. Get on with it and have a nice day. By the way, we will not foot any legal bills for people hauled before the courts.”

I suppose that is one commitment it did stick to. BC have not contributed one cent to the legal battle waged by the researchers against the PSNI raid on the archive, nor has it provided one cent to the legal defence of those who ended up in court as a result of the tapes. BC abandoned everyone.

As for Moloney’s judgement, unlike me, he had been through a serious source protection case in Belfast around the Pat Finucane case. That made him cautious, not wanting to rush his fences on the project. His assessment of what the librarian conveyed to him was hardly an abandonment of his instinct, but was based on a wide range of factors probably similar to those outlined by the loyalist researcher and views held by myself. As it turned out he was mistaken, but no more than me. In his view everything was set in stone.

When you think of the publication of Voices From The Grave, if BC had the slightest doubt about the guarantees being absolute, that was the point where they should have been brandishing the halt sign. Instead, they were writing forwards for the book. Why did they allow the publication to go ahead and speak publicly about the existence of the archive if they knew it was not resistant to a court order?

Moreover – and this is easily forgotten over the course of time and the evolution of the blame game – Moloney made two crucial interventions early on which prevented the entire archive falling into the hands of the PSNI. The first was to alert the New York Times to the existence of the subpoena at a moment when BC was trying to smother any suggestion of going to the media. That prevented BC getting its shafting act together. It was forced into putting up a fight of sorts. Sham as it was, the College could no longer hand the archive over and be done with as now we suspect was its preferred option. He then moved to get independent legal counsel for both of us. That ensured we were not chained below deck on the BC ship once the captain and his crew decided to scuttle the vessel and jump to safety, abandoning all passengers on the grounds that “sure they are all terrorists anyway.” That allowed a serious campaign, for the most part coordinated by my wife, to get into gear.

Looking back through a prism of what has occurred since the project began and knowing what I now do, were I to do it again, I would want it all done very differently. Even the donor contract would no longer suffice for me. I would insist on it being much more specific, substantively more robust. So now we sit holding the black swan, best defined in a Mick Herron novel as “a totally unexpected event with a big impact. But one that seems predictable afterwards, with the benefit of hindsight.”

Alfie Gallagher: Long-standing critics of the Belfast Project like Danny Morrison and Allison Morris would probably say that you and Ed Moloney were blinded to such dangers by an overarching desire to damage the reputation of Gerry Adams. Justice John O'Hara would seem to agree with them. In his judgment, O'Hara says that the tapes in the Bell case demonstrate that you had "a clear bias" against Adams and that you were "out to get" him. Would you accept that this judgment is a vindication for your critics? Does it not irreparably damage the credibility of the project?

Anthony McIntyre: They would wouldn’t they, to borrow a well-worn phrase. I haven’t read a thing by Allison in yonks. The last time she came up was when one of the families from the Shankill bombing accused her of lying in relation to the Castlereagh material. And I only ever read Danny to find out what he is lying about. I suppose both have a dog in the fight. Almost everybody accepts that Allison handed her Dolours Price material to the Sunday Life despite her denials. That helped start the Boston College subpoena although that was not her intention. I was pretty philosophical about her doing what she did in spite of the problems it caused. She has as much right to interview Dolours as anybody else. My issue with her was the extent she went to cover up her action through frivolous complaints in the NUJ and smearing. It all came to nought.

Morrison was left badly exposed as a result of the oral history for his role in causing the deaths of six hunger strikers, hence his visceral hatred of it and those associated with it. And I think ultimately, he had a much more nefarious role than Morris because of who, in my view, he has been working for.

Justice O’Hara’s claims about bias failed to disconcert me in the slightest. I have a bias towards a belief that Adams was a key IRA strategist, towards a belief that he was the architect of the Disappeared, towards a belief that he served as the IRA chief of staff, a bias towards a view that he served on the IRA’s army council. I would be surprised if Justice O’Hara failed to share that bias. He would need to be chronically stupid not to. Did that bias towards those views lead me to ask any question designed to prompt a dishonest response? Not the slightest shred of evidence that it did. So was my probing on Adams out to get him or to get the truth about him?

It won’t damage the credibility of the project because far too many people are interested in the contents of the tapes, the general public, academics and journalists. The reading I am getting is that while there were plenty of lies told at the Bell trial about Gerry Adams, they were all told by Gerry Adams who gave evidence of never having been in the IRA plus the usual crap he spews.

An additional factor is that Interviewee Z also wrote into the conditions of his contract, which it is suggested BC managed to lose, that his interviews were not to be released until 30 years after both he and his partner had died. That was hardly the action of a person or project out to sabotage the political career of Gerry Adams.

Alfie Gallagher: The tapes at the centre of the Bell trial have not yet been made public, but Justice O'Hara argues that they "clearly show" you leading Ivor Bell to "speak against" Gerry Adams and to corroborate the claim that Adams ordered the disappearance of Jean McConville. O'Hara's view is supported by Gerry Moriarty's detailed report on the trial in the Irish Times and the testimony of Professor Kevin O'Neill. So when did you first become aware of Gerry Adams's alleged involvement in Jean McConville's murder? Were you not leading Ivor Bell to confirm this allegation in these tapes?

Anthony McIntyre: I have at no time said I interviewed Ivor Bell. Nor has he said he was interviewed by me. Interviewee Z has never given me permission to reveal his identity, so I will address the question in terms of Z.

There was nothing about either Kevin O’Neill’s testimony or Gerry Moriarty’s reporting that I found objectionable. Would I have preferred they said something different? Of course, but it is not for me to impose my preferences on them nor for them to be guided by how I might view matters. Kevin O’Neill’s testimony proved crucial to the verdict. I welcome the verdict, much as I would welcome a similar verdict if reached in the Winston Rea case. Kevin O’Neill gave what I believe was his genuinely held appraisal of the interview technique. Now, I can counter it with a defence of my own technique, rightly described by Ed Moloney as unconventional. But Kevin O’Neill was not in court to make an argument on my behalf. He was there to give his view as a competent historian on what he listened to on tape. And he reached conclusions that it was not the way to do oral history. I agree it was not the way to do conventional oral history.

At the heart of Kevin O’Neill’s argument was his contention that my questions were leading. He has previously made the same observation. I’ll cite from my own contribution to an interview with Marian Finucane in 2014:

Ed Moloney would then come back and he might be critical, he might say: you didn't emphasise this or you've asked a leading question. And on occasion Ed did criticise me for asking leading questions and he said look, don't be asking leading questions. And others had felt I asked leading questions … But I mean my own view of an interview is: there's no purpose in asking a question that doesn't lead to something. Why bother?

People will have to make up their own minds about the extent, if any, to which questions shaped answers. Z was free to answer whatever way he chose. Justice O’Hara at no point claimed Z was malleable and like putty in my hands. I suppose from my point of view I employed a probing technique designed to unlock knowledge. Was it designed to produce accounts that were not true? No. Did it challenge anything that seemed to be inaccurate? Yes.

As for first time I learned of the allegations against Adams, at this point it is impossible to say. It was a long time ago. What I can do is cite the record: in the Sunday Tribune in 1999, I wrote a piece stating that the policy of disappearing people was initiated by the post Twomey leadership in 1972. Adams was the Belfast commander immediately after Twomey.

Alfie Gallagher: But Kevin O'Neill did not merely testify that your questions were leading. He said that the tapes that were played during the Bell trial were "much more compromised" than the archive material he reviewed in 2002. In Gerry Moriarty's trial report, O'Neill says that one of the "serious concerns" he has about these tapes is that "there was preparation by McIntyre of Bell off tape". Presumably O'Neill is referring to an off-tape conversation between you and interviewee Z, before which Z is unsure whether Gerry Adams ordered the disappearance of Jean McConville but after which Z has "come to the conclusion that Gerry [Adams] did give the order to disappear her”. In retrospect, do you not think this was inappropriate? Isn't it possible that because of your bias against Gerry Adams, you were looking exclusively for answers that confirmed your hostile view of him whilst ignoring evidence to the contrary?

Anthony McIntyre: Kevin O’Neill would have to detail exactly what he meant by that. You should talk to him. All interviewees were talked to off the tape. I would always cover the ground with them in respect of the areas to be covered and the no-go areas. There is a demonstrable gulf between preparing and prompting. If it was a mere question of seeking interviewees who would confirm a hostile view of Adams and ignoring evidence to the contrary, the advice I gave to Dolours Price – which ultimately led to her not talking about the McConville incident – would not have been proffered. I at no time interviewed anybody, either as part of the BC project or separate from it who told me that Gerry Adams was never in the IRA. If an interviewee was to tell me that in May 72 Gerry Adams killed two women in an explosion, I would have immediately contested this by pointing out on tape that Adams could not have done so as he was in prison at the time.

It is through the recorded interviews that I reveal the existence of a discussion off tape. That is laid out there for the audience to weigh up when they are making a judgement on the authenticity of everything that is said. I could have chosen to conceal that. Revealing not concealing was the purpose of the project.

My modus operandi is only inappropriate if I prompt an interviewee to make an allegation which I know to be untrue. As an evidence gathering exercise, it is all inappropriate, but the people culpable of impropriety here are those who seek to use it as evidence, not those who gathered it as something else.

Would I adopt the same approach if I was to interview people tomorrow? Yes.

Alfie Gallagher: I'm not aware of anyone – outside of Sinn Féin at least – who claims to believe Gerry Adams's denials of IRA membership. Indeed, I'd say most people find a lot of the allegations made against Adams in the Boston tapes to be credible. But however many skeletons there might be in his closet, most people credit Gerry Adams for ending the IRA's armed struggle and steering the Republican Movement into constitutional politics. Vincent Browne gives a succinct expression of this view in his documentary about Adams: "Without him, the atrocities almost certainly would have happened anyway, but without him, peace wouldn’t have happened when it did.”

Is it not the case that if you and other critics of Gerry Adams had won the debate within the Republican Movement in the mid-90s, then the IRA's armed campaign would have lasted a lot longer? Wasn't the alternative to Gerry's jaw-jaw just dissident war-war?

Anthony McIntyre: I have never bought into the Vincent Browne perspective that peace only came about because of Adams. It can be argued that in order to make peace an essential component of his political career the IRA’s war was extended in time well beyond what was necessary. If you consider how little was really achieved between 1974 and 1998 it makes a mockery of the war. Therefore we have so much Sinn Fein revisionism today. I think had the debate been won by other critics, there would have been a different type of peace, one fuelled by the needs of the most disadvantaged and not shaped by the exigencies of political careers. I feel the odyssey of Adams needs viewed as a full reel and not as a still shot of a moment in time when he is brandishing a dove. The title of the Davenport-Sharrock book Man Of War, Man of Peace? is illustrative of the point I make. What use is a history of George Best where it does not address his role in Manchester United?

Alfie Gallagher: But isn't it true that Adams's critics within the Republican Movement in the early 90s were in favour of continuing the armed struggle? Isn't that one of the main reasons why the first ceasefire collapsed?

Anthony McIntyre: Many of them were, the majority I would safely guess. Were they indifferent to reasoned argument or were they resentful of Adams trying to stroke them? I think the way he conducted business, his endless deception, the pursuit of his own career to the detriment of all else, was arguably a rallying point for much of the opposition. An argument not given enough credence is that when Adams abandoned it, the armed struggle collapsed. The inference to be drawn is that it only carried on as long as it did because his input was essential: that’s another reason I don’t buy into the rather benign interpretation offered by Vincent.

Alfie Gallagher: Returning to Bell trial, I think the glaring flaw in Justice John O'Hara's written judgment is his claim that you deliberately gave a false guarantee of anonymity to your interviewees. As you said above, you were given the same false guarantee by Boston College yourself when you were interviewed for the Belfast Project. Indeed, the PSNI has spent the last three years fighting for legal access to your interviews in an attempt to prosecute you. Where does your case currently stand? Why do you think the PSNI is devoting so much time and resources to access the Boston College tapes when their legal admissibility was always in serious doubt?

Anthony McIntyre: Justice O’Hara was patently wrong, but it is the type of error that has been so well cancelled out by events and documentation, that it is no longer necessary to address it. The PSNI reflects the community it hails from. A more accurate name for it would have been the DUPSNI. The same deep-rooted strain of antipathy towards republicanism that permeates the DUP is manifested in the PSNI. Given the polarised nature of Northern society, it would be strange if it were any other way. And there is no one there to put manners on the PSNI because it has put manners on Sinn Fein.

The PSNI went after the BC tapes with a gusto never on display when in supposed pursuit of police and troop transgression. The instinct there is to cover up, make sure evidence stays beyond the reach of lawyers acting on behalf of the families of those killed by state actors. For all the talk about legacy they have never once investigated police torture or prison staff violence despite it being as systemic as clerical abuse. My own case has moved from the Divisional Court in Belfast to the Supreme Court in London and back to Belfast where it is currently seeking to go before the Appeal Court there. The PSNI motive is most likely to be found in a blend of vindictiveness and fishing. The courts in the North are so timid and on message that the PSNI would be foolish not to try it on with the judges. There is a good reason for the quip about the judiciary in the North – “If you want justice go to a brothel; if you want screwed go to a court.”

The fabricated investigation – there was no investigation – the PSNI concocted one as an excuse, much as they sought to bribe a son of Jean McConville in a bid to create a pretext for an investigation and a bid to plunder a history archive. The PSNI have been lying through their teeth since the get go. In my own case, they have been lying on oath, making up armed robberies and concocting prison sentences that demonstrably never happened, fabricating narratives about bomb attacks. There is also the possibility that they want to access as much as they can in a bid to measure what damage if any has been done to the agents they were running. Before they issued a subpoena, they, in my view, had one of their agents make a written approach to BC seeking access to the archive. When it was rebuffed, the subpoena was resorted to.

The PSNI might speak to me at some point in the future but I will not be speaking to them. Not a word.

Alfie Gallagher: Finally, Anthony, what are your hopes for the future of the archive in Boston College and its historical legacy?

Anthony McIntyre: I have few hopes for the archive. I regard it as an opportunity lost. Consider the chill effect that has been in place since the first PSNI sabotage, which has inhibited researchers reaching out and the researched opening up. Couple this to a lot of people – who could have made a major contribution to the type of truth recovery it rendered possible – having died during that chill season. The aggregated effect is a considerable swathe of the tillable history terrain being lost to us forever. Those knowledgeable but now silent voices will never speak again.

When I listen to some of the public broadcast discussion, particularly around the Patrick Radden Keefe book Say Nothing, it makes me think that people like Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes have left a rich mine for future students to excavate. Also, that their humanity has been crystallised and preserved in a manner robust enough to resist the sustained erosion of a revisionism which tries to rewrite the past with a pen filled with ink from the present. Brendan and Dolours brought to the fore a more subterranean narrative that ruptured the self-serving official mulch of those who would rather it had never seen the light of day. Their past is not a mere cog in somebody else’s wheel. It has an autonomous force of its own.

⏭ Alfie Gallagher is a Sligo based blogger.

The Boston Tapes Revisited: An Interview With Anthony McIntyre

Alfie Gallagher answers thirteen questions in a Booker's Dozen.


TPQ: What are you currently reading?

AG: A few weeks ago, I read Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski's The People's Republic of Walmart. It's an intriguing introduction to modern economic planning, both in terms of its pervasive role in running the largest multinational corporations of today and its potential role in democratic socialist economies of tomorrow. At the moment though, I'm reading the third book in Frank Herbert's Dune sci-fi saga, Patrick Cockburn's Age of Jihad and also, embarrassing as it is to admit, J. M. Roberts' 1300-page magnum opus History of the World. It's embarrassing because I first began to read the latter about fifteen years ago! Because I suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder, some things in life are more difficult than others. For various reasons, reading can be difficult for me -- this book in particular. I've started and stopped, re-read and re-interpreted parts of it several times over the years. It's been a Sisyphean ordeal, but to paraphrase Camus, it's in the struggle that we find meaning.

TPQ: Best book you have ever read? 

 AG: My favourite novel is probably John Rutherford's modern English translation of Don Quixote. When I first came across the book, I was trying to learn more about the nature of fiction and narrative. I found myself totally transported by this roguish and episodic story about stories, this metafictional narrative centuries before its time, this supposed parody of medieval romance that's really more of a joshing homage. Above all, it's just a funny book. It made me laugh and it made me think. I even have a copy of Picasso's sketch of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza hanging in my bedroom! 

 As for non-fiction, a personal favourite is Simon Blackburn's Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy. Blackburn has a gift for introducing to the average reader complex discourses on epistemology, free will and the philosophy of the mind with remarkable depth and lucidity. This book helped clarify my sometimes muddled thinking on such issues and provided me with a solid foundation for further reading.

 TPQ: A must-read before you die?

 AG: In fiction, I'd like to read Joyce's Ulysses, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. In non-fiction, I'd particularly like to tackle Eric Hobsbawm's Ages series.

TPQ: A preference for fact or fiction?

AG: Before I began to better manage my OCD and before I started using the Kindle, I found fiction much harder to read because I had a crippling compulsion to look up words in the dictionary. Non-fiction was easier, but by no means problem-free. Thankfully though, I've managed to reduce these perfectionistic urges greatly and I actually find fiction easier to read now... but that's probably because I over-analyse facts!

TPQ: Favourite Female author?

AG: That's hard to say because I tend to focus my reading on individual books rather a particular author's body of work. I especially admire Flannery O'Connor spare yet piercing prose and Jane Austen's subtle Victorian wit, but my favourite novel written by a woman is Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. It's one of the few novels I've read twice or more. I love the nested narrative, the weird quasi-incestuous obsessions, the gothic eeriness. 

TPQ: Favourite male author?

AG: Again, that's a difficult question to answer. The authors I find easiest to read would probably be Elmore Leonard and George Orwell. Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is all-time favourite, as is Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. If a gun was put to my head, I'd probably pick Flann O'Brien — though I'm sure you disagree! I think his work is extraordinarily imaginative and gloriously daft.

A Berlin Book Tower in memory of the Nazi book burning.
TPQ: First book you ever read?

AG: I can't recall the first book I ever read, but the first book that made a significant impact on me was the Usborne Illustrated Guide to Greek Myths and Legends. It know this because it was the basis of my first obsessive compulsive episode when I was 8 years old. I became terribly worried that unless I walked through doors in a certain way, the Greek gods and monsters I'd read about would somehow become "real"!

TPQ: Favourite childhood author?

AG: I wasn't much of a bookworm as a child, so I didn't really have a favourite author. I did enjoy encyclopaedias and science/technology books though.

TPQ: Any book you point blank refuse to read?

AG: I'm not sure I'd refuse to read any book as a matter of principle, but I do know I'd be very queasy at the thoughts of tackling PS, I love You or The Da Vinci Code.

TPQ: Any author you point blank refuse to read?

AG: Again, it's not so much a principled rejection of an author as it is a matter of what I can stomach. I think I'd find the dull, self-serving and self-important memoirs of certain politicians very nauseating — Gerry Adams, Tony Blair, the Clintons, etc.

TPQ: Pick a book to give to somebody so that they would more fully understand you.

AG: I'd love to say something cool like A Confederacy of Dunces or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but if I really want people to understand me and the problems I've had, then I'd have to refer them to the following: Jeffrey Schwarz's Brain Lock, Lee Baer's The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts and Overcoming Obsessive Compulsive Disorder by Dave Veale and Rob Willson.

TPQ: Last book you gave as a present?

 AG: Excluding ebooks — lest I incriminate myself! — the last book I gave as a present was The Great Big Book of Irish Wildlife: Through the Seasons. I bought it for my 7-year-old nephew Patrick.

 TPQ: Book you would most like to see turned into a movie?

 AG: In an ideal world, I'd like to see Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian made into a film, but in reality I'm sure it would be softened and sanitized like the film version of The Road.


⏭ Alfie Gallagher is a Sligo based mathematician.


Booker's Dozen @ Alfie Gallagher

Alfie Gallagher discusses free speech with Anthony McIntyre.

 AM: Seems the fastest growing group in the country is the MOPEDs – the Most Offended People Ever Discovered. The provenance of the term lies in the North where unionists would use MOPE as an acronym for diminishing nationalist grievances by dismissing them as the Most Oppressed People Ever. In a bit of discursive reversal the term can be employed against unionism although by no means exclusively, as they too are indistinguishable from the rest who are simply getting out of bed before dawn to make sure they catch the first offence of the day. While there might look to be some intelligent design behind a campaign to strangle freedom of expression and inquiry, it is not that straightforward, more a confluence of disparate groups ranting about whatever it is they take offence at. I heard it said by Pat Leahy on a Dublin radio station recently that people are now permanently primed to take instant offence. He was talking about the response to Leo Varadkar’s reference to priests getting up to no good behind the altar. Hardly the most insulting thing to be said yet immediately the clerics were out of the traps screaming that they had been terribly offended. Leahy is right, and I really do think we are seeing the most sustained erosion of free inquiry and the means by which we pursue it – freedom of expression. And it is almost by stealth, creeping up on us.

AG: I certainly agree that for at least the past decade or more, we have seen a steady, stealthy narrowing of the boundaries of permissible expression throughout self-described free societies. As you say, I don't think there is any kind of grand coordination involved, though there has certainly been an increase in state censorship. For instance, under the UK's Communications Act 2003, it is literally a criminal offence to post something online which someone might deem "grossly offensive", and the police have grown increasingly eager to investigate and prosecute such "crimes". I remember a few years ago the case of Azhar Ahmed, who received a criminal conviction along with a fine and community service sentence simply for making crass Facebook comments about the deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan. Since then there have been a number of similar prosecutions along with many more receiving formal warnings from the police about their social media content. There have also been serious concerns raised about the application of the Prevent strategy in British universities. In other European countries, hate speech laws are increasingly used to supress pro-Palestinian and left-wing groups.

However, perhaps an even greater cause for concern, I believe, is the growing tolerance of and even the demand for stifling and sanitizing expression and inquiry. To me, this is detrimental to public understanding. In the end, it is not so much about the right of individuals to speak as it is the right of ordinary people to listen, to think, and to understand without self-appointed or state-appointed cultural gatekeepers deciding for them.

AM: The English police have taken to investigating opinion that has not been defined as criminal. This is clearly the thought police in play. They even visited that religious idiot Jim Wells in the North over his dislike of gay people, I have long been taken by the view of the philosopher Anthony Grayling that:

Give any government, any security service, any policing authority, any special interest group such as a religious organisation or a political party, any prude or moraliser, any zealot of any kind, the power to shut someone else up, and they will leap at it with alacrity.

Because so many want to silence others on the grounds that what others say offends them, the state is not seen as censoring but upholding public order. All the while the muzzles are growing while the mouth is shrinking.

AG: Again, I agree, but I find that conversations such as ours are eagerly misinterpreted or deliberately misrepresented. To me, Anthony Grayling's observation stands on its own merits, but in certain activist and academic quarters, the fact that he is a white, middle-class liberal is enough to dismiss him out of hand regardless of the substance of his arguments. I think that much of this is sophistry: a kind of a woke ad hominem. Of course, none of this is to dismiss the existence and the impact of bigotry in society. I still see examples of racist, sexist and other bigoted thinking all too frequently, but I find that the least effective way of dealing with prejudice is to presume that its exists in people as a form of original sin and that it is something which needs to be muzzled rather than exposed, explored and scrutinized.

AM: Original sin – conveys a sense of muzzling what is labelled a dangerous thought being applied with religious like relish. Even dogs get muzzled when they bite not when they bark. We also have the Leftoid attacks on Angela Nagel over her article on immigration where all she tried to do was have the matter looked at from a Marxist perspective, relied on the writings of Marx to do so, and sought to show that the case could be made that immigration was an instrument of capital to facilitate the free flow of cheap and accessible labour for further exploitation. Sections of the left can be so censorious - I am very suspicious of them, seeing them as the Regressive Left.

AG: I thought Angela Nagle's article on open borders was a worthy contribution to an important debate. To be sure, the style of Nagle's piece was polemical, and while several writers did respond with reasonable yet robust critiques of her argument, the online reaction from many open-border activists was hysterical. And I'm not talking merely about anonymous uber-woke Twitterati: I saw a number of high-profile Irish academics and activists endorse blog posts and Twitter threads that called Nagle a "crypto-Strasserite" and falsely accused her of plagiarising Grover Norquist (even though she explicitly and carefully cites his article). Her current employers and her former university apparently received phone calls about her. While not strictly censorship, this is a kind of intimidation and it creates a climate in left-wing circles where dissenting views are punished and orthodoxy is rewarded. It is very disheartening but sadly unsurprising.

All things being equal, I think open borders would be a good idea. The problem is that right now, all things in the global economy are manifestly unequal. Therefore, I think the people who tweet "Open the borders now!" focus on a symptom of the problem rather than its cause. In the contemporary context, one in which organised labour has never been weaker, I think that an open borders policy merely empowers and entrenches corporate interests. As Angela Nagle points out, this is not a controversial political position: it is essentially what Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders advocate. More importantly, like prison abolition, open borders policy has virtually no support in the general population. Outside of the academic/activist left and the libertarian right, it's not even on most people's political radar let alone their political agenda. As Norman Finkelstein observed, left-wing politics has to be about reaching masses of people in order to bring about the most progressive, most enlightened goals that current circumstances allow. But this cannot be done if we go well beyond where people are at politically and what they are ready to support. If we piously insist on doing so, then we are no longer engaged in politics; we have become instead, in Norman's wickedly witty words, just another cult.

Of course, I think right-wingers can be just as censorious as sections of the left, if not more so. Look at how difficult it is to make robust critiques of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians in mainstream American media without being blacklisted as an anti-Semite. Last month, we had Nigel Farage calling for the police to investigate Jo Brand for telling a joke! It's absolute madness!

AM: Open Borders, or closed borders, people should be free to pursue the inquiry as they see fit. Citizens should be allowed to explore all manner of ideas. I think we have to draw a distinction between what is an idea and what is an insult. To argue that black people are inferior to white people is an idea, an abhorrent one in my opinion but one that people should be free to advocate and then be forced to stand over when the time comes to pay the fare. Free speech is not a free ride. It is like a roller coaster – you have to face any turbulence that comes on the journey. By contrast, to call a black person a “nigger” is clearly not an idea but an insult and should be rightly prohibited in public discourse. All we learn from that is nothing about the black person but that the person using the term is a moronic bigot. In this I am minded of the manner in which David Irving was treated. The Austrians jailed him for Holocaust denial whereas when he sued Deborah Lipstadt for allegedly libelling him, she tore him asunder in the court. She later objected to his imprisonment in Austria saying: 

I am uncomfortable with imprisoning people for speech. Let him go and let him fade from everyone's radar screens... Generally, I don't think Holocaust denial should be a crime. I am a free speech person, I am against censorship.

We see the same thing replicated in the Anti-Semitism discussion where bodies like the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, reprehensibly try to stigmatise people who see a point of comparison between Israeli war crimes against humanity and Nazi atrocities. Yet it has surprisingly little to say as far as I am aware of Israelis and their supporters claiming that the situation in the Middle East today is akin to the Holocaust. This comparison was in fact strongly criticised by Lipstadt.

AG: For sure, people should be able to put explore or advocate any idea. Moreover, we all must accept that our own ideas, arguments and even our most cherished beliefs also need to be subjected to scrutiny. None of us should be afraid of discovering that we are wrong because the likelihood is that we very often are. To a greater or lesser extent, each one of us is burdened by time/information constraints as well as cognitive errors and biases. It is therefore inevitable that even the most well-intentioned and intellectually honest individuals will draw unsound conclusions and even make massive errors of judgment. I've made quite a few myself and likely will make many more! As someone who has struggled with mental illness since childhood, I have had to come to terms with the fact that my own intuitions are often deeply irrational. Though it was a tremendous struggle, I found that embracing my own frailty and fallibility was a liberation from fear of uncertainty, from the terror of the unanswerable question: "What if everything I believe is wrong?"

And yes, there are beliefs like white supremacy that I find not only noxious but also completely unfounded and frankly idiotic. However, I do not think it is a good idea to suppress the advocacy of ideas that I (and probably the vast majority of other people) believe to be wrong and hateful. For me, it's really not about the rights of scumbags like Richard Spencer or Milo Yiannopoulos. It's about the rights of the general population. Do we trust people to think for themselves or do we believe that they need an intellectual and moral elite to do the thinking for them? Do we want people to actually understand the reasons why white supremacy is wrong or do we want them to recite anti-racist slogans like the Nicene creed? Of course, I'm not so naive or utopian to believe that every controversy can be resolved by a good, old-fashioned debate. Indeed, I often find that a lot of what passes for "debate" on TV and radio to be vacuous. But the answer is not censorship from above; it is more engagement, more rigorous discourse, more incisive scrutiny of ideas and institutions from below.

AM: It also has to be about the right to hear. There is much obnoxious guff that passes for free speech and seriously objectionable ideas. But I want to decide for myself rather than have PC crowd decide for me. If they don’t want to listen to David Irving, then don’t go in. If I want to listen, don’t stop me going in. Finally, how do you respond to the accusation that is often bandied around that people resisting the PC gangs, the Woke culture, the myriad of state and self-appointed committees for public safety are free speech fundamentalists?

AG: Well, I suppose it depends on what they mean by the term "free speech fundamentalist". If it is someone who believes that no idea, argument or belief should be immediately suppressed without any public airing, then I'm a free speech fundamentalist. But as you said, free speech is not a free ride, nor should it be. Scrutiny and criticism are essential. And of course, we ought to be able to robustly challenge claims that we believe are deliberately false or malicious. I've no objection to libel law in principle, but in both Ireland and the UK, the law is obscenely imbalanced in favour of the plantiff. In Ireland, it seems to be the only occasion in which the defendant is presumed guilty until proven innocent! Thus libel law in both the UK and Ireland functions both as a tool of the wealthy to muzzle criticism and as a cash cow for the legal establishment. It results in many perverse judgments and farcical situations: for instance, multi-billionaire Denis O'Brien receiving a massive settlement simply for being called a "hypocrite" and subsequently managing to prevent the bulk of the Irish media from reporting speeches made about him in the Dáil.

Of course, I don't believe that freedom of expression necessarily covers every possible exchange of information — stolen credit card details, hacked passwords, recipes for chemical weapons, etc. However, when it comes to placing legal limits, I think each scenario needs to be considered separately, in its own context and on its own merits. If I had to sum up my position on the question of limits to free speech, I think AC Grayling, whom you quoted earlier, puts it best:

Restrictions on free speech have to be extremely narrow, extremely specific, case by case, one-off, and only very rarely, on the best justification, prior to the speech itself.

One thing I am sure of is the need for openness, transparency and public scrutiny in such matters.

AM: Share with me your Free thought for the day

AG: Never cherish your beliefs like religious relics. Always expose them to the most intense criticism because nothing is so sacred to be beyond questioning. As Charles Sanders Pierce put it:

enquiry is not standing upon the bedrock of fact. It is walking upon a bog, and can only say, this ground seems to hold for the present. Here I will stay until it begins to give way.


Alfie Gallagher blogs @ Left From The West



In Quillversation ⬌ Free Speech

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