(So who shall we put on the list?)
Fascism is on the march around the world. Donald Trump is on an authoritarian warpath both at home and abroad, the Zionist Nazis are brazenly, openly and proudly engaged in a live streamed genocide against the Palestinians, the British outlaw protest groups, the German police remind us all that they have lost none of the swagger of the SS by beating up women on Palestinian marches, arresting people for wearing Keffiyehs and bizarrely anyone caught speaking Irish. It is hard to imagine in this context that Fascism also creeps up on us, the groundwork is laid years before, by people who should know better and do, but also know what their bank balance, pension and health plan look like too.
The Irish poet W.B. Yeats in his bucolic poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree says of the place that
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
Peace for him was something that crept up on him, small things added up, creating an atmosphere, a context. If you read the mainstream media and listen to liberal handwringing, Fascism is an overnight phenomenon that they had nothing to do with in creating. It is all the fault of Trump and Netanyahu and it happened not quite overnight but in a short period of time. But no, there were lots of crickets singing along the path and many a linnet spreading its wings. There are many elements to it, the collapse of working-class resistance and leadership, the stranglehold of the trade union bureaucracy on workers’ attempts to fight, a loss of political perspectives and reference points and the NGOisation of a left that has become dependent on state largesse just to exist. Censorship and the stifling of dissent is one small, but important element and it didn’t come out of the blue, the groundwork was laid long ago by right wing forces, often with the support of liberals or their stony silence. You can’t say From the River to Sea without fear of arrest in Germany and many other places. But of course, there are lots of things you can’t say.
When the US went after Julian Assange many liberals not only did not support him, but took at face value, not only the allegations of sexual assault and rape, which were bogus, but also the concern of those pursuing him on those charges. There are few presidents of the US, if any, who have not engaged in inappropriate sexual behaviour. And in Sweden, where the alleged assaults took place, politicians forced to resign over such issues demand severance payments even when it involves a minor.[1] The Swedes were not interested in the alleged assaults but in handing Assange over to the US and he was left to rot, first in the Ecuadorian Embassy and later in Belmarsh prison. It sent a message that we are not entitled to truthful information about what the great and the good do. Edward Snowden learnt that lesson too and had to go into exile, paradoxically to a country not known for its press freedom either. But when you flee persecution, beggars can’t be choosers and you go wherever affords you safety.
Aside from going after those who sought to put information into the public domain the dear leaders preferred we knew nothing about, there are those whose works, both fiction and non-fiction are subjected to attempts at censorship, sometimes not because of what the particular work says, but because of the authors views on unrelated matters. Liberals, conservatives, religious nuts and of course that moany self-obsessed cherub generation, that considers itself so progressive but hold many reactionary positions all engage in censorship in one form or other, sometimes of the same author but for different reasons. JK Rowling is criticised by trans activists for her defence of women’s spaces, whilst conservatives and religious nuts accuse her of promoting witchcraft. All have called for her books to be boycotted, banned, or otherwise suppressed. In the case of the conservatives, they actually managed to have some of her books removed from school shelves in Zeeland, Michigan and Nashville, Tennessee in 2019 over concerns about witchcraft.[2] A trans activist’s wet dream, though if witchcraft were real, well that would solve whether you can change sex or not.
The link between these attitudes and the current rampant attempts at or actual fascism (Israel is beyond doubt a fascist regime) is never made. In the US between 2001 and 2020 organised groups challenged 46 titles per year but in 2024 this reached 4,190 titles for that year alone. Conservatives, fascists and the deranged right challenge a wide range of materials, particularly LGBTQ+ titles, sometimes on the grounds of age appropriateness. Some of the books may indeed be inappropriate for children, but they really don’t want any positive books or discussion of LGB lives or TQ+. These are the people who in other periods across the world have banned books such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and also books such as the Joy of Sex. Prudes with issues about their own sexuality, who have perhaps never enjoyed sex, or a book, for that matter.
Liberals and conservatives like to think the authors they want banned, or those whose voice they would censor, fit into nice neat categories of reprobates. They don’t. Margaret Atwood is a case in point. She is a feminist and her novel The Handmaid’s Tale about a dystopian world where conservative attitudes towards women are taken to their logical conclusion is a feminist text and now thanks to the TV series a social reference point for all. It resonates with many women, as what it portrays is not a million miles removed from current reality. However, in 2018 she ran the gauntlet when she criticised the #Me Too movement. She didn’t disagree with women saying they had been raped, sexually assaulted or had their careers ruined because they had stood up to the powerful Hollywood men who tried to force them to have sex with them. She argued instead about the procedures of the movement and the idea that the allegation was enough to convict. She stated:
The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn't get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? The legal system can be fixed, or our society could dispose of it. Institutions, corporations and workplaces can houseclean, or they can expect more stars to fall, and also a lot of asteroids.
If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers? It won't be the Bad Feminists like me. We are acceptable neither to Right nor to Left. In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.[3]
This seems a reasonable statement, a starting point for a discussion, but no, she was hounded and the usual calls for cancellation were made. She survived. She got back into their good books because she was on the side of the trans in the debate about women’s spaces. People are complex, have varied ideas that vary over time. This is not acceptable to the cherubs. Absolute uniformity of opinion is demanded on all issues at all times. Or at least on all the issues that the high priests of the dogma decide are important. This is easily seen on the right, where there is rarely a need for caricature. Frequently amongst liberals there is no need for caricature either, but some of the more sophisticated types are able to present themselves as being more nuanced, regardless of whether they actually are or not. Their position is that anyone who disagrees with them should be banished to some literary Devil’s Island, where like Papillon they may be allowed to escape many years later, if even then.
Margaret Atwood has once again come under fire. This time from the right. How the liberals who pilloried her will object, I do not know, given their past record on censorship and on her specifically. In her native Canada, Edmonton’s Public School Board has decided to remove 200 book titles from the libraries, including Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale due to sexual content.[4] Amongst the titles to be removed is The Color Purple by Alice Walker, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. It is laughable, but liberals and are ill placed to object given their own behaviour. They have asked for everything from Shakespeare to Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mocking Bird to be removed from school and even university libraries. The cherubs have even demanded that some books be removed from courses, or that they be given trigger warnings when reading Shakespeare, students of history can even demand that when studying WWII or the Holocaust that they be given trigger warnings. They were coddled for years by liberals. It went hand in hand with the notion of safe spaces i.e. areas in which you couldn’t be challenged by ideas that made you feel uncomfortable. This led in the case of Maryam Namazie, an Iranian feminist and an ex-Muslim, who was invited in 2015 to give a talk on blasphemy in the age of ISIS by the Atheist, Securalist and Humanist Society at Goldsmiths being shut down midway through her talk. She was interrupted by the Islamic Society, who even turned off her PowerPoint presentation. When she told them to be quiet, the head of the society shouted Safe Space! Safe Space! Intimidation! The Feminist Society on campus did not support the Iranian feminist’s right to speak but rather the Islamic Society’s right to shut her down. There is a hierarchy of opinions and the liberals accepted and argued that there are lots of liberal views that should not be heard, ever.
You would think that given the recent history in stifling opinion on Palestine the left and liberals would have learnt the lesson. But no. Not one bit of it. Trump is not the only idiot who doubles down on nonsense. Most of the liberals do it with a similar zeal and lack of reference to the facts.
John Boyne, the Irish author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a case in point. His novella Earth, about sexual abuse, made the longlist for the Polari Prize, an award specifically for LGBTQ+ authors. He is a gay man and so qualifies. However, making even the long list brought howls of rage from the cherubs and their time worn elders. He should have been removed from the list they claimed, not on the basis of the literary merit of his novella about sexual abuse, but rather because of his position on trans, an issue not dealt with it in his work.[5] The uproar has led to the cancelation of the prize this year and its future is in doubt. Boyne himself was saddened by it all and asked the authors who withdrew their names to resubmit them and he would ask not to make the shortlist as he considered it a worthy prize for some of the new authors.[6] It fell on deaf ears. His sin in the matter was unforgiveable. Yes, even liberals talk like conservatives and have notions of sins: original, venial and mortal. His was a mortal sin with no redemption. He said biological sex was real, he as a gay man was attracted to other men, not genitals and less still some amorphous notion of gender and blue hair. I am paraphrasing of course, but that is about the measure of what he said.
What has all this got to do with fascism? A lot. The idea that some ideas are fought by suppressing them, is a common one in capitalist societies, mainly used by the state and the right. We have many examples of this, the most infamous of which is perhaps the McCarthyite witch hunt in the US, Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act in Ireland which banned interviews with Sinn Féin, the Ley Mordaza in Spain which banned the filming of the cops, laws in many countries that make insulting the royal parasites on the throne a criminal offence (Spain, Thailand etc). Now however, we have had about two decades of liberals demanding the state take such action, organising it themselves when the state fails to act, arguing for increased measures of suppression of free speech and even assembly, thought crime legislation and not just against right wingers, but also heretics from within their own liberal ranks.
Of course, were it just liberals we could dismiss them with the contempt they deserve and say no more. However, they are joined in their crusade by certain “Marxist” currents, some of which have been to the fore in this nonsense. Marx had a lot to say about censorship and why he opposed it. Trotsky also stated that “any workers ‘leader’ who arms the bourgeois state with special means to control public opinion in general, and the press in particular, is a traitor (bold not in original).”[7] Many of those demanding censorship and calling for cancel culture, such as the SWP in Britain and PbP in Ireland consider themselves to be Trotskyist, though they increasingly downplay their origins. Traitors all in the eyes of old man Trotsky. Lest anyone think, this is some particular aberration of Trotskyist groups, sorry to disappoint, many Stalinist groups and in an inherently contradictory manner Anarchists also call for such measures.
These liberals and erstwhile Marxists, of various hues, are not to blame for the rise of Fascism, but they did contribute to it by legitimating censorship and the very notion of thought crimes. They argued for states to have the tools they now use against pro-Palestinian activists and they have left the wider movement ill-prepared to challenge such attacks as their disagreement with the state is not whether thought crimes exist, or free speech should be curtailed, but about who the state should target. In their reformist cretinism they thought they had the state on their side. A genuine unforgiveable error. Perhaps it crept up on them, but now they see the monster in all its putrid decadence, they marvel at their baby instead of learning the lesson.
References
[2] The Guardian (23/08/2025) Banned! The 20 books they didn’t want you to read. Steven Poole.
[3] The Globe and Mail (13/01/20218) Am I a bad feminist? Margaret Atwood.
[4] Global News (29/08/2025) Edmonton Public removing more than 200 library books to comply with provincial rules.
[5] Author statement on the Polari Prize Longlist.
[6] The Telegraph (19/08/2025) Here’s what happened when they tried to cancel me. John Boyne.
[7] Trotsky, L. (1938) Freedom of the Press and the Working Class.
