Sense and censorship

by Paul Johnson
CENSORS, or would-be censors, invariably look foolish in the perspective of history. But it is not often that they make such idiots of themselves at the time as Mr. Maudling did last week. His blundering attempt to stop the BBC's 'Ulster Inquiry' had all the hallmarks of President Nixon's ludicrous little ploy to save the East Pakistan colony — it was morally indefensible and certain to fail, leaving the perpetrator empty-handed and red-faced.
No one was surprised, of course, that the Stormont crew were against the programme. They are against any programme on Ulster which cannot be guaranteed, in advance, to endorse the Unionist case. Ideally, they would prefer no TV or newspaper coverage of Ulster at all. But is it not shameful that they should be able to pull the strings and have a British Home Secretary —who went to the Home Office with a reputation for liberalism — dancing faithfully to their tune?
I have maintained from the start that this hopeless war in Ulster, if continued long enough, would drag down British public standards to the squalid level of Stormont, and that in particular it would undermine our freedom of speech and comment. Now we are seeing it happen. For though the BBC rejected the government's 'advice,' it was frightened enough to ensure that the programme failed to get at the heart of the matter.
It did not ask the question: why have the minority been driven to violence? And it certainly could not provide an answer, since no spokesman for the IRA was allowed to give witness. Moreover, the next time the BBC will certainly not risk a headlong conflict with the government. The most effective form of censorship is that which, by threats, induces self-censorship. And the BBC already operates a tight system of self-censorship on Ulster, which the government's menaces over the 'Inquiry' will help to strengthen.
Censorship is the father of folly. It makes is possible for frightened, or incompetent, or evil men in high positions to get away with lies and half-truths. It permits errors to be compounded, and failures to be reinforced. It is when things go wrong that ministers and generals are most anxious for the truth to be suppressed. Yet it is precisely at such moments of danger and disaster that full access to the truth is most essential. How can remedies be found if the facts are hidden or, worse, distorted?
Everyone knows that the government's policy in Ulster has reached complete deadlock. Lacking the courage, as yet, to pursue alternatives, it is simply buying time — a purchase paid for not just in coin of the realm, but in the lives of young soldiers and hapless civilians. Only an open and vigorous public debate can permit a new consensus to evolve, and so give ministers the authority and resolution to risk experiments. Censorship not only deludes the people, it paralyses those who seek to impose it.
But the objections to censorship are not merely pragmatic: they are moral, too. To circumscribe another man's right to the truth is an act of theft. It is to deny his exercise of free will, to insist that his moral susceptibilities are atrophied, or defective, and must be supplemented by the judicious control of the censor. Censorship, in fact, is an unparalleled form of arrogance, the deadliest of all sins, for it elevates the censor to a superior rank in creation, and degrades the censored by implying their inability to distinguish between good and evil. Censorship is an invasion of the divine prerogative.
The irony of the Ulster situation is that the Stormont regime is being driven, in extrernis, to abandon its one reasonable claim to speak with more moral authority than the government in Dublin — that it does not impose, or seek to impose, any form of censorship. Northern Unionists have always been able to argue powerfully that the odious system of censorship of books operated by the Irish Republic is, in itself, positive proof that those who seek to reunify Ireland are seeking also to subject free British subjects in the North to clericalist tyranny.
I do not believe this to be true. I have always thought it inevitable that a reunified Ireland would be a wholly secular state, and that the addition of the North would reinforce democratic freedoms on both sides of the Border, creating in time a modern party-political structure of the type which has served Britain so well.
Nevertheless, it is on this point that the North needs not merely reassurances but some form of practical action. in the Republic, it is now generally accepted that the Irish constitution will have to be radically revised before Ulster can be incorporated. I would go further and say that it should be scrapped, and that the writing of a new constitution should be made the prime subject of negotiations between Dublin and the parties in the North. Indeed, that is what Irishmen should be doing at present. instead of killing each other in the streets, and ranting from the platforms.
I believe a growing number of people in the South now take this view. But the joint construction of a new constitution must itself depend on Unionist acceptance that a 32-county state is the object to work for.
To get this. the Republic must make a unilateral gesture: it must show itself willing to abandon some of the things the North finds abhorrent. What better beginning could be made than to scrap its system of censorship? The thing is repugnant in itself : it is disgraceful that many of Ireland's finest writers cannot publish their books in the land where they were born, and in consequence live in exile.
It is morally wrong. And, in political terms, it is a barrier between North and South just as real — in some ways more pervasive — than the Border, but far more easily removed. 1 can think of no action that Dublin can take which would have a stronger impact on British opinion, or more successfully erode such moral basis as Stormont still possesses. Let the Irish do it: and do it now