If you still cling to the ‘don’t call it ‘censorship’ — the State’s not involved’ definition, you’re irrelevant

Spiked:

It shows that it is not only the state or even sections of the authorities that demand censorship today – all sorts of advocacy groups, educators and youthful organisations now crusade like modern-day Torquemadas for the silencing of their opponents.

And it demonstrates the extent to which censorship today both springs from and reinforces a new degraded view of human subjectivity, a view of individuals as fundamentally psychologically fragile and thus in need of protection from allegedly dangerous ideas.

In such circumstances, censorship can even be re-presented as a public good, designed not necessarily to police morality in any old-fashioned way but rather to manage relations between the various fragile sections of society.

Perversely, censorship is repackaged as a way of protecting the powerless. That idea, more than any other, needs to be challenged, and the authoritarian, patronising, divisive, knowledge-hampering consequences of modern-day censorship exposed.