You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (32 page)

The Web keeps the politically committed on sites which confirm their prejudices, and never forces them to tackle a wider society that has little interest in or knowledge of their political ideas. As for wider society, when there were only a few television channels, the mass audience had little choice but to watch national news programmes. Now they can surf the multi-media world, and avoid all contact with current-affairs journalism. The Web and satellite television risk confining interest in the vital concerns of the day to a minority of politically engaged hobbyists.

Evgeny Morozov, the most bracing critic of modern optimism, emphasises the anaesthetising effects of perpetual amusement. People use new means of communication not to engage in political activism, but to find entertainment. The Net is no exception, and has increased the opportunities for the masses to find pleasing diversions to a level that no one had previously imagined possible. In Russia, China, Vietnam and the other formerly puritan communist countries, the decision by the new market-orientated regimes to allow Western-style media to provide high-quality escapism, sport, dating and gossip sites was a smart move that made their control of the masses more effective. In Belarus, Morozov discovered Internet service providers that were offering free downloads of pirated movies and music. The dictatorship ‘could easily put an end to such practices, [but] prefers to look the other way and may even be encouraging them’. Unlike so many who write about the Net, Morozov was brought up in a dictatorship – Belarus, as it happens – and the knowledge that freedom is hard to win explains his impatience with wishful thinking.

I hope I am not making the insulting error of pretending that democracies are as oppressive as dictatorships – such comparisons are the self-pitying and self-dramatising whines of spoilt Western children. I am merely saying that the Web cannot free individuals from the need to challenge the constraints of politics, law and popular indifference, whatever system governs their country. Writers in democracies have fewer constraints, and for that we should be more grateful than we are. But if we want to achieve political change, the new possibilities of reaching and talking to people are offset by the difficulties in breaking out of the ghetto and preaching to the unconverted.

Meanwhile, the Net-induced death of dictatorial systems is far from certain, or even likely. They can adapt, as absolutist regimes have always adapted. They may indeed find the task of controlling easier, because of one benefit the Net brings that none of the old communications systems offered.

With the exception of North Korea, modern dictatorships are not as oppressive as the Stalinist state Orwell dissected in the 1940s. On one point, though, he almost predicted the future. Every reader of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
remembers the ‘telescreens’ the party installed in homes, that had the potential to watch every movement and record every sound.

Early in the novel, Winston Smith half-heartedly attempts the mandatory morning exercises. He assumes that no one is watching him, and allows his mind to wander, when:

Orwell’s image of a dictatorship that could turn televisions into spies in the home never became a reality.

Computers, on the other hand …

Polish border guards were put on alert when they received orders to detain a runaway herd of several hundred cows, which swam across the Bug River from Belarus to Poland. Belarusian authorities now plan to build a fence to prevent livestock from crossing the EU’s longest eastern border into Poland.

RADIO POLONIA, OCTOBER
2006

In the summer of 2010, actors from the Belarus Free Theatre landed in London looking like time travellers from another century. They were dressed in shabby clothes. They smoked cigarettes, and wondered why people tutted so. Their hosts were old-timers too, with records of solidarity with those struggling against dictatorship that stretched back into the Cold War. Index on Censorship, an organisation Stephen Spender founded in 1972 to help dissidents in the old Soviet bloc, greeted them. Tom Stoppard, who had written some of his finest plays about communist oppression, praised their bravery. It was as if nothing had changed since Stoppard was defending Václav Havel in the 1970s.

The stories the company told had an equally traditional feel. Natalia Koliada, its founder, described how the secret police had threatened her and her husband, and forced the company to perform in private houses or in the woods before audiences she had to vet to ensure they did not contain informers. Koliada had an ironic intelligence and an open heart. Even as she talked about her family’s suffering, she could not stay glum for long. The absurdity of the dictatorship matched its cruelty, and she was soon bursting into astonished laughter. The company rejoiced in the story of how a herd of Belarusian cows had made a mass break for freedom and swum the River Bug to escape to Poland. Polish border guards had captured and deported the beasts back across the frontier, and the Belarusian authorities had promised to build a fence to keep them in. The human parallels the story offered of an unconcerned world cooperating with a dictatorship were too good for the theatre’s writers to miss.

Koliada said that I should never forget that even in Russia the regime renamed the KGB the ‘FSB’ because of the unfortunate memories the old initials aroused. ‘Not so in Belarus. Our dictator still calls our secret police the KGB. The nature of their job has not changed, why change the name? At least he’s honest.’

That was the only honesty on offer. The censors and the censored had to play elaborate games, in which neither could admit their true motives. The actors had to pretend they wished to stage a work for artistic reasons, and not because they wanted to criticise the regime. The censors had to pretend that there were no reasons why any rational Belarusian would wish to criticise the regime, and yet find reasons for banning the work anyway.

One of the first plays the company tried to perform was
4.48 Psychosis
by Sarah Kane, a wrenching dramatisation of depression the British playwright completed just before she committed suicide in 1999, at the age of twenty-eight. (4.48 a.m. was the time her night terrors awoke her.)

The censor was in a quandary. He knew why the Free Theatre was drawn to Kane, and why the audience would appreciate the work. Along with prostitution and industrial injuries, mental illness stands at an extremely high level in Belarus. But as a functionary of Lukashenko’s dictatorship, the censor could not accuse the company of trying to highlight a social evil the regime presided over, because that would mean admitting that mental illness
was
at an extremely high level in Belarus. He thought hard before passing judgement.

‘You can’t show it, because there is no depression in Belarus.’

‘We’re not saying there is,’ the actors replied sweetly. ‘Sarah Kane was British, so if any government is being criticised it is the British government.’

The logic of their argument stumped the censor for a moment. Then he rallied.

‘Ah, but people who see the play may
think
that there is depression in Belarus – even though there isn’t – so I’m still banning it.’

Andrei Sannikov, whose good manners and carefully chosen words signalled that he had once worked as a diplomat, accompanied the actors to London. He was preparing to stand as an opposition candidate in the December 2010 elections, and was trying to mobilise indifferent European publics to the Belarusian opposition’s cause. He and his friends acknowledged that the Internet helped the opposition at home and abroad. It hosted their websites, and allowed them to mobilise domestic and international support. On occasion hundreds of thousands of people read articles on the Charter 97 dissident site. The Free Theatre told audiences of upcoming performances through blogs. The flash mobs which so impressed Westerners also inconvenienced the police. I will not pretend that the Net made no difference. For the Belarusian as for the Arab opposition, it gave them a new and welcome advantage. When the crunch came, however, it was as if it had never been invented. Belarusians learned the hard way that it takes a little more than flash mobs to shift a tyranny.

Before the election campaign began, Sannikov’s press secretary committed suicide by hanging himself. Or that is what the police said. Sannikov did not believe a word of it. There was no suicide note, and his friend had not been depressed in the days before his death, but was looking forward to the coming struggle. Opponents of the regime had a habit of ‘disappearing’, and Sannikov had good reasons for fearing the worst.

The regime rigged the December 2010 election, and demonstrators came out onto the streets. A ferocious police response met them. Contrary to the predictions of Net utopians, phones that could upload to YouTube in no way inhibited the police, or caused them to worry about what outsiders might think, any more than they restrained the behaviour of the forces of the clerical regime in Iran or the Ba’athist regime in Syria when they turned on the revolutionaries. The police set on every demonstrator they could find. They arrested the entire staff of Charter 97, along with a thousand others. They marched Natalia Koliada to a prison van – ‘a kind of mobile jail’ – where they made her lie face-down. ‘It was dark inside, and I couldn’t see a thing. The guard said, “My only dream is to kill you; if you so much as move you’ll feel my baton all over your body, you animal.” Then he threatened to rape me.’ In every corridor of the jail they took her to ‘men were standing facing the walls with their hands behind their backs. It was like a scene out of films about fascism.’ Perhaps the regime did not realise that it had captured a prize target – either that or a KGB clerk bungled the paperwork. When they arraigned Koliada in court the next day, they charged her under someone else’s name with a minor offence. She escaped with a fine, and got out of the country.

They made no mistakes with Andrei Sannikov. The police picked him out at the post-election demonstration. They beat him with truncheons, and held the crowd back so it could not come to his aid. The KGB took his wife too, and once they were in jail they worked out a bestial way to destroy their sanity. The couple had left their three-year-old son with his grandparents. The police threatened to snatch the child and put him into state care, a tactic they had tried previously with Koliada’s twelve-year-old daughter.

When they sentenced Sannikov to five years’ hard labour for ‘organising mass disturbances’, spectators in the courtroom cried out, ‘Andrei, you are our president!’ Battered but dignified, Sannikov declared his support for democracy, the rule of law and enforceable international standards of behaviour from the dock: ‘We all want one thing – to live in our own country, participate in fair elections and not to fear for our lives or the lives of our loved ones. That’s exactly why we are being tried today, facing fabricated evidence from those who ignored the law. I want to warn all those who neglected the law today – you are bound to appear in court and incur deserved punishment. What’s worse – you will inevitably have to look into the eyes of your children.’

They will have to look into the eyes of their children. Whether they will receive the punishments they so well deserve is an open question, whose answer depends on political calculations. Will the growing economic crisis push the populace into revolt? Will Russia abandon its support for the dictator? Whatever scenario one imagines, it is hard to imagine the Net making a decisive difference. As in democracies, the new technologies do not just allow citizens of dictatorships to expand their knowledge. They also help the authorities control the population. With people as with cattle, electric fences can always contain them.

Welcome to Dystopia

An age of revolution provokes counter-revolution, as elites fight to hold on to power. Their success in crushing democratic movements ought to destroy the whimsical notion that technology determines political freedom. The Iranian and Belarusian regimes suppressed the opposition with the utmost brutality – and survived the revolt. The Syrian and Bahraini governments taught demonstrators that if they took to the streets they would kill them. In Libya, the revolutionaries required the support of the full force of NATO air power before they could overthrow the dictatorship. If in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood and the army unite to form a common reactionary front, the Egyptians will find that revolution has replaced a bad regime with a worse one – as the Russians found after 1917 and the Iranians after 1979.

Liberals have been able to use the Internet in the struggles of our time. Like the printing presses, it has opened novel possibilities. But the Net does not make democratic change inevitable, because liberalism’s enemies can use it as well. As with all other advances in communications technology, the Net adds to the influence of those who already possess it.

Dissidents in China, like dissidents in dictatorial regimes everywhere, welcome the Web. It allows environmental campaigns and protests against official incompetence that would once have been impossible – although it is worth noting that liberal bloggers avoid full-frontal attacks on the Communist Party.

The most popular sites in China offer entertainment, not politics, however, and the authorities see no reason to stop the masses losing themselves in escapism and fantasy. Overwhelmingly, those sites that cater for the niche current affairs market are not written by liberal bloggers, but by nationalists and authoritarian party-liners. They criticise the government not for denying human rights, but for not asserting China’s interests with sufficient ruthlessness. The most sinister sites target dissidents. When a professor complained that the cult of Mao in China venerated a tyrant, who killed more people in the twentieth century than any other dictator, the hard-line Utopia website responded by collecting ten thousand signatures demanding that the police prosecute him for subversion. Utopia called him a ‘capitalist running dog’, ‘cow ghost’ and ‘snake spirit’ – insults that outsiders found quaint but that Chinese readers recognised as anathemas the party used to describe Mao’s enemies when he began the massacres of the Cultural Revolution. Pro-regime websites, like pro-regime novelists, artists and journalists, face none of the harassment the state metes out to its political and religious opponents.

Liberals regarded China as an oddity after the fall of the Berlin Wall. History was over, and if the Chinese Communist Party wanted to continue to see its country grow, it would have to accept the democratic reforms that Westerners assumed the expanding middle class was bound to demand. When China grew into the world’s second largest economic power, without the middle class demanding or the Communist Party granting democratic reforms, the deterministic argument changed. The Internet would now undermine communist rule, and the rule of all other repressive regimes. If dictatorial states tried to restrict and censor it, they would see their economies shrink as open societies reaped the economic benefit of free speech in cyberspace. The crash of 2008 ought to have thrown a bucket of cold water over the excited futurologists. Open societies suffered far more than closed regimes. A member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was entitled to wonder why Americans were telling him he must allow free speech when China was booming and the First Amendment had not stopped debt-laden America going through a deep recession.

On a technical level, controlling the Net caused the party few headaches. From the beginning, the Chinese state had been able to dominate the medium, shape its growth, control its structure and limit its users’ access to the rest of the world. With the cooperation of every large Western Web company except Google, China blocks the addresses of dissident sites or hijacks users’ sessions when they search for suspicious words – ‘Tibet’ and ‘Tiananmen’ to name two. The state requires online censors – ‘Big Mamas’ – to remove politically sensitive postings in chat forums. (The cosy name for the not-so-cosy job comes from the title Chinese families accord to the wife of the eldest uncle, who has the responsibility of guiding and taking care of everyone else.)

Net censorship in China and elsewhere is a private–public partnership. After human-rights groups accused the American communications corporation Cisco of helping China construct firewalls and keyword-searching facilities, a bland spokeswoman was entirely unconcerned. ‘Our customers determine the specific uses for the capabilities of these products,’ she said. The company was doing what all good businesses must do, and keeping the customer satisfied. When Google pulled out of China after it found that hackers had broken into dissidents’ accounts, presumably with state approval, no other Western technology company followed it. They were content to abide by the ‘pledge of self-discipline’ for the Chinese Internet industry, and to ‘refrain from producing, posting or disseminating pernicious information that may jeopardize state security and disrupt social stability’ in return for the chance of making money. China licenses Internet service and content providers in the same manner that authoritarian seventeenth-century governments licensed printers. The effects are the same. An official for Sohu.com, a Chinese search engine and content provider, admitted in the early days of the Net that his company was ‘very much self-censoring’, and would not link to news that might anger the Party.

Attacks on the complicity of Western corporations with censorship came regularly from human-rights groups, and only Google took notice. How long Westerners will have even a minimal capacity to influence decision-making in China and other authoritarian states is open to doubt. Western dominance of the Net cannot last. The speed with which the Chinese economy is growing will ensure that new censorship technologies are developed in an environment where human-rights groups are banned rather than politely ignored.