In her Reith lecture on freedom in 2022, the great Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned of the ‘unconscionable barbarism’ of cancel culture. She herself had felt its flames lick at her feet when she refused to bow to that truthless credo, ‘trans women are women’. ‘It was like being accused of blasphemy in a religion that is not yours’, she said.
To carry a candle for freedom as the idiot wind of censorship swirls all around takes courage
She decried the malice and savagery of cancellation. It is a betrayal of our humanity to seek to disappear those whose only offence is dissent, she said. To the scalp-hungry army of little Torquemadas who insist some ideas are so wicked they must be crushed, Adichie said a firm: ‘No.’ That is ‘barbarism’, she said. It is a ‘virtual vigilante action’ that inflicts a terrible double wrong on society: it both ‘silences the person who has spoken’ and ‘creates a vengeful atmosphere that deters others from speaking.’
This week, we heard yet more testimony on the pitiless inhumanity of cancel culture, this time from the mighty Róisín Murphy. She was the frontwoman of Nineties dance duo Moloko who has since become one of the best-regarded solo auteurs of electro-pop on these isles. Her thoughtcrime was not dissimilar to Adichie’s: she expressed blasphemous misgivings about gender ideology. The witchfinders came hard for her.
It was in August 2023. In a private Facebook post, Murphy described puberty-blockers as ‘f**ked, absolutely desolate’. ‘Big Pharma [is] laughing all the way to the bank’, she said. ‘Little mixed-up kids are vulnerable and need to be protected’, not pumped with hormone-warping meds, she wrote. Oh, and can we stop calling women ‘Terfs’, she pleaded – it’s insulting and dehumanising.
We now know just how high a price Murphy paid for ‘desecrating the prevailing orthodoxy’, to borrow a line from Adichie. In a moving speech at a parliamentary event on Monday to draw attention to cancel culture in the arts, Murphy described how it feels when the mob rounds on you and brands you a sacrilegious shrew. ‘The world goes dark very quickly’, she said, a distinct note of sorrow in her voice.
‘Everyone and anyone who is ever going to disappoint you does so all at once’, she said. ‘Networks of interwoven friendship and career that took years to grow collapse overnight.’ It felt ‘bewildering’, she said. Murphy discovered that cancel culture is the enemy of friendship as well as freedom. It demands, in Adichie’s words, that ‘you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.’ Like in Stasi East Germany, old comrades will condemn you to save their own skin.
Then came the misogyny and mockery. Murphy recalled how, ‘as a woman in her fifties’, she was not only branded a misspeaking witch but also insulted on the basis of her age and appearance. Sexism has attended every witch-hunt of gender-critical women. Young men who masquerade as women calling real women of a certain age ‘hags’ and ‘gross’ – it is obscene. It was stirring to see Murphy tell her story of cancellation in parliament, an institution that too often turned a blind eye to this gagging of women whose only crime was to tell the truth.
Murphy was speaking at the launch of a report titled ‘The New Boycott Crisis’, which details how a ‘wave of boycotts’ is threatening the arts. Not only gender-critical women but also Jews have fallen victim to the bourgeois mob’s cruel, philistine urge to boycott ‘problematic’ artists. The report found a ‘marked increase’ in anti-Semitism following Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023, with Jewish artists accused of ‘Nazism, Zionism or moral complicity simply by virtue of their heritage.’
One of those artists is Josh Breslaw of the British-Jewish band Oi Va Voi. He spoke on Monday too. Two of his band’s gigs were cancelled at the behest of ‘pro-Palestine’ activists. The band’s sin? Its singer is Israeli. That’s it. The sexism of silencing ‘uppity women’ flows naturally into the fascism of shutting down Jews. It is bigotry upon bigotry. Imagine thinking you are on the ‘right side of history’ when your activism consists of little more than zealously boycotting the wares of the Jewish state and obsessively blacklisting Jewish creatives. These ‘anti-fascists’ need to drop the ‘anti’ from their name.
The boycott report was produced by Freedom in the Arts, an incredibly important initiative founded by Rosie Kay and Denise Fahmy. They know a thing or two about cancellation. Kay, a choreographer, was forced to leave her own dance troupe, the Rosie Kay Dance Company, over her gender-critical beliefs. Fahmy won a harassment claim against Arts Council England, where she worked, after hostile comments were made about her beliefs at an internal meeting. What are her scurrilous beliefs? That men aren’t women.
Adichie, Murphy, Kay, Fahmy, and not to mention J.K. Rowling, who reminds us that freedom of speech is the ‘lifeblood of a liberal society’. I for one am grateful to these heroic women fighting for liberty. To carry a candle for freedom as the idiot wind of censorship swirls all around takes courage. The dangling sword of cancellation is the enemy of art, for as Adichie reminds us, art demands a ‘kind of formless roving of the mind to go nowhere and anywhere and everywhere’. ‘It is from that swell that art emerges.’
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