Turning society into Room 101 / Sp!ked, 19 April 2007
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/earticle/3104/
" ‘In denial’, ‘phobic’, ‘hateful’… increasingly, certain kinds of speech are depicted as a sickness, and censorship is seen as the cure.
Censorship is entering into a dangerous new dawn. In the past, certain ideas and forms of speech were silenced on the (usually overblown) basis that they were immoral, corrupt, a threat to ‘national security’ or ‘public safety’. Today, thoughts and speech that fall foul of the mainstream are depicted as a mental defect, a pathology, a sort of virus that requires therapeutic intervention and corrective education. People are silenced because they are ‘in denial’ (of the Holocaust or climate change), or because they’re ‘phobic’ (whether Islamophobic or homophobic), or because they spread ‘hate speech’ (they’re consumed by irrational hatred). All of these new censorious categories – denial, phobia, hatefulness – speak to the pathologisation of certain ideas. Speech is increasingly depicted as a sickness, and censorship as the cure."