Abstract
Index Chair
“The most powerful weapon is not the bomb. It is the truth”
–
ALWAYS THOUGHT IT one of the great ironies of the age that Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Russian hydrogen bomb, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet he deserved it for his lonely fight to give voice to the dissident movement in the USSR, when thousands of artists and writers had disappeared, their voices virtually unheard. Whilst the authorities could destroy the works of artists and writers, it was harder to silence the nation’s most garlanded physicist, winner of both the Stalin and Lenin Prizes, and one of the greatest assets of the Soviet military establishment. But they had to try.
Just three years before our first appeal was launched in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, the great physicist had published a stunning cri de coeur calling for creative and intellectual freedom everywhere. His advocacy made him a cause celebre to young scientists like myself. It also guaranteed his eclipse by the Soviet authorities. Within a decade of the launch of Index, even he had been locked out of his laboratories and denounced by official scholarly bodies. He was eventually exiled to Gorky, a closed city, where authorities hoped he’d be forgotten.
His example taught me lessons that still, in my view, inform the work of Index. First, that no-one, however distinguished and revered, is safe from persecution. If Sakharov could be muted, so could anyone if the authorities were determined. Second, that in the mind of authoritarians, truth is the most dangerous enemy. Third, freedom dies every time someone opts for silence in the hope that it will protect them from repression. And last, that tyranny never really gives up its assault on truth – it simply changes its flag and its anthem.
No one should have to be a hero in order to point out that everyday reality is separate from authoritarian fantasy. But for the past 50 years that is exactly what the many individuals have been struggling to do through their writings, art, satire and journalism. Index on Censorship, operating in the relative freedom of the West, has amplified their voices to the world – sometimes starting with nothing more than a conspiratorial whisper or a smuggled verse.
Written after leaving prison in 1983, the banned Czech playwright Václav Havel’s Mistake responded to Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe; both appeared in our magazine. In 1989 we published the Hunger Strike Declaration by leaders of the Tiananmen Square protests. In 2002, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya gave us one of the first investigations of the Russian war in Chechnya. She was assassinated four years later. All of these stories gained global prominence.
But Index has never lost sight of the people whose stories are not worldwide news. For those who lose the right to speak, silence is total. The fact that someone, somewhere noticed made a difference. The disappearance of the Shah’s opponents in the 1970s would have gone unremarked by many who entertained his generals both in London and in Tehran if it were not for Index’s reports of their torture and disappearance. The arrests of journalists in the Maldives may not lead the headlines in London, but our coverage is no less important for those who are locked up or locked out. To the media organisation promoting LGBTQ rights in Uganda, or the radio station taking on drug cartels in Latin America, the fact that their struggle is not conducted in total darkness can make the difference between life and death.
The best thing would be for Index to have no reason to exist. But based on what we’ve learned over the past 50 years we have no plan for that eventuality. We know that those who have no answer to a question will still do their best to prevent it being asked. Those who cannot persuade others will still try to intimidate them. And those who find a diversity of views inconvenient will attempt to obliterate every version of the truth but their own. That is why Index has been here for half a century and why it won’t stop being needed any time soon.