The prevention of blog

September 15, 2005 in Uncategorized

Well, there can be few in the blogosphere who still haven’t heard, but John Band’s Shot By Both Sides has gone dark after he was subjected to blackmail over an, ah, controversial remark he made regarding Bob Geldof. And the Board of Deputies of British Jews. And, ye Gods, gas. His point was, as far as I could make out, that anyone who wanted censorship deserved to die, which is excessive but not too bad in principle. But, really..

Send the Board [of Deputies] to the gas chambers, that’s what I say (no, not for their ethnicity; for their fatuous whining. And obviously, the people who complain about Bob Geldof saying ‘fuck’ on the telly should be ahead of them in the queue….

I commented at the time that, yes, it was offensive and it was stupid. I still think it was offensive and stupid. But it did not justify the action Mr Anonymous took. Band received threats that his employer would be sent a demand to sack him over the matter and that the national press would be involved. These threats, of course, came anonymously - did I mention that? - because the person responsible is a coward as well as a bully with no respect for free speech.

Now, there are several important points this raises. For a start, it’s a class issue. If John was rich, he could tell them to fuck off. Freedom of the press is famously limited to people who own a press - what else are blogs for if not to get around this? A second issue is the attack on good behaviour on the internet. It works on trust, mutual respect, and mutual criticism. They could have vented spleen in the comments - hell, that was SBBS’s main function, being the frenzied Ulsteroid interface-area between the rival UK blogging communities. Only there did the Euro-lefties, the Hitchens/Aaronovitch tendency and the libertarian-right wingnuts meet. They could have asked him to pull it down, set up an anti-Band blog…but they decided to go physical. And the only sanction on the net is the right to reply - which means putting a name to whatever you produce.

The most important point, though, was the extremism of their response. They didn’t demand that he erase the offending post or apologise - they set out to efface everything on SBBS. If it was a book they’d have burned it.

Where does that leave us? Some people have been talking about reanonymising their sites (which I doubt will help, and is defeatist anyway). I can’t - TYR started out as semi-anonymous, but any attempt to tack back that way went last summer when an email I sent to Laura Rozen was reposted in full on her website. After that I decided to let it go - some sites even link here with my name.

I have a little theory about this incident. John is not the first blogger to be blackmailed off the air in the UK. Newton Emerson of the now-defunct Portadown News was forced to leave his job after the strongly Republican-aligned Andersonstown News carried a story accusing him of using his employers’ resources to maintain the site - not coincidentally, shortly after he criticised a certain political party. SBBS carried some pretty venomous comments on both factions from time to time. I wonder if the Bob Geldof post was merely a pretext?

(Dave of Backword has more here, including a list of links.)

I know we’re behind on the Orwell nominations, I was planning to do a Katrina Special Edition with Hitchens, Barbara Bush and others, but this nomination goes to Anonymous, but unfortunately he/she/they/it is too much of a pathetic snivelling dogfucker to give a name, so they will be unable to accept it.