[In the following essay, originally published in 1972, Webb provides a brief history of the journal Index on Censorship and the state of censorship around the world in the second half of the twentieth century.]

‘Wake up!’ Solzhenitsyn taunted the Kremlin's geriatrics after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968: ‘Your clocks are slow in relation to our times!’ Index, a child of the better ideals and aspirations of the sixties, was a response to that impatience at the stalling of yet another turning point of history. What moved Stephen Spender and some of his writer and scholar friends was not so much the dramas lately enacted on the political barricades, but the appeals from writers and other intellectuals in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, driven by frustration at the holding back of change, asking directly and openly for help and solidarity from their peers in the West. The cases they described were disturbing enough, like that of Andrei Sinyavsky, and the trial in Moscow of Yuri Galanskov and Aleksander Ginzburg, which Pavel Litvinov in a brave and unprecedented letter to The Times called ‘a wild mockery of … the accused … and of the witnesses unthinkable in the twentieth century’. What Spender thought remarkable, however, was that Litvinov, Andrei Amalrik and the other Russian human rights campaigners, as he wrote in the first issue of Index in the Spring of 1972, ‘seemed to take it for granted that in spite of the ideological conditioning of the society in which they live, there is nevertheless an international community of scientists, writers and scholars thinking about the same problems and applying to them the same human values …’

Solzhenitsyn and others had spoken about the especial horror for writers of having their writings disappear with them into the dark of a lawless imprisonment, vanishing as though they had never been, like cherished children strangled in infancy. ‘The idea behind Index,’ wrote another of the founders, Stuart Hampshire, in the twentieth anniversary issue, ‘was to ensure that … the tyrant's concealments of oppression and of absolute cruelty, should always be challenged. There should be the noise of publicity outside every detention centre and concentration camp, and a published record of every tyrannical denial of free expression.’ In this way, imprisoned or exiled writers would know at least that ‘their names, and the names of their works, would remain among the names of the living’. As for their persecutors, what was aimed at was ‘the embarrassment of tyranny, wherever it appears’.

Index kept faith with Pavel Litvinov, Amalrik and their kind, kept up the noise, kept the spotlight of publicity trained on the barbed wire, the prison window, the torture chamber in the basement, the shameful ‘treatment’ rooms of psychiatric clinics in which the KGB had taken to incarcerating citizens suffering from independent thought. As well as letters of protest, and the smuggled testimonies of exile and abuse, they gave us the banned literary texts not only of Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky and other established, if little published, novelists and essayists, but of younger writers like Joseph Brodsky, for whose marvellous talent the Soviet literary and legal establishments found no use. (After all, as Spender said in his introductory manifesto, by most informed reckoning the work that was being censored—in Greece, South Africa and South America, as well as in the Soviet bloc—was among the most exciting being written. In this, too, opening windows on the complacent provincialism of British literary life, Index was ahead of the game, widening the horizons of British publishing and leading the way for followers like Granta.) The magazine also kept an eye on the work and welfare of Václav Havel and the other Czech Chartists, in and out of prison; and when Polish tanks went on the streets of Warsaw and Gdansk in December 1981, and Solidarity's activists disappeared into prisons and detention centres, General Jaruszelski was not spared the embarrassment of Adam Michnik's scathing texts and other unwelcome attentions Index was able to bring to bear.

It was not until 1989 that history and the Kremlin were ready to turn at last. What a mistake it would have been for Index to suppose that with the Cold War ‘won’, and the end of history ushering in the eternal day of economic liberalism, its job was largely done, though many a politician and police chief must have wished devoutly that it had been so. But then its editors and writers never did think of themselves as enlisted men and women in the Cold War, and ‘… tyranny, wherever it appears’ was never a false or empty piety.

That, from the beginning, is the flag under which Index has sailed. Of course the grim suppressions of the Communist world were not neglected. The first issue contained Solzhenitsyn's moving memorial for Alexander Tvardovsky, poems by Natalya Gorbanevskaya, herself lately released from a psychiatric prison, and a fine story by Milovan Djilas, banned in his own country since 1963. (Also a review, I note, with some pride at the connection, of Writers Against Rulers, Dusăn Hamšik's account of the Czechoslovak writers' role in the Prague Spring, for which I had written an introduction. That brought in another impulse important to Index: to celebrate the liberating effect of the human voice speaking plainly and directly to power, as Ludvík Vaculík had done to the outraged Czech leadership, refusing to employ the blank and evasive dialect Party etiquette required.)

But even that first Index made just as much disconcerting noise under the windows of the Greek colonels, of Pakistan's military ruler, Ayah Khan, and the censors of Portugal, Spain and Brazil, where it was recorded in Index's own ‘Index’ (the core of the magazine which has grown into an incomparable catalogue—a history of censoring crimes and follies the world over) that Antonioni's film Zabriskie Point had been banned on the grounds of ‘insulting a friendly country’, although the Americans, the junta's valued friends in question, hadn't actually banned it themselves. Section two of our own Official Secrets Act also came in for a dishonourable mention, as did the Pentagon Papers, whose leaking in the New York Times made it impossible for Americans not to confront the nature of the war in Vietnam. And it was a message from a Greek prison cell, the end of George Mangakis's ‘Letter to Europeans’, that showed Index already doing the job it was designed for:

It is true, then, that there are situations in which each of us represents all mankind. And it is the same with these papers: I have entrusted them to a poor Italian prisoner who has just been released and who was willing to try to smuggle them out for me. Through him I hope they will eventually reach you … I have raised my hand, made a sign. And so we exist. We over here in prison, and you out there who agree with us.

In the quarter of a century since then, Index has continued to be there for the imprisoned, censored and oppressed in most corners of the globe and across the political spectrum: for the ‘disappeared’ and their families in Argentina, and the resisters and victims of other fascist juntas in Latin America, as well as the banned poets of Cuba; for the Chinese student leaders who survived the Tiananmen Square massacre to serve long prison sentences, and the victims of famine and arms traders in Africa; for those afflicted by the deadly fever of ancient nationalisms in Bosnia or the implacability of religious fundamentalism, not only in its Islamic versions, but in Israel and the United States as well. And since the Wall came down, and the world began to spin so fast, there have been insidious new tyrannies to keep track of.

The distance that stretches between now and the world before 1989, less than a decade by calendar time, demonstrates as well as any of Eric Hobsbawm's arguments that historical time is different: that 1989 was indeed the end of the short, violent twentieth century begun in 1914, and that already we are embarked, ill-prepared, on a new one, buffeted by strange winds that blow from beyond the millennium. And already it is clear that the work of Index will be needed just as much in this contradictory new world of clashing civilizations and a global economy, and that in some ways new times may be more difficult and testing.

Taking censorship seriously can be a seriously subversive business, as authority has always been well aware. Insist effectively on freedom of the word and the unearthly radiance of thrones and altars fades, while dictators, chiefs of staff, armaments manufacturers and media imperialists begin to look humanly vulnerable, and nothing distresses them more than that. Soon, other more stoutly defended freedoms of the day—to dine at the Ritz, to make money whatever the social or ecological cost—are blinking in the light of critical scrutiny.

That writers and scholars should insist on the primacy of this freedom is not the special pleading of a sectional interest, though politicians may find it convenient to represent it as that. For however democracy may evolve, free speech will remain the right and empowerment without which the struggle for other human rights cannot even be articulated. So while Index never forgets to begin with the word, the connection to wider human rights dilemmas is inescapable, and they have not been shirked.

In our far from brave new world, however, an old argument in censorship debates is revived. It might be caricatured as being between the wild surmise of the subversives and the strict constructionism of classical liberals seeking to address issues of freedom solely through legal process. Stuart Hampshire's twentieth anniversary reflections set out the argument with all its new difficulties, as the increasingly fluid moral relativism of the West (or North) comes up against the fixed ethical constructions of the East (or South). The metaphysical basis of the hostility between liberal atheists or agnostics and religious fundamentalists means not only that it is likely to be more durable than the Cold War's divisions, but that it ‘may even represent an opposition within human nature which is permanent and which cannot be expected to disappear’. Since, as reaction to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie showed so disconcertingly, this split, even in its most dramatized form, between Western liberal materialism and Islam's fundamentalist counter-reformation, now runs through the middle of countries and not just between them, Hampshire's argument that disputes between the sides can only be usefully addressed through procedural justice, with opposing views stated and reviewed, might seem to have a universal validity. Index would then be on safe ground, free of imputations of Western cultural imperialism (or ‘being political’), by stressing ‘the justice of just and fair procedures, as distinct from substantial questions of justice’.

This, after all, was very like the stance of Pavel Litvinov and his fellow human rights activists: what the Kremlin found disconcerting was their proposal not of political confrontation, but simply that Soviet legal authorities should not violate their own laws or the international obligations they had entered into, such as the Helsinki agreements.

But there are other lessons for new times to be learned from the Cold War's pathologies. One might be that the kind of responsive interest Western intellectuals once took in the struggles of independent writers in the old Soviet empire should be transferred to the problem of Islamic writers and thinkers whose work presents a less reductive or ‘Old Testament’ view of the teachings of their religion. Another might be drawn from a fine polemic, too long to include here, in which Václav Havel made the point that the kind of totalitarianism with which he was all too familiar could not abide stories because it couldn't know how they would end, its very raison d'être being that it knew all the answers. That essay appeared perhaps eighteen months before Havel's own story changed so miraculously, though I came across it only this winter. A week later I was reading the warning of no less a capitalist than George Soros that laissez-faire capitalism was beginning to show signs of the particular hubris of totalitarianism with its strident insistence that the market had all the answers: becoming, in short, another closed-circuit ideology to which there was no alternative—‘an ideology’, as Soros puts it, ‘hostile to the open society’. (Havel had a nice retort ready for ‘end of history’ triumphalism, too: ‘If ideology destroys history by explaining it away completely, history destroys ideology by unfolding in a way other than that prescribed by ideology.’)

The consequences for storytellers fictional and factual are hardly so drastic as those that faced Havel and his friends, but they are steadily eroding our freedoms. ‘Liberty is ill in Britain … the very concept … is being challenged and corroded by the Thatcher government,’ Ronald Dworkin was writing in 1988, only a month or two later than Havel, reviewing legislative changes involving human rights restrictions of the kind still being brought forward in 1997, though latterly not always without corrective amendments won through dogged parliamentary and extra-parliamentary criticism; as John Mortimer reminded us in that same issue, ‘the price of freedom is perpetual fussing’.

There are other straws in the wind which Index has not omitted to notice: for example, that concentration of press ownership is generating a dismal, synthetic-populist Gleichschaltung of tone, range and content; and that all but one or two of Britain's best-known publishing houses are now owned and controlled by American conglomerates. Then, as inescapable as environmental pollution, there is the pollution of thought and language through the spread of deceitful euphemisms, derived in part from the new management cant—‘downsizing’ and all its ugly sisters—partly from the malevolent dialects used, together with reporting controls, to obscure or ‘sanitize’ what happens in wars, dialects elaborated in theatres stretching from Vietnam to the Gulf, but clearly kin to Nazi usages developed to cover the realities of the Holocaust. Add to this the extension of ‘confusion marketing’ into American and thus inevitably into British politics, so that announcements of opaque and minimalist policies from parties hamstrung by the ‘no alternative’ ideology are introduced by increasingly desperate-sounding mantras—‘It is perfectly clear … I want to make it perfectly clear … We have always made it absolutely clear …’—and it may soon be time for writers to make an effort not unlike that which Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll and their friends in Gruppe 47 had to make amid the rubble of post war Berlin to purge the German language of accumulated poisons fatal to creative and democratic thinking.

Stuart Hampshire's prescription may be the right one in conflicts where the paramount need is to establish any ground at all between political and religious cultures on which arguments about freedom and rights might be heard, though, as the case of Salman Rushdie continues to show, there are huge difficulties. And then, theocracies or other people's tribalisms may be more or less malign or benevolent, but not many of Index's writers and readers will be happy with Samuel Huntingdon's conclusion in The Clash of Civilisations that in future we should leave tormented populations, or minorities (or writers like Ken Saro-Wiwa?) in other cultures and continents to it, or at best to the first aid kits of politically unsupported human rights professionals, while we get on with the business of Transatlantica's business. Does such a formula satisfy even strategic, let alone moral, considerations in the case of crippled Russia, half in and half out of Europe? Might not the cause of freedom have been better and more safely served if the West had sent fewer ideological economists and more money and practical expertise? Or to put it another way, can anyone read Irena Maryniak's account of the hundreds of thousands of abandoned children adrift in the anarchic new freedom-to-make-money atmosphere of Russia and eastern Europe, without feeling that ‘substantial questions of justice’ have to be raised in considering the nature of what happened to those societies?

For dealing with such questions, and with the shadowy but growing threats to freedom in the more or less liberal democracies and their less than liberal quasi-protectorates and oil suppliers, the more imaginative and recruiting responses of the ‘subversive’ model will be needed. (The media mogul and the arms trader, the agribusinessman and the polluting developer in Africa, South America or nearer home, may well be operating, expensively advised, just within the letter of the law; and if that becomes too cramping, will often have the power and interest to get the law altered, or—as the new political correctness requires one to say of the most blatantly regressive measures—‘reformed’.)

But then readers will know that Index has long been shrewdly and productively engaged with these difficult debates and others like them, as witness, for example, the recent thoughtful critique by Caroline Moorehead and its editor, Ursula Owen, of the limits of human rights operations as presently conceived. Michael Ignatieff's reflections on the possibilities and impossibilities of truth and reconciliation commissions is a subtle unravelling of similar dilemmas.

To try to do justice both to the history and to the quality of its recording over a quarter of a century is a task verging on the whimsical. What one does realize, looking back through the files, is that in an age very much aware of the intractability of its problems, and for all the unending struggle to raise operating funds, Index, in its brave new colours, has never been more focused and effective. For just one measure of that achievement, consider its continuing ability to attract so many of the best contemporary writers—‘by-lines to kill for’, as an envious contemporary once put it—something peculiarly satisfying in a culture trained to think that the only freedom that really matters is the freedom to make money.