University College Cork invites Nick Griffin

In the wake of the withdrawal of Nick Griffin's invitation to speak at Trinity College Dublin's Philosophical Society in October, academics from University College Cork immediately moved in to fill the void and carry the banner of "freedom of speech" in direct defiance of anti-fascists everywhere.

The visit is set to take place in February 2012.

Note: in 1999 when UCC attempted to host holocaust denier David Irving, 600 protesters had to be baton charged out of the building by police and the lecture was cancelled.


No platform for fascists.

well, make sure that particular history will repeat itself then :)

It sickens me to even think anyone in Ireland besides Unionists would even spit on Nick Griffin. Hopefully the small amount of faith I have in Ireland politically wasn't misplaced:)

What do you have to worry about? Is Nick Griffin's intellectual might so great that students in Cork shouldn't be allowed to hear him speak in case they fall under his spell?

Universities should allow free and open discussion. 'Anti-fascist activists' shouldn't be assuming the role of thought police.

The problem isn't that the students will, or will not, be able to resist his arguments; rather that being invited to give a lecture at a university grants legitimacy to the speaker. It implies that they diserve to have that platform, a platform that has perviously, and will again, shared with acredited experts.

Nick Griffin is no less 'legitimate' than many other bourgeois public figures. And who decides whether someone is 'legitimate' or not? Campus Labour Party activists (who are among those opposing the invitation) and David Cameron-sponsored UAF types? Heaven forbid.

Whether someone is invited to a public discussion should be a matter for the organisers and the organisers alone.

Would it have been better if they had invited someone like Theresa May or Jack Straw, i.e. people who have actually deported immigrants?

And surely students should be free to decide for themselves whether a speaker is legitimate or not?

Why are you defending a platform for Fascists?

There may be suggestions as to why in my posts above.

You state something about freedom of speech. A vague notion at best. But you also state that freedom of speech does not apply to anti-fascists by saying that whom they invite for so called intelectual debate is the colleges own bussiness and theirs alone.
THAT is defending a platform for fascists.

I'm defending the right of the Government and Politics Society at University College Cork to invite Nick Griffin to one of their debates. The 'no platform' people are calling on the university authorities to ban fascists from Campus, just as they sometimes call on the state to ban fascists from society. That's something which i would very strongly oppose.

On what grounds do you oppose this?

On the grounds that the establishment should not be given further powers to restrict the freedom of expression.

While I am sure there are few defenders of liberal capitalist democracy here, surely you understand that there is a difference between you bog standard capitalist member of the intelligntsia and a fascist like Griffin?

Yet, ironically, they take a more progressive position than you do.

Students opposesing a university event.. where is your problem?

Certainly. For all the reactionary bile that exists within British governments, past and previous, your assertin that these were no more desirable than the regime fascists like Griffin would impose is blatently ubsurd.

I thought that materialists thought civil liberties are less important than material conditions, i.e. fuck a fascist's civil liberties if they want to destroy the material conditions of a whole bunch of people.

Yes, there is a key difference - between actual, existing representatives of the capitalist class, and a panto villain whose chances of winning any real power are extremely minimal at best. Standing with the former lot to defeat the latter makes clearly no sense at all.

we are discussing the fact that antifa will break up the speech by Griffin. Or we are discussing the possibility of universities not deciding to let fascists speak at their intelectual club nights.


I do not see what the establishment has to do with it.

Nor do I see where free speech should be used as an excuse to allow a one sided debate. Seeing as free speech does not seem to equal equal voicing rights....the university chose for example not to invite communists to counter the arguments fo that fascist. Free speech seems to be applied arbitrarilly into misinformation. Nor do I see how there is a strong of lectures on the subject by different political perspectives. What I do see is a university using the excuse of freespeech to allow fascists to become accreditted and their opinions given validation by an educational institution.

Universities are institutions of the bourgeois establishment.

If you want university bans against people like Griffin, you want the university bureaucracy to have powers to decide what kind of discussion meetings can and can't take place on campus. Today they will ban those on the far right, and tomorrow they will ban those connected to the far left. That is bad news for those of us who oppose all censorship in capitalist society and who believe that "it is only the greatest freedom of expression that can create favorable conditions for the advance of the revolutionary movement in the working class." (Trotsky)

And the idea that we should not have free speech on campus because it causes "misinformation" (if i understand your point correctly) implies that university students are idiotic children who should only be exposed to ideas and viewpoints that are deemed to be okay by the censors.

Exactly. And this then contradicts your entire argument below. As institutions of the bourgeois establishment they vioce the opinions of the bourgeois establishment and are indeed centers of misinformation and selective censorship designed to create a flow of information which serves the bourgeois establishment. This is reflected in who they let speak, how they let them speak and when they let them speak.

You are under the illusion that they do not already do this?


Really?

Then those on the far left who advocate total and absolute freedom of speech are absolutely bonkers to think that this is even remotely possible in a capitalist society.

Especially when they...in their zeal to reach this goal...advocate an unopposed platform for fascists and right wing spin. Unopposed as in giving credibility and legitimacy to their position and viewpoints by selectively applying freedom of speech at the exclusion of other view points in order to preserve that so called freedom of speech. unopposed also in denying anti-fascists the right to practice their freedom of speech.

Your arguments earlier that these institutions...which are mostly private property or state controlled....should have the right to allow anybody they want to speak seems to ignore the fact that the epithaph bourgeois institution/private propert/state controlled institutions and freedom of speech are contradictions. The argument then boils down to a protection of property and selective application of supposed rights and freedoms.

Again. You are under the impression that they are not already?

But you completely misunderstand my argument. My argument is that what you defend here is NOT the application of freedom of speech but the ARBITRARY and SELECTIVE application of freedom of speech. That causes misinformation.

It also gives credibility and legitimacy to the political positions of the speakers....which extends far beyond the walls of the university. Now...perhaps you may have failed to notice the enormous swing to the extreme right the western world is making? But this is for the large part due to several burgeois instutions working very hard to give just that kind of credibility and legitimacy to their viewpoints.


Then again...I see you did not adress the issue of your argument against anti-fascists not to be allowed to voice their dissenting opinion.
Which contradicts your argument that you advocate total free speech.

It's a university society (in this instance, a kind of debating club) that has invited Nick Griffin, not the university itself. I said that such organisations should be free to invite whoever they like to debates, free from the intrusion of university censorship and rules and regulations, things which 'anti-fascist' people are increasingly supporting.

Yes, there are some restrictions which socialists face on campuses in the West (although clearly not as many as faced by the extreme right). And in times of social and political instability, that situation can very quickly change for the worse. The climate of censorship which certain leftists are helping to create today, will be used against the left tomorrow.

Ending the exploitation of labour is not possible under capitalist society, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't oppose exploitation. The same goes for political censorship.

And when the university bureaucracy (who people like UAF think should be free to enforce censorship on campus groups) decides that a speaker invited by a socialist organisation (say, a black nationalist speaker or an Irish republican) is illegitimate and bans him or her, it will be at least partly because 'anti-fascists' decided to grant the university such powers in the first place, and, moreover, because instead of fighting political censorship, they were some of its biggest cheerleaders.

Sure, they can invite anyone they want. And likewise anti-fascists can protest and attempt to remove that person from campus if they want.

What twisted fairy tale world do you live in? The notion that universities/campuses are 'left-wing' or 'liberal' is a joke. There are Marxist professors, sure, but this doesn't translate at all into leftist ideas being supported or put forth by the universities themselves. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Leftism is tolerated as an academic discipline but shunned and ridiculed as an actual practice.

Wow. You sure run out the same tired ass lines of bullshit logic.

We aren't creating a 'climate of censorship.' No platform means no platform. Why no platform? Not because we want censorship but because we don't want racist/sexist/bigoted motherfuckers spouting their racist/sexist/bigoted shit. Not to hard to understand is it?

In general, a leftist speaker isn't a racist fuckwad. So yeah.... you're entirely argument is based upon bourgeois notions of "freedoms" and "rights" and doesn't relate at all to the fact that fascists do not get to speak because their speech is entirely tied into limiting the speech of others.

"If you don't want to play nice, you don't get to play."
Fascists don't want to play nice. They want to oppress and limit the abilities of large portions of the human population to live their lives as they see fit. So, because of this, they don't get to participate in the discussion of how we should live our lives.

No platform isn't hard to understand...

- August