"Like Salem Massachusetts, Scottish poetry is a small world. But the disputes that have torn it apart would be recognised by citizens of a dictatorship, trapped members of a religious sect, or workers under the control of a megalomaniac CEO...
https://twitter.com/NickCohen4/status/1313130718487293952
...The urge to worship power is universal; as is the willingness to go along with the persecution of dissent when a part of your mind knows the persecution is outrageous."
"You should be able to offer support to transwomen, as Lindsay has done during her career, while deploring incitement to violence against lesbians. Although the magazine privately admitted to her it had made a mistake, Lindsay was publicly accused of transphobia...
...As in so many other witch crazes, Lindsay found the extremes had been sanctified. No criticism of an extremist could be permitted. The religion or ideology in this case must be accepted in its totality...
...The all-or-nothing character of the ideology guarantees that the extremes define it. Raising doubts about the tactics of one militant was enough to damn her as an enemy of all trans people. "
"she was told she guilty of a ‘derailment’, and her thinking was ‘colonialist’. Fake evidence was manufactured. Anonymous heresy hunters went through her poems, and found that ‘The Imagined We’ was anti-trans because it used menstruation as a metaphor."
"Scottish PEN, which once stood for free expression and would come to the aid of writers in trouble, cut Lindsay off at the knees. It said it was ‘disappointed’ by the library’s statement and offered Lindsay no support...
...As JK Rowling has found, when the pile-ons pile up, Scottish PEN and other free speech organisations duck for cover."
"The police warned her and staff at the library their physical safety may be in danger..had heard that an antifa group might target them. Scottish anti-fascists had, apparently, taken a break from the fight against neo-Nazism so they might concentrate on poetry libraries instead"
"The Scottish arts scene thinks of itself as radical. But many of those who went for Lindsay or stood by rather than speak out behaved like the classic prudent bourgeois. Why not go with the flow? Why risk my career by standing up for a hounded woman? What’s in it for me?"
"Lindsay’s essay should be read in full. And to read it, you need to buy The Dark Horse, whose editors deserve your support because it took courage to run it."thedarkhorsemagazine.com/Issues/Issue-42
"Witch hunters will tolerate only two possible outcomes to their chase. Either they destroy the heretic by driving her out of work and making her name a by-word for ignominy. Or they force her into a total capitulation...
...The artist, politician, journalist or left-wing activist must engage in public self-flagellation. They must make an obsequious apology. They must accept that their critics were wholly right and beg forgiveness for the offence they caused."
"I am always struck by how no one cares that the apology is fake and has been forced from the target. Sincerity is not required. Rather the accusers demand that their victims bend the knee and acknowledge their mastery...
... If rape is about power not sex, then witch-hunts are about power not truth."
"Lindsay to her immense credit won’t grovel. She will not accept an art world where the first lesson a writer must learn is how to self-censor. Banal work will be the inevitable consequence – indeed, you only need to look around the arts to see that in many cases it already is..
...Poets may not be Shelley’s unacknowledged legislators of the world, Lindsay concludes, ‘but let us ensure the Twitter mob is not either’. It may be late in the day, but that remains a slogan worth rallying to."
The above thread is the words of @NickCohen4
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