Is silence still violence? I’m just wondering because this week Graham Norton was asked about the deluge of hateful slurs and threats that are frequently fired at JK Rowling and he dodged the issue. Instead he rambled on about how celebs should not comment on difficult topics like transgenderism. So was his silence on the misogynistic monstering of JK Rowling an act of violence?
‘Silence is Violence’ is the radical slogan du jour. It was popularised by Black Lives Matter. There were moments over the past couple of years when you couldn’t browse the internet for five minutes without encountering a post saying that anyone who keeps schtum on hatred and violence is helping to compound that hatred and violence. But it seems this judgment is not equally applied. Silence on hatred against racial minorities? That’s violence. Silence on the rape threats, death threats and sexist hate that are aimed at Rowling and other women who are critical of the trans ideology? That’s fine.
It was during an appearance at the Cheltenham Literary Festival that Norton remarkably chose to skip over the persecution of Rowling. He was making fun of ‘men of a certain age’ like John Cleese who complain about being cancelled. Then the host, Mariella Frostrup, brilliantly turned it around.
Norton ridiculed the entire concept of cancel culture
Old blokes are an ‘easy target’, she said. What about JK Rowling, she asked, a woman who is ‘deluged with…anger, rage and attempts at censorship’?
Norton’s response? A flat, perfunctory ‘Yeah’ and then he moved on to talk about the need for more expert commentary over celebrity chatter.
It was a stunning misstep for such a seasoned broadcaster. Men, listen — if someone asks you about the vile harassment of JK Rowling merely for expressing her opinions you say: ‘It’s very bad’, okay? I don’t care if you don’t actually think it’s very bad, though that would be odd — you still need to say it. We blokes cannot just look the other way as Rowling is threatened with sexual assault, threatened with death by pipe bomb, doxxed and subjected to sexist insults every single day, all because she believes men cannot become women. Many other ‘gender-critical’ women experience similar. It’s time more men offered these women solidarity, or at least empathy.
For the record, I don’t believe ‘silence is violence’. I never liked that slogan. It always struck me as an intolerant diktat — ‘If you don’t buy into all our BLM ideas, then you are part of the problem of racial violence!’ But silence on injustice can certainly be cowardly. And the silence from the media and much of the literary set on the irrational demonisation of Rowling for the crime of wrongthink is certainly that. Mr Norton, surely you know you don’t have to agree with everything someone says to acknowledge that it is wicked to dehumanise and try to silence that person?
Norton ridiculed the entire concept of cancel culture. Actually it’s ‘accountability culture’, he said. People who have been free to say whatever they want for decades are now finally being held accountable, that’s all. What a chilling phrase that is — ‘accountability culture’. It seems to me that behind that bland, HR-style phrase there lurks an unforgiving desire to shame and punish anyone who holds the supposedly wrong views.
‘Who watches the watchers?’, we used to say about censorship in the old days. Well, who holds to account the accountability police? Why should they get to decide who must be held accountable? Why must Rowling be held accountable for expressing biological facts but hardcore trans activists don’t have to be held accountable despite saying awful things? Why is John Cleese ‘held accountable’ for allegedly being offensive, but the once notoriously offensive Frankie Boyle is not? Could it be that Cleese holds ‘wrong’ beliefs, especially on political correctness, which he criticises, while Boyle has bizarrely become a BBC-style correct-thinker in recent years?
Of course that’s what it is. ‘Accountability culture’ really means the isolation of people who say things the establishment doesn’t want to hear. It’s always been the way. Galileo was ‘held accountable’ by the Inquisition, critics of the King were ‘held accountable’ by the Star Chamber, and provocative playwrights were ‘held accountable’ by Mary Whitehouse. Now we all have the pleasure of being held accountable by the likes of Graham Norton. Happy days.
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