Civil Rights and Censorship - 5 October 2001

One evening some time after the Second World War, I was sitting with an old friend sharing, as we often did, the twilight wine of Scotland.

He was a famous historian, both of France and the United States. He was a short, pawky, bloodshot, humorous Scot, a professor of history at Cambridge University.

He had an incomparable gift for recalling the most academic historical fact and illustrating it with, say, a line from Cole Porter or the Gershwin brothers.

We were talking about differences between English and American usage in language, politics - I can't recall - but as I poured myself a splash of the fizzy stuff we call soda, I remarked: "Do you know something? It took me about 40 years to stop asking, especially in the Middle West, for Scotch and soda."

The waiter would come back and say something like: "What sort of soda would that be, sir?" - suggesting it might be a lemon or an orange drink soda.

I learned, as I say, rather late in the day, in a part of the country settled mainly by Germans or Scandinavians, to say "with seltzer".

Today and for the past 15, 20 years I'd guess, seltzer is now universal - printed on the soda water bottles.

My friend chuckled and said: "Well, I suppose you and I know as much American social history as any single American but when you're not born in a country you will find the only mistakes you make are elementary ones."

How true. I discovered this week that since the disaster of 11 September I've been suffering, unknowingly, from - not a mistake so much as a misapprehension, a false assumption, say, about British and American concerns for civil rights.

It has to do with the fears I had a week or two ago about the radical left here, which is small but rowdy and in the colleges disproportionately powerful among the faculties. Let me say over what I had to say only a week ago.

"Already," I said, "passionate upholders of civil rights are beginning to whine about what they take to be violations of their rights in the security measures taken by the Department of Justice (that's to say the FBI), by the state and city police.

As I talk Attorney General Ashcroft is going before Congress to see if it is constitutional of him to ask that the legal wiretapping of regulation telephones be extended to cell phones.

This, of course, has already been done in Western countries that don't have an 18th Century written constitution to tell them how to behave in every contingency of life that might upset or constrain the freedom of the individual to go where he pleases and say and do what he wants."

A little harshly put perhaps but I was saying all this on the assumption that European libertarians, Britons especially, were more realistic than Americans and that they perhaps, from long experience, have learned to put up with such restrictions on personal liberty in wartime.

A newspaper liberal here writes: "We are about to live in a police state. Next thing they'll be making us carry identity cards just like the Nazis."

Well it was a surprise to me to learn from my favourite English magazine that there is no libertarian lobby in England. That France and Germany and many civilised European countries already require identity cards and that Britons wouldn't make much a fuss about them.

This discovery of mine led to another one about this country, which is that a great number of Americans, and I'm thinking of educated Americans, had barely heard or thought of what those restrictions might be in time of war.

Judging from the kind of literate people who write letters to the serious papers there's a majority who warn us all that we must preserve our civil rights and watch out that the next government doesn't impose anything like - the most dreaded word in the liberal vocabulary - censorship.

I can't think of a war in history in which one of the first acts of government was not to impose a code of censorship. In this country the universal code was dramatically relaxed during Vietnam, to the eventual discrediting of the administration and the demoralising of public support for the war.

How relaxed? Well you could say anything you liked about the government and the armed forces and the president, you could avoid the draft, you could urge others to do it - acts which in any previous war would have had you prosecuted and jailed as giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

However, since, as I speak, the war has not yet begun you'd suppose that it's too early for protestors to start parading.

Not at all. Last weekend huge parades were held in San Francisco and in Washington by a great assortment of types from anti-globalisation demonstrators to a small, very passionate, group called Against War and Race - a meaningless slogan if ever there was one.

It reminded me instantly of a very large group of Britons, in the late 1930s, who bore a banner with the device Against War and Fascism.

A national ballot carried the signatures of millions of Britons willing to do everything to get rid of Hitler except fight him.

The slogan Against War and Fascism in retrospect seems about as witless as proclaiming yourself to be Against Hospitals and Disease, but such was the temper of the time that the impulse driving so many good and decent people into the cause of Against War and Fascism was simple dread - a deep fear of war that haunted all of us, young and old, who had survived, less than 20 years before, the enormous slaughter of the First World War.

And I think that fear for their own skins, more than anything, is the moving force behind these mobs who are protesting the war before the war has begun, or before we even know what sort of war the future holds.

However, although the protestors bulk awfully large on a television screen they are, at latest count, a tiny minority of the population.

Mayor Giuliani once again speaks for what, from the national polls, appears to be the great majority when he says: "I keep telling people to do their thing, go about their lives as usual.

"If I go out from this building and am killed it'll make no difference to the record of my life - how I behaved. Our national anthem says 'Land of the free, home of the brave'. OK let's go out and be brave."

A stirring sight within the sound of these words was a long line - what in England is called a queue - down on 34th Street, of tourists ready to pay their way into the Empire State Building which is, once again, the tallest building in the city.

It was evacuated for several days after the devastation but the lights around its towering spire were never dimmed.

And the next shot we had was of interviews with tourists taking in the high, long, view of downtown and the harbour. One man said he had stayed miserable but dry-eyed throughout 11 September but shed a tear when he saw, miles away, stark and clear, the Statue of Liberty.

Another old man from the Middle West said: "Well the mayor said to come to New York, look us over, we need you. We'd never been to New York but here we are doing like the mayor said."

On the protection of civil rights I'd guess that not among those protesting thousands are many ageing Americans who will keep their eye on what the courts will or will not permit by way of security measures.

People who remember that immediately after Pearl Harbour, the Supreme Court approved of the government's ordering 100,000 Japanese, most of them American citizens, to be taken from their homes on the coast of California and put in detention camps inland for the rest of the war.

An act for which, only in the past decade, has the Supreme Court apologised and ordered financial compensation for all living descendants of the victims.

This administration was very mindful of that colossal error when at the Washington Cathedral service a Muslim priest appeared alongside the usual Catholic and Protestant priests and a rabbi.

I think one of the most moving single television shots I saw, apart from the scenes of death and destruction, was a close up of a pair of stockinged feet.

The camera panned up to the body and pleading face of George W Bush in a mosque.

Which brings up, I'm sure, the question strangers of this land seem to want to have answered - how is the president doing?

The overwhelming consensus is that he's doing fine. And to sceptics who think it must be the men around him I'm assured on very high authority that the men around him frequently disagree but nobody but George W calls the shots - he hasn't put a foot wrong.

For a man feeling his way in the dark of the unknown, not putting a foot wrong is no mean feat.

For those even more sceptical foreigners, the appalled intelligentsia, who practically went into mourning when Mr Bush became President Bush, who deplored the grammar and the seeming naivety of the new president: Remember the universal groan that went out when an unknown failed haberdasher, a provincial if ever there was one, succeeded President Roosevelt and demonstrated how leadership could triumph over grammar. His name was Harry S Truman.

And how about Abraham Lincoln? He was thought so embarrassingly naïve and stutteringly provincial when he came to the White House that the London Times thought him unworthy of the presidency and went on calling him "the baboon".

The first thing he did, when the civil war was on, was to suspend habeas corpus, gag the press, root out the grafters and war profiteers and take command of the Union armies.

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