Criminalizing Dissent by Rob Watts

Author:Rob Watts [Watts, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138488717
Google: 4E7twgEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-01-15T04:56:37+00:00

Cultural polarity

Richard Handyside, the publisher of The Little Red Schoolbook, was caught in a cross fire of cultural polarity. He fell between ‘two social phenomena … one virtuous, one vicious’ that preoccupy a community. This means that what becomes a problem like obscene literature represented by The Little Red Schoolbook or the ‘Schoolkids’ issue of OZ arises sit cheek by jowl with activities which enjoy social approval or are approved of. Handyside fell into a space occupied by a fear-driven preoccupation to regulate and censor overt expressions of sex and the actual explosion in the availability of pornography and public expressions of sexuality that marked out the 1960s and 1970s.

Some sense of that polarity is suggested by a conversation between DCI George Fenwick, head of the ‘Dirty squad’ and the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling in the Heath Conservative government. As Paul Soreen tells it, Fenwick informed Maudling that:

In this country at the minute there are somewhere in the region of 80 publications which advocate what in the current idiom is called the alternative society. Of these about 25 can be termed ‘underground’ press and a number of them contain articles which can be described as indecent. However, by far the worst of these are Oz, Frendz and IT, in that order. These in fact are the only ones against whom action has been taken or indeed contemplated in the last 12 months.

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