Inventive Ways to Survive Cancellation and Censorship

E very time a progressive journalist complains that the government should regulate what we say on social media, every time an NGO produces a report about the threat that “misinformation” poses to democracy, every time I remember when the government demanded that social-media companies de-boost, erase, or grant the CDC a right of reply to our Facebook posts during the pandemic, my mind turns to a certain revolutionary Irishman and one of the most energetically creative opponents of censorship imaginable.

Arthur Griffith was born in Dublin in 1871, the son of a printer. Like many of his later peers in the Irish revolutionary movement, he was educated by the Christian Brothers and became at first an ardent cultural nationalist, joining the Gaelic League, which existed to preserve and revive the Irish language. He would go on to bequeath to Irish politics the two-word name of his party that has existed in many forms ever since: Sinn Féin, the Irish phrase meaning roughly: We, ourselves.

The overwhelming majority of Irish voters in Griffith’s time considered themselves nationalists and voted dutifully for the Irish Parliamentary Party led by John Redmond. The IPP was disproportionately influential because the number of MPs it sent to Parliament in London was fixed constitutionally (as a hedge against Catholic fertility) before the Great Famine and waves of subsequent emigration dramatically reduced the island’s population by 1900. The Irish Parliamentary Party’s almost singular cause was Home Rule, the establishment of a subordinate parliament in Dublin.

Griffith’s politics are not easily mapped. He was more radical than mainstream nationalists, wanting a separate and coequal parliament in Dublin. But he argued for it as a reactionary legitimist, positing that Dublin’s former parliament could never be legally dissolved, as it was in the Act of Union. Griffith had some antisemitic views then current among conservatives and nationalists, but he abandoned them over time. Unlike most of his republican-oriented peers in the nationalist movement, Griffith argued for retaining a connection to the Crown, a model of dual monarchy that he based on the rise of Hungary to equal status with Austria in their shared empire. This could also be seen as a grand consolation prize for Irish Protestant Unionists. What preoccupied Griffith most of all was the economic development of Ireland. He was a Hamiltonian by philosophy and journalist by trade, and his newspapers the United Irishman and Sinn Féin were filled with agitation for tariffs, investment in manufacturing, and comparisons of Ireland to similar European nations, meant to stimulate Irish people to pursue independence in order to pursue national prosperity.

After a decade of rising cultural nationalism, Irish politics went haywire in 1912. The election produced an alliance between the IPP and the Liberal Party. They passed a bill that restricted the House of Lords veto, allowing any piece of legislation from the Commons to come into law if it passed three years consecutively. This put a countdown clock in motion. Unionists in Ireland and Great Britain effectively had three years to oppose or alter Home Rule by extra-constitutional means. Unionists signed a covenant to oppose Home Rule by any means necessary and began to arm themselves for civil war. Southern Nationalists formed their own paramilitary, and their commander, the historian Eoin MacNeill, practically welcomed Unionists to make their threatened “march to Cork,” where he believed they and the Nationalists would settle among themselves, rather than with an English parliament, the future of Ireland.

In this utterly febrile environment, the onset of World War I was welcomed by his majesty’s government as a positive relief from the heady, bloody danger of the Irish question. Home Rule could be put on hold by the Suspensory Act. Springing partition of Ireland on Redmond could wait. But the rhetoric used to sell the war to Irish recruits — come and fight so that small Catholic nations such as Belgium may be free — tended to enflame as much radical nationalist sentiment as pro-war feelings. The wartime government also used global upheaval as plentiful justification for government censorship of seditious views. Griffith’s the United Irishman and Sinn Féin were repeatedly raided and closed down by the authorities.

And here is where Griffth’s genius really showed itself. Griffith decided to fight censorship by accepting it. With money from the Irish Republican Brotherhood, he founded a new newspaper called Scissors and Paste. Each issue had only one paragraph of original text:

Ourselves

It is high treason for an Irishman to argue with the sword the right of his small nationality to equal political freedom with Belgium, or Serbia, or Hungary. It is destruction to the property of his printer now when he argues it with the pen. Hence while England is fighting the battle of Small Nationalities, Ireland is reduced to Scissors and Paste. Up to the present the sale and use of these instruments have not been prohibited by the British government in Ireland.

The rest of the paper was made up of aggregated reprints from censored newspapers and some foreign newspapers, juxtaposed with each other to reveal the stories as lies and spin. For a ha’penny, readers were introduced to the first entirely aggregated publication known to history. Sometimes Griffith contrasted approved British publications with extracts from neutral American ones, in order to highlight and reveal fissures in geopolitics that would otherwise be unknown to the Irish public. Griffith found that the most effective way around censorship was to accept it in an ironical fashion.

Embarrassing the government by publicizing the nonsense its censorship produced only enraged the censors even more. Scissors and Paste became an even larger target than the samizdat journals of other Irish nationalists. This witty bit of activism won Griffith an even larger share of repute among more radical nationalists, and fear among the authorities, so much so that Griffith was arrested after the 1916 Easter Rising. He hadn’t even participated in it or known of it, and yet the English press gave his party credit, calling it the Sinn Féin Rebellion. Griffith would be arrested twice more in the following years for his journalism and his participation in what was truly becoming a rebellion under his brand. In the 1918 elections, Sinn Féin candidates took the majority of Irish seats and followed Griffith’s policy of abstaining from taking their seats in London and instead sitting together as a government in Dublin.

Griffith would go on to lead the Irish delegation that negotiated the Anglo-Irish treaty, ending the Irish War of Independence in 1921. After Éamon de Valera resigned the position, Griffith was elected president of Dáil Éireann, the free state’s new government, but died in 1922.

For me, Griffith is a model of anti-censorship activism. Nothing is as deflating to an overweening power as being met with a knowing smirk and barely suppressed laughter. When he couldn’t defeat censorship, he could at least humiliate it. But it required diligence, bravery, and, most of all, a sharp wit. I fear he’s a model for times to come.