Suppression Stories
By Brian Martin
Fund for Intellectual Dissent, 1997. 171 pp.
Review by Allen Myers
Brian Martin, an occasional contributor to Green Left Weekly, has produced an intriguing and very readable account of the suppression of dissent in Australia, mainly in the academic field.
Martin, a social scientist now located at the University of Wollongong, has not done a comprehensive study with questionnaires, tables of statistics and the usual trappings. Intellectual suppression doesn't lend itself to that sort of study, because it is usually carried out in subtle ways and is generally denied by the suppressors.
Instead, Martin discusses in some detail a series of different cases which indicate different mechanisms of suppression (denial of tenure, sacking, refusal to publish, defamation proceedings) and some of the varied tactics for fighting back.
Incidents of suppression are far more common than is generally realised, Martin believes, although it is impossible to say how widespread it is. The cases we hear about are usually only those in which an unusually tenacious fight back succeeds in gaining some brief media attention.
There would be more cases of successful resistance, Martin concludes, if fewer of the people suppressed had illusions about what can be achieved through "proper channels". More effective are public campaigns:
"With a campaign, formal channels may not even be necessary. Politicians and top administrators can always intervene if the urgency is great enough. A noisy campaign is more likely to trigger their involvement than a case following standard bureaucratic protocol."
Indeed, he cites a study by Jean Lennane, president of Whistleblowers Australia, who interviewed whistleblowers who had taken their complaints through official channels. The most frequent response was that official channels had "made no difference"; in the remaining cases, "the system" had been a hindrance to the whistleblower more often than a help.
This is a sensible book, which is to say that it puts things like suppression in a political context rather than treating them as some sort of abstraction. Thus Martin notes the large measure of hypocrisy and bad faith in the anti-PC campaign:
"The term 'political correctness' was originally used as a humorous and gentle reminder within the left to beware of becoming too self-righteous about stands on issues such as sexist language or views on certain issues. 'PC' has now become a term by which to attack policies aimed at reducing sexual or ethnic inequalities, among others."
I highly recommend this book. You can order it for $20 ($12 for low income) from Fund for Intellectual Dissent, Box U129, Wollongong University, Wollongong 2500. You can also download it free from the internet: http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/documents/. But all proceeds from sales of the book go to the Fund for Intellectual Dissent, which will use them to provide free copies to those who can't afford to buy them, so pay for your copy if you can.