Malevolent voices that despise our freedoms

A few posts back I linked to an article at The Time online which purported to be by Philip Pullman and was written as a literary sneer at the very things which Jack Straw said in the other article I linked to. Pullman's piece has been pulled (er... man?) which does seem slightly suspicious given the content. You may read a copy of the article here. I have headed my piece with the same title as the original. Many people have gone further and added the whole article to their own blogs and hence if there is any less-than-innocent reason for its disappearance, the full force of The Streisand Effect can be felt.

I am loathe to suggest a malevolent reason for the original article being pulled and we do need to analyse the possible reasons. The facts are that the original link gives a 404 error arising within the timesonline site.

Firstly I suppose we have to look at it being the result of someone in control of the site not being comfortable with it and deliberately pulling it.

Secondly it may just be purely a technical error.

These first two issues are linked in that putting up a message to suggest that the article had been deliberately pulled, even if it did not give a reason, would smack on censorship and hence the simple deletion of the source file.

Thirdly there is a chance that the article was published without the permission of the author though you would think that Philip Pullman would have thought about how it would look should it be pulled without information being displayed as to why. As the piece was to coincide with the Convention on Modern Liberty there is also the possibility that it was due to be a keynote speech and hence it was taken down to ensure that people attended the session. Again some sort of information about that being the case would have been helpful.

Finally and most upsetting for me is the possibility that the whole piece was a hoax rather like the beautiful piece of writing that was sent around the Internet after 9/11 purporting to be from The Dalai Lama but was disappointingly not by him at all. Google has now come up with this article in today's Guardian which claims to be Pullman's address to the Convention on Modern Liberty and I have no reason to doubt that it is. ..... pause ..... just read it and while it is less flowery than the Times piece, it makes a more consistent point and says it in a proper way that even our government can understand. His conclusion is stinging.

We are a better people than our government believes we are; we are a better nation.

I have no reason to believe that the original piece was not by Philip Pullman and I am enough of an optimist to think that the reason for its disappearance is innocent. If it is not then so begins the work of Winston Smith.