Let’s kill all the censors! (Twitter cancels Shakespeare)
P.S. What would Malcolm X do?
Peter Kirwan is an associate professor at the University of Nottingham. On April 20, he tweeted out the following:
“Really excited for @NottsRebels taking the stage with the @TheRSC for today’s Henry VI press performances. Break a leg everyone, and do kill all the lawyers.”
He was supporting the Nottingham Shakespeare Rebels acting group. The quote he was referencing is spoken by Dick the Butcher in Act IV Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s play, Henry VI. The full quote is “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”
Twitter, in all its #woke glory, promptly:
Claimed that Kirwan’s tweet violated its rules on “abuse and harassment”
Removed the tweet
Locked Kirwan out of his account
I could, of course, launch into a well-justified rant about #woke censorship, thought policing, and all that jazz. Instead, I’ll borrow something Malcolm X said while debating at Oxford University in 1964:
“I read once, passingly, about a man named Shakespeare. I only read about him passingly, but I remember one thing he wrote that kind of moved me. He put it in the mouth of Hamlet, I think, it was, who said, ‘To be or not to be.’ He was in doubt about something — whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune — moderation — or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. And I go for that.
“If you take up arms, you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who’s in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time. And in my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built, and the only way it’s going to be built — is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone — I don’t care what color you are — as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”