You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom by Nick Cohen Read Free Book Online Page B

toleration did not limit argument, but removed the sanctions of the state and the established Church that had stood in argument’s way. It did not rule out appeals to logic, reason, imagination and sympathy – but gave them the space to breathe without the threat of punishment. Argument involves the true respect that comes from treating others as adults who can cope with challenging ideas and expecting them to treat you with a similar courtesy. Looking back on his life in 2011, Rushdie echoed Jefferson: ‘The question is who has power over the story. The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.’
    The ‘respect’ demanded by Rushdie’s enemies infantilised both the giver and the receiver, and suited religious reactionaries well. They had every interest in keeping their subject populations in a state of infantile ignorance, and in spreading the fear that all who thought about arguing with them would know that they risked becoming the next target.

A Clash of Civilisations?
     
    I see no way to secure liberalism by trying to put its core values beyond any but internal or consensual reasoning. The resulting slide into relativism leaves a disastrous parallel between ‘liberalism for the liberals’ and ‘cannibalism for the cannibals’.
    MARTIN HOLLIS
     
    Islamism is a movement of the radical religious right. Its borrowings from fascism include the anti-Jewish conspiracy theory and the anti-Freemason conspiracy theory. It places men above women. It worships martyrdom and the concomitant cult of death. You do not have to stare too long or too hard at its adherents to realise that they are liberalism’s enemies. Yet the most jarring aspect of Khomeini’s denunciations was that he and his supporters implied that Western liberals should regard them as brothers in the struggles to defend the wretched of the earth. They used the anti-imperialist language the political left employed when it castigated the machinations of the White House and the CIA, and the anti-racist language it employed when castigating white oppression.
    With a devious inversion, they turned the freedom to speak and to criticise into instruments of coercion the strong inflicted on the weak. If you wanted to be a genuine liberal, if you wanted to be on the side of the weak in their battle with the strong, you must be against Rushdie. Of all the lies that surrounded the fatwa, this was not only the most noxious but also the most farcical.
    Rushdie was a typical leftist of the 1980s. He supported all the old causes. He was a candid friend of the Nicaraguan revolution, and wrote in defence of the Palestinians. At first, he welcomed the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the arrival of the Islamic revolution, although he changed his mind long before its admirers tried to kill him. In Britain, he was the first great novelist English literature had produced to confront the disorientation felt by migrants. By necessity, his subject and his own experience made him a tough and on occasion vituperative enemy of racism. In the early 1980s, he broadcast a blood-chilling description of Britain as an island saturated with chauvinism. Unlike the Germans, who had come through painful self-examination to ‘purify German thought and the German language of the pollution of Nazism’, the British had never come to terms with the evils of Empire, he told the liberal viewers of Channel 4, who were doubtless suitably guilt-ridden. ‘British thought, British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism. It’s still there, breeding lice and vermin, waiting for unscrupulous people to exploit it for their own ends. British racism, of course, is not our problem. It’s yours. We simply suffer from the effects of your