You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Nick Cohen

      RULES FOR CENSORS (2):

       A Little Fear Goes a Long, Long Way

      Free societies are not free because their citizens are fighting for their freedom. They are free because previous generations of citizens have fought for their freedom. When put under dictatorial pressure, they must start old fights anew. Once the struggle begins, you can never guarantee in advance that the citizens of the United States, Holland or Britain will be braver than the citizens of Iran, Zimbabwe or Burma. National and political differences are no protection against the universal emotion of fear. Not the immediate fear that causes the eyeballs to dilate and the fight-or-flight response to kick in, but the niggling fear at the back of the mind that warns of the pressing need to avoid a fight in the first place.

      Hitoshi Igarashi was the only person associated with The Satanic Verses to pay for the Ayatollah’s blood lust with his life. Compared to the millions killed in wars and genocides in the years that followed the fatwa, the pain the enemies of the novel inflicted was small. But it was sufficient. The threats against Rushdie produced a fear that suffused Western culture and paralysed its best instincts. From then on, authoritarians seeking to restrict civil liberties or members of the political right led the opposition to militant Islamism. Liberals, who had the best arguments against theocracy, and who might have offered immigrants to Europe – particularly women immigrants to Europe – a better future, went absent without leave.

      The society around them imitated the craven politicians, bishops and rabbis rather than the workers in the bookshops and the editors at Penguin. It displayed little or no willingness to defend the potential victims of terror. In one of his rare interviews, Peter Mayer, Penguin’s chief executive, praised the bravery of everyone in the book trade who had defended his right to publish, but then told a bleak story about how strangers treated his family. He had received many death threats. Someone went to the trouble to cut themselves and send him a letter scrawled in blood. An anonymous telephone caller told Mayer that ‘not only would they kill me but that they would take my daughter and smash her head against a concrete wall’. Far from rallying to defend an innocent girl and her innocent father, the parents of her classmates demanded that the school expel her. What would happen, they asked, if the Iranian assassins went to the school and got the wrong girl?

      And Mayer thought, ‘You think my daughter is the right girl?’

      The same cowardice greeted him when he applied for a co-op apartment in New York. ‘There were objections that the Iranians could send a hit squad and target the wrong apartment. As if I had done something wrong.’

      The intimidation became too much for Penguin to bear. Rushdie’s relationship with Mayer broke down as he came to think that his publisher was trying to avoid releasing a paperback edition of The Satanic Verses. ‘Months of pressure began to tell on Mayer,’ Rushdie remembered, ‘eroding his will … He began to persuade himself, it seemed, that he had done all he needed to do.’ The trouble was that any delay in publishing the paperback would cause the Islamists to redouble their efforts. The ‘affair’ would never go away as long as Rushdie’s enemies thought they could claim the partial victory of stopping the paperback edition.

      Articles carrying quotes from apparently senior sources at Penguin criticising Rushdie appeared in the press. When Rushdie went to call on Penguin, company lawyers attended their meetings. The common front of author and publisher broke down. A disillusioned Rushdie managed to create a consortium to publish the paperback, but after that last act of bravery, everything changed.

      After Rushdie, the fear of a knife in the ribs or a bomb at the office meant that liberals who stuck by liberalism were in the wrong. They knew the consequences now. If someone killed them, they were guilty of provoking their own murder. In the eyes of most politicians and most of the journalists, broadcasters, academics and intellectuals whose livelihoods depended on the freedom to debate and criticise, the targets of religious violence had no one to blame but themselves. The intensity of the rage against Rushdie allowed them to turn John Stuart Mill on his head. Mill argued that censorship could be justified only if a writer or speaker caused a direct harm – by urging on a mob to commit a crime, was his example. Rushdie did not incite violence. His opponents did. The harm was all on their side. However, governments and cultural bureaucracies came to believe that when religious mobs showed that they were prepared to murder Rushdie, they provided the justification for the censorship they sought.

      The attack on The Satanic Verses appalled liberals. The fight to defend it exhausted them. Knowing what they now knew, few wanted to put themselves through what Rushdie and Penguin had been through. Unlike the Western campaigns against apartheid, Franco, the Greek colonels and the Soviet Empire, a campaign for free speech would involve them running a slight risk of becoming the target of violence themselves. They soon found high-minded reasons to avoid it, and redefined their failure to take on militant religion as a virtuous act. Their preferred tactic was to extend arguments against racism to cover criticism of religion. Or rather, they extended them to cover arguments about minority religions in Western countries. It remained open season on Christianity for liberal writers and comedians, even though Islamist pogroms in Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt and Iraq and communist oppression in China made Christianity the most persecuted of the major religions.

      Writers taking on religious themes, journalists writing about Islamist extremism, or police officers, teachers and social workers investigating the abuse of women, knew that they now ran the risk of their opponents accusing them of a kind of racial prejudice. The charge of ‘Islamophobia’ would not always stick, but its targets understood that their employers would take it seriously and their contemporaries would regard them as tainted until they had cleared their names. The accusation was not always fatuous. As the millennium arrived, racists and nativist conservatives, who hated Muslims because they were immigrants or came from immigrant families, could develop the most unlikely interest in human rights. If liberalism gave them a new means of attack, they were prepared to feign an interest in it. The only principled response to their hypocrisy was to oppose racism and radical Islam in equal measure and for the same reasons. The best conservatives and liberals managed that, but most settled into the ruts described by a liberal Muslim think tank in 2011. ‘Sections of the political left have not done enough to challenge Islamism, yet, encouragingly, they have challenged anti-Muslim extremism,’ it said. ‘Similarly, sections of the political right have been reluctant to challenge far-right extremism yet are willing to challenge Islamism.’

      The fear the Ayatollah generated among liberals thus operated on several levels. Critics of religious obscurantism, most notably liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims, feared violent reprisals. Beyond the worries about direct threats lay the fear that religious groups, bureaucrats, left-wing politicians and newspapers would accuse critics of insensitivity or racism, and that racist groups or websites would confirm the accusation by repeating their critiques. The fear of the vilification and ostracism that would follow was often the most effective deterrent against speaking out. ‘Society can and does execute its own mandates,’ said John Stuart Mill. ‘It practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.’ He might have been writing of modern Europe.

      The nature of intellectual life made retreat the likely option. Whatever radical postures they strike, writers and journalists in Western countries are not the equivalents of soldiers or police officers. Nor are they members of a revolutionary underground. They do not begin an artistic or journalistic career expecting to risk their lives. They do not work in well-protected police stations or military bases alongside colleagues who have access to firearms. They work in university campuses or offices, or, in the case of many authors, at home surrounded by their families. Rushdie’s marriage broke down under the strain of the fatwa. Police moved the couple fifty-six times in the first few months, and his wife walked out. The desperate Rushdie tried everything to persuade his pursuers to let him live in peace.