You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Nick Cohen
of how censorship in its clerical, economic and political forms works in practice. It is a history of the controversies of our times, and an argument that free speech is better than suppression in almost all circumstances. I hope that I will have convinced you by the end that the limits on free speech – for there are always limits – should be few, and that the law must refuse to implement them if there is a hint of a public interest in allowing debate to continue unimpeded.
My subject is censorship that hurts, not spin or the unstoppable desire of partisan newspapers, broadcasters and bloggers to preach to the converted and dismiss or ignore news their audiences do not wish to hear. I accept that press officers’ manipulation of information is an attempt to limit and control. But manipulation becomes censorship only on those occasions when the law punishes those who expose the spin. I agree too that editorial suppression is a type of censorship, because it ensures that readers rarely find a good word about trade unions in a right-wing newspaper, or a sympathetic article about Israel in a left-wing journal. The effects are trivial, because those readers who do not wish to be spoon-fed opinions can find contrary views elsewhere, and a journalist who does not like the party line of one media organisation can choose to move to another.
True censorship removes choice. It menaces and issues commands that few can ignore. Write a freethinking novel, and religious terrorists will come to assassinate you. Tell the world about your employers’ incompetence, and they will deprive you of your livelihood. Criticise a pharmaceutical corporation or an association of ‘alternative health’ quacks and they will seek to bankrupt you in the English courts. Speak out in a dictatorship, and the secret police will escort you to jail.
The invention of the Net, like all communications revolutions before it, is having and will have profound effects – which I do not seek to belittle. Its effect on the ability of the strong and the violent to impose their views is less marked than optimists imagine, because they fail to understand the difference between total control and effective control. Everyone who wants to suppress information would like to remove all trace of it. But when total power eludes them, they seek to impose limits. It may irk a Russian oligarch that readers can find accounts of his mafia past somewhere on the Web, or infuriate the Chinese, Iranian and Belarusian regimes that dissident sites escape their controls. But they are not threatened unless people can act on the information. Action requires something more than an anonymous post somewhere in cyberspace. It requires the right to campaign and argue in public. As we have seen in the Middle East, in dictatorships it can require the courage to risk your life in a revolution.
Censorship’s main role is to restrict the scope for action. If religious terror ensures that every mainstream broadcaster is frightened of lampooning Islam’s founding myths, or if the citizens of a dictatorship know that they will be arrested if they challenge their leaders’ abuses of power, then censors are exercising effective control by punishing those who challenge them and bullying their contemporaries into silence.
‘You can be a famous poisoner or a successful poisoner,’ runs the old joke, ‘but you can’t be both.’ The same applies to censors. Ninety-nine per cent of successful censorship is hidden from view. Even when brave men and women speak out, the chilling effect of the punishments their opponents inflict on them silences others. Those who might have added weight to their arguments and built a campaign for change look at the political or religious violence, or at the threat of dismissal from work, or at the penalties overbearing judges impose, and walk away.
Technology can change the rules, but it cannot change the game. Freedom always has to be fought for, because it is rooted in cultures, laws and constitutions, not in microchips and search engines, and is protected by institutions that are obliged to defend it. The struggle for freedom of speech is at root a political struggle, not least because the powerful can use new technologies as effectively as the weak – often more effectively. Today’s techno-utopianism is at best irritating and at worst a dangerous distraction, because it offers the comforting illusion that we can escape the need to fight against reactionary and unjust governments, enterprises and movements with the click of a mouse. When the first edition of this book came out, an otherwise kind critic bemoaned my failure to understand that the Web brought the dissident enemies of the Putin regime in from the fringe and allowed them to challenge the kleptocracy. ‘The great boon of the Web is that distinctions between the mainstream and the esoteric crumble,’ he said. ‘How can Cohen not see that?’
One year on, and the protests against the Russian state’s rigging of elections are over, and Putin is still in power. I wish it were otherwise, but contrary to the shallow views of Net utopians, technology cannot ensure progress. When it comes, progress in human affairs does not advance in a straight line. It bends and swerves; and sometimes it retreats. Today’s debates assume that we are living in a better and more open world than our repressed ancestors. The most striking counter-argument against modern complacency is to begin by looking at that most contentious and dangerous of forces, and observe that we were freer to challenge religions that claimed dominion over men’s minds and women’s bodies thirty years ago than we are now.
In 1988, Salman Rushdie for one thought that a writer could criticise religious bigotry without running the risk that fanatics would murder him and everyone who worked with him, just for telling a story.
PART ONE
God
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised & unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for.
JOHN MILTON, 1644
ONE
‘Kill the Blasphemer’
It would be absurd to think a book could cause riots. That would be a strange view of the world.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, 1988
Of course it was blasphemous. A book that challenges theocracy is blasphemous by definition. Not just because it questions the divine provenance of a sacred text – Did God speak to Moses? Inspire the gospels? Send the archangel Gabriel to instruct Muhammad on how to live and what to worship? – but because it criticises the bigotries the sacred text instructs the faithful to hold. By this measure, any book worth reading is blasphemous to some degree, and The Satanic Verses was well worth reading.
To say that Salman Rushdie did not know his novel would cause ‘offence’ is not true in the narrow sense of the word. He and his publishers never imagined the viciousness of the reaction, but just before the book was published in 1988, he sent a draft to the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. Rushdie wanted Said’s opinion because he thought his new novel ‘may upset some of the faithful’. Indeed it did, but in the late twentieth century, no honest writer abandoned his or her book because it might upset a powerful lobby. Lackeys working for a plutocrat’s newspaper or propagandists serving a state or corporate bureaucracy guarded their tongues and self-censored, but not artists and intellectuals in free countries.
Rushdie was writing in one of the most optimistic times in history. The advances in political, sexual and intellectual freedoms were unparalleled. It seemed that decent men and women needed only to raise their angry voices for tyrants to totter and fall. First in the fascistic dictatorships of Spain, Portugal and Greece in the 1970s, then in the military dictatorships of South America in the 1980s, and from 1989 to 1991 in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and apartheid South Africa, hundreds of millions of people saw their oppressors admit defeat and embrace liberal democracy.
Those who fought on the side of liberty did not worry about offending the religious or challenging cultures. Forty years ago a campaigner against state-enforced racism knew that supporters of apartheid came from a white supremacist culture with deep roots in the ‘communities’ of Dutch and English Africans. Their clerics provided a religious justification for racism by instructing them that blacks were the heirs of Ham, whom God had condemned to be ‘the servants of servants’ because of a curse – vindictive even by the standards