You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Nick Cohen
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 problem. And until you, the whites, see that the issue is not integration, or harmony, or multi-culturalism, but simply facing up to and eradicating the prejudices within almost all of you, the citizens of your new and last Empire will be obliged to struggle against you.’
If Rushdie was an agent of the imperialists, he was operating under deep cover.
Assessing the response of liberals to the assault on liberalism and the attempts to murder one of their own is blighted by the old problem that we remember the best writers’ work, because it survives and moulds the future’s thinking, but forget the lesser journalists and authors who dominate debate at the time. The best left-wing writers of the 1980s understood that the left’s commitment to freedom of speech was far from certain. They knew that it had its own foul history of fellow travelling with tyranny. Their noses sniffed the air to catch the first whiff of treachery. In Culture of Complaint, his dissection of the politicisation of the arts and humanities in the 1980s, Robert Hughes lacerated the universities for their failure to defend Rushdie. Academics were forever berating dead white males for their failure to conform to exacting modern standards, he said, but stayed silent as murderers threatened the basic standards of intellectual life. On American campuses, they held that if a man so much as looked around with a lustful eye, or called a young female a ‘girl’ instead of a ‘woman’, he was guilty of gross sexual impropriety. ‘Abroad it was more or less OK for a cabal of regressive theocratic bigots to insist on the chador, to cut off thieves’ hands and put out the eyes of offenders on TV, and to murder novelists as state policy. Oppression is what we do in the West. What they do in the Middle East is “their culture”.’ Leftists could not make a stand, because to their minds defending Rushdie would at some level mean giving aid and comfort to racists and strengthening the hand of the one enemy they could admit to having: the imperialist warmongers in Washington, DC.
Rushdie’s friend Christopher Hitchens saw the centres of British cities clogged with men who wanted to pass blasphemy laws and give the police the power to control what free citizens could read. ‘That this ultra-reactionary mobocracy was composed mainly of people with brown skins ought to have made no difference. In Pakistan, long familiar with the hysteria of Jamaat Islami and other religio-dictatorial gangs, it would have made no difference at all. But somehow, when staged in the streets and squares of Britain it did make a difference. A pronounced awkwardness was introduced into the atmosphere.’
Too many of his former comrades were dodging the issue by imagining a false moral equivalence, he said. Rushdie and his oppressors were to their minds equally guilty. They could not see that ‘all of the deaths and injuries – all of them – from the mob scenes in Pakistan to the activities of the Iranian assassination squads were directly caused by Rushdie’s enemies. None of the deaths – none of them – were caused by him, or by his friends and defenders. Yet you will notice the displacement tactic used by … the multicultural left which blamed the mayhem on an abstract construct – “the Rushdie Affair”. I dimly understood at the time that this kind of post-modern “left” somehow in league with political Islam was something new. That this trahison would take a partly “multicultural form” was also something that was ceasing to surprise me.’
The Western leftists Hughes and Hitchens had in their sights were making the elementary howler of confusing ethnicity – which no one can change – with religions or political ideologies – which are systems of ideas that men and women ought to be free to accept or reject. As that howler now howls like a gale through liberal discourse, we had better take the time to explain why its assumptions are false before moving on.
When Serb extremists killed Bosnian Muslims because of their religion, their lethal religious prejudice was indeed akin to lethal racial prejudice. When employers from the old Protestant ascendancy in Northern Ireland refused Catholics jobs because they were Catholics, a comparison with colour bars against black workers in the old American South applied. When people said that a conspiracy of American Jews controlled American foreign policy, or that Muslim immigrants were imposing a jihadi theology on Europe, they were propagating racist conspiracy theories. Moral equivalence held in all these cases.
When supporters of Rushdie opposed the murder of authors, however, their ideals could not have been further from the dark fantasies of racial hatred. Islamists could call them ‘Islamophobes’ if they wanted, for they were indeed opposing reactionary Islamic doctrines, but they were doing so because they were liberals who wanted to show solidarity with liberals from the Muslim world, not because they were filled with an irrational loathing. When Catholic reactionaries accuse opponents of papal doctrine on contraception and abortion of ‘anti-Catholicism’, and when believers in a greater Israel accuse opponents of Israeli expansion into the West Bank of anti-Semitism, they too are palming a card from the bottom of the deck. They are trying to pass off rational morality as an irrational hatred.
In 1989, such confusions lay in the future. Hitchens and Hughes may have realised that an ominous shift was taking place, but most commentators at the time did not. Liberal opinion seemed to me and many others to reel from the threats of the extremists, collect itself and fight back.
Liberalism’s First (and Last) Stand
The staff and directors of Penguin, Rushdie’s publishers, showed steadiness under fire. Led by Peter Mayer, the chief executive, they contemplated the consequences of withdrawing The Satanic Verses. Penguin would not suffer alone, they decided. Every other publisher putting out works that a demagogue could take offence at might become a target.
Mayer and his colleagues were living in fear. The sneering claim that they ‘knew what they were doing’ when they published The Satanic Verses was contradicted by their evident astonishment. As furious men plotted murder, they had to