Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?. Mick Hume
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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015
Copyright © Mick Hume 2015
Mick Hume asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008125455
Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780008126384
Version: 2015-05-11
For Stella and Isabel, may they always think what they like and say what they think
Contents
Prologue: ‘Je Suis Charlie’ and the free-speech fraud
SECTION ONE: The silent war on free speech
1 A few things we forgot about free speech
2 The age of the reverse-Voltaires
3 A short history of free-speech heretics
4 The Internet Front: hunting for trolls down ‘memory holes’
5 The University Front: students fight for ‘freedom from speech’
6 The Entertainment Front: football – kicking free speech with impunity; comedy – no laughing matter
SECTION TWO: Five good excuses for restricting free speech – and why they’re all wrong
7 ‘There is no right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre’
8 ‘… but words will always hurt me’
9 ‘Mind your Ps, Qs, Ns and Ys’
10 ‘Liars and Holocaust deniers do not deserve to be heard’
11 ‘Free speech is just a licence for the mass media to brainwash the public’
A short summation for the defence
Epilogue: The Trigger Warnings we need
Trigger Warning (noun): a statement at the start of any piece of writing, video, etc, alerting the reader or viewer to the fact that it contains material they might find upsetting or offensive.
This is not a book about the Charlie Hebdo massacre. When I began to write Trigger Warning in late 2014, Charlie was a small French satirical magazine known by relatively few and read by far fewer, particularly in the Anglo-American world. The murderous attack at the magazine’s Paris offices in January 2015 did not really alter the argument about the urgent need to defend free speech, but that massacre and the reactions to it certainly brought the issues into focus.
Two concerns had already motivated me to write this book, both of which were highlighted in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo. The first was an awareness of the widening gap between the rhetorical, ritualistic support that Western societies pay to freedom of speech in principle, and the increasing preparedness to compromise and restrict it in practice. The sight of world political leaders declaring ‘Je Suis Charlie’, whilst simultaneously trying to outlaw opinions they found offensive, illustrated that chasm.
My second concern was that the political and cultural attacks on free speech were often being led, not by Islamist extremists, but by those in the West who would consider themselves liberal or left-minded. The flipside of this was freedom being dismissed as of interest only to right-wing cranks, accused of ‘hiding behind free speech’. As a veteran of radical struggles who still considers himself on the left, even if not of its modern incarnation, I have always understood that fighting for free speech is indispensable to those who want to argue for radical ideas and social change. When I first wrote in defence of ‘the Right to be Offensive’, twenty-five years ago, it was as the editor of Living Marxism magazine. Those opinions were in a distinct minority on the British left even then. Today, with campaigners demanding post-Charlie purges of both ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Islamo-fascism’,