Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?. Mick Hume
polemical book is intended as a contribution to that resistance. The case it makes for free speech has developed through years of argument as a campaigning political journalist in both the alternative and mainstream UK media. In 1988 I was the launch editor of Living Marxism, which we relaunched as the taboo-busting LM magazine in the Nineties until it was forced to close in 2000 after being sued under England’s atrocious libel laws. Then I became the launch editor of Spiked (spiked-online.com), the UK’s first and best web-based current affairs and comment magazine, of which I am now editor-at-large. I was also the only libertarian Marxist columnist at The Times (London) for ten years, and now write as a guest columnist for the Sun, among others.
The development of the arguments in the pages that follow would not, however, have been possible without the input of others. I want to recognise and thank my overworked and underpaid colleagues at Spiked, where many of these ideas first germinated and where the crisis of free speech in Anglo-American society has been brilliantly brought to light by editor Brendan O’Neill, ably backed by deputy editor Tim Black and managing editor Viv Regan. Spiked’s transatlantic ‘Free Speech Now’ campaign, especially its work to combat censorship on campus led by Tom Slater, is a model, online and off, of how to breathe new life into a dormant political principle.
I also want sincerely to thank my old friends and collaborators Frank Furedi, whose inspiration and advice was as indispensable for this book as it has been for longer than either of us might care to remember, and Michael Fitzpatrick, who first tried to teach me how to write properly more than thirty years ago, and is still trying now. Thanks are due to Martin Redfern, my editor at William Collins, for bringing the idea to fruition. And most of all to my wife, Ginny, the managing editor of all that I do, for making me start and finish writing it. The responsibility for the text, warts and all, is of course mine.
Mick Hume, London, April 2015
Prologue
‘Je Suis Charlie’ and the free-speech fraud
Free speech is threatened on two fronts: occasionally by bullets, and every day by buts.
Copenhagen, Denmark, 15 February 2015. A meeting in a café to discuss the issues of free speech and blasphemy, just over a month after the massacre at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Inna Shevchenko of the Ukrainian feminist protest group FEMEN opens the panel discussion, talking about her relationship with the cartoonist Charb – Charlie Hebdo’s editor – and their shared insistence on their right to freedom of expression (FEMEN are famous for protesting topless).
Shevchenko gets to the nub of the argument: ‘I realise that, every time we talk about the activity of those people, there will always be, “Yes, it is freedom of speech, but …” And the turning point is “but”. Why do we still say “but” when we …’ At that precise moment her speech is ended by the sound of sustained gunfire from outside the meeting.1
The timing of the Islamist gunman’s attack on the Copenhagen free-speech meeting was so precise it might almost have been scripted. Just as the speaker raised the problem of people within the West saying ‘Yes it is free speech, but’ to signal the limits of their support, the murderer added his own full stop to the debate from outside by opening up with an M95 assault rifle, leaving Finn Noergaard, a Danish film-maker, dead. (The gunman later killed another man in an attack on a synagogue in the city.)
There is no equivalence, of course, between bullets and buts, between violent assaults on free speech and equivocal endorsements of it. Might it be, however, that the weakening of support for free speech in the West, signalled by the rising chorus of ‘buts’ attached to it, has encouraged those few willing to take more forceful action to put a stop to what they deem offensive?
Two crimes were committed against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015.
Islamist gunmen committed mass murder at the paper’s Paris offices. They shot dead eight cartoonists and journalists, two police officers and two others, in a graphic demonstration of their hatred for freedom of speech and of the press.
Then the great and the good of Western society committed a mass free-speech fraud. They sold us the line that they all supported free speech, making rhetorical and ritualistic gestures of support for the Charlie Hebdo victims. Yet at the same time many were acting out their contempt for the real freedom of expression that allows such provocative publications to exist in the first place.
The massive ‘Je Suis Charlie’ demonstrations in Paris and many other cities, which followed the massacre and the connected murders at a Jewish supermarket, were uplifting displays of human solidarity that made an impression on us all. They also, however, gave a misleading impression of the state of play with free speech in Europe and America.
Here, it might have appeared, was a clear cultural divide: on one side, a free world united in support of Charlie Hebdo and freedom of expression; on the other, a handful of extremists opposed to liberty and ‘all that we hold dear’. Behind those solidarity banners, however, Western opinion was far less solidly for free speech. Many public figures could hardly wait to stop paying lip service to liberty and start adding the inevitable qualifications, obfuscations and, above all, ‘Buts …’
Those who took a dim view of genuinely free speech in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo were not confined to Islamist terror cells. It quickly emerged that the threat to freedom came not just from a few barbarians at the gate. Free speech faces more powerful enemies within the supposed citadel of civilisation itself.
The moving displays of solidarity were primarily showing sympathy with the murder victims. Support for freedom of speech as embodied by the consistently offensive Charlie Hebdo was a lot less solid. It might have been more appropriate if many of those placards had named individual victims – ‘Je Suis Charb/Wolinski/Elsa’ – rather than Charlie the magazine. From the Guardian to Sky News, media outlets in the UK which expressed outrage at the murders still felt obliged to apologise for any offence caused by allowing a glimpse of the post-massacre cover of Charlie Hebdo, with its cartoon image of Muhammad.
Even before the dead had been buried, it turned out that the ‘worldwide’ support for Charlie Hebdo’s right to free speech was far from universal – and that those of a different persuasion were not confined to the hostile parts of the Islamic world.
An international consensus of a different hue quickly emerged, to agree that the Charlie Hebdo massacre showed the need to apply limits to free speech and restrict the right to be offensive. This consensus included some unusual bedfellows, notably His Holiness Pope Francis and the Communist Party of China.
Soon after condemning the murders, the Pope almost appeared to suggest that those cartoonists he called ‘provocateurs’ had been asking for it. His Holiness declared that ‘There is a limit’ to free speech, that ‘You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others’, and that it was ‘normal’ for those who do so to ‘expect a punch’.2
The state-run Xinhua News Agency, official voice of the Chinese Communist regime, was a couple of days ahead of the Pope in stating that ‘the world is diverse and there should be limits on press freedom’. Its editorial made clear that, for China’s authoritarian rulers, ‘unfettered and unprincipled satire, humiliation and free speech are not acceptable’.3
To which the natural response might be: ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’ and ‘Do Red bears dump on the press?’ Nobody should have been too shocked to hear such views on punishing heretics from the head of the Church whose Inquisition condemned Galileo, or from the Chinese state hierarchy that has kept its press on the shortest leash and freedom in a noose.
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