Free Speech is Scary. The Solution: Speak Up

The parade of world leaders through the streets of central Paris made a mockery of the dead cartoonists; some of those who linked arms did all they could to suppress freedom of expression in their own countries.

Nick Cohen, in You Can’t Read This Book, lays out what he sees as the greatest threat to free speech that we currently face. Despite having been published in 2012, the situation described feels completely contemporary and is still very much a worthwhile read. His main message is that free speech, aided by new technology, should not be taken for granted, and that this applies to the freer Western countries just as much as the world’s less free countries. He divides the book into three parts: God, Money and State. Each poses a risk to freedom of speech in different ways. Each is assumed to have been mitigated by new technology. Each has harnessed this new technology for its own oppressive ends.

Mr. Cohen first discusses the issues surrounding free speech when it comes up against the wall of blasphemy. This is particularly felt along the fault lines between Islam and Western secularism. As Mr. Cohen lays out in detail, when the going gets tough, our commitment to free speech and expression in the West takes the path of expediency. Our collectively corroded spine was most devastatingly betrayed by our abandonment of Salman Rushdie, who was left out in the cold facing the guns, bombs and blades of the Ayatollah’s fatwa followers without the support of his fellow intellectuals and many in government. He was a troublemaker, in their view, who had it coming to him. Did this apply to his publishers and translators who were firebombed, and even killed?

The failure to stand up to the Islamic fundamentalists and their blasphemy censorship when it came for Mr. Rushdie was prophetic; Ayaan Hirsi Ali proved too independent-minded for the self-proclaimed universalists and lovers of freedom in Holland, and she was forced into hiding for preaching what she thought were universal values that the Dutch held close to their hearts; it turned out that it was really her fault that the murder of Theo Van Gogh caused all the trouble it did. The massacre of the staff of Charlie Hebdo in 2015 displayed the moral lacuna at the heart of modern culture: They also brought it upon themselves. The parade of world leaders through the streets of central Paris made a mockery of the dead cartoonists; Palestine under Mahmud Abbas is not exactly a haven for satire of Muhammad or Islam. Meanwhile, the inanity of holding up a pencil rather than the cover of Charlie Hebdo in opposition to the Kalashnikov completed the act of the metaphorical grave dancing that took place that day.