January 29, 2012

The Affair That Won’t Go Away


For Salman Rushdie, the “affair” is over. When he walks into a Notting Hill restaurant, his eyes do not scan the room for signs of danger. The other diners do not wolf down their meals and scuttle for the exit, in case today is the day when the bomber gets through. They treat the entrance of a writer, who once could not move without a posse of suspicious security guards, as an unremarkable event.

Rushdie is fine. More than fine, actually: he’s flourishing. Deepa Mehta has filmed Midnight’s Children. Rushdie has written the script, so if viewers wish to protest that the film diminishes, trivialises or otherwise fails to match the glittering standards of his masterpiece they must direct their complaints to him. A US cable network has commissioned him to write a sci-fi series and, like so many others, Rushdie relishes the space and freedom American television gives to dramatists.

The terror, which once dominated his life and the lives of everyone associated with his work, is history now. When Ayatollah Khomeini ordered Muslims to kill him for his blasphemies, Julian Barnes gave him a shrewd piece of advice. However many attempts were made on his life and lives of his translators and publishers, however many times Special Branch moved him from safe house to safe house, he must not allow the “Rushdie affair” to turn him into an obsessive.
Carry on reading

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January 28, 2012

“Working girls at King’s Cross have more dignity than authors with a book to sell.”

My You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom is out this week. As the title says, it’s about freedom of speech, a subject that has come to mean more and more to me as I have watched religious zealots intimidate liberals into silence, and the libel laws and omerta of City hierarchies stop investigations into a catastrophic financial system when they might have made a difference.
Carry on reading

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January 28, 2012

Thank God for polemicists, though atheist Nick Cohen won’t like that sentiment.

Review of You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom
By Steve Briggs,
The Glasgow Herald.
You Can’t Read This Book is a blistering onslaught on the conventional view that we’re living in an age where the internet, citizen journalism and the light-speed growth of Google, Facebook and YouTube have led to unprecedented freedom of speech, information and opinion.
Carry on reading.

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January 27, 2012

Plutocrats, Neo-Nazis, Judges and Geeks. Interview with Little Atoms

Listen to the podcast here

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January 26, 2012

How London became the censorship capital of the world

By Ed West
Telegraph
January 26 2012

In 2006 the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet began an investigation into the curious rise of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing, which had come from a small community on a volcanic island and become an unlikely giant, buying assets across Denmark. The paper found that the bank had links with Russian oligarchs and tax havens and, more worrying, may have overstretched themselves.

Kaupthing sued them. The paper defended its journalism, and the Danish Press Council rejected the bank’s complaint. But then the bewildered Danish editors were informed that the bank was now suing them – in London, which because Bladet was available in Britain (thanks to the internet), they could do. The newspapermen came from a country where a £25,000 libel suit was considered expensive, but soon racked up legal costs of £1 million in London before the case even came to court. Ekstra Bladet agreed to pay substantial damages to Kaupthing and print an apology.

A few months later Kaupthing collapsed, along with the other Icelandic banks, Iceland’s GDP fell by 65 per cent, and Britain and Holland demanded compensation equivalent of the entire Iceland economy. As Nick Cohen writes in his study of modern censorship, You Can’t Read This Book: “As events were to turn out, the English legal profession had also stopped the British investors who were to lose deposits worth $30 billion in Iceland from learning that there was a whiff of danger around the country’s banks, although no lawyer showed remorse about that.”

At the risk of winning the Order of the Brown Nose, Cohen is perhaps the most insightful, thought-provoking and entertaining political writer in Britain today, and comes from the honest tradition of English liberal thought that threads from John Milton to John Stuart Mill and George Orwell; for that reason he has fallen out with the dishonest liberal tradition, a split that began with the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie on Valentine’s Day, 1989. He has that rare trait of being fair to all parties, refreshing in the tribal atmosphere of political debate, which has no doubt angered sectarians on his side.
Book on sale here
Carry on reading here

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January 26, 2012

The frontiers of freedom

The Spectator
28 January 2012
You Can’t Read This Book by Nick Cohen Fourth Estate, £12.99, pp. 224, ISBN 9780007308903
By Hugo Rifkind

The problem with Nick Cohen’s very readable You Can’t Read This Book is the way that you can, glaringly, read this book.

This isn’t quite as glib an observation as it sounds. Cohen’s central point is that the censors’ pens did not fall down with the Berlin Wall. And yet here he is, very obviously free to tell us about them.

Cohen is a rambunctious pessimist. His style involves mustering a degree of anger for a page or two, often through an outrage only loosely connected to the matter at hand (Islam’s treatment of women, segregation in the Deep South, the crimes of Roman Polanski, for example) and then, once the wheels of our righteous indignation are drawn back to the point where they start clicking, he lets go, and lets rip, and woof, it’s awesome.
read more »

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January 26, 2012

Why British journalists are taught to be dishonest

By Laurie Penny.
New Statesman, 25 January 2012

The first thing I learned in journalism school was not to say anything bad about the police. If I did, even if I’d seen abuses of power with my own eyes, I could face a suit for damages that would ruin me, my editors and whatever paper had been unfortunate enough to publish my work.

Nick Cohen’s new treatise on censorship, You Can’t Read This Book, airs one of the more painful secrets of the British press – the slide, especially over the last 15 years, towards a culture where archaic libel laws give the wealthy and privileged “the power to enforce a censorship that the naive supposed had vanished with the repressions of the old establishment.”

I recently spent some time in the United States, where the cultural attitude to freedom of the press is rather different. A country that produced Fox News and allows presidential attack ads to run on television can hardly be held up as a gold standard for fair and unbiased reporting, but if American journalism lacks deference, British journalism is crippled by a surfeit of it.
Carry on reading

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January 25, 2012

Stifling Expression

By Julie Burchill

Prospect 25 January 2012 Issue 191

Nick Cohen’s books are like the best Smiths songs; however depressing the content, the execution is so shimmering, so incandescent with indignation that the overall effect is transcendently uplifting. In 2007’s What’s Left, the last book which I felt compelled to order by the dozen and press upon whoever came to the door (a few Jehovah’s Witnesses went away with more than they bargained for) he examined the truly repulsive spectacle of “how the liberal left of the 20th century came to support the far right of the 21st.” That is, how the enemies of sexism, racism, homophobia and religious mania came to embrace all of those evils in their eagerness to suck up to the last beacon of anti-Americanism: political Islam.
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January 25, 2012

You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom by Nick Cohen (The Times)

By Ian Finlayson (£)
January 21 2012 12:01AM

Into the space vacated by the controversialist Christopher Hitchens we might recruit the sardonic, sceptical columnist Nick Cohen. Here he takes on three mighty, repressive institutions — Religion, Money and the State — and exposes their counterfeit claims of safeguarding liberty, of doing away with censorship, for the empty words that they are in practice. Freedom of speech? Yes, you can write that novel, publish that cartoon — at risk of a fatwa, prison, a firewall, death or a superinjunction. Censorship is subtle and the illusions of freedom are underpinned by the realities of cultures, laws and constitutions, vigorously defended by entrenched interests. Net Utopians who point to information technology as their great hope are deluded, says Cohen. Freedom of speech is still a political struggle.

Fourth Estate, 330pp; £12.99; To buy this book for £11.69 visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 08452712134 or at Amazon here.

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January 22, 2012

How freedom goes


Joan Smith has a piece in the Independent about religious censorship of open debate in Britain, a supposedly free country. It is well written and argued, as Smith’s writing invariably is, but what distinguishes it is that it is the only defence of our liberties in the Sunday papers.

Consider the events of the past few days
Carry on reading

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