Plutocrats, Neo-Nazis, Judges and Geeks. Interview with Little Atoms
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
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
Review of You Can’t Read This Book by Nick Cohen (Sunday Times)
You Can’t Read This Book on sale on Amazon (here) and in the bookshops too.
I t was — naturally — Oscar Wilde who remarked that he never read a book he was asked to review, because “it prejudices you so”. When the cover of one actually states “You can’t read this book”, the author is almost asking for such dismissive treatment, not because of the Wildean instinct in all of us, but because the title is so patently a stunt. Each of us is meant to think, “Yes, I jolly well can” — and buy the thing.
Nick Cohen is a writer who should not need such marketing ingenuity. He is one of the glories of British journalism: courageous, clear-thinking (when sober) and intellectually incorruptible. What’s Left?, his 2007 polemic, was a devastating broadside against the tendency of so-called liberals to offer support to the most reactionary Islamists, under the guise of anti-colonialism; the fury it engendered among Cohen’s former comrades on the left was testimony to its accuracy.
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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
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Peter Tatchell, Still on the Front Line
It looks as if Robert Mugabe will die in his bed rather than in the prison cell where he so richly deserves to eke out his days. During his time as dictator of Zimbabwe, he has had just one intimation of the fear he has inspired in so many others.
On 30 October 1999, while Mugabe was visiting London, two men jumped in front of his car. A third stood behind, so the driver could not reverse away. A thin, neatly dressed Australian opened the passenger door. He held up his left hand, palm forward, to show that he was not carrying a gun. He laid his right hand on the tyrant’s shoulder and said: “Robert Mugabe, you are under arrest on charges of torture. I am now summoning the police.” Mugabe’s eyes popped, his jaw dropped and the blood drained from his face.
The police came, sure enough. But they showed their pinched priorities by arresting Peter Tatchell and his fellow gay activists. The moment is worth savouring, nevertheless. For a few seconds, Tatchell had succeeded in giving Mugabe a taste of how a just world would treat him.
Tatchell turns 60 this week. January 2012 also marks the 45th anniversary of his career as a human rights and gay rights activist. These labels have been so devalued I need to elaborate. Every respectable person claims to support human rights. In Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding’s Mr Darcy was no longer the wealthy landowner of Jane Austen’s imagination but a wealthy human rights lawyer.
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Web of tyrants
Even those who are wary of the utopianism the net has generated tend to take it for granted that the new communications technologies have saved us from the need to worry about censorship. Sceptics fear that the web provides us with too much information, not too little. Enthusiasts see a future of unlimited free speech when all the old arguments about libel, official secrecy and blasphemy become redundant.
To see how far the consensus spreads look at Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?, a new collection of the views of 150 of the world’s leading minds on the technological revolution. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaks for the sceptical. He turns off his computer when he needs to think. Like Nicholas Carr — whose essay ‘Is Google Making us Stupid?’ infuriated Silicon Valley — he finds that the restless interruptions of working online have added to the ‘world’s attention deficit disorder’. The net’s dismal achievement has been to reduce further our collective attention span ‘from the depths to which television brought it’.
All bracingly iconoclastic. But when Tegmark turns to freedom of speech, he is as sure as the most wide-eyed cyber-utopian that it will flourish online.
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Nick Cohen
