Journalism from London.
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REVIEWS
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“Nick Cohen’s brilliant broadside against censorship in an age of freedom.” Richard Dawkins
"Cohen is right that the struggle for freedom of speech is a political struggle. The internet does not itself liberate, Cohen reminds us. On the contrary. Both the powerful and the weak can use internet technologies. Techno-utopianism is a dangerous distraction, encouraging the illusion that the censors can be defeated by the click of a mouse. Cohen celebrates Milton's Areopagitica (1644) and Mill's On Liberty (1859). His own book stands alongside them." Anthony Julius, Standpoint.
"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 uplifting." Julie Burchill Prospect
"He has a sense of history and literature, in contrast to the dominant political generation of PPE graduates who have read every page of the Economist since they were at Oxford, but have never opened a novel." Denis MacShane, the Observer.
"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." Ed West, The Telegraph
"Cohen is a friendly and engaging writer, who combines the solitary scholar’s extraordinary range of reference with a bon-vivant wit and warmth. A lover of contemporary fiction, his polemics read like novels. He finishes his book with a list of ways to fight back."Max Dunbar 3am Magazine
"The author has no time for artists, comedians and "loud-mouthed newspaper columnists" who pose as the moral equivalents of dissenters in repressive regimes, as they fearlessly speak truth to power, knowing that power will never go after them. On more delicate matters, meanwhile, they preserve a cowardly or self-interested silence. Cohen is a political animal, but with this free-thinking man of the Left there is no sense of the hedging, elisions or contrarian games so familiar in the field. A nose for censorship, of the silent or bullying variety, means not just carrying a powerful bullshit detector, which he does, but being your own man. And God knows there are few enough of those."
George Walden, London Evening Standard
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REVIEWS
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"After all, there are thousands and thousands of middle-aged lefties for whom their once-revolutionary “credentials” are all they have left to show for a lifetime of “activism”, and who could not face their friends — or, perhaps, their students — if they found themselves endorsing a war fought by British or American soldiers. (I myself remember repressing a twinge of annoyance at the idea that the assault on civilisation represented by the 9/11 attacks would drive my anti-Kissinger book from the front page where I still believe it belonged.) But Cohen goes further: “I wanted anything associated with Tony Blair to fail, because that would allow me to return to the easy life of attacking him.”
It is this sentence, and its implications, that make his book an exceptional and necessary one. Cohen has no problem with those who are upset about state-sponsored exaggerations of the causes of war, or furious about the bungled occupation of Iraq that has ensued. People who think this is the problem are not his problem. Here’s his problem: the people who would die before they would applaud the squaddies and grunts who removed hideous regimes from Afghanistan and Iraq, yet who happily describe Islamist video-butchers and suicide-murderers as a “resistance”. Those who do this are not “anti-war” at all, but are shadily taking the other side in a conflict where the moral and civilisational stakes are extremely high."
Christopher Hitchens, Sunday Times
"Nick Cohen's roaring polemic of outrage against the moral and political crisis of the liberal tradition. It is already one of the most discussed current affairs books of the new year. At the very least it forces, or ought to force, anyone on the left to think carefully about where their movement has ended up in the modern world. Martin Kettle, The Guardian
"The psychology of the left wing is hauntingly displayed by Nick Cohen" Philip Hensher, The Spectator
The FBI could only jail Al Capone for tax evasion. It would have preferred to have put him in the dock for racketeering and organising the St Valentine’s Day massacre. But the cops had to settle for charging him with not paying taxes on the proceeds of crime rather than the crimes themselves.
The punishment of Capone serves as a metaphor for the end of the good press Ken Livingstone has had from the “liberal” media. I
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As the crisis widens ideological divisions, how are you reacting? Are you trying to judge arguments on their merits, in as far as any of us can? Or do you now have the soul of a secret policeman? Do you automatically praise novels or dramas that confirm your biases and damn anything that deviates from your party line?
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Review by Nick Cohen of Justice and the Enemy by William Shawcross.
In 1946, Sir Hartley Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, gave a noble speech: “Mankind itself, struggling now to re-establish, in all the countries of the world the common simple things – liberty, love, understanding – comes to this court and cries, ‘These are our laws – let them prevail.’”
That any notion of justice prevailed after the horror of the second world war was a miracle in itself. Churchill and Stalin wanted the summary execution of Nazi war criminals. The rule of law prevailed, however. The military court gave the 24 alleged war criminals a fair trial, acquitting three and condemning another seven to prison rather than death. World opinion remembers Nuremberg fondly, but deprecates the efforts of America to punish Islamists suspected of war crimes today.
Yet as Sir Hartley’s son, William Shawcross, notes, if you had offered a Nazi a choice between Nuremberg then and Guantánamo now, he would have headed to the Caribbean at once. American military commissions grant defendants the right of appeal, oversight of their cases by civilian courts and the best legal representation – none of which the victorious allies allowed the defeated Germans.
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The EU, which boasts that solidarity is its founding principle, is forcing Greece into destitution and chaos
Greek democracy is being destroyed. Not by soldiers marching with insane slogans on their lips about the inevitable triumph of the German master race, international proletariat or global jihad, but by moderate men and women who think themselves immune to ideological frenzy. Greece’s enemies are novel, but no less frightening for that: extremists from the centre ground; the respectable running riot.
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Politics Weekly: Abu Qatada, Rick Santorum and religion in politics
Giles Fraser, Nick Cohen and Hadley Freeman discuss the Abu Qatada row; the surge in support for Republican candidate Rick Santorum and the role of religion in politics
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Imagine Paul Chambers sitting in a pub, boasting about a wonderful woman he was hoping to make his own. As he describes how he will fly from the East Midlands to her home in Northern Ireland for their first date, he catches a glimpse of the television news. Bad weather has closed the airport.
“Crap!” he bellows at the screen in mock fury. “Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”
By definition, a pub is a public place but no one takes any notice. His friends laugh at the lame gag, then forget it. A busybody by the bar overhears him, but the smile on Chambers’s face tells him that he is joking. In any case, the busybody reflects, terrorists have attacked airports for many reasons and delayed passengers have found all kinds of ways to express their frustration. But no one has ever blown an airport sky high because snow has closed its runways.
Instead of joking in a pub, however, Chambers joked on Twitter. His case is a cautionary tale to all who do not realise that the new technologies are Janus-faced.
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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.
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It took the British ruling class years to accept that the Astor family, into which David Cameron has married, were true aristocrats. They were American immigrants, doubly damned because they had made their fortune in “trade”. The Astors soothed suspicions by entertaining in style at Cliveden, their Italianate mansion on the edge of the Chilterns. In the 1930s, Waldorf Astor, the second viscount, and his wife, Nancy, increased their prestige by making their home the social centre for the pro-appeasement wing of the Conservative party.
David Astor, a great editor of this newspaper, could not abide the portrayal of his parents as Hitler’s stooges by the left of his day. Less partial observers did not deny that Nazi sympathisers were always welcome guests. Hatred of war, antisemitism and, above all, fear of communism drove the Astors on. They saw Nazism as a bulwark against a Bolshevism that might one day rob them of their wealth. Although the British Communist party was a tiny force, they believed Britain should not fight Germany for fear of bringing on revolution. A Tory from Churchill’s camp encapsulated the Astors’ paranoid delusions, when he cut them with the magnificent put-down: “I see you are prepared to put the supposed interests of your adopted class before the real interests of your adopted country.”
Cliveden is now a hotel. The British upper class welcomes wealthy foreigners with greedy gusto. To cap it all, the barefaced producers of The King’s Speech whitewash the history of aristocratic appeasement by pretending that George VI and the late Queen Mother were supporters of Churchill and opponents of bowing to Hitler’s demands rather than the other way round. Nothing of the prewar atmosphere remains except the paranoia.
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When Rooney Mara, star of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, suggested that Lisbeth Salander was not a feminist, Stieg Larsson’s partner knew how to put her down. “Does she know what film she has been in?” asked Eva Gabrielsson, who shared much of Larsson’s life until his death in 2004. “Has she read the books? Has she not had any coaching?”
In case you were in any doubt, the questions were rhetorical. To Gabrielsson, Mara was another ignorant Hollywood star. If she had taken the trouble to understand The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo before playing its goth heroine, she would have realised that Salander’s “entire being represents a resistance, an active resistance to the mechanisms that mean women don’t advance in this world and in worst-case scenarios are abused like she was”.
Her repetition of “resistance” flagged that Gabrielsson, like Larsson, had done time on the European far left. Their backgrounds only emphasised the extraordinary and apparently admirable success of the Millennium trilogy.
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In October 2010, American liberals held their largest demonstration in Washington DC since the great crash of 2008. They did not raise their angry voices to denounce fantastic corporate greed and fraud. They were not furious that speculators had destroyed the hopes of millions of Americans. Instead, they staged the world’s first protest against anger – a rage against rage.
Its organisers, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, exhorted their followers at the “Rally to Restore Sanity” to wear “I’m With Reasonable” T-shirts – ironically, of course – and set aside political differences in the interests of getting on with their neighbours. Despite the subsequent Occupy Wall Street movement, the pattern Stewart and Colbert set has held. Genteel liberals have allowed American conservatives to all but monopolise political fury since the banks went down. Considering what conservatives allowed financial markets to do, the fact that the right could be furious with anyone but itself is an astonishing story and one that Thomas Frank was born to cover.
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Nick Cohen