By Nick Dyrenfurth
Brisbane Times
The Grass scandal is hardly some isolated phenomenon. Rather it points to a far deeper intellectual and moral malaise on the political left, although as British journalist Nick Cohen pointed out in a penetrating recent essay for Standpoint magazine, what has been described as the new anti-Semitism from the far left and militant Islamic groups was in fact ”extraordinarily consistent” during the previous century.

Read the whole thing

Cohen’s You Can’t Read This Book is, as the title suggests, a provocation to confront paradox. It is mandatory for anyone who believes free speech and civility are mutually exclusive. Cohen exposes with anti-social lucidity that religious urgings to tolerance are often built on injustice, liberal intellectuals have sacrificed freedom to the fear of fatwas, and journalists and academics have lost sight of their first duty: to tell the truth.

Cohen is clear that the dual purpose of universities and the media is “to allow free debate without fear or favour”. He is critical of Australia’s recent Finkelstein inquiry into the media on the grounds that it reverses the liberal belief that “the citizen should regulate the state, not the other way round”.
Rec Coverage 28 Day pass

At the core of Cohen’s thesis on freedom is abhorrence with the contemporary drift from John Stuart Mill’s restriction on free speech based on the principle of no harm, to the crime of offence that is used to prosecute writers under hate speech and anti-vilification legislation.

Finkelstein added to the mix recommendations that would allow proposed new media regulators to monitor and censor journalists on the charge of bias. But, as Cohen elucidates, “truth trumps everything and it is not always fair or balanced. You should not balance the statement ’2+2=4′ with ‘but critics of mathematics say that it makes 5′.”

It is the refusal to cloak truth with fashionable illusions that separates journalism from public relations, propaganda and spin. Yet the Finkelstein inquiry recommendations propose interpreting truth via a media regulatory body while claiming to champion free inquiry and expression. It’s a line of illogic that would have been laughed out of Athens if Plato and Socrates had laid their hands on it.

Cohen is plain about how to train journalists to genuinely champion truth. It’s a six-step plan. He advises young journalists to go out and report; meet people who do not share their view of the world; confront their own ideological prejudices; never write something just because someone else is writing it; wake up in the middle of the night worrying about their prose style; and be ferociously, even neurotically, self-critical.

And the rewards?

“After 10 years of torture, maybe 20, they might be able to hack it.”

Cohen suspects that modern universities do not encourage students to confront their ideological prejudices and is deeply concerned about it. His earlier book What’s Left? chronicles the mishandling of free thinkers and the revision of history by academe and the media. The book was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize but had Cohen blacklisted in Left-liberal quarters.

Recent political commentary accuses Cohen of sectarian Semitic impulses, but he is at pains not to excuse himself from critique. He is often asked about whether he would ban Holocaust denial because his last name is Cohen. No, he responds, because the solution to racism, homophobia and misogyny is to fight bad ideas with better ideas. And to do that you need freedom to pursue, deduce and express truth without fear of blasphemy laws and other censorial legislation.

It is this belief in rigorous, open debate that has Cohen genuinely puzzling why “academics who depend on freedom of thought are among the first to deny its benefits to others”. He would not be assuaged by the fact the Finkelstein inquiry was staffed by academics and lawyers. Nor that it was preceded by a new regulatory body for Australian universities, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, which was established on the agreement that it would not regulate academic activity — an agreement for which universities lobbied hard.

There is no doubt that censorship is a serious political strategy and, since the Enlightenment, newspapers have fought it as a matter of public duty. The fact public intellectuals such as Cohen cannot propose free speech tempered by moderate libel, defamation and privacy laws without being accused of offence reflects an illiberal contemporary global culture.

But the routine imprisonment and murder of free thinkers in China and the Middle East should inspire Westerners to defend en masse the value of free speech in domestic and foreign policy. It does not. And that remains an injustice whose forward march will be stopped only by the pursuit and publication of truth: the principle of intellectual life writ large on freedom.

Jennifer Oriel is a Melbourne-based writer.

One of Britain’s leading authorities on China told me that an editor instructed him to not make unflattering remarks about the Communist party in a piece to accompany the fair. Others described a seminar at the British Council in September on how the British should think about freedom of speech in China. It was chaired by Claire Fox, of the Institute of Ideas, the successor organisation to the British Revolutionary Communist party. This sinister clique moved as one from the totalitarian left to the corporate right without stopping at any worthwhile point in between. Observers in the audience predicted that China’s combination of communist dictatorship with capitalist exploitation would appeal to Fox.
They were not disappointed. We should stop talking about human rights and freedom of expression, she said. We should hold our own government to account rather than engage in “China-bashing”. Writers, she concluded, have always benefited from the creative stimulus of censorship. By her logic, there was no need to protest when oppression was good for them. It was “worse than risible”, Jonathan Heawood, director of the free expression charity English Pen, told me. “I was surprised that no one from the British Council was prepared to rebut these absurd assertions.” Now he knows why the council stayed silent. The London Book Fair has been rigged.

Fox has taken to the Web to denounce my account. “It’s hearsay but no direct quote and inaccurate” etc
Well, here is the direct quote Jonathan Heawood, the director of English PEN, gave me. “I was at a British Council seminar last September at which Claire Fox chaired a discussion of Chinese literature. In response to a comment from the floor about the number of imprisoned Chinese writers, Fox asserted that we should stop talking about human rights and freedom of expression in order to talk about literature; that we should hold our own governments to account rather than ‘China bashing’; and that writers have always benefited from the creative stimulus of censorship.”
Heawood then went on to tell me that he found this “worse than risible”. He was surprised that “no-one from the British Council was prepared to rebut these absurd assertions”. I used both these lines in my piece.
For the record Heawood was not trying to remember an argument six months after the event. He was so surprised by what he heard that he wrote as soon as the meeting was over on 23 September 2011 to Susie Nicklin, the Literature Director of the British Council to complain about Fox. Nicklin did not attempt to claim that Heawood had misheard or misunderstood Fox. She did not attempt to deny any part of his account.
For those of you who do not know the Revolutionary Communist Party/Institute of Ideas sect and think it incredible that its members would seek to make excuses for the Chinese dictatorship, remember that these are the people who tried to help Milosevic by claiming that pictures of Serb concentration camps were fakes. For those who want the full, foul story, here is a long and brilliant account by David Campbell on how the RCP and its allies manufactured the modern equivalent of holocaust denial.

It’s completely senseless and borders on the insanely pointless — a bit like Berliners being executed by the Gestapo for looting a pot or a kettle from a bombed-out house in the last days of the war.

So, where are the protests from the Irish left against this vile, murderous Government?
Carry on reading

But dogged by this “secret society” image, the Freemasons have launched a rebranding exercise
Carry on reading

WHAT’S LEFT? How the Liberals Lost Their Way
by Nick Cohen
Fourth Estate £12.99 pp296

It is not until quite near the end of this mordant and instructive polemic that Nick Cohen comes right out with his own confession: “My instant reaction to the 9/11 attacks was that they were a nuisance that got in the way of more pressing concerns. Throughout the 1990s, I had been writing about the overweening power of big business and how it could corrupt democratic governments. I had lambasted new Labour for its love of conservative crime policies and attacks on civil liberties for years. Attacking Tony Blair was what I liked doing — what got me out of bed in the morning. Accepting that fascism is worse than western democracy, even western democracies governed by George W Bush and Tony Blair, sounds very easy in theory, but it is very difficult to do in practice when you are a habitual enemy of the status quo in your own country.”

He might have left it at this. 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.

There are two possible sorts of “left” reaction to a dilemma like this. One is to seek out the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world — the Kurdish revolutionaries in Iraq, say, or the Afghan women’s movement — and to offer them your solidarity whether Bush or Blair will do so or not. (Some things, as Orwell wrote, are true even if The Daily Telegraph says they are true.) The other is to say that globalisation is the main enemy, and that, therefore, any enemy of that enemy is a friend. In this twisted mental universe, even a medievalist jihad is better than no struggle at all. Cohen has decided to adopt the first position, and to anatomise and ridicule the second one. The result is an exemplary piece of political satire, in which the generally amusing and ironic tone should not lull you into ignoring the deadly seriousness of the argument.

It is not absolutely necessary to have a personal stake in a discussion like this, but it does help. Cohen started out trying to defend the honour of the left, and attempting to appeal to its better traditions. He swiftly found that this made him the target of the most hysterical slander, from people whose hatred of liberal democracy has a long and sordid ancestry. He then lowered his head, clenched his teeth, steered into the storm and embarked on the toughest struggle an old leftist can ever undertake: a confrontation with former comrades who suspect him of “selling out”. What probably began as a long essay has now metamorphosed into a full-scale settling of accounts.

It’s all here: from the pseudo-radicals who said there was nothing to choose between Nazi imperialism in Europe and British rule in India, through the supporters of the Hitler-Stalin pact, all the way to those who defended Slobodan Milosevic as a socialist and those who took, quite literally took, money from the bloody hands of Saddam Hussein. Just in the past decade or so, had this “anti-war” rabble had its way, we would have seen Kuwait stay part of Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo cleansed and annexed by “Greater” Serbia, and the Taliban retaining control of Afghanistan. You might think that such a record would lead its adherents to be dismissed as a silly and sinister fringe, but instead it is they who pose as the principled radicals and their opponents who are treated with unconcealed disdain in the universities and on the BBC.

This betrayal (because there is no other word for it) has been made possible in part by a degraded version of multiculturalism. The hard left has junked its historic secularism, to say nothing of its principles of equality for females and homosexuals, to make common cause with Muslim outfits some of which are associated in other countries with the extreme right. It has done this by the use of nonsense terms such as “Islamophobia”, which are designed to give the no-less nonsensical impression that Islam is some kind of persecuted ethnicity. But the vile attacks by Islamists on the Jews (Britain’s oldest minority) and on India (Britain’s most important democratic ally after the United States) show the truly reactionary and hateful character of the opportunist alliance between failed ex-Stalinists and fanatical theocrats. For Cohen, as for some others of us, this is no longer a difference of emphasis within the family of the left. It is the adamant line of division in a bitter fight against a new form of fascism, at home no less than abroad.

I think he is right to identify the opening of this crisis with the events in Bosnia and Kosovo, because in that instance it was America (pushed by the supposed “poodle” Blair) that used force to prevent the annihilation of a Muslim community. Those who opposed that rescue operation, and who yet denounce the fight against Bin-Ladenism and its allies as “targeting” Muslims, have given the game away and shown that they hate only Anglo-American policy, to a degree that results in blindness. Meanwhile, Israel is always and everywhere to be denounced (and not always wrongly) while the other product of British partition policy during 1947-48, the part-rogue and part-failed state named Pakistan, is never indicted in the same way for its numberless bigotries and aggressions. This is bad faith, and needs to be unmasked as such. Cohen’s book is an admirable example of self- criticism and self-examination, using intellectual honesty as a means of illuminating a much wider canvas.

Do not feel that you have to be a leftist or liberal to read it, because it engages with an argument that is crucial for all of us, and for our time.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. What’s Left? is available at the Books First price of £11.99 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

Follow-Up Links

Listen to the rally to defend free expression in full here.
One Law For All
Full Nick Cohen interview:
(Check back in the morning!)
Buy Nick Cohen’s ‘You Can’t Read This Book’ here.
Full Paula Kirby Interview: