By Paul Anderson
Tribune 27 January 2012
“Which is where Nick Cohen’s fiery new polemic about freedom of expression, You Can’t Read This Book, comes in. He recognises that we need regulation to preserve media freedom. The book’s big theme is that formal legal guarantees of freedom of expression are not enough to sustain its practice.

Fear – fear of being fired for stepping out of line by a corporation or government organisation that employs you, fear of the libel action that might come from a super-rich crook with a holiday home in London, fear of being assassinated for offending the religious sensibilities of some imam in Iran (who might well broadcast on Press TV) – is as potent a constraint on free expression as the censor of a totalitarian state, and a much larger and more present danger in western democracies than necessary tolerant democratic media regulation.

Cohen’s book is brilliant – add that to the cover blurb – but it doesn’t go far enough…”
Read the whole thing

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.
Carry on reading

The Guardian
By Suzanne Moore
You Can’t Read This Book is published today. Available here and in book shops

“The futility of much of this is actually a block on real debates about free speech. Nick Cohen’s magnificent new book You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom reminds us that pre-publication self-censorship “is the most suffocating form there is”. This self-censorship is all around us: people are afraid to call Mossad killings murder for fear of being called antisemitic or still talk of the horrific murder of women as “honour killings” for fear of being Islamophobic.

Cohen takes us back to what I call the big bang of cultural relativism: Salman Rushdie and the Satanic Verses. People were killed by zealots who had never even read this book. The boundaries of the free world were remapped. Suddenly “respect” for religions meant some got far more respect than others. We know that a cartoon of the Prophet can cause death, but the ridiculing of Christianity is everyday. Cohen quotes the inimitable creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who said: “It’s really open season on Jesus. We can do whatever we want to Jesus and we have.”

Actually, though, this current climate of outrage is depoliticised in its democratic “anyone, anytime, anywhere can be offended” mode. What Cohen does so refreshingly is to insist on the primacy of the political. A real culture war, as opposed to these Twitter scuffles, means understanding that the political is as much a part of our identity as the religious. We can feel “the offence as deeply as any believer who has had his God or prophet questioned”. This means not bowing down to the religious right, be it Muslim or Christian or Hindu. It means questioning the kind of self-censorship that went on in corporate financial structures before the banking collapse.”

Read the whole thing

Click this link for the podcast

This humane thought inspired one Daniel Knowles of the Telegraph to pen a whole column condemning Penny.
Carry on reading

“The function of the artist as canary in the coalmine has long gone. It is unlikely that any historian will look to the arts of the first decade of the 21st century to find warnings of the economic collapse of the West.”

Read more

Read the whole thing

Carry on reading