Self-censorship is, in many ways, Cohen’s real thesis, which makes me wonder if his title wouldn’t have been better as You Don’t Want to Read This Book. His chapters on the credit market implosion and the Hobson’s choice faced by institutional whistleblowers are among the finest in this book because they examine both antiquated and self-defeating
statutes as much as ingrained human psychology. Conservatives can appreciate Cohen’s description of contemporary corporate culture as a kind of velvet dictatorship where thunderous egos reign in the boardroom and underlings are too terrified to say that the boss is talking utter nonsense, lest they should first lose their jobs, then be reputationally boxed out of their inustries altogether. Whatever kind of enterprise this is, it is not “free.”
Read it all
The Dirtiest Book of All
Scared to tell the truth: why censorship won’t work
Jennifer Oriel
The Australian
April 18
EVERY force has an equal and opposing reaction. Nick Cohen is to censorship what sound is to silence. British journalist, political commentator and five-time author, Cohen is a welcome town crier in a global village grown scared of speaking truth to Western wealth and Islamic fundamentalism.
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.
Invisible Censorship
From Diplomaatia
Review of You Can’t Read this Book
Just like the late Christopher Hitchens (to whom the book was dedicated), Cohen, who is a columnist for the Observer, belongs to the rare class of thinkers who position themselves politically on the left, but have the capacity to rise above ideologies when assessing any particular topic at hand, and who is therefore hard to categorise politically to the confusion of those who desperately try to do so. Cohen can harshly criticise economic inequality and the bankers’ greed, but he does not share the view, popular among left-wing thinkers, that everything bad comes from capitalism and ‘American imperialism’, and consequently nothing bad can come from cultural ‘non-West’ that is seen as their opposite. Cohen opposes the repression of freedom regardless who and where it comes from – in his own backyard and out in the world.
Read on
The Truth Won’t Out
Review of You Can’t Read This Book
By Sonia Purnell
Literary Review
NICK COHEN’S book opens with a quotation from the late Christopher Hitchens about how ‘ideas and books have to be formulated and written by individuals’. It is just as well that we have individuals such as Cohen, who are sufficiently bloody minded – as Hitchens himself was – to strike out against conventional wisdoms and a wilful collective complacency. As Cohen’s work amply demonstrates, we in the West believe ourselves to be free but when it comes to freedom of speech we are anything but. Even legitimate criticism can leave us financially ruined or dead.
After Parliament gave judges the power to develop a right to privacy in 2000, the judiciary saw fit to reject England’s tradition of open justice with a breathtaking disdain for the past. They built a wedding cake of suffocating injunctions and superinjunctions, to the point, Cohen observes, that ‘the censors censored the fact of censorship’. Fred Goodwin, now stripped of his knighthood because of the way he disastrously steered the Royal Bank of Scotland to near collapse, was able to persuade a court to suppress reporting of his extra-marital affair with a subordinate. Although he was in charge of a publicly traded bank employing tens of thousands of people and responsible for the savings and prospects of many more, the courts ruled that the relationship was private and could not be revealed without fear of going to jail.
Once, England and her thinkers, such as John Milton or John Stuart Mill, were known as passionate defenders of freedom. Yet now our courts’ reputation overseas is for their eagerness to prevent unwelcome truths about the wealthy and the powerful from being aired. No wonder foreigners flock to these shores for our particularly alarming brand of rich man’s justice.
Focus on ‘free’ world’s blinkers and censors
Review of You Can’t Read This Book
By J P O’Malley
Jewish Chronicle
His analysis of moral hypocrisy is first-class. If you believe we are living in an unprecedented time of freedom, in the cyber and physical worlds, do read this book and dare to be challenged.
“This mild-mannered group – two journalists; a PR; a teacher; Paul, who does something in finance that I still don’t understand – responded with cacophony of hooting derision”
Review of You Can’t Read This Book
I raised the subject of Nick Cohen – who has written an incisive, depressing, and wonderful new book on censorship – over supper with some friends on Sunday evening. The topic of conversation had drifted from crappy remuneration – mine was the crappiest – to current reading habits. I supposed dropping the name of the impeccably progressive Observer columnist would score some acceptable-face-of-conservatism points from leftish friends who find my centre-right views eccentric.
This mild-mannered group – two journalists; a PR; a teacher; Paul, who does something in finance that I still don’t understand – responded with a cacophony of hooting derision punctuated by fitful denunciations largely populated by the terms “neocon”, “WMD”, “war-monger”, and “it’s all about Israel”. Cohen may not be an “Islamophobe” but he was “the kind of writer Islamophobes enjoy reading”. He was an “apologist for Bush’s war for oil” who was “almost as shrill as Melanie Phillips”. Paul, whose job, whatever it is, presumably doesn’t involve managing hedge funds on behalf of orphanages, deployed the most stinging insult in the liberal armoury: “Cohen should go write for the Daily Mail”.
Freedom of expression under attack
Britain’s plaintiff-friendly libel laws are so infamous, they’ve even inspired a gag on South Park. In the notorious “Trapped in the closet” episode, young Stan Marsh — thought to be the reincarnation of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard — announces that the “religion” is a giant scam. Scientologist Tom Cruise, furious at this gross insult to his faith, declares, “I’ll sue you — in England!”
The real-life punch line: “Trapped in the closet” did not air on British television, because of the very real possibility that Cruise would successfully sue any broadcaster who tried.
Carry on reading
Self-censorship rules
Reid’s Reader, New Zealand on You Can’t Read This Book
So we live in an age of unparallelled freedom of expression, right? It’s only a matter of time before other closed societies succumb to it.
Thus goes the current popular myth.
But Nick Cohen’s isn’t having a bar of it.
It can happen again, only worse
By Joseph Brean, National Post, Mar. 17, 2012
Discussion of You Can’t Read This Book
To judge by the loudest headlines and the most retweeted quips, censorship has been having a bad run in the last while, with failure heaped upon failure.
Overseas, the Arab Spring was credited as much to free-flowing social media as to the rebels who used it, and the campaign for dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei made him more famous than ever. A request by the U.S. government that science journals withhold details of bird flu research because of bio-terrorism fears caused a furore that is likely to end with their publication. And in Canada, the federal human rights law against Internet hate speech is about to be repealed and/or judicially overturned as censorious overreaching that violates the Charter right to free expression.
The Internet has made us feel free, and in its glare, the censor has come to seem like a foolish, out-dated, beady-eyed accountant of ideas. Censors are like poisoners, according to Nick Cohen, author of a new book on the subject. They can be successful or famous, but not both.
Nick Cohen
