Nick Cohen: Writing from London

A British political writer illustrates the threat posed to a fundamental human right by religion, politics and cold hard cash.

Review of You Can’t Read This Book.
By Salil Tripathi Mint Magazine, India

At one point in this provocative polemic defending free speech, Nick Cohen asks: Given what we know today of what happened to authors, artists and writers after the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, would a writer dare to imagine, to dream, and write a similar work that challenges religious beliefs? It is important to note that Cohen’s critique is not only of Islam. Like all champions of free speech, he is an equal opportunity offender, doling out criticism equally to Hindu nationalists driving Maqbool Fida Husain out of India (and scaring a London gallery which would not show his work), Christians complaining about shows on television, and orthodox Jews who’d like women to sit at the back of the bus.
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Review of You Can’t Read This Book

From “Twlldunyrpobsais”.

A man stands in court, appealing against his conviction. His crime? Making an off colour joke on a social networking site.
Another is fleeing for his life when, on an airport stop-over, he is arrested and handed back to his pursuers. He is lead away, to face trial and highly possibly, the death sentence. His crime? Making an off colour joke on a social networking site.
A respected author, who has spent his entire writing life exploring the meaning of story, and the contrast (but never clash) between cultures, cannot visit a literary festival in the land of his birth. Demagogues and compliant (perhaps even, instigating) police have made it unsafe for perhaps his homeland’s greatest living author to give a speech about writing fiction.
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From New Humanist

With the persecution of Salman Rushdie, the continuing furore over ‘offensive cartoons’, and polluters, dictators and terrorist bagmen using British libel law to shield their misdeeds from public scrutiny, the opponents of free speech have never had it so good. This is Nick Cohen’s ten-point plan to stop the rot, protect free expression and turn back the tide of outrage that threatens our right to speak
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See also Richard Dawkins disucssing “offence,” Rushdie, You Can’t Read This Book and the nature of “militant” atheism.

By Chris Dillow

This marvellous piece by Nick Cohen should provide a culture shock for those of us whose political sensibilities were formed in the 1970s. He says:

The managers of private and public bureaucracies justify their elevated status and salaries not only by attempting to run efficient organisations (a task that is often beyond the poor dears) but by monitoring and intimidating those beneath them.

And You Can’t Read This Book attacks “the power of the wealthy to silence their critics.”

His point is capitalists are often the enemies of freedom.

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The Diamond Mine

Despite the idiotic sneer that such principles are “fashionable”, it is always the ideas of secularism, libertarianism, internationalism, and solidarity that stand in need of reaffirmation.

Christopher Hitchens

On 7^th December last year, some twenty Muslim men stormed a book launch in Amsterdam and promptly declared a death sentence upon the book’s author. They unfurled a black banner adorned with hateful Arabic, began chanting “Takfir!”, and threatened to break the author’s neck. When the audience bravely formed a human shield around the hunted writer, the men began demanding that the event be shut down. The writer and the audience, to their credit, stood their ground, until the Dutch police arrived, eventually arresting a number of the extremists, whereafter discussion of the recently published book resumed. What is important to note about this small but sordidly telling episode is the nature of the book and the person that had driven these men into such an apparently murderous rage. For the author – a slight but brightly articulate woman called Ishrad Manji – is no apostate, and her book – Allah, Liberty, and Love: The Courage to Reconcile Faith and Freedom – is no Satanic Verses. Manji is, in fact, an avowed believer in Islam, and her book, as its title suggests, is nothing more threatening or ‘offensive’ than a reasoned call for a reformist approach to Islam and a plea for moderation amongst her fellow Muslims. For this, apparently, did she deserve nothing less than death.

What must be understood about the reactionary mind it that it hates its own moderates and progressives before it even begins to hate its nominal enemies. “The first aim of religious violence,” argues Nick Cohen in his new book, “is to stop experiment by the faithful and enforce taboos.”

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Nick Cohen (he of “What’s Left?”) really is one of the good guys. If his website isn’t on your personal list of places to visit once a week or so, then it should be (he said, with the “now listen to me” tone of the ex-teacher). He’s just published a new book on censorship, “You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom” (out now and available for your e-book reader!), and I’ve been trying to follow his comments and articles on his website. The core of this particular article is contained in this quote: ‘When I was researching You Can’t Read This Book, my study of censorship, an old joke came back to me. “You can be a famous poisoner or a successful poisoner but you can’t be both”. Successful censorship is hidden.’
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The Literary Review.
Feb 2012

The grand posture of writers in liberal democracies is that they are the moral equivalents of dissidents in repressive regimes. Loud-mouthed newspaper columnists claim to ‘speak truth to power’. Novelists, artists, playwrights and comedians announce their willingness to transgress boundaries. Their publishers look for controversy like boozers look for brawls because they know that few marketing strategies beat the claim that a courageous iconoclast is challenging establishments and shattering taboos.

To maintain the illusion that they are part of some kind of radical underground, intellectuals must practise a deceit. They can never admit to their audience that fear of violent reprisals, ostracism or crippling financial penalties keeps them away from subjects that ought to concern them – and their fellow citizens.
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