January 20, 2012

Web of tyrants

Even those who are wary of the utopianism the net has generated tend to take it for granted that the new communications technologies have saved us from the need to worry about censorship. Sceptics fear that the web provides us with too much information, not too little. Enthusiasts see a future of unlimited free speech when all the old arguments about libel, official secrecy and blasphemy become redundant.

To see how far the consensus spreads look at Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?, a new collection of the views of 150 of the world’s leading minds on the technological revolution. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaks for the sceptical. He turns off his computer when he needs to think. Like Nicholas Carr — whose essay ‘Is Google Making us Stupid?’ infuriated Silicon Valley — he finds that the restless interruptions of working online have added to the ‘world’s attention deficit disorder’. The net’s dismal achievement has been to reduce further our collective attention span ‘from the depths to which television brought it’.

All bracingly iconoclastic. But when Tegmark turns to freedom of speech, he is as sure as the most wide-eyed cyber-utopian that it will flourish online.
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January 19, 2012

Cosy Moments Cannot be Muzzled: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

3:AM Magazine
By Max Dunbar

“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.”

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January 19, 2012

This growing culture of outrage doesn’t extend free speech – it limits it

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.”

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January 17, 2012

How British libel laws help rich villains escape the scrutiny of the press

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
By Maeve McClenaghan
You Can’t Read This Book is now on sale at Amazon

“At a time of the Leveson inquiry and increased scrutiny of journalistic tactics, Cohen’s book is a timely reminder that the British press is not simply the rampaging, lie-mongering industry it can sometimes appear. Instead, he reveals how the press works within a litigious and restrictive system, where those with money and power can censor the most important, newsworthy stories of the day – a system described by United Nations as having ‘served to discourage critical media reporting on matters of serious public interest, adversely affecting the ability of scholars and journalists to publish their work’.

Unsurprisingly, given his subject matter, Cohen focuses on examples from people now deceased, and who therefore cannot be defamed. It is interesting, then, to consider just how much is going unsaid today, and who is pulling the legal strings that are silencing the press.”

Isn’t it just?
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January 15, 2012

The Paranoia of the Plutocracy.


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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January 15, 2012

How London Globalised Censorship

Extract from You Can’t Read This Book in the Observer

“In Britain, money buys silence. The cost of libel actions in England and Wales is 140 times higher than the European average. If you lose a case, lawyers operating on a no-win, no-fee contract force you to pay damages, your costs, your assailant’s costs, a “success fee” for the victorious lawyers– which doubles their real costs – and a payment to cover insurance bills. In 2010, Lord Justice Jackson added these together and estimated that the costs of civil litigation in England could amount to 10 times the damages the court awarded.

A chill descended on English writing as publishers realised that punitive costs could cripple them. Libel law became the strangest branch of English jurisprudence. It was a law that lawyers hardly ever tested in court. Libel judges had to find other work for much of the year. The overwhelming majority of libel actions never ended in a hearing to determine if a work was true or its opinions fair, but remained hidden from public view. Publishers quietly settled, coughed up and withdrew offending material rather than run the risk of facing extortionate bills.

Beyond these cases of censorship lay the unknowable number of writers and publishers who self-censored. As when you contemplate religious censorship, you must always think of the books that were never written, and the investigations that were never begun, because of the overweening power of money.”

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January 13, 2012

You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom – review George Walden

From the London Evening Standard. Book now available in paperback or for Kindle here

A glance at the British media and at publishing might suggest that on liberty of expression we have never had it so good. Look again, Nick Cohen writes in this lively, entertaining polemic.
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January 8, 2012

Stieg Larsson and women’s liberation


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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January 8, 2012

Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right by Thomas Frank – review


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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January 2, 2012

The Good, the Smug and the Blind

“How unlike our own dear Tories the tea partiers are, the Economist implies. While the Yanks are demented, the Brits are sensible, practical men and women of moderate temperament who abhor extremism and have no time for wishful thinking. No member of the coalition cabinet or editor on the Economist would sign up for any let alone all of the above.

Yet British conservatives hold extremist views on economics that are as wild as anything you can find on the American right.”

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