Journalism from London.
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REVIEWS
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“Nick Cohen’s brilliant broadside against censorship in an age of freedom.” Richard Dawkins
"Cohen is right that the struggle for freedom of speech is a political struggle. The internet does not itself liberate, Cohen reminds us. On the contrary. Both the powerful and the weak can use internet technologies. Techno-utopianism is a dangerous distraction, encouraging the illusion that the censors can be defeated by the click of a mouse. Cohen celebrates Milton's Areopagitica (1644) and Mill's On Liberty (1859). His own book stands alongside them." Anthony Julius, Standpoint.
"Nick Cohen’s books are like the best Smiths songs; however depressing the content, the execution is so shimmering, so incandescent with indignation that the overall effect is uplifting." Julie Burchill Prospect
"He has a sense of history and literature, in contrast to the dominant political generation of PPE graduates who have read every page of the Economist since they were at Oxford, but have never opened a novel." Denis MacShane, the Observer.
"At the risk of winning the Order of the Brown Nose, Cohen is perhaps the most insightful, thought-provoking and entertaining political writer in Britain today, and comes from the honest tradition of English liberal thought that threads from John Milton to John Stuart Mill and George Orwell; for that reason he has fallen out with the dishonest liberal tradition, a split that began with the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie on Valentine’s Day, 1989. He has that rare trait of being fair to all parties, refreshing in the tribal atmosphere of political debate, which has no doubt angered sectarians on his side." Ed West, The Telegraph
"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."Max Dunbar 3am Magazine
"The author has no time for artists, comedians and "loud-mouthed newspaper columnists" who pose as the moral equivalents of dissenters in repressive regimes, as they fearlessly speak truth to power, knowing that power will never go after them. On more delicate matters, meanwhile, they preserve a cowardly or self-interested silence. Cohen is a political animal, but with this free-thinking man of the Left there is no sense of the hedging, elisions or contrarian games so familiar in the field. A nose for censorship, of the silent or bullying variety, means not just carrying a powerful bullshit detector, which he does, but being your own man. And God knows there are few enough of those."
George Walden, London Evening Standard
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"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."
Christopher Hitchens, Sunday Times
"Nick Cohen's roaring polemic of outrage against the moral and political crisis of the liberal tradition. It is already one of the most discussed current affairs books of the new year. At the very least it forces, or ought to force, anyone on the left to think carefully about where their movement has ended up in the modern world. Martin Kettle, The Guardian
"The psychology of the left wing is hauntingly displayed by Nick Cohen" Philip Hensher, The Spectator
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.
At the weekend, I was honoured to award the Secularist of the Year prize to Peter Tatchell on behalf of the National Secular Society. From the stage, I looked across the restaurant where the celebratory lunch was held and saw only intelligent, polite people (if by that stage of the proceedings, intelligent, polite and slightly tipsy people). I had to break the news to them that according to respectable society they were fanatics; the moral equivalents of religious bigots.
Carry on reading
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.
Review of Hilter by A. N. Wilson
“A biography that reads so well thus ends with witterings that are so asinine Thought for the Day could broadcast them.”
Carry on reading
Read the whole thing
“Saudi Arabia provided exhibits. The Saudi royal family’s King Abdulaziz Public Library partnered the museum. HSBC Amanah, a bank that issues sharia-compliant loans, sponsored the show. By negligence or design, nothing in the exhibition offends the Saudi state.”
Carry on reading
From Index on Cenorship
Journalist, author and free speech advocate Nick Cohen was, for a while, a lively presence on Twitter. He gave up the highly addictive site to work on his latest book, a polemic on censorship called You Can’t Read This Book (as more than one reviewer has pointed out, you can and should read this book).
Book completed and published, Cohen set out on the promotional slog required of authors, and rejoined Twitter 10 days ago in order to plug his work. After a few tweets alerting real-world friends to his presence, Cohen found his account (@NickCohen2) suspended, without explanation.
Bemused, Cohen tried to set up a new account (@NickCohen4), using a different email address. Again, Cohen sent a few tweets before finding the account suspended within hours.
Cohen is yet to have an explanation of the suspensions.
The irony to a free speech advocate being blocked from the web is clear, not least as Cohen praises Twitter in his book. But the Observer columnist has had previous trouble with his online profile. Cohen’s Wikipedia page was subjected to repeated slanderous edits by “David Rose”, later outed on the Jack of Kent blog as Independent journalist Johann Hari, who had a very public falling out with Cohen in the pages of Dissent magazine. “David Rose” was found to have maliciously edited several other “enemies” Wikipedia pages, including that of Telegraph blogger (and former colleague of Hari at the New Statesman) Christina Odone.
Index on Censorship
By Marta Cooper
England’s libel laws have turned the country into “liberty’s enemy”, Observer columnist and author of You Can’t Read This Book Nick Cohen said at last night’s launch of Index and English PEN’s final report of the Alternative Libel Project.
“We virtually invented freedom of expression, but any scandal can go to the High Court,” Cohen said.
Do you feel morally superior to the Taliban?”. The actor, channeling Martin Amis, wants a show of hands.
Slowly, a few hands go up, including mine. “Only about a fifth of you”.
Lawyers do not figure highly in the estimation of newspaper columnist Nick Cohen. His broadside at censorship in a liberal age paints solicitors, barristers and judges as the lackeys of oligarchs and snake-oil sellers and conspirators in liberal silence when the going gets tough.
According to Cohen, free speech in our supposedly tolerant, internet-enabled, chattering society is under threat from the state, money and religion. Of these, the state is the least-threatening force. The very fact that the ‘Twitter joke’ trial was itself an object of ridicule (though no joke for the chap in the dock) makes Cohen’s point that, in Britain today, journalists, satirists and activist lawyers are not afraid of the state.
Money buys a better class of gag. Cohen’s target is ‘a town called Sue’ (a Geoffrey Robertson line, I recall) – London and its readiness to deploy English libel law at the service of dubious characters in any corner of the world, serving the wealthy ‘as attentively as the shop girls in the Harrods food hall’. As many of the litigants that Cohen names are still living, wealthy and prickly, I won’t make work for the Gazette’s libel lawyer by identifying them here.
I’m going to be even more circumspect about Cohen’s third threat to free speech: God. Or rather, the self-censorship that surrounds any critical or humorous treatment of Islam since the Satanic Verses affair.
Anyone who read Cohen’s important 2007 polemic What’s Left? will have no doubt where he stands on the matter of, as he sees it, so-called liberals who will surrender their principles in the name of multiculturalism. When the lord chief justice and archbishop of Canterbury murmured in support of sharia law, Cohen notes: ‘Women lawyers at the bar, who complained so vociferously about the law’s glass ceiling, did not accuse the archbishop and the judge of sexism.’
The point is that, while a threat from the state will cause inconvenience and guarantee a certain celebrity, a gag from a wealthy libel litigant will cause bankruptcy, while being gagged by a religious fanatic may involve death threats, or even death. And the liberal establishment is likely to shuffle, embarrassed, away.
In his original preface to Animal Farm, Orwell wrote: ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ That still stands.
Of course you can read Cohen’s book. But, if my explorations of lefty north London bookshops last weekend are anything to go by, you won’t find it very prominently displayed.
Michael Cross is news editor of the Law Society Gazette
Nick Cohen