Читать книгу You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom - Nick Cohen - Страница 13

Free societies are not free because their citizens are fighting for their freedom. They are free because previous generations of citizens have fought for their freedom. When put under dictatorial pressure, they must start old fights anew. Once the struggle begins, you can never guarantee in advance that the citizens of the United States, Holland or Britain will be braver than the citizens of Iran, Zimbabwe or Burma. National and political differences are no protection against the universal emotion of fear. Not the immediate fear that causes the eyeballs to dilate and the fight-or-flight response to kick in, but the niggling fear at the back of the mind that warns of the pressing need to avoid a fight in the first place.

Hitoshi Igarashi was the only person associated with The Satanic Verses to pay for the Ayatollah’s blood lust with his life. Compared to the millions killed in wars and genocides in the years that followed the fatwa, the pain the enemies of the novel inflicted was small. But it was sufficient. The threats against Rushdie produced a fear that suffused Western culture and paralysed its best instincts. From then on, authoritarians seeking to restrict civil liberties or members of the political right led the opposition to militant Islamism. Liberals, who had the best arguments against theocracy, and who might have offered immigrants to Europe – particularly women immigrants to Europe – a better future, went absent without leave.

The society around them imitated the craven politicians, bishops and rabbis rather than the workers in the bookshops and the editors at Penguin. It displayed little or no willingness to defend the potential victims of terror. In one of his rare interviews, Peter Mayer, Penguin’s chief executive, praised the bravery of everyone in the book trade who had defended his right to publish, but then told a bleak story about how strangers treated his family. He had received many death threats. Someone went to the trouble to cut themselves and send him a letter scrawled in blood. An anonymous telephone caller told Mayer that ‘not only would they kill me but that they would take my daughter and smash her head against a concrete wall’. Far from rallying to defend an innocent girl and her innocent father, the parents of her classmates demanded that the school expel her. What would happen, they asked, if the Iranian assassins went to the school and got the wrong girl?

And Mayer thought, ‘You think my daughter is the right girl?’

The same cowardice greeted him when he applied for a co-op apartment in New York. ‘There were objections that the Iranians could send a hit squad and target the wrong apartment. As if I had done something wrong.’

The intimidation became too much for Penguin to bear. Rushdie’s relationship with Mayer broke down as he came to think that his publisher was trying to avoid releasing a paperback edition of The Satanic Verses. ‘Months of pressure began to tell on Mayer,’ Rushdie remembered, ‘eroding his will … He began to persuade himself, it seemed, that he had done all he needed to do.’ The trouble was that any delay in publishing the paperback would cause the Islamists to redouble their efforts. The ‘affair’ would never go away as long as Rushdie’s enemies thought they could claim the partial victory of stopping the paperback edition.

Articles carrying quotes from apparently senior sources at Penguin criticising Rushdie appeared in the press. When Rushdie went to call on Penguin, company lawyers attended their meetings. The common front of author and publisher broke down. A disillusioned Rushdie managed to create a consortium to publish the paperback, but after that last act of bravery, everything changed.

After Rushdie, the fear of a knife in the ribs or a bomb at the office meant that liberals who stuck by liberalism were in the wrong. They knew the consequences now. If someone killed them, they were guilty of provoking their own murder. In the eyes of most politicians and most of the journalists, broadcasters, academics and intellectuals whose livelihoods depended on the freedom to debate and criticise, the targets of religious violence had no one to blame but themselves. The intensity of the rage against Rushdie allowed them to turn John Stuart Mill on his head. Mill argued that censorship could be justified only if a writer or speaker caused a direct harm – by urging on a mob to commit a crime, was his example. Rushdie did not incite violence. His opponents did. The harm was all on their side. However, governments and cultural bureaucracies came to believe that when religious mobs showed that they were prepared to murder Rushdie, they provided the justification for the censorship they sought.

The attack on The Satanic Verses appalled liberals. The fight to defend it exhausted them. Knowing what they now knew, few wanted to put themselves through what Rushdie and Penguin had been through. Unlike the Western campaigns against apartheid, Franco, the Greek colonels and the Soviet Empire, a campaign for free speech would involve them running a slight risk of becoming the target of violence themselves. They soon found high-minded reasons to avoid it, and redefined their failure to take on militant religion as a virtuous act. Their preferred tactic was to extend arguments against racism to cover criticism of religion. Or rather, they extended them to cover arguments about minority religions in Western countries. It remained open season on Christianity for liberal writers and comedians, even though Islamist pogroms in Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt and Iraq and communist oppression in China made Christianity the most persecuted of the major religions.

Writers taking on religious themes, journalists writing about Islamist extremism, or police officers, teachers and social workers investigating the abuse of women, knew that they now ran the risk of their opponents accusing them of a kind of racial prejudice. The charge of ‘Islamophobia’ would not always stick, but its targets understood that their employers would take it seriously and their contemporaries would regard them as tainted until they had cleared their names. The accusation was not always fatuous. As the millennium arrived, racists and nativist conservatives, who hated Muslims because they were immigrants or came from immigrant families, could develop the most unlikely interest in human rights. If liberalism gave them a new means of attack, they were prepared to feign an interest in it. The only principled response to their hypocrisy was to oppose racism and radical Islam in equal measure and for the same reasons. The best conservatives and liberals managed that, but most settled into the ruts described by a liberal Muslim think tank in 2011. ‘Sections of the political left have not done enough to challenge Islamism, yet, encouragingly, they have challenged anti-Muslim extremism,’ it said. ‘Similarly, sections of the political right have been reluctant to challenge far-right extremism yet are willing to challenge Islamism.’

The fear the Ayatollah generated among liberals thus operated on several levels. Critics of religious obscurantism, most notably liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims, feared violent reprisals. Beyond the worries about direct threats lay the fear that religious groups, bureaucrats, left-wing politicians and newspapers would accuse critics of insensitivity or racism, and that racist groups or websites would confirm the accusation by repeating their critiques. The fear of the vilification and ostracism that would follow was often the most effective deterrent against speaking out. ‘Society can and does execute its own mandates,’ said John Stuart Mill. ‘It practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.’ He might have been writing of modern Europe.

The nature of intellectual life made retreat the likely option. Whatever radical postures they strike, writers and journalists in Western countries are not the equivalents of soldiers or police officers. Nor are they members of a revolutionary underground. They do not begin an artistic or journalistic career expecting to risk their lives. They do not work in well-protected police stations or military bases alongside colleagues who have access to firearms. They work in university campuses or offices, or, in the case of many authors, at home surrounded by their families. Rushdie’s marriage broke down under the strain of the fatwa. Police moved the couple fifty-six times in the first few months, and his wife walked out. The desperate Rushdie tried everything to persuade his pursuers to let him live in peace. He apologised to Iran and converted to Islam. Nothing worked. His enemies just laughed at him and pressed on with the terror campaign. Should other writers spend years in hiding with no hope of escape? Did they want to see their relationships disintegrate, as Rushdie had done?

They could rely on the police for protection, but only up to a point. Ordinary criminals, including ordinary murderers, want to escape from the scenes of their crimes. Visible security measures deter them. The likelihood of arrest and prosecution makes them think twice. Suicide bombers, brainwashed to believe they are on their way to paradise to ravish an assortment of virgins, do not care about arrest and prosecution once they have detonated their bombs. They reason that the police cannot prosecute a corpse.

If they had discovered a general resolve to take on militant religion, then writers and editors might have found safety in numbers. Instead, they were united by their fear. An inversion of the usual processes of publishing began. In normal circumstances, publishers look for controversy the way boozers look for brawls. Nothing delights them more than an author or newspaper columnist who arouses anger. When Margaret Thatcher’s government tried and failed to suppress the memoirs of Peter Wright, a retired MI5 officer, his paranoid book became an international bestseller. The British authorities’ trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover for obscenity in 1960 turned the lawyers and expert witnesses on D.H. Lawrence’s side into liberal heroes, and the publishers into happy men and women. Forty years on, admiring newspaper features and television drama documentaries still recalled how E.M. Forster, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams had revealed to the jury the artistic merit behind Lawrence’s use of the words ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’. The prosecutor, the hapless Mervyn Griffith-Jones, earned his dismal place in the history books when he revealed how out of touch the fuddy-duddy establishment of the 1960s had become by asking the jury if this was the kind of book ‘you would wish your wife or servants to read’.

Before Rushdie, publishers praised themselves for their business acumen in buying a book that offended the authorities. After Rushdie, the smart business move was for a publishing house to turn down books that might offend religious zealots. Publishers knew that their business rivals would not pick up the discarded title; they would be equally frightened, and no more inclined to run risks. A cost-benefit analysis lay behind their calculations. Authors can be touchy creatures: vain, grasping and needy. But say what you must about us, no author has ever murdered an editor for not printing a book, or bombed the home of a television commissioning editor for not broadcasting a drama.

Censorship is at its most effective when its victims pretend it does not exist. If intellectuals had stated that they were too scared to cover subjects of public concern, then at least they would have possessed the courage to admit that they were afraid. Western societies would then have been honest with themselves, and perhaps that honesty would have given birth to a new resolution. But the psychological costs of a frank confession were too high to contemplate. Honesty would have exposed contemporary culture as a culture of pretence.

The grand pose of intellectuals and artists in liberal democracies in the years after the fatwa was that they were the moral equivalents of the victims of repressive regimes. Loud-mouthed newspaper columnists struck heroic postures and claimed to be dissenting voices bravely ‘speaking truth to power’. Their editors never had to worry that ‘power’ would respond by raiding their offices. Publicly funded BBC comedians and state-subsidised playwrights claimed to be the edgy breakers of taboos as they denounced the wars of the Bush/Blair era. Although they never said it, they knew that Bush and Blair would not retaliate by cutting grants or putting artists on trial for sedition – nor did governments fighting wars on two fronts think of imposing military censorship on civilians. Few admitted that what made liberal democracies liberal was that ‘power’ would not throw you in prison, whether you spoke the truth to it or not, and that taboos had been broken for so long that the most ‘edgy’ thing an artist could do was conform to them. If the transgressive had come clean, they would have had to accept that they lampooned the bigotry of Christianity and the wickedness of Western governments because they knew that Christians were not so bigoted and Western leaders were not so wicked that they would retaliate by trying to kill them, while the Islamists they ignored just might. Their fear caused them to adopt out of nervousness an ideology that Islamists adopted out of conviction. A partisan of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat or al Qaeda would not tolerate criticism of Muhammad, but had no difficulty in attacking the greed of Western corporations and the double standards of Western governments. As for denunciations of Christianity and Judaism from Western commentators, Islamists welcomed them, because they echoed their own denunciations of Zionists and Crusaders.

Journalists hoped no one would notice that we were living with a similar double standard. Newspapers ran accounts of Western soldiers torturing or mistreating prisoners in Iraq or Afghanistan. They could well have put troops’ lives in danger as the Internet and satellite television sent images of abuse round the world. If anyone raised the matter with us, we replied that freedom of the press and the need to expose torture trumped all other considerations. It would have been a conclusive argument, had we not refused to publish articles and cartoons that might have put our lives in danger. As it was when Grayson Perry, a British artist who produced what Catholics would consider to be blasphemous images of the Virgin Mary, said what everyone knew to be true, his candour was so rare The Times treated it as news. ‘The reason I have not gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel the real fear that someone will slit my throat,’ he told the audience at a debate on art and politics.

Few others could bring themselves to say the same in public, or admit the truth to themselves in private. In the chilling phrase of Kenan Malik, they ‘internalised the fatwa’, and lived with a fear that dare not speak its name. They ignored the Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs, Africans and Turks who just wanted to get on with building a new life in the West, they forgot about the refugees who had fled to Europe to escape militant Islam, and took militant Islam to be the authentic voice of European Muslims.

You only had to look around to understand why they accepted that there might be something in the clash-of-civilisations hypothesis after all. The 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington were planned in Hamburg. The 7/7 attacks on the London transport system were planned in Leeds and executed by men with broad Yorkshire accents. Most terrorist violence in Europe came from within. Meanwhile Britain exported terrorists to Pakistan, Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Danish Muslims travelled the world to whip up trade boycotts against their own country.

Theirs were not typical cases. But those in charge of politics and culture were well aware that behind the terrorists were hundreds of thousands of people whose attitudes towards violence were at best ambivalent. In 2007 a survey of British Muslims found that, contrary to expectations, the sense of belonging to Britain was higher among the old, who were more likely to have been born abroad, than the young, who were more likely to have been born in Britain. A significant minority was turning to religious reaction. About one third of Muslims surveyed aged between sixteen and twenty-four wanted the introduction of Sharia law and supported the execution of apostates. Cheeringly, two thirds did not, but anxious cultural bureaucrats were more impressed by those who might do them harm than by those who would leave them alone, particularly when the forces of reaction appeared to have history on their side.

In his caustic Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West, the American conservative writer Christopher Caldwell saw a continent that was declining in numbers and paralysed by political correctness. It had become too weak to face down the ‘adversary culture’ of militant Islam. He and others on the right held that post-Christian, post-imperial, post-Holocaust, post-modern, post-just-about-everything European countries lacked the patriotic pride and religious certainties of strong societies, and were wide open to attack from those who felt no comparable embarrassment about their beliefs. As I hope this book makes clear, I think that conservatives underestimate the power and appeal of liberalism. But the most striking feature of the twenty years after The Satanic Verses was that Western political and cultural grandees, who trumpeted their anti-Americanism, behaved as if American conservatives were right. They treated Muslims as a homogeneous bloc, and allowed the reactionaries to set the cultural agenda.

They might have looked to Salman Rushdie, to the feminists in Women Against Fundamentalism, to the Arab and Iranian dissidents and to liberals in immigrant communities struggling against the religious ultras. But a principled stand would have involved confronting their fears. However fantastic those fears were, they were not irrational. They could glance at the evening news and see Islamists slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians in Pakistan, Iraq, Nigeria and Afghanistan. They knew it could happen here, because in Rushdie’s case it had happened here.

With religious censorship, as with censorship in all its forms, you should not just think about the rejected books, newspaper articles, TV scripts and plays, but remember the far larger class of works that authors begin then decide to abandon. The words that were never written, the arguments that were never made during two decades when argument was needed. In 2010, the BBC asked the Egyptian-American feminist Mona Eltahawy why ever-larger numbers of European women were allowing men to tell them that they must hide behind veils. ‘I think it has become more prevalent because the space has been left completely uncontested to the Muslim right wing, which does not respect anyone’s rights whatsoever except for this one right to cover a woman’s face,’ she replied. ‘No one has pushed back against the Muslim right wing. Integration has largely failed across Europe, even in the UK.’

You can find many reasons why writers, journalists and politicians failed to push back against the Muslim right wing, or even to admit that a Muslim right wing existed. I accept that they were not always cowardly, and that an honourable wariness about the possibility of aiding the white right wing motivated many. But beneath the plausible arguments lay a base and basic fear.

It pushed the majority of Western liberals into adhering in whole or in part to the post-Rushdie rules of self-censorship:

1 They would defer to Islamists and engage in no criticism of the life and teachings of Muhammad.

2 They would treat the Koran as the inerrant word of God, as they would the sacred texts of any other religion which threatened violence, and not suggest that sacred texts are man-made.

3 They would carry on exercising their freedom to criticise, often justifiably, Western religions and governments, which were not threatening to kill them, while appeasing or ignoring those that might.

4 They would never admit to being hypocrites, or accept that their double standards favoured extremists.

5 They would minimise political differences within Muslim communities and refuse to risk their necks for Muslim or ex-Muslim liberals and feminists.

6 They would say that the dictatorial policies of religious regimes and movements were the fault of Western provocation.

7 They would argue that religious violence had nothing to do with religion.

If these rules were all there were, it would have been bad enough. But rules imply limits, and there were no limits. After Grayson Perry said he did not satirise Islam because he feared having his throat slit, he added a shrewd observation. ‘I’m interested in religion and I’ve made a lot of pieces about it,’ he said. ‘With other targets you’ve got a better idea of who they are, but Islamism is very amorphous. You don’t know what the threshold is. Even what seems an innocuous image might trigger off a really violent reaction, so I just play safe all the time.’