You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom
From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the advert of the Web, everywhere you turn you are told that we live in age of unparalleled freedom. This is dangerously naïve. From the revolution in Iran that wasn’t to the imposition of super-injunctions from the filthy rich, we still live in a world where you can write a book and end up dead.After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communism, and the advent of the Web which allowed for even the smallest voice to be heard, everywhere you turned you were told that we were living in an age of unparalleled freedom.You Can't Read This Book argues that this view is dangerously naive. From the revolution in Iran that wasn't, to the Great Firewall of China and the imposition of super-injunctions from the filthy rich protecting their privacy, the traditional opponents of freedom of speech - religious fanaticism, plutocratic power and dictatorial states - are thriving, and in many respects finding the world a more comfortable place in the early 21st century than they did in the late 20th.This is not an account of interesting but trivial disputes about freedom of speech: the rights and wrongs of shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre, of playing heavy metal at 3 am in a built-up area or articulating extremist ideas in a school or university. Rather, this is a story that starts with the cataclysmic reaction of the Left and Right to the publication and denunciation of the Satanic Verses in 1988 that saw them jump into bed with radical extremists. And it ends at the juncture where even in the transgressive, liberated West, where so much blood had been spilt for Freedom, where rebellion is the conformist style and playing the dissenter the smart career move in the arts and media, you can write a book and end up destroyed or dead.
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NICK COHEN
You Can’t Read This Book
Censorship in an Age of Freedom
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Fourth Estate
This revised edition published by Fourth Estate 2013
Copyright © Nick Cohen 2012, 2013
The right of Nick Cohen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 978000751850
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2013 ISBN: 9780007436453
Version: 2017-03-27
For Christopher Hitchens
(1949–2011)
There is an all-out confrontation between the ironic and the literal mind: between every kind of commissar and inquisitor and bureaucrat and those who know that, whatever the role of social and political forces, ideas and books have to be formulated and written by individuals.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
CONTENTS
Rules for Censors (1): Demand a Respect You Don’t Deserve
Rules for Censors (2): A Little Fear Goes a Long, Long Way
Rules for Censors (3): Go Postal!
4. The Racism of the Anti-Racists
Rules for Censors (4): Say that it is Bigoted to Oppose Bigotry
How to Fight Back: John Milton and the Absurdity of Identity Politics
5. The Cult of the Supreme Manager
Rules for Censors (5): People Don’t Want to Know
Rules for Censors (6): Money Makes You a Member of a Master Race
How to Fight Back: John Stuart Mill and the Struggle to Speak Your Mind
7. The Internet and the Revolution
Rules for Censors (7): Look to the Past/Think of the Future
8. The Internet and the Counter-Revolution
INTRODUCTION
Do you believe in freedom of speech?
Really, are you sure?
You may say you do. It’s the sort of thing that everyone says. Just as everyone says they have a sense of humour, especially when they don’t. You will certainly have had serious men and women assure you that freedom of speech is inevitable whether you believe in it or not. In the late twentieth century states, courts, private companies and public bureaucracies confined information, their argument runs. If it spread beyond those with ‘a need to know’, the authorities of the nation state, whether a dictatorship or a democracy, could imprison or fine the leaker. The threat of punishment was enough to deter newspapers from publishing or television stations from broadcasting.
That manageable world has gone for good. If one person living in a court’s jurisdiction breaks an injunction, a judge can punish him. But how can a judge punish a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand on Twitter or Facebook? If a court in New Delhi, Copenhagen or London bans the publication of embarrassing information, sites outside the jurisdiction of the Indian, Danish or British courts can publish it on the Web, and everyone with access to a computer in India, Denmark or Britain can read it, along with billions of others.
If the Web has a soul, then a loathing for censorship stirs it. The Streisand effect – first named in 2005 after the star tried to sue a photographer for publishing pictures of her Malibu mansion, and succeeded only in directing hundreds of thousands of viewers to his website – is a real phenomenon. Label a report ‘confidential’ and it becomes as desirable as forbidden fruit. Once a whistleblower leaks it, you can guarantee that the Web will broadcast its contents, regardless of whether they are interesting or not.
Optimists about the liberating potential of technology can find many reasons to be euphoric. The Net has no borders. National laws cannot contain it. Attempts to press down on the free circulation of information in one country just push it into other countries. The ability of users to copy, link and draw others into their campaigns had stripped censors of their power.
On this cheerful reading, we live in a new world where information is liquid. Wall it in, and it will seep through the brickwork. ‘An old way of doing things is dying; a new one is being born,’ announced a US cyber activist. ‘The Age of Transparency is here.’
