Read You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom Online
Authors: Nick Cohen
Tags: #Political Science, #Censorship
You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (2 page)
What follows is an examination of how censorship in its clerical, economic and political forms works in practice. It is a history of the controversies of our times, and an argument that free speech is better than suppression in almost all circumstances. I hope that I will have convinced you by the end that the limits on free speech – for there are always limits – should be few, and that the law must refuse to implement them if there is a hint of a public interest in allowing debate to continue unimpeded.
My subject is censorship that hurts, not spin or the unstoppable desire of partisan newspapers, broadcasters and bloggers to preach to the converted and dismiss or ignore news their audiences do not wish to hear. I accept that press officers’ manipulation of information is an attempt to limit and control. But manipulation becomes censorship only on those rare occasions when the law punishes those who expose the spin. I agree too that editorial suppression is a type of censorship, because it ensures that readers rarely find a good word about trade unions in a right-wing newspaper, or a sympathetic article about Israel in a left-wing journal. The effects are trivial, because those readers who do not wish to be spoon-fed opinions can find contrary views elsewhere, and a journalist who does not like the party line of one media organisation can choose to move to another. True censorship removes choice. It menaces and issues commands that few can ignore. Write a free-thinking novel, and religious terrorists will come to assassinate you. Tell the world about your employers’ incompetence, and they will deprive you of your livelihood. Criticise a pharmaceutical corporation or an association of ‘alternative health’ quacks and they will seek to bankrupt you in the English courts. Speak out in a dictatorship, and the secret police will escort you to jail.
The invention of the Net, like all communications revolutions before it, is having and will have profound effects – which I do not seek to belittle. Its effect on the ability of the strong and the violent to impose their views is less marked than optimists imagine, because they fail to understand the difference between
total
control and
effective
control. Everyone who wants to suppress information would like to remove all trace of it. But when total power eludes them, they seek to impose limits. It may irk a Russian oligarch that readers can find accounts of his mafia past somewhere on the Web, or infuriate the Chinese, Iranian and Belarusian regimes that dissident sites escape their controls. But they are not threatened unless people can act on the information. Action requires something more than an anonymous post somewhere in cyberspace. It requires the right to campaign and argue in public. As we have seen in the Middle East, in dictatorships it can require the courage to risk your life in a revolution.
Censorship’s main role is to restrict the scope for action. If Islamist violence ensures that every mainstream broadcaster in the West is frightened of exposing Islam’s founding myths, or if the citizens of a dictatorship know that they will be arrested if they challenge their leaders’ abuses of power, then censors are exercising effective control by punishing those who challenge them and bullying their contemporaries into silence. If these examples strike you as remote from everyday life, imagine that English lawyers find they can force Twitter to pass on the details of everyone who tweeted about a randy footballer’s love life. Suppose then that the English legal system prosecuted the rumour-mongers for contempt of court. I guarantee you that the next time gossip began about a ‘love rat’ celebrity, it would not shoot across the Web with quite the speed of the news of Ryan Giggs’s adultery.
‘You can be a famous poisoner or a successful poisoner,’ runs the old joke, ‘but you can’t be both.’ The same applies to censors. Ninety-nine per cent of successful censorship is hidden from view. Even when brave men and women speak out, the chilling effect of the punishments their opponents inflict on them silences others. Those who might have added weight to their arguments and built a campaign for change look at the political or religious violence, or at the threat of dismissal from work, or at the penalties overbearing judges impose, and walk away.
Technology can change the rules, but it cannot change the game. Freedom always has to be fought for, because it is rooted in cultures, laws and constitutions, not in microchips and search engines, and is protected by institutions that are obliged to defend it. The struggle for freedom of speech is at root a political struggle, not least because the powerful can use new technologies as effectively as the weak – often more effectively. Today’s techno-utopianism is at best irritating and at worst a dangerous distraction, because it offers the comforting illusion that we can escape the need to fight against reactionary and unjust governments, regimes and movements with the click of a mouse.
Contrary to the shallow views of Net utopians, technology cannot ensure progress either. When it comes, progress in human affairs does not advance in a straight line. It bends and swerves; and sometimes it retreats. Today’s debates assume that we are living in a better and more open world than our repressed ancestors. The most striking counter-argument against modern complacency is to begin by looking at that most contentious and dangerous of forces, and observe that we were freer to challenge religions that claimed dominion over men’s minds and women’s bodies thirty years ago than we are now.
In 1988, Salman Rushdie for one thought that a writer could criticise religious bigotry without running the risk that fanatics would murder him and everyone who worked with him, just for telling a story.
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised & unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for.
JOHN MILTON
, 1644
It would be absurd to think a book could cause riots. That would be a strange view of the world.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
, 1988
Of course it was blasphemous. A book that challenges theocracy is blasphemous by definition. Not just because it questions the divine provenance of a sacred text – Did God speak to Moses? Inspire the gospels? Send the archangel Gabriel to instruct Muhammad on how to live and what to worship? – but because it criticises the bigotries the sacred text instructs the faithful to hold. By this measure, any book worth reading is blasphemous to some degree, and
The Satanic Verses
was well worth reading.
To say that Salman Rushdie did not know his novel would cause ‘offence’ is not true in the narrow sense of the word. He and his publishers never imagined the viciousness of the reaction, but just before the book was published in 1988, he sent a draft to the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. Rushdie wanted Said’s opinion because he thought his new novel ‘may upset some of the faithful’. Indeed it did, but in the late twentieth century, no honest writer abandoned his or her book because it might upset a powerful lobby. Lackeys working for a plutocrat’s newspaper or propagandists serving a state or corporate bureaucracy guarded their tongues and self-censored, but not artists and intellectuals in free countries.
Rushdie was writing in one of the most optimistic times in history. The advances in political, sexual and intellectual freedoms were unparalleled. It seemed that decent men and women needed only to raise their angry voices for tyrants to totter and fall. First in the fascistic dictatorships of Spain, Portugal and Greece in the 1970s, then in the military dictatorships of South America in the 1980s, and from 1989 to 1991 in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and apartheid South Africa, hundreds of millions of people saw their oppressors admit defeat and embrace liberal democracy.
Those who fought on the side of liberty did not worry about offending the religious or challenging cultures. Forty years ago a campaigner against state-enforced racism knew that supporters of apartheid came from a white supremacist culture with deep roots in the ‘communities’ of Dutch and English Africans. Their clerics provided a religious justification for racism by instructing them that blacks were the heirs of Ham, whom God had condemned to be ‘the servants of servants’ because of a curse – vindictive even by the standards of the Abrahamic religions – that Noah placed on Ham’s son Canaan. (Ham had had the temerity to gaze on a sleeping Noah when he was naked and drunk, and laugh at him. God therefore damned his line in perpetuity.) The opponents of oppression did not say that they must ‘respect Afrikaans culture’, however. They did not say that it was Afrikaanophobic to be judgemental about religion, or explain that it was imperialist to criticise the beliefs of ‘the other’. If a religion was oppressive or a culture repugnant, one had a duty to offend it.
The liberal resurgence, which brought down so many tyrannies, was also an attack on the beliefs and values of the old democracies. The 1960s generation brought an end to the deference shown to democratic leaders and established institutions. Many found its irreverence shocking, but no matter. The job of artists, intellectuals and journalists became to satirise and expose; to be the transgressive and edgy critics of authority. They did not confine themselves to politics. Cultural constraints, backed by religious authority, collapsed under the pressure of the second wave of feminism, the sexual revolution and the movements for racial and homosexual emancipation. The revolution in private life was greater than the revolution in politics. Old fences that had seemed fixed by God or custom for eternity fell as surely as the Berlin Wall.
Struggling to encapsulate in a paragraph how the cultural revolution of the second half of the twentieth century had torn up family structures and prejudices, the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm settled on an account from a baffled film critic of the plot of Pedro Almodóvar’s 1987
Law of Desire
.
In the film Carmen Maura plays a man who’s had a transsexual operation and, due to an unhappy love affair with his/her father, has given up on men to have a lesbian, I guess, relationship with a woman, who is played by a famous Madrid transvestite.
It was easy to mock. But laughter ought to have been stifled by the knowledge that within living memory transsexuals, transvestites, gays and lesbians had not been subjects that writers and directors could cover sympathetically, or on occasion at all. Their release from traditional morality reflected the release of wider society from sexual prejudice.
That release offended religious and social conservatives who thought a woman’s place was in the home, sexual licence a sin and homosexuality a crime against nature. Although the fashion for relativism was growing in Western universities in the 1980s, leftish academics did not say we had no right to offend the cultures of racists, misogynists and homophobes, and demand that we ‘respect’ their ‘equally valid’ contributions to a diverse society. Even they knew that reform is impossible without challenging established cultures. Challenge involves offence. Stop offending, and the world stands still.
Salman Rushdie was a man of his time, who would never have understood the notion that you should think twice before offending the powerful.
Midnight’s Children
, the 1981 novel that made him famous, was an account of how the ideals of independent India, which Nehru announced as the chimes of midnight struck on 14–15 August 1947, degenerated into the tyranny of Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency. Its successor,
Shame
, dissected the brutalities of military and religious tyranny in Pakistan. By the time he began
The Satanic Verses
Rushdie was the literary conscience of the subcontinent. He deplored the cruelties of post-colonialism, while never forgetting the cruelties of the colonists. It was not a surprise that after looking at post-partition India and Pakistan, he turned his attention to Islam. He had been born into a secular Muslim family in Bombay. He had studied the Koran at Cambridge University, as a literary text written by men rather than God’s creation. The Islamic Revolution in Iran, which brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in 1979, had pushed religious conservatism to the centre of politics. Rushdie would no more treat religious authority uncritically than he would treat secular authority uncritically. If he had, he would have committed a real offence against the intellectual standards of his day.
A God of Bullies
Rushdie’s title declared his intention. According to a contested religious tradition, the satanic verses were the lines the devil tricked Muhammad into believing were the words of God as he struggled to convert the pagan people of Mecca to Islam. Satan suggested that Muhammad tell the Meccans he would compromise his harsh new religion and allow Mecca’s pagan goddesses Al-Lat, Al-’Uzzá and Man
t to intercede with God on their behalf. The biographers of the Prophet claimed that the angel Gabriel chastised Muhammad for allowing Satan to deceive him. Mortified, the Prophet took back the satanic words and returned to uncompromising monotheism.
To modern and not so modern eyes, the episode raises pertinent questions about how believers can consider a sacred text to be the inerrant word of a god or gods when the devil or anyone else can insert their thoughts into it. The cases of the Koran, Old Testament and New Testament gave them excellent grounds for scepticism, because the texts were not prepared until decades after the supposed revelations. Rushdie endorsed scepticism by showing how well the Koran suited the prejudices of early medieval Arabia, and threw in the oppression of women for good measure.
Al-Lat, Al-’Uzzá and Mant were goddesses, and Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, was determined to wipe out the goddess cults of the ancient world and replace them with the rule of a stern and unbending patriarch. It is worth mentioning Christianity and Judaism at this point, because although everyone who raises the subject of sexism and religion in the post-Rushdie world concentrates on Islam’s attitude to women, liberalism’s task of knocking misogyny out of the other mainstream religions is not over. As late as 2010, a modest proposal to allow women to become bishops with the same powers as their male counterparts pushed the Church of England close to schism. In any other area of public life, the suggestion that male employees could refuse to serve a woman boss would be greeted with derision. To a large faction within the supposedly modern and moderate Church of England, sexism remained God’s will, and equality of opportunity an offence against the divine order. At about the same time as Anglicans were displaying their prejudices, gangs of Orthodox Jews were forming themselves into ‘chastity squads’. They beat divorced women in Jerusalem for breaking religious law by walking out in the company of married men, and asked the courts to uphold men’s ‘right’ to force Orthodox women to sit at the back of buses – an unconscious homage to the segregation of blacks and whites in the old American South.
Rushdie was touching therefore on a theme that was close to being universal. While there always have been and always will be men who wish to dominate women, the peculiar iniquity of religion is to turn misogyny into a part of the divine order: to make sexism a virtue and equality a sin.
The authors of a recent study of religious oppression dispensed with the circumlocutions of modern commentators, and put the case for an unembarrassed critique of religion plainly. They considered how Sharia adultery laws state that a raped woman must face the next-to-impossible task of providing four male witnesses to substantiate her allegation or be convicted of adultery; how when rapists leave Pakistani women pregnant courts take the bulge in their bellies as evidence against them; how in Nigeria, Sharia courts not only punish raped women for adultery but order an extra punishment of a whipping for making false accusations against ‘innocent’ men; how in the United States, the fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints gives teenagers to old men in arranged marriages and tells them they must submit to their wishes; and how the theocratic Saudi Arabian state stops women walking unaccompanied in the street, driving a car and speaking to men outside the family. Then – after drawing a deep breath – they asked, ‘Does God hate women?’
Well, what can one say? Religious authorities and conservative clerics worship a wretchedly cruel unjust vindictive executioner of a God. They worship a God of ten-year-old boys, a God of playground bullies, a God of rapists, of gangs, of pimps. They worship – despite rhetoric about justice and compassion – a God who sides with the strong against the weak, a God who cheers for privilege and punishes egalitarianism. They worship a God who is a male and who gangs up with other males against women. They worship a thug. They worship a God who thinks little girls should be married to grown men. They worship a God who looks on in approval when a grown man rapes a child because he is ‘married’ to her. They worship a God who thinks a woman should receive eighty lashes with a whip because her hair wasn’t completely covered. They worship a God who is pleased when three brothers hack their sisters to death with axes because one of them married without their father’s permission.
Although the authors looked at the abuse of children by the Catholic Church, and prejudice in Jewish, American Baptist and Mormon sects, most of their examples came from Islam and Hinduism. That is not a sign of prejudice on their part. Any writer tackling religious oppression has to accept that liberalism tempered the misogyny of mainstream Christianity and Judaism in the rich world after centuries of struggle, but left the poor world largely untouched. Christianity and Judaism are not ‘better’ than Islam and Hinduism. Free-thinkers have just made a better job of containing their prejudices and cruelties.
Rushdie’s Muhammad does not always pretend that religious ordinances come from heaven. As he considers the Meccans’ demand that their goddesses should be allowed to argue with his male god, he is no longer a prophet seeking to understand divine commands, but a politician weighing the options. The pagans of Mecca will accept his new religion in return for him allowing them to keep their old goddesses. That’s the bargain. That’s the offer on the table. God’s will has nothing to do with it. Nor do the tricks of Satan. If Paris is worth a mass, is Mecca worth a goddess, or two, or three?
