Salman Rushdie on Free Speech

From yesterday's PBS.org article entitled "Salman Rushdie Warns Free Speech Under Threat":

Writer Salman Rushdie has made a public speech, nine months after being stabbed and seriously injured onstage, warning that freedom of expression in the West is under its most severe threat in his lifetime.

Rushdie delivered a video message to the British Book Awards, where he was awarded the Freedom to Publish award on Monday evening. Organizers said the honor “acknowledges the determination of authors, publishers and booksellers who take a stand against intolerance, despite the ongoing threats they face.”

He said that “we live in a moment, I think, at which freedom of expression, freedom to publish has not in my lifetime been under such threat in the countries of the West.”

“Now I am sitting here in the U.S., I have to look at the extraordinary attack on libraries, and books for children in schools,” he said. “The attack on the idea of libraries themselves. It is quite remarkably alarming, and we need to be very aware of it, and to fight against it very hard.”

To read the entire article, click HERE.

From Salman Rushdie's 5-11-12 NEW YORKER essay entitled "On Censorship":

The creative act requires not only freedom but also this assumption of freedom. If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today. If he is afraid of the consequences of his choice of subject or of his manner of treatment of it, then his choices will not be determined by his talent, but by fear. If we are not confident of our freedom, then we are not free.

And, even worse than that, when censorship intrudes on art, it becomes the subject; the art becomes “censored art,” and that is how the world sees and understands it. The censor labels the work immoral, or blasphemous, or pornographic, or controversial, and those words are forever hung like albatrosses around the necks of those cursed mariners, the censored works. The attack on the work does more than define the work; in a sense, for the general public, it becomes the work. For every reader of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or “Tropic of Capricorn,” every viewer of “Last Tango in Paris” or “A Clockwork Orange,” there will be ten, a hundred, a thousand people who “know” those works as excessively filthy, or excessively violent, or both.

The assumption of guilt replaces the assumption of innocence. Why did that Indian Muslim artist have to paint that Hindu goddess in the nude? Couldn’t he have respected her modesty? Why did that Russian writer have his hero fall in love with a nymphet? Couldn’t he have chosen a legally acceptable age? Why did that British playwright depict a sexual assault in a Sikh temple, a gurdwara? Couldn’t the same assault have been removed from holy ground? Why are artists so troublesome? Can’t they just offer us beauty, morality, and a damn good story? Why do artists think, if they behave in this way, that we should be on their side? “And the people all said sit down, sit down you’re rocking the boat / And the devil will drag you under, with a soul so heavy you’ll never float / Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down / You’re rocking the boat.”

At its most effective, the censor’s lie actually succeeds in replacing the artist’s truth. That which is censored is thought to have deserved censorship.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

From Matt Bai's 8-16-22 WASHINGTON POST article entitled "The Attack on Salman Rushdie Is a Warning About Where We’re Headed":

If you’re too young to remember the late 80s, you might not understand what a pervasive symbol of Western freedom Rushdie became. This was after he published his novel “The Satanic Verses,” with its portrayal of the prophet Muhammad that so infuriated Iran’s radical clerics.

Rushdie stayed mostly out of sight for many years, though he reemerged one night in 1991 at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he spoke on the sanctity of the First Amendment. Every public appearance he made in the decade or so after the fatwa, with private security lurking nearby, constituted an act of remarkable courage.

If there was debate in this country over the rightness of Rushdie’s cause, I don’t recall it; even Jimmy Carter, who condemned the book in a pusillanimous New York Times op-ed, defended Rushdie’s right to be heard. Back then, pretty much everyone agreed that democracy demanded basic tolerance and free expression, even if we sometimes argued vehemently over what kind of speech was appropriate in the public square.

Those were the days when the ACLU defended the rights of Nazi sympathizers to march down the street in Illinois. And when even Republican presidents exalted the American press as a contrast to communist repression and theocratic rule — despite their evident disdain for what journalists wrote.

Those were also the times when the leadership of both parties rejected violent rhetoric — let alone actual violence such as the Oklahoma City bombing — in response to political or religious grievance. You may recall that former president George H.W. Bush resigned from the National Rifle Association, an important political constituency, in 1995 after it referred to federal agents as “jack-booted thugs.” (The NRA apologized; Bush didn’t relent.)

What a different society from the one we have now, when the most basic propositions in American life are up for debate — if anyone even knows how to do that anymore.

Now the movement conservatives who once proclaimed themselves a bulwark against mob rule can’t even find the spine to distance themselves from an armed attack on the Capitol. They grovel, instead, before a leader who would have joined the uprising himself if anyone had been willing to drive him.

Two days after Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House leader, responded to the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago last week by saying that the Justice Department was in “an intolerable state of weaponized politicization,” an armed man, and apparent Donald Trump supporter, tried to enter the FBI headquarters in Cincinnati.

How close is this to a political fatwa? How long until Trump and McCarthy’s holy war starts taking the lives of political opponents and journalists?

Meanwhile, as my Post colleague Margaret Sullivan notes, cultural conservatives around the country are doubling as school librarians, rooting out books by such authors as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Maurice Sendak. Mainstream Republicans cheer them on.

The moment demands a brave, intellectually liberal response. Good luck with that. The left’s commitment to open debate has all but disappeared when we need it most, as a stunning number of activists and academics embrace the idea that free speech is a tool of oppression, wielded by the White elite.

Even the ACLU isn’t really in the free speech business anymore, preferring instead to enforce social justice orthodoxies. First Amendment rights are still celebrated on campuses and social media — so long as you adhere to the accepted lexicon of identity and a sanctioned version of American history.

(Yeah, I know: “Both sidesism!” Give it a rest.)

Is any of this as egregious as urging on violent extremists? On the sliding scale of anti-democratic behaviors, no. But ask yourself this: If Rushdie had written his book in 2022 instead of 1988, and if the blasphemy had revolved not around Islam but around, say, the left’s notion of gender fluidity, how many leading Democrats would be standing up to champion his artistic freedom?

The answer is: very few. And that’s a problem, because the only winning response to lawlessness and censorship is a rededication to bedrock democratic ideals — and not only when it reaffirms your worldview.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

From Jake Kerridge's 8-15-22 GUARDIAN article entitled "Why The Satanic Verses Would Never Be Published Today":

Having spent the weekend in a deep gloom following the obscene attack on Salman Rushdie, I rejoiced to read reports that he had started making jokes from his hospital bed. His “usual feisty and defiant sense of humour remains intact”, his son Zafar has said.

A Rushdie who stopped making jokes would no longer be Rushdie. He is a fundamentally comic writer, whose masters are Laurence Sterne and Charles Dickens, and it was trying to be funny about Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses that brought the world crashing down on his head back in 1989. Rushdie knew well that the only way to understand something, be it an idea or a person, is to find out what is funny about it; to joke about something is to pay it the compliment of taking it seriously.

In the 33 years since The Satanic Verses came out, however, there is an increasing suspicion of satirical comedy as an appropriate means of telling the truth about the world. Thus The Satanic Verses would be never published today, particularly in an industry that is becoming increasingly risk-averse.

Indeed, publishers are terrified of causing offence in any way nowadays, and if their authors are accused of transgressing against today’s orthodoxies by the moral guardians who congregate on social media, the likeliest response is a stream of apologies or, in some cases, the dropping of the author.

When Kate Clanchy’s Orwell-prize-winning memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me was accused of perpetuating racist and ableist tropes, she felt insufficiently supported by her publisher (and one staff member who expressed the same view was forced to publicly apologise). Neither Clanchy’s book nor Rushdie’s are unproblematic, but we seem now to be a long way from the era in which Rushdie’s publisher, Penguin, not only stood by him but refused to bow to pressure to cancel the paperback edition of the novel; Clanchy’s publisher, by contrast, released her from her contract.

This sort of situation seems likely to intensify. It was recently reported that the old guard are now leaving publishing houses such as Picador and Vintage, and the industry is becoming increasingly dominated by a youthful generation with an in-built resistance to work that causes offence. If The Satanic Verses were to be submitted today, it would be assessed by sensitivity readers, the professional scrutineers whose job is to point out to authors unwitting instances of such offence [...]. 

In 1991, David Britton, a publisher and pornographic bookseller from Manchester, had the distinction of seeing his novel Lord Horror proscribed by a magistrate – the last novel to be banned in Britain. The London literary elite were conspicuous by their absence at Britton’s (successful) appeal, although the science fiction writer Michael Moorcock did testify on his behalf.

Britton’s novel was a jet-black satire on anti-Semitism, accused of anti-Semitism itself: but then people who deem themselves worthy of deciding whether or not books should be banned are probably not the sort of people who are good at spotting irony or nuance.

Writers who want to use humour are often told by those who seek to censor them that they must “punch up”, not down, and only make fun of those higher in life’s pecking order than they are. Was the atheist Salman Rushdie punching down when he made jokes about things that Muslims, so many of whom face prejudice and persecution, hold dear? Or was he trying to give readers an awareness of the possibility of a different perspective on religion?

The answer may not be clear-cut: but the world will not be a wiser and happier place if writers are forced to shy away from anything that might, in someone’s eyes, cause offence.

To read the entire article, click HERE.