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This culture of offence-taking censoriousness emanates powerfully from Anglo-American universities, traditional bastions of open-minded inquiry and debate. It came as no surprise, after the Paris massacre, to hear a leading student official at Bristol University in England suggest that Charlie Hebdo would have been banned from their campus anyway, since its potentially offensive images would certainly have contradicted the university’s cocooning ‘safe-space’ policies, which treat adult students like delicate flowers and words and images as if they were automatic weapons. What price such a caustic magazine surviving at all in the UK today, where it is apparently considered suspicious even to read Charlie Hebdo, never mind write for it? Several police forces in England reportedly quizzed local newsagents about the names of those who ordered copies of the post-massacre edition.24

Perhaps we need to face the hard fact that the Islamic gunmen who attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo acted not just as the soldiers of an oldish Eastern religion but also as the armed extremist wing of a thoroughly modern Western creed. The West today is dogged by a creeping culture of conformism. From the official censors of the police and political elite to the army of unofficial censors online, the cri de coeur of these crusaders against offensive speech is You-Can’t-Say-That. The Islamist gunmen took that attitude to a murderous extreme.

A month later came the Copenhagen shootings, when a gunman attacked a café meeting called to discuss issues of free speech and blasphemy, and then a synagogue, leaving two dead. This too sounded like a repercussion of a familiar attitude. The idea of assailing meetings to prevent speakers even being heard has grown more and more popular in radical Western circles in recent years, especially on campus. The reactionary No Platform policy has evolved from one aimed at fascists and political extremists into a broader demand to ban anybody who might cause offence to somebody, from comedians to philosophical societies. Where No Platform protesters seek pre-emptively to shout down or shut down speakers they find offensive, the Copenhagen gunman sought to shoot them down. That is an important tactical difference. But the underlying attitude of intolerance of offensive speech seems familiar. Where do these gunmen get their ideas from? They might be inspired by Western-hating clerics. But they can only be encouraged by a Western culture that seems to have fallen out of love with its own core value of free speech.

The prevailing mood of intellectual intolerance in the upper echelons of Western culture is exemplified by the onward march of Trigger Warnings, from which this book takes its title. The habit of putting a Trigger Warning (or ‘TW’) at the start of any piece of writing or video, to warn readers or viewers of potentially upsetting or offensive content, has spread from US campuses across the Atlantic and the internet. The implied message of a Trigger Warning is that it would probably be better if you did not read or see this. Those delivering a different kind of Trigger Warning in Paris and Copenhagen aimed to cut out the middleman and stop anybody reading the blasphemous Charlie Hebdo or listening to a debate about free speech and blasphemy.

That Copenhagen meeting on free speech and blasphemy was called on the anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa condemning the author Salman Rushdie to death for his novel The Satanic Verses, first published in 1988. Rushdie’s was one of few prominent voices raised against the attack of the but-heads after Charlie Hebdo. The author told an audience at the University of Vermont in Burlington that: ‘The moment somebody says “Yes I believe in free speech, but” – I stop listening.’ Rushdie ridiculed the free-speech frauds’ familiar cop-outs that: ‘I believe in free speech, but people should behave themselves … I believe in free speech, but we shouldn’t upset anybody … I believe in free speech, but let’s not go too far.’ The ‘buts’ that began to be heard in the UK and US when Rushdie was accused of going too far and upsetting people twenty-five years ago have since become a deafening chorus. If he stops listening the moment somebody uses any of those weasel formulations these days, Rushdie must spend a considerable amount of time with his smartphone earbuds plugged in.25

That bitter controversy surrounding Muslim protests against The Satanic Verses a quarter of a century ago marked a turning point in attitudes towards offensive speech, when many in the West condemned the fatwa yet chided Rushdie for being too offensive to Islam. It was during that row in 1989 that I first wrote about the importance of the Right to Be Offensive. Then in 1994, as the editor of Living Marxism magazine, I published a declaration in defence of that right. It upheld two principles – ‘No censorship – bans are for bigots and Big Brother’, and ‘No taboos – taboos are for the superstitious and the stupid’ – and an imperative that has informed my attitude ever since: ‘Question everything – Ban nothing’.26

In the two decades since, as the You-Can’t-Say-That culture has advanced, the fear of offending Islam has grown in the West. There has been a sustained effort to bury the issue post-Rushdie, to avoid discussing sensitive or difficult questions about what our society stands for and what unites or divides us. The result has been to suppress free speech and censor what is deemed potentially offensive. As the author Kenan Malik puts it in From Fatwa to Jihad, in recent years the liberal elite ‘internalised the fatwa’. There is now a quite lengthy list of plays, books and exhibitions that have been cancelled or cut in Europe and the US in order to avoid controversy or offence (and not just to Muslims) – often in acts of pre-emptive self-censorship without the need for protests beforehand.27

Having done their best to bury these issues and stymie debate for decades, our elites seem shocked when the tensions suddenly break through the surface of society and explode into view, as in the violent protests against the Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2011, and the murderous assault on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the Copenhagen debate in 2015.

They then try to force the genie back into the bottle, cracking down on anything deemed to be ‘extremist’ speech. This has led to bizarre cases such as that of Samina Malik, the UK’s ‘lyrical terrorist’, who was given a nine-month suspended prison sentence in 2007 (subsequently quashed on appeal) for writing doggerel in praise of Osama bin Laden. Sample: ‘Kafirs your time will come soon/And no-one will be able to save you from your doom’. You get the idea. For penning this McGonagall-lite on the back of till receipts from the WH Smith store where she worked at Heathrow Airport, Malik was convicted of possessing material that might ‘prove useful to terrorists’ (it is hard to see how). As the lyrical terrorist herself had to point out to the learned court: ‘To partake in something and to write about something are two different things.’ No longer, it seems. She was convicted of a modern British thought crime.28

Not all exponents of radical Islamist doctrine and alleged apologists for terrorism are such harmless scribblers, of course. There are some far more dangerous Islamist demagogues around in the West, accused of effectively acting as recruiting sergeants for al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. In the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo it might be tempting to imagine going along with government attempts to crack down on ‘radicalisation’ and censor extremists in our universities. Wouldn’t it be good if we could simply gag them with the UK’s 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, and kick them off campus, if not out of the country, altogether?

But such simple authoritarian solutions won’t work. Trying to defend freedom by banning its enemies, to uphold our belief in free speech by censoring those who disagree, would be both wrong in principle and useless in practice. What we need to do is to fight them on the intellectual and political beaches, not try to bury the issues in the sand. The big problem Western society faces is not how to stop radical Islamists expounding their beliefs; it is how best to make a compelling case for what ‘we’ are supposed to believe in. As ever in times of trouble, the only thing that is likely to work is encouraging more speech rather than ordering there be less of it. Free speech is the potential solution, not the problem.

Despite the initial upsurge of ‘Je Suis Charlie’ sentiments, the Paris massacre has not led to any major new campaign for free speech. Quite the opposite – it has reinforced the fear, reticence and confusion surrounding freedom of expression in the West today. This book aims to put the case for unfettered free speech and the right to be offensive. These are both non-negotiable principles and practical necessities to address the problems we face.

That must involve defending the right of a magazine like Charlie Hebdo to offend who it chooses, without any buts, and whether we like it or not. The truth is you don’t have to be Charlie, read Charlie or chortle at Charlie in order to defend it. Free speech is always primarily about defending what a US Supreme Court justice once famously described as ‘freedom for the thought that we hate’.

In passing we might note that wholeheartedly defending Charlie Hebdo’s right to offend need not necessarily mean reprinting its cartoons, as some insisted it must. Freedom of speech and of the press mean that media outlets must be free to make their own editorial judgements about what they publish – just as others must be free to pass judgement on those decisions.

In the free-speech fraud that followed the Charlie Hebdo massacre, many suddenly started talking about the ‘right to offend’ and the fact that there is ‘no right not to be offended’. Quite so. What most of them appeared to mean, however, is that we must defend the right to offend Islamist extremists. Yet the right to be offensive has to be about much more than Islam. It means the right to question, criticise or ridicule any belief or religion – and the freedom of the religious or anybody else to offend secular sensibilities, too.

In the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo Clare Short, a 34-year-old Catholic mother of three and blogger, wrote of her concerns that a fearful backlash against ‘offensive’ speech might now make it hard for her ‘to express my views without fear of prosecution’. She observed that she had ‘never thought I would be appreciating the “right to offend”, but today it seems I am’. Short concluded that ‘Je Suis Charlie, and I would like to proclaim that Jesus Christ is lord, marriage can only occur between one man and one woman, and that abortion is murder. Or am I not allowed to say that?’ If ‘Je Suis Charlie’ is to mean something more than a slogan on a discarded placard, she surely should be allowed to proclaim her beliefs, however out of step with the times they might seem.29

Any such tolerance of traditional opinion seemed seriously out of vogue just two months after the Paris attacks, however, when Sir Elton John led an international celebrity boycott of Dolce & Gabbana, after the two gay Catholic Italian fashion designers told an interviewer they believed gay adoption of ‘synthetic’ babies to be unnatural. The #BoycottDolceGabbana tag swept across social media as many thousands backed the celebs’ demand to close the designers down, not for exploiting workers, overcharging customers or anything else they might have done, but merely for expressing an unfashionable opinion. ‘Elton John is a Taliban,’ said Italian senator Roberto Formigoni in response to the boycott, ‘and is using with Dolce & Gabbana the same method used by the Taliban against Charlie Hebdo.’ Not quite ‘the same method’ – no gun attacks by gay parents on D&G stores were reported – but perhaps a similar-sounding message.30

Defending the right to be offensive also means recognising that the work of such bold cartoonists, whether one considers it insightful or infantile, is not enough. The right to be offensive means something more than the right to ridicule Islam or any religionists. We should be free to question everything that we are not supposed to question in the suffocating cloud of conformism that hangs over our societies today.

France of course is the land of Voltaire, the eighteenth-century revolutionary writer whose views on tolerance and free speech are famously summarised as: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will fight to the death your right to say it.’ By contrast, as this book examines, we are now living in the age of the reverse-Voltaires, whose slogan is ‘I know I will detest what you say, and I will defend to the end of free speech for my right to stop you saying it.’

It would be a fitting tribute to those killed in Paris and Copenhagen if we were to rekindle the spirit of the free-speech fighters of yesteryear for the twenty-first century. ‘Je Suis Charlie’ is not enough – we need to send out the message loud and clear that ‘Nous Sommes Voltaire’.

SECTION ONE

The silent war on free speech

Compared to many countries elsewhere in the world, the UK and the US look like bastions of freedom of speech, holding the line against censorship and intolerance. The 800th anniversary of England’s Magna Carta in 2015 is understandably being marked with much self-congratulatory talk about our long history of unbroken liberty.

Yet there is little cause for complacency when we come to consider the state of free speech in the Anglo-American world. There is a danger that we underestimate the importance of freedom of expression in creating and advancing our civilisation. There is a danger, too, that we overestimate how secure that liberty really is in Western culture today.

This first section of the book sets out to establish why we need to defend free speech more forthrightly. Against the background of the historic fight for free speech it aims to identify the new threats and challenges from inside the supposed free-speech citadels of Western society.

1

A few things we forgot about free speech

No subject (with the possible exception of football) has been talked about as much yet seriously discussed as little as free speech. Everybody pays lip service to the right to freedom of speech. Few of us appear to give much thought to what that means or why it matters. Sometimes it’s necessary to remind ourselves of the obvious and look again at what we take for granted.

After all, it’s funny how the simple little things can slip your mind. The first thing that seems to have been forgotten about free speech is that it’s supposed to be Free. The second thing that is often forgotten is that it’s simply Speech.

This chapter offers a quick reminder of why these things matter, alongside the third thing we often forget: that, when you put those two words together, you have the most important expression in the English language. Free speech is the single most powerful factor in creating and sustaining a civilised society. Without the advance of free speech, the development of life as we know it in the West is unlikely to have been possible over the past 500 years. There could have been little progress towards democracy in Europe or America without the ability to demand political change and to put forward competing principles about how society should be run. Many of the great scientific breakthroughs would have been unimaginable without winning the freedom to speak out and question the old accepted ‘truths’ about the world.

Few new artistic or cultural advances would have happened unless there was sufficient freedom of expression for writers and artists to go where none had gone before. None of the mass communications on which the interconnected modern world relies could have thrived without the fight for free speech – or if they existed, they would not be worth having. And the other freedoms we take for granted today, from the high principles of sexual and racial equality in law to the low liberty to gossip about the rich and famous online, would have been hard to secure without first demanding the freedom of all to speak out in public.

In short, without the willingness of some to insist on their right to speak what they believed to be true, we might still be living on a flat Earth at the centre of the known Universe, where women were denied the vote but granted the right to be burnt as witches. That is one good reason why it is time to stop kicking and ‘but-ing’ free speech around so casually today and get serious about discussing how to defend and extend our most precious liberty.

To begin with the dreaded f-word. It often appears to have slipped our Anglo-American society’s mind that free speech is supposed to be Free. That’s free as in ‘free as a bird’, to soar as high as it can and swoop as low as it chooses. Not as in ‘free-range chicken’, at liberty only to scratch in the dirt within a fenced-in pen and en route to the chopping block.

Free means speech should not be shackled by official censorship imposed by governments, police, courts or any other state-licensed pecknose or prodstaff. Nor should it be stymied by unofficial censorship exercised through university speech codes and ‘safe zones’, twitterstorming mobs of online crusaders against offensiveness, or Islamist zealots gunning for blasphemy. And nor should it be sacrificed by the spineless self-censorship of intellectual invertebrates.

If it is to mean anything, free speech has to live up to its name. This is the hardest thing for many who claim to endorse the principle to remember in practice. It means that what others say or write need not conform to what you, I, or anybody else might prefer. Bad taste or good, offensive or attractive, cutting or boring. Just so long as it is free.

Here is the terrible truth about free speech. Anybody can choose to write, blog, tweet, chant, preach, phone a radio programme or shout at a television set. Not all of them will have the purity of soul of Jesus Christ or Joan Rivers, the wisdom of Socrates or Simon Cowell, or the good manners of Prince Harry or Piers Morgan. That’s tough. They still get the same access to free speech as the rest of us, whether we like it or not.

Defending the unfettered Free in free speech is not a question of endorsing whatever objectionable or idiotic things might be written or said. Nobody had to find Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons insightful or hilarious in order to stand by its right to publish them. Nor is it a question of being soft and suffering somebody else’s nonsense in silence. Free speech means you are also free to talk back as you see fit.

The Free in free speech does mean recognising that free speech is for fools, fanatics and the other fellow too – even if they want to use that freedom to argue against it. Like all true liberties, free speech is an indivisible and universal right. We defend it for all or not at all.

Remembering to put the Free in free speech makes clear why we should oppose attempts to outlaw or curtail certain categories of speech. Freedom is, unfortunately, indivisible. You cannot have half-freedom, part-time freedom or fat-free freedom. You cannot abolish slavery but only for white people or celebrities. Similarly you cannot declare your support for free speech, but only defend those parts of it that you like or that meet your preferred set of standards, however high-minded those preferences might appear. If one leg or even one gangrenous toe remains chained to the post, the entire body is still shackled.

In all the talk about free speech today, how often do you hear free speech spoken of as a universal and non-negotiable right? Instead the focus seems always to be on the buts, the exceptions, the limits to freedom. Everybody in public life might insist that they support free speech, but scratch the surface and it becomes clear that what many support is not so much free speech as speech on parole.

They want speech that is released from custody only on licence with a promise of good behaviour, preferably wearing a security ankle bracelet to stop it straying from the straight and narrow, having signed the rhetorical offenders’ register. Speech that is free to toe the line, stick to the script and do what it is told. The reinterpretation of freedom to mean liberty-on-licence is a con that the free-speech fraudsters should not be allowed to get away with.

Once you forget the meaning of ‘freedom’ and start cherry-picking which people or what type of speech might deserve it, free speech ceases to be a right. Instead it becomes a privilege, to be extended or withheld to the well- or the not so well-behaved as those in authority see fit. This is the message of all those fashionable sermons about how ‘rights come with responsibilities’. That is just another way of saying that it is not a right at all, but a selective reward for good behaviour. Rights don’t come with buts or provisos.

Today’s free-speech fraudsters will claim to support it firmly in principle, yet equivocate in practice. This often translates as supporting it for those who share your attitudes and opinions – less free speech than ‘me speech’.

To defend free speech ‘in principle’ must mean to defend it for all. Otherwise, once a principle becomes negotiable it ceases to be principled at all (as in the old political joke, ‘We have principles, and if you don’t like them, we have others’).

The indivisibility of the right to free speech is also a very practical matter. Once you make free speech a privilege and not a right, who are you going to trust to make the decision about where to draw that line through free speech? Government ministers? High court judges? Mary Berry and Sharon Osbourne?

This is an old lesson which many, especially on the left, still stubbornly refuse to learn. As far back as the 1930s, the British left campaigned for a ban on marches by Oswald Mosley’s black-shirted British Union of Fascists. They got their wish in the Public Order Act of 1936 – and were quickly astonished to discover that the state used its new powers to ban their right to protest, too. Almost eighty years later, and British anti-fascist crusaders are still apparently outraged to find that, when they ‘win’ a legal ban on a little demonstration by some far-right grouplet, the police will use the same blanket ban to prevent them staging a ‘victory’ march.

This problem is even more acute now, when everything is judged by the subjective standards of ‘offence’ and things can be censored or banned not for threatening public order but for hurting somebody’s feelings and making them feel ‘uncomfortable’. There is no telling where the runaway train of censorship in the name of ‘me speech’ will end – witness the fate of the UK feminist comedians and speakers who have been surprised to find themselves protested against and even banned from campuses for being deemed offensive to some, shortly after they had demanded the same treatment for sexist blokes. Once you say that free speech is only for those who comply and conform and toe a fashionable line, you are asking for trouble.

The other practical problem with ‘me speech’ is that, by restricting the free-speech rights of those you detest, you weaken your own and everybody else’s rights. You deny others the right to listen and to argue, to test the truth and judge for ourselves. You effectively condemn yourself to being locked in your bubble cell, with only your own and similar opinions to listen to, like a solitary prisoner with only one book to read (and even that is his own boring diary).

As Thomas Paine, the English radical who became a key figure in both the American and the French revolutions of the eighteenth century, wrote in the introduction to his classic The Age of Reason (a critique of religion considered so offensive that it was subject to serial prosecutions by the British government): ‘He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.’1 It is not only those directly denied their freedom who are ‘enslaved’ by selectively chaining some forms of speech.

It is important to remember that free speech in the West, as chapter 3, about the history of the issue, argues, was never a gift from the gods or an act of largesse doled out by governments. From the Magna Carta 800 years ago to today, any liberties that are worth the parchment they are written on have been hard-won in a struggle to wrest them from our rulers. Once won, those liberties do not come with any moral commandments. Nobody has to pass through the eye of an ethical needle to qualify for the right to free speech. There should be no official test to pass or licence to obtain before you can express an opinion.

Free speech is not to be rationed out like charity, to only the most deserving cases. A right is a right, and is not limited by any incumbent responsibilities. Liberties do not come with strings attached, any more than freedom can be exercised in leg-irons.

This is not a plea for irresponsible speech. It is to be dearly wished that people exercise their rights responsibly and take responsibility for what they say. We might like to think that taking responsibility would always involve saying what you mean and meaning what you say; expressing the truth as you understand it as clearly as you are able, and then standing by it for all that you are worth. But wishing that could be true is no excuse for trampling on the speech rights of others in the name of what you imagine their responsibilities should be.

We should remember that the Free in free speech is not only about the freedom to speak and write as you see fit. It is also about the freedom of the rest of us to hear and read everything that we choose, and to judge for ourselves what is right. The flipside of freedom of speech is the freedom to listen (or not) and to choose.

We are under no obligation to take any notice of anybody’s words; the right to free speech never entails a ‘right’ to be taken seriously. But nor does the speaker have any obligation to restrict what they say to what we want to hear. To mean something worthwhile, freedom must be first and foremost for the other person’s point of view. George Orwell put in perfectly in his 1945 essay ‘The Freedom of the Press’ (originally written as a preface to his novel Animal Farm, though ironically the publisher refused to include it): ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’2

As part of forgetting to put the Free in free speech, we also appear to have forgotten the meaning of tolerance. Today tolerance is talked about in two related ways: either it means allowing the expression of views without judging or criticising them, or it is used as the excuse for closing down views which are too offensive, as in ‘we will not tolerate intolerance’. Neither has much to do with true tolerance.

Intolerance is always the enemy of free-thinking. But tolerance and the right to free speech does not mean a free ride. Tolerance is not about allowing anybody to rant away, offend and insult without challenge because ‘everybody’s entitled to their opinion’. True tolerance means allowing others to express their opinions, however disagreeable – and then being free yourself to tell them what you think of it, just as they are free to repay the compliment to you. In this, I am always with the great Englishman of letters Dr Samuel Johnson, who declared that ‘Every man has the right to utter what he thinks truth – and every other man has the right to knock him down for it.’3 Figuratively speaking, at the very least.

The second thing we have forgotten about free speech is that it is Speech. It is simply words. Words can be powerful tools, but there are no magic words – not even Abracadabra – that in themselves can change reality. Words are not deeds. It follows that offensive speech should not be policed as if it were a criminal offence.

It is true that ‘words can be weapons’ in a battle of ideas, or even just in a slanging match. But however sharp or pointed they might be, words cannot be knives. However blunt words are, they are not baseball bats. No matter how loaded they are or how fast you fire them off, words are not guns.

Yet all too often today we see words treated as if they were physical weapons. People in the UK are imprisoned for tweeting insults, as if they had handed out a bodily beating. Outraged online mobs pursue ‘rape deniers’ or other speech deviants across social media much as the London mob pursued the misogynist murderer Bill Sykes through the Dickensian city. Politicians and public figures in the US or UK are forced to apologise for having caused unintentional offence with some words, as if they had unintentionally caused a war (which is something they would never apologise for, of course).

This confusion of words and deeds is even written into UK law, with the Public Order Act used to imprison thousands of people each year for ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour’ (my italics), blurring the distinction between what people say and what they do, as if abusive language really was the equivalent of physical abuse.

Words can hurt but they are not physical weapons. And an argument or opinion, however aggressive or offensive it might seem, is not a physical assault. The difference is far more than semantic. There are and should be laws against assault and threats of violence. There often are but should not be laws or rules against words used to express opinions, however violently one might disagree with them. The right response to violent assault is to end it, as forcibly as necessary, and possibly to lock up the perpetrator. The answer to bad words is not to end speech or lock up the speaker. It is more speech – to resist or simply to rubbish the words objected to.