By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, August 15, 2022
Since news of the harrowing attempt on Salman
Rushdie’s life broke from Chautauqua on Friday, the British government and
its emissaries have been sure to say all the right things. “Appalled,” was
Boris Johnson’s verdict. “Appalled that Sir Salman Rushdie has been stabbed
while exercising a right we should never cease to defend.” Sir Keir Starmer,
the leader of the Labour Party and Johnson’s sparring opponent in Parliament,
echoed this position. Rushdie, Starmer said, “has long embodied the struggle
for liberty and freedom against those who seek to destroy them.”
Great. And how about those censorship laws of which the
British still seem so fond?
I do not make this comparison tritely. Neither Johnson
nor Starmer would condone stabbing British citizens who write things they
dislike. But investigating? Arresting? Charging? Imprisoning? About those courses
of action, they are far, far more sanguine than they should be. If, indeed,
Johnson and Starmer believe that free speech is “a right we should never cease
to defend” — if they believe, indeed, that it is a key part of the “struggle
for liberty and freedom” — then they ought to follow up on that thought by
ensuring that the ugly web of restrictions and rules that sit on Britain’s
books at present are consigned to the ash heap on which they belong. Call it
the Salman Rushdie Act of 2022.
In its current form, British free-speech law — or rather,
British anti–free-speech law — exhibits a dangerous respect for the
subjective concept of “offense.” Just two weeks ago, in the English county of
Hampshire, a man was arrested for posting a meme that showed a trans flag as a
swastika. When, inevitably, he asked what the hell was going on, he was informed by the arresting officers that “someone has
been caused anxiety based on your social media post, and that’s why you’re
being arrested.” In a sensible country, this answer would have been met with
cacophonous laughter, followed by a confident, “So what?” In Britain? Not so
much. In the last few years alone, the British government has secured “hate
crime” convictions against a man who filmed his pet dog giving Nazi salutes,
against a man who criticized a popular soldier on social
media, and against a
woman who posted Snoop Dogg lyrics on her Instagram page. Each year,
Britain plays host to thousands of such prosecutions.
In 2013, the British parliament attempted to limit the
worst among the excesses by removing a section of the 1986 Public Order Act
that, among other things, had justified the arrests of a man who had sung the song “Kung Fu Fighting” in a pub, of a man
who had made a joke about Nelson Mandela, and of a man who had told a mounted police officer in the city of
Oxford that his horse was “gay.” Clearly, that didn’t do the job. And why not?
Well, because the root problem with Britain’s free-speech laws is not that they
are occasionally abused by the overzealous, but that they do not actually
protect free speech at all. Almost everyone can grasp that it is absurd to
arrest people for making offensive jokes, but, until the British come to
understand that it is equally absurd to arrest people who hold their unpopular
opinions in earnest, they will remain stuck in their present bind.
Rifle through the court documents from any high-profile
censorship case and you will see the same language repeated ad nauseam. The
speaker had to be imprisoned, you see, because he had caused “offense” or “anxiety” or “upset.” The
sentence had be imposed, you understand, because it was
“necessary to reflect the public outrage.” The police had to
get involved, you grok, because, if they hadn’t, then someone, somewhere might
have had to process their emotions without the intervention of the state. Or,
put another way: The mob grew upset, so we indulged them.
The result of this approach has been the transformation
of Britain into an equal-opportunity censor, from which nobody is immune. As
one might anticipate, the country’s dense thicket of laws has often ensnared
Muslims and Christians for their criticism of “sexual immorality.” But it
has also entangled the atheists who pushed back
against them — which, given the deference paid to subjective
intangibles such as “hate,” “offense,” or “outrage,” was inevitable. A few
years ago, in his capacity as Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer
suggested that it would be problematic if the British government were to
investigate “offensive, shocking or disturbing” statements, and proposed that,
instead, prosecutors should limit themselves to material that was “grossly
offensive, indecent, obscene or false.” I think I might be
able to see the problem here.
In its scope and in its severity, there is a meaningful
difference between the approach taken by the British government and the fatwa
that the Iranian dictatorship saw fit to impose upon Salman Rushdie, and yet,
in a substantive sense, they are indistinguishable in every way beyond degree.
The Iranian government contends that some words are beyond the pale because
they offend its most deeply held beliefs. And so does the British government,
albeit in the name of a different herd of sacred cows. Unlike in the United
States, the rules in Britain are not designed to prevent only that speech which
is attached
to imminent action, but to prevent speech that might make self-professed
adults feel sad.
That is not good enough. I do not doubt for a moment that
it is unpleasant for a man who truly believes that he is a woman to see a meme
that compares his political allies to the Nazis. But this cannot be the end of
the story. Presumably, it is also unpleasant for a man who believes that the
Koran is true in every particular to read criticisms or mockery of his faith,
and yet a commitment to elementary liberalism prevents us from responding to
this possibility by dispatching the cops to his aid. In essence, the question
in both cases really is a simple one: Namely, “What should happen to people who
say unpopular, ugly, or even downright evil things?” In my
estimation, there can be only one answer: Nothing. Actions? In
certain circumstances, actions may be brought under authority. But words,
unconnected from motion or force? Never.
Next month, either Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak will replace
Boris Johnson as prime minister. Responding to the attack on Salman Rushdie,
Truss said that, “People must be able to speak freely and freedom of speech
must be defended,” while Sunak hailed “free speech and artistic freedom” and
submitted that Rushdie was “in our thoughts.” If they are serious, they will
begin the work of removing from British law any traces of the mindset that put
Rushdie and others at risk in the first instance. There is no such thing as
“free speech but,” and the desire to insist otherwise represents a
catastrophic concession of the most important premise in all the free world:
that however offended one might be at what another person has said or written
or thought, that offense is a purely private matter that ought to be of no more
interest to our governing authorities than is the number of socks in my bedroom
drawer.
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