Censorship by Fear

 Russell Jacoby's A Climate of Fear (Harper's Magazine) puts to task those on the left who will give free speech out of fear. He begins with Salman Rushdie and expands outwards.

As it happens, he had cause to worry. In the intervening years, support for Rushdie and for free expression has narrowed—a fact made particularly clear since his August 2022 stabbing by an American of Lebanese descent who expressed admiration for Khomeini and condemned Rushdie after reading “a couple pages” of The Satanic Verses. The assault, which put Rushdie in intensive care and left him blind in one eye, would have been unimaginable without the fatwa, yet many have been content to treat it as a random act of violence by a lone madman.

An August 19 New York City rally of writers gathered in support of Rushdie reprised a 1989 demonstration against the fatwa in which Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Christopher Hitchens, and others participated, but the later iteration “paled in comparison,” a Le Monde editorial remarked. Across social media, writers expressed concern for Rushdie’s health, but an instinctual solidarity with him and the sense—so strong at the time of the fatwa—that his fate spoke to all of us as members of a liberal society did not materialize. Even among his defenders, free speech took a back seat.

Why? One reason is fear. In 2009, the British writer Hanif Kureishi told Prospect Magazine that “nobody would have the balls today to write The Satanic Verses.” He might have added that no one would have the balls to defend it. Most writers, Kureishi continued, live quietly, and “they don’t want a bomb in the letterbox.”

I have no sympathy for the thin-skinned, the world will mangle those whose sensibilities are too tender for the struggle that is life.

The PEN protest popularized the idea that free speech should face limits when it comes to marginalized groups. The free speech movement of the old campus left apparently had the story upside-down: the new progressive credo posits that free speech sustains racism. In a recent article with the lovely title the settler coloniality of free speech, the scholar Darcy Leigh argues that free speech props up “white supremacist colonial power.” Rather than serving as a public good, Leigh explains in a model of academic prose, the “liberal politics around the freedom of free speech have functioned to control or silence Indigenous, Black, and/or otherwise racially othered speech.”

What this view means in practice was recently demonstrated at Minnesota’s Hamline University, when the adjunct professor Erika López Prater showed a fourteenth-century painting of Mohammed to a global art history class. The image was not a satirical drawing but an illustration from medieval Persia, and López Prater gave advance warning, allowing any student who might take offense to leave. Nonetheless, the university fired López Prater following complaints from Muslim students, and the university’s president co-signed a letter stating that the feelings of the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.”

The free speech skeptics might want to read up on the history of abolitionism. In 1860, Frederick Douglass participated in a meeting of abolitionists in Boston. A mob of anti-abolitionists stormed the hall and silenced the gathering. When Douglass finally gave his prepared remarks, he included some thoughts on free speech. He found the excuse that the meeting in crisis-ridden Boston was “ill-timed” unconvincing: “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.” The right to free speech, he stated, strikes fear in the heart of tyrants. “It is the right which they first of all strike down. . . . Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble. . . . Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.”

Without free speech, there   would never have been “Indigenous, Black, and/or otherwise racially othered speech.” Without free speech, Frederick Douglass would be a meaningless name. History shows free speech protections expanded to include the marginalized because the marginalized fought their muzzles. Liberals did that. They did not whine about upset feelings, they fought to keep the unpopular voices heard. Democracy cannot survive if we do not protect free speech. Democratic government needs to have its dissenting heard because we are human and cannot be certain if the mainstream is operating with all the facts, all the knowledge, all the perspectives it needs for a just government. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao had their righteousness and censored anything counter to their righteousness. Of course, that righteousness killed millions and millions of human beings, but no one's feelings were hurt,

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