Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?

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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 (#ue9fd4c07-d1ba-5f39-9778-c8d16f04b4df)

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.