Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? PDF
Preview Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?
Copyright William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015 Copyright © Mick Hume 2015 Mick Hume asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non- transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008125455 Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780008126384 Version: 2015-05-11 Dedication For Stella and Isabel, may they always think what they like and say what they think Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Author’s note Prologue: ‘Je Suis Charlie’ and the free-speech fraud SECTION ONE: The silent war on free speech 1 A few things we forgot about free speech 2 The age of the reverse-Voltaires 3 A short history of free-speech heretics 4 The Internet Front: hunting for trolls down ‘memory holes’ 5 The University Front: students fight for ‘freedom from speech’ 6 The Entertainment Front: football – kicking free speech with impunity; comedy – no laughing matter SECTION TWO: Five good excuses for restricting free speech – and why they’re all wrong 7 ‘There is no right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre’ 8 ‘… but words will always hurt me’ 9 ‘Mind your Ps, Qs, Ns and Ys’ 10 ‘Liars and Holocaust deniers do not deserve to be heard’ 11 ‘Free speech is just a licence for the mass media to brainwash the public’ A short summation for the defence Epilogue: The Trigger Warnings we need Notes About the Publisher Epigraph Trigger Warning (noun): a statement at the start of any piece of writing, video, etc, alerting the reader or viewer to the fact that it contains material they might find upsetting or offensive. Author’s note This is not a book about the Charlie Hebdo massacre. When I began to write Trigger Warning in late 2014, Charlie was a small French satirical magazine known by relatively few and read by far fewer, particularly in the Anglo- American world. The murderous attack at the magazine’s Paris offices in January 2015 did not really alter the argument about the urgent need to defend free speech, but that massacre and the reactions to it certainly brought the issues into focus. Two concerns had already motivated me to write this book, both of which were highlighted in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo. The first was an awareness of the widening gap between the rhetorical, ritualistic support that Western societies pay to freedom of speech in principle, and the increasing preparedness to compromise and restrict it in practice. The sight of world political leaders declaring ‘Je Suis Charlie’, whilst simultaneously trying to outlaw opinions they found offensive, illustrated that chasm. My second concern was that the political and cultural attacks on free speech were often being led, not by Islamist extremists, but by those in the West who would consider themselves liberal or left-minded. The flipside of this was freedom being dismissed as of interest only to right-wing cranks, accused of ‘hiding behind free speech’. As a veteran of radical struggles who still considers himself on the left, even if not of its modern incarnation, I have always understood that fighting for free speech is indispensable to those who want to argue for radical ideas and social change. When I first wrote in defence of ‘the Right to be Offensive’, twenty-five years ago, it was as the editor of Living Marxism magazine. Those opinions were in a distinct minority on the British left even then. Today, with campaigners demanding post-Charlie purges of both ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Islamo-fascism’, the need to resist the tide and make the radical case for the right to offend is more urgent still. This polemical book is intended as a contribution to that resistance. The case it makes for free speech has developed through years of argument as a campaigning political journalist in both the alternative and mainstream UK media. In 1988 I was the launch editor of Living Marxism, which we relaunched as the taboo-busting LM magazine in the Nineties until it was forced to close in 2000 after being sued under England’s atrocious libel laws. Then I became the launch editor of Spiked (spiked-online.com), the UK’s first and best web-based current affairs and comment magazine, of which I am now editor-at-large. I was also the only libertarian Marxist columnist at The Times (London) for ten years, and now write as a guest columnist for the Sun, among others. The development of the arguments in the pages that follow would not, however, have been possible without the input of others. I want to recognise and thank my overworked and underpaid colleagues at Spiked, where many of these ideas first germinated and where the crisis of free speech in Anglo-American society has been brilliantly brought to light by editor Brendan O’Neill, ably backed by deputy editor Tim Black and managing editor Viv Regan. Spiked’s transatlantic ‘Free Speech Now’ campaign, especially its work to combat censorship on campus led by Tom Slater, is a model, online and off, of how to breathe new life into a dormant political principle. I also want sincerely to thank my old friends and collaborators Frank Furedi, whose inspiration and advice was as indispensable for this book as it has been for longer than either of us might care to remember, and Michael Fitzpatrick, who first tried to teach me how to write properly more than thirty years ago, and is still trying now. Thanks are due to Martin Redfern, my editor at William Collins, for bringing the idea to fruition. And most of all to my wife, Ginny, the managing editor of all that I do, for making me start and finish writing it. The responsibility for the text, warts and all, is of course mine. Mick Hume, London, April 2015
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