Book review: You Can’t Read This Book

IT’S A strange title: we plainly can read Nick Cohen’s latest book. Its subject is censorship, and Cohen’s cover undermines much of his excellent content. At least one reader worked his way through the pages in forlorn anticipation of the sections that he would not be allowed to read.

His beef is that we are threatened by two forms of censorship – self-censorship and legal censorship – and they are often connected. Writers often censor themselves not only because they are afraid of receiving writs, but because they do not want to have their throats cut by religious zealots. Cohen argues that the 1989 Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie ushered in an era in which it has become impossible to articulate public criticism of one of the world’s largest confessional groups without running the real risk of being killed by its agents.

That is not new to Europe. Critics of the Roman Catholic faith in, say, 16th-century Spain were occasionally burned alive (“critics” at that time included such non-adherents as Muslims and Jews). Cohen is certain that without the denominational divisions and secular liberal consensus that followed the Reformation and the Enlightenment, Christian churches might still be up to the same tricks. Theistic omnipotence is planted in their frontal lobes, as was evidenced by the sympathy of so many British bishops and archbishops for the Ayatollah Khomeini’s judgment on Rushdie.

But they cannot burn us at the stake because we have reined them in. Nobody has reined in Islam. That victory for fundamental self-censorship – for the power of fear over the strength of free argument - would be hard enough to bear. It is made heavier by the connivance of so many western liberals who perceive criticism of Islam as a form of racism. Cohen is contemptuous of his supposed allies on the Left who make “the elementary howler of confusing ethnicity … with religions or political ideologies.”

His book is a scattergun of points, anecdotes and arguments. It often reads not as one integral narrative, but as a chain of cleverly linked opinion columns. There are breaks in the chain. We in the western democracies have the deepest and broadest freedoms in history. Cohen cannot convince even himself that we do not.

He is, however, a compelling writer. He trots us from our voluntary obeisance to Islam into the mire of the super-injunction. We lumber from that bog into the dictatorship of the workplace in western democracies – the fact that we are all free to call the Prime Minister a lunatic, the Procurator Fiscal a moron and the Chief Constable a dolt, but “if employees criticise their employers in public” they face “the loss of their career, their pension, and perhaps their means of making a livelihood.”

And we finish, muddied but unbowed, in the British legal system. That should more properly be read as the English legal system. Scottish law (and therefore the Scottish media) is famously immune to many of the censorious rulings of southern courts.

But the fact that judges routinely err on the side of quacks, fakes and crooks against whistleblowers and the press enables the careers throughout Britain of people as diversely undesirable as Robert Maxwell, Fred Goodwin, snake-oil salesmen who call themselves homeopaths, and Hollywood billionaires who want to punish American periodicals outside the legislature of the First Amendment to the constitution of the United States. That’s the amendment which permits free speech.

Nick Cohen is a fan of the First Amendment, and would like to see something like it introduced to these islands. Cohen is a Millsian. Insofar as the philosophy of John Stuart Mill can be reduced and applied to the 21st century, he urged that nobody should be persecuted, prosecuted or censored for saying or writing or doing something, unless it directly caused bodily harm.

The Millsian tenet is seductive. Its thoughtful introduction to this book has the incidental effect of suggesting that Nick Cohen might have delivered a more cogent and convincing volume by writing a modern critical and biographical assessment of the author of On Liberty, as Christopher Hitchens did of George Orwell.

Under Millsian principles it would still be the function of Lord Chief Justice Moron to interpret “directly” and “harm”. But our societal values, and therefore his or her legal mandate, would be more clear. They would be balanced against the prospective censor. We would be less likely in the future to be told, with meaning, “You Can’t Read This Book”.

• You Can’t Read This Book

by Nick Cohen

Fourth Estate, 224pp, £12.99