Rushdie attack sees illiberal hypocrites defending free speech
What on earth is going on? Granted, there are so many leftist mantras proliferating today it is difficult to keep up. Most of us are familiar with the prevailing cultural Marxist clichés – “safe spaces”, “unconscious bias”, “white privilege”, etc. – but, lately, the opinion formers, social media influencers, politicians and arts industry parasites have been excitedly babbling a strange and disturbing new slogan: “Freedom of speech”.
The attack on Salman Rushdie, or rather the need to respond to it, has drastically disoriented the progressive priesthood. So much so, they have resurrected a concept they have spent the past two decades striving to bury – freedom of speech – and culturally appropriated it for the temporary purpose of joining in the latest emotional spasm on social media.
It is not a pretty sight: thousands of hypocrites shedding crocodile tears over an outrage against freedom of speech. Freedom of what? Since when did liberty of expression occupy a place in the woke scheme of things, except as a transgressive violation of the “safety” of ethnic, sexual or trans minorities? Many felt moved to recall the public burnings of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses by mobs, as acutely reprehensible, regardless of whether they had previously called for the similar incineration of J K Rowling’s novels, on social media.
Publishers who would not for a nano-second contemplate publishing The Satanic Verses today, have been bleating about the sanctity of creative writers’ right to express their ideas free of censorship. The issue has even provoked nostalgic allusions to the Lady Chatterley trial, the implication being that British publishers are a stalwart band of champions of free speech and the Duke of Wellington’s maxim “Publish and be damned!” The reality of North Korean levels of censorship, conducted by “sensitivity editors”, prevailing throughout London’s mainstream publishing houses, is hypocritically ignored.
L’affaire Rushdie is a deeply disorienting event for all the usual suspects. The prescriptions of the woke cult would naturally predispose the elites to disown Rushdie, but they have sufficient remaining contact with reality to realise that, in presentational terms, that would be suicidal. If the writer, during his convalescence, utters hostile criticism of jihadists, fatwas and ayatollahs, will he be charged with Islamophobia?
The attempted murder of Rushdie has given more employment to casuists than they have enjoyed since the 16th century. Apparently, for the sophisticated observer, the crucial thing is to distinguish between Islamic (good) and Islamist (bad). It is regrettable that this solemn distinction bears an unfortunate resemblance to the Beyond the Fringe sketch in which Jonathan Miller delivered the immortal (but cancellation-provoking in today’s climate) line: “I’m not really a Jew, just Jewish – not the whole hog…”
The mystery is why Labour MPs, uniquely, were so backward in condemning the attack on Rushdie. Is it simply that Labour is now so woke that the notion of publishing a novel that offends anyone is unthinkable and the author of such a work has only himself to blame for any consequences that occur?
The plain truth of the Rushdie outrage is that the Marxist elites are all over the place. There are so many conflicting elements to the affair that it does not compute; there are too many pieces to fit in the jigsaw. Like all leftist movements, wokery is beginning to fragment and factionalise. The first major fissure that developed was between feminists and the trans cult. The outcome is that, after two generations of crusading, feminists have delivered an outcome in which women no longer have privacy in their formerly private spaces and are being erased from the public square, from healthcare and even from the vocabulary.
By the analogy of the 1930s Soviet precedent, feminists are the Trotskyites, being purged by the Stalinists of the trans orthodoxy. There will be many more such fragmentations. The Rushdie issue goes to the heart of the left’s ambivalence over Islam. As a religion, a metaphysical system embracing an afterlife, it is intuitively anathema to the secular left. It condemns homosexuality, one of the totemic causes of the contemporary left, and abortion. So far, so hostile.
On the other hand, as a saving grace in woke perception, it is also inimical to the Judaeo-Christian tradition – the ultimate target and hate object of the secular left. It has anti-imperialist connotations, congenial to the UK/US self-loathing of progressives. Having, as Tony Blair’s speech writer cheerfully revealed, encouraged uncontrolled immigration “to rub the right’s nose in diversity”, Labour now depends on the Muslim vote in a significant number of constituencies. It sees, in America, an analogous immigrant community, the Latinos, deserting the Democrats for the Republicans and dreads a comparable shift in Britain.
So, instinct, obsessions and self-interest are competing to render the left incoherent in its response to the Salman Rushdie case. The momentary, opportunist endorsement of free speech will not survive the retreat of the Rushdie affair from page one to the inner sections of newspapers. This is the last hurrah for the old leftist opposition to censorship, a momentary glimpse of sunlight before the clouds of woke intolerance roll back into place.
Formerly, the leading champions of free speech would have been our universities: today, they are the chief promoters of censorship. When the fatwa against Rushdie was promulgated in 1989, dons and undergraduates at British universities were at the forefront of the condemnation of this invitation to murder an author. Today, you could not put a cigarette paper (if such an offending object were available) between the campus ayatollahs leading mobs to “de-platform” speakers and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, their spiritual partners in intolerance.
Academic life in Britain has been destroyed by a superstitious trans cult remorselessly extending its grip on the humanities into the sciences, including medicine. Academic standards have been nullified by an admissions process that fatally combines social engineering with greed for overseas students paying high fees. It is fitting that the iconic research project in a UK university today should be a PhD in self-abuse.
With the wellsprings of the culture – universities, publishing houses, media – all poisoned, it is unsurprising there has been little authentic reaction to the Salman Rushdie attack. It requires in-depth analysis, for it has many features. The first and most obvious is the repugnance we feel when an attempt is made to assassinate a writer – or anyone else.
But the affair has other significances. Prominent among them is the inability of our “post-modern” culture to comprehend the values of other societies, despite its shallow claims to “multiculturalism”. At the root of the issue is the ineffable difference between people of religious faith, who believe in an afterlife and the responsibilities they must shoulder to deserve it, and those who believe in nothing.
If their most cherished beliefs are blasphemed, believers will not simply be offended in a snowflake way, but concerned that such disrespect may provoke punishment from the deity. It necessarily entails retribution. A civilised society respects certain religious sensitivities. In an Islamic context, the Danish cartoons were a gratuitous offence: caricatures of terrorist bombers are fair game, but to lampoon the founder of the religion destroyed any prospect of Muslims receiving the anti-terrorist message.
Cowardice has induced militant secularists to be wary of offending Islam, while concentrating their bile and obscenity on attacking Christianity. Western Christians are not turning the other cheek; they are, for the moment, succumbing to materialism and indifferentism, encouraged by their relativist ecclesiastical leaders. Islam preserves a more intense belief.
Militant secularists are so cocooned in Western cultural nihilism and the self-referential ghetto of social media that they have no real perspective on global realities. They imagine their views are shared by all but a superstitious rump of humanity. The reality is that, globally, there are 2.3 billion Christians and 1.8 billion Muslims, before one even considers other religions.
No one compelled Rushdie to write The Satanic Verses and he did so in the full knowledge of the offence it would cause. It is difficult to see that it achieved any valuable purpose, other than notoriety for the author. It fell to the British taxpayer to provide him, for years, with the kind of security the Duke of Sussex covets. That is the price of defending a civilised principle and the British public accepted it.
But the whole debate, due to the intellectual and moral poverty of our supposed elites, has strongly infantile impulses. A much-abused term employed by commentators, in condemning the Ayatollah’s fatwa, was “medieval”. The medieval period inflicted on our ancestors such ghastly phenomena as St Thomas Aquinas, Dante Alighieri, Notre Dame and Chartres cathedrals, the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and the Sorbonne; the post-modern age has given us such glories as James Kelman, A C Grayling, the Barbican, the Tour Montparnasse and Southend-on-Sea campus.
Already, the turmoil is subsiding. Soon, with a sense of embarrassment at having momentarily endorsed such a fascist concept as free speech, our leaders will return to progressing the Online Safety Bill, arresting Christian preachers, sacking offenders who claim human beings cannot change sex and demolishing the remnant of our energy supply chain. The real Midnight’s Children will be back in control.