Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash (Atlantic Books, £20)
Freedom of speech has always been a vexed, even dangerous, business. Socrates questioned the gods and earned himself a swift trip across the Styx. Here we are, 2,400 years later, and western liberal democracies still struggle over how much free speech is healthy, whether there should be any sort of bridle on it and, now, how to deal with the ever-growing electronic media. Is shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre worse than a Daily Mail story blaming working women for the rise in autism, or Fox News insisting that Birmingham has succumbed to radical Islam to the point that non-Muslims don’t dare breach the A4540? Should govern ment suppress “offensive” speech, say, Chris Ofili’s painting of the Virgin Mary as a black woman with a var nished lump of elephant dung on one breast, David Irving’s Holocaust-denying rants, or Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad? Is the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford a hurtful endorse ment of imperialism or merely a historical artefact? And who decides?