Again, the fans failed to kill Salman Rushdie. The first thing we have to admire is his incredible resilience: the fallout from the August 12 attack is yet to be seen and we can rest assured that Rushdie’s life will be turned upside down forever, but he survives 10 stab wounds – in the Throat, on the liver, in an eye that can lose – is not within everyone’s reach. Rushdie, of course, as everyone knows, had already survived a decade of persecution from a fundamentalist regime whose killers were ubiquitous; the conditions in which he lived during those years would have staggered another, and it always struck me as a miracle that Rushdie not only emerged from constant threat safe and sound, but was able to function with a halfway normal to get on with life. And that’s what he has done: he continues to write his novels and conduct his private life, and also in public defends the same freedoms for which he was sentenced to death with a courage for which the rest of us thank him.
I wrote “the others” but the rigorous truth is that this is not the case: not everyone finds it obvious that Rushdie deserves our unconditional support and there are still those who do not understand the attacks he has faced condone or justify 30 years. I am not referring to the fundamentalists, as is obvious, nor to those societies which appear like democracies from the outside but whose mentality is in fact that of a totalitarian system, but to what Rushdie has dubbed “the But Brigades”. . Yes, these militants say, freedom of expression is fine, but not when it says something that offends me; Yes, I defend freedom of conscience, but up to a point. These voices have accompanied Rushdie since the 1989 fatwa, and it is chilling to read Joseph Anton, the extraordinary book in which Rushdie tells of his most difficult years, and to remember how many writers or journalists – people who are living in freedom of expression or by virtue of it – did not consider it unacceptable that a religious figure should urge his faithful to murder a novelist for having put into words an act of conceit.
We’ve heard these voices everywhere in recent years, not just after the Charlie Hebdo murders. And I asked myself: are we facing the same phenomenon as in 1989? It is possible, and worrying, to read the attack on Rushdie as the natural result of a new process: the installation among us of an intolerant and curious mentality that is not responsive to the fatwa but corresponds in large part to our times. After all, Rushdie’s attacker was born 10 years after the publication of The Satanic Verses and was far removed – not just literally – from Ayatollah Khomeini’s world: his world is the world of hate speech turned into sad routine, radicalization through social networks, freedom debate stifled by the fear of annulment and above all of death threats, which everyone directs against everyone with scandalous impunity and which occur more often than we think. JK Rowling suffered them last week without going any further for rejecting the attack on Rushdie. “Don’t worry, you’re next,” wrote a certain Meer Asif Aziz on Twitter. Rowling asked Twitter for assistance and received this response: “After reviewing the available information, we believe that the content you reported does not violate any of Twitter’s rules.”
In our world, the air in which we express ourselves is becoming increasingly toxic. It is a world of rampant censorship, a censorship that we accept or have become accustomed to because there is no other means, and it can be said that freedom of expression, or what we used to call those words, has one has changed its content in our days. : The debate over what can be thought and said is no longer the same, and I won’t be the first to suggest, for example, that the Satanic Verses would probably not be published today (for very different reasons) as it would be Roman like Lolita will not be published. The most serious thing is that this censorship is no longer exercised by political powers or religious authorities, but by each of the citizens, and both the citizens and the companies in which we meet – political, economic, whatever – we make decisions say or remain silent about what we do based on the possible controversy and what may cause it: bullying, harassment, cancellation or violence.
In The Betrayed Testaments, Milan Kundera (one of the most eloquent defenders of the Satanic Verses, incidentally) speaks of the novel as the privileged place where we override our moral judgment. The moral of the novel, says Kundera, contradicts the human habit of condemning everyone “immediately, incessantly” and above all “before understanding”. “From the wisdom of the novel,” he continues, “this fiery tendency to judge is the most despicable folly, the most pernicious evil.” I’ve always thought those words “fervent willingness to judge” to someone not on Twitter has spoken comes closest to describing what’s happening on Twitter. This is the atmosphere in which we live today, and there is no telling what degradation of our freedoms such a state of affairs will lead to.
These days I remember the words Rushdie said before the Catalan PEN a few years ago: “Who has the power to tell the stories of our lives and to determine not only what stories can be told, but how they can be told can be told? How must they be counted? Obviously there are stories that we all live in, the story of the culture and language that we live in, the story that we live in, and indeed the ethical structures that we live in, one of which is religion. Who should have power over these stories? The freedom to tell our story as we understand or imagine it, and to do so without fear of censorship or attack, is at stake. Rushdie always defended that, even if no one asked for it anymore, even if everyone understood that he remained silent on these matters to the end of his days.
And no, he hasn’t. Word has come out that last Friday, before the attack that nearly killed him, Rushdie was preparing to publicly defend the United States’ need to provide sanctuary to Ukrainian writers, and I recalled, almost by accident, that I was him so: in a PEN meeting, which dealt with the protection of writers and journalists from the authoritarian and censorship activities of the Chinese government. Aside from his essays and public speaking, the images I have of Rushdie are inseparable from his tenacity in defending the ideas in which the rest of us live, especially when it can help others. She has done so while the world around her has been changing, but for that very reason the brutal attack to which she fell victim should not only deserve our full rejection but also serve as a reminder: change the enemies of liberties themselves, but they do not disappear.
John Gabriel Vasquez He’s a writer. His latest book is The Peace Disagreements (Alfaguara).
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