Stephen Fry is Right - We Need to Grow Up

If his critics are right, and if gradation and shades of grey either do not or should not exist, then I have the same right as a victim of a brutal gang rape to be outraged by comments made by Stephen Fry in an interview with US chat show host David Rubin. The same right? No, the same obligation. If his critics are right, I should by now be writhing, crippled by anger. I should have been hurt; I should have been triggered.

For, if his critics are right, rape is rape and abuse is abuse and not only are there no questions left to be asked or answered but anyone stupid, anyone insensitive enough to doubt that inherent truth is a monster; a relic of a less progressive age; a hideous ogre.

So I should be triggered.  I should be. We are all supposed to read from the same Newspeak dictionary, that wonderful thing that frees us from the pain of difficult thoughts by depriving us of the language used to express them.

I have been abused; the victim, I bellyfeel, of sexcrime; and damn the blackwhiters and crimethinkers who duckspeak otherwise.

It – this abuse - has happened on no less than four occasions. Sex whilst one party is inebriated, intoxicated and incapable of giving proper consent, is rape, is it not? That, the exploitation of my own past-penchant for illegal and mind-altering substances, accounts for three of the four; three ‘days-after’ spent regretting to my core that I was too fucked to say no.

The fourth occurred long before. It would be more accurate to call it the first. I was twelve or thirteen, perhaps fourteen, and visiting my uncle in his care home. It was his birthday; we took him a cake and balloons (of which he was once terrified; the chance of bangs and loud noises triggers those occupying his place on the spectrum but he grew up and away from that fear). We were to spend time celebrating with him and his carers and his fellow residents.

Whilst most went into the kitchen, to cut the cake with deliberately blunted knives, I stayed in another room with two of those fellow residents. One was a woman rocking quietly and with earnest intent in the corner. I don’t mind saying that I found her disconcerting; I did. And the other was a man, huge and black. Not fat, just huge. And I found him endearing by comparison. He looked kind and friendly, smiling absent-mindedly as he turned some toy over in his hands.

I was about to leave the room and find the others when that man stood up. I assumed he’d had the same idea and I waited for him to leave first.

Except that he wasn’t leaving, was he. No, he was walking over to me and, pressed up against the wall by his bulk, I felt one large hand, warm and calloused, find its way inside the waistband of my trousers.

It didn’t last long; the hand was hurriedly withdrawn when the rocking woman screeched from the corner. “No! What have we told you about touching!”

And I left the room, nonplussed and a little breathless but otherwise unaffected. I’ve never forgotten the experience and I’d never want to. Looking back, and thankful to that rocking woman who had so alarmed me, I think it is probably the first time the old adage about appearances was made real to me. They can be deceiving. The value of that experience vastly overmatches the occasional chill I get from the memory of it.

I have a vivid imagination. I could ponder here, in writing, what might have happened had the rocking woman not been there. I could speculate as to what might have occurred had I encountered that man not in a care home with my family but in an empty house or a secluded alleyway. It would have been unpleasant. Dare I say worse?

No, I dare not say worse, because that would imply that there are different forms of abuse or severities of rape. And that would be inconceivable, unconscionable in this enlightened day and this progressive age where we are all survivors; where there is no acknowledgeable qualitative difference between an unwanted hand on your cock and a rape at the hands of Jimmy Savile or an entire Somali militia.

It is as if we now live in a culture dedicated to the propagation of trauma. Whereas once we would have looked for ways to overcome what has happened to us, we are now encouraged to feel it as keenly as we can and for as long as we can; to let it define us; to adopt it as an integral part of our identity. We are encouraged to free associate with feeling and to expand our own to encompass the pain and sadness of others.

I say that what happened to me was bad but that it does not begin to compare with what has happened to others. But this new movement would have me say that it does compare, moreover that is the same and so I should feel worse about it. When there is no gradation, when we do not consider relativity in these matters or discriminate between cases, we are forced to elevate the banal and the moderate in order that we not exclude the extreme from this single, unified standard we now operate by. It is all a case, as Fry decries, of black and white, Good and Evil, with all moral nuance dispensed with.

I don’t doubt that this movement, and related cases like #Rhodesmustfall which encourages black students to inherit offences against their ancestors, is sincere in its belief that such conflations are in our best interests and that they serve the common good. It takes a sincere belief in good to breed the most sinister and harmful thoughts and ideologies. As Voltaire is thought to have said “l meglio è l'inimico del bene;” They make the best the enemy of the good.

But to understand that is to understand the need to fight against it, to know that the sacrifice of nuance and of good sense and intellectual rigour contributes only to the conflagration of the crimes these movements rail against. Seldom is it a commitment to harm and to evil that drives authoritarian regimes to suppress dissent; they do it because they know that they are right and the dissenters just don’t get it!

But which of the two most resembles the Ogre? It is not Stephen Fry, who argues against the trivialisation of rape that his opponents accuse him of and is undoubtedly better equipped than they of the moral arsenal needed to condemn it. No, the Ogres are the reactionary forces that believe that they are right regardless of their ability to justify it, and who prefer to fall for the easy temptation of censorship than take the difficult path to enlightenment.

As Auden said:

“The Ogre does what ogres can,

Deeds quite impossible for man,

But one prize is beyond his reach:

The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plane,

Among its desperate and slain,

The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,

While drivel gushes from his lips.”

Saudi Arabia is Going to Execute a Poet.

On the Perversions of our ‘Allies’ and a Defence of a Poet.

(This piece was originally written for The Heythrop Lion's 'THIS' Magazine

 

There are few occasions on which the United Nations is able to disgrace itself more effectively than when it comes to making appointments to committees and sinecures. Iraq, for example, was due to take the chairmanship of the special committee on disarmament in 2003; a move prohibited not by any common sense on the part of the U.N. but because the US-led intervention in that same year made such an appointment impossible. Iran has recently been re-elected to a seat on the U.N’s Commission on the Status of Women. Robert Mugabe, the subject of a wide-ranging travel ban, was asked to be an ambassador for tourism in 2012, and the Human Rights Council  - which counts amongst its membership such bastions of human rights as Pakistan and Uganda and the Holy See – is currently chaired by Saudi Arabia.

It should come as no surprise that the U.N., which makes no firm commitment to anything save the moral imperative to create ever more useless, ever more profligate committees, will express no opinion on the matter of Saudi Arabia’s chairmanship. Rather more depressing, though, is the silence on the part of our own government (which, by taking part in tactical vote-trading with Saudi Arabia, ensured that country’s elevation to its current lofty position) on the crimes against humans and human rights being committed almost every day by the head of the UNHRC.

The Kingdom’s recent history – and by recent I speak of the past few months – is a hideous collection of sundered heads and bloodied bodies. The execution of the prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was at least granted some coverage in the Western media, though the Obama and Cameron administrations declined to condemn it in anything but uncertain terms. The sentencing of the human rights blogger Raif Badawi to 10 years in prison and one thousand lashes (a punishment that has had to be staggered given the very real chance that it might have killed him) has received less attention than that, possibly due to the fact that it did not cause embassies to be closed or burned, but it, too, has been covered.

But whilst the first example can be understood in the context of Saudi Arabia’s prosecution of its not-so-cold war with Iran, and both cases can be seen as the desperate actions of a regime seeking to re-establish sure-footing following the death of King Abdullah and the destabilizing effects of Islamic State (and how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!), it is the impending execution of the Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh which speaks most clearly to the character of the House of Saud.

It serves no purpose as an act of geo-realpolitik. Nor is it part of a wider attempt at suppressing political dissent. The sentence of death in this case, for the related but distinct crimes of apostasy and ‘spreading blasphemous ideas’ in his art (charges he denies), are symptoms of a deep-rooted loathing of art and music and freedom of thought and expression; a loathing which is a necessary consequence of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi or Salafist iteration of Sharia. It should be of great concern to all of us that that is the iteration which we in the West are made to import into our own countries, often through Saudi-printed and Saudi-approved copies of the Quran with which we stock our prison libraries, and also in the form of ‘generous’ donations to mosques and madrassas made by the Saudi state. The exporting of evangelization and religious coercion, often in radicalizing forms, is one of the largest and least spoken-of facets of Saudi trade policy.  

(And it is no coincidence that the same aversion to aesthetics and thought can also be found in wide swathes of Pakistan, in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan and in the territories in Iraq and Syria governed by Islamic State. But, of course, it has nothing to do with Islam.)

I cannot attest to the quality or beauty or insightfulness of Ashraf Fayadh’s poetry. I cannot read his works in the language in which they were written and I am increasingly of the opinion that poetry can never be properly translated without suffering some essential loss. I cannot even support Ashraf’s claim that he is innocent of the charges levelled against him. Fortunately, I do not need to. For it should go without saying that apostasy and blasphemy are not considered crimes under any sane system of justice, and the decisions by the Saudi authorities to deny Ashraf anything like a fair trial, not to mention access to a lawyer, are so obviously in contravention of international law and of human rights as enshrined by the UNHRC – yes, again, the very body now chaired from Riyadh – that there really is, on our side, no case to defend.

But there is undoubtedly a case to be prosecuted, and every passing day on which the wider international community remains silent is one in which our supposed commitment to support human rights and values is side-lined by spreadsheet morality; by concerns over arms deals and oil exports. Remember when, following the attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the streets of Paris were treated to a parade of world leaders, all of whom voiced their commitment to uphold the rights of freedom of thought and expression? Well, where are they now? Where is their support now?!

It should be beholden upon all of us, and not just those who claim to speak for us, to combat the forces who prefer and who act in the hopes of achieving an unfeeling, unthinking, beauty-less world. But it should be particularly important for us, we subjects of this disunited kingdom, to speak more loudly and with an especially firm commitment to purpose in matters such as this. For we have known its antithesis, and it has cost us dearly in the past.

The case of Ashraf Fayadh bears the hallmarks of the affairs of both Salman Rushdie and Oscar Wilde. The facts of the former should be so well-known that they need no restating here – the sentencing to death of a writer for the crime of writing is abhorrent to us, isn’t it? Laws against blasphemy and ‘offensiveness’ are loathsome and infantile, are they not?

But the second might perhaps require something more by way of explanation. Indeed, its inclusion here caused me to think and think again, but I have concluded that it is right to include it and the point it makes is more than salient. For the ruin of Oscar Wilde, like the attack on Mr. Fayadh, are both proofs that can be used against W.H. Auden’s fatuous claim that ‘poetry makes nothing happen.’ And both are examples of individuals sent down by forms of love. To quote from Alfred Douglas’s fateful poem: a love ‘that dare not speak its name.’

The ‘Shame’ spoken of and felt (and, yes, acted upon) by the likes of Wilde and Bosie, which was a crime (and remains a crime in places like Saudi Arabia), is just as natural and vital to us as the ‘crime’ for which Ashraf Fayadh has been condemned. It is natural to us because it is of our nature! The dignity of our species, in other words, demands that we use and are able to use, free from fear of punishment, our ability to think and to write what we think, and to portray beauty, and to practice it and feel it with all the pain and reverence and hard work befitting any fundamental Love. To deny the freedom to think is to deny the freedom to love. They are, in that sense, two forms of the same virtue. And it allows one to accuse the House of Saud, and religion, as being opposed to love. Which it is; which they both are.

I have penned a poem – The Ballad of Burning - which shares its sentiment with that expressed within this piece.  I had thought to close with it. But as there is a place set aside in this august journal – a poets’ corner, of a kind - for works of rhyme and rhythm and metre (and sometimes those that lack the same, but that is an argument for another time), I have decided instead to close with the words of another.

Part of the title of this piece is taken (and then reworked) from Percy Bysshe-Shelley’s polemic, published posthumously, entitled ‘A defence of Poetry.’  It is amongst the most eloquent cases ever made for art and for the meaning and the importance of art. I encourage the reader to peruse it in its entirety, but it closes as follows:

“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

The point, if I have done my job, is clear. And I hope that you will join with me, and with the good people at PEN International, and Amnesty International, and the innumerable poets and writers and musicians and ordinary human beings in doing what our government is too cowardly to do on our behalf: condemn this sentence, condemn this crime, and work for the freedom of Mr. Ashraf Fayadh.

Tory Peer in Call for 'Practical' SRE in Primary Schools.

Conservative peer in call for ‘practical’ sex ed lessons.

The Conservative peer Lord Sleaze is to push ahead with his controversial SRE campaign despite widespread criticism of his proposals. In a speech tomorrow, Lord Sleaze is expected to call for ‘practical instruction’ to be included as part of a scheme entailing mandatory SRE education for primary school pupils.

TNN contacted Mr. Sleaze, who had this to say on the subject.

“Now look. I know this proposal has its critics, but I tell you: I went to a private school; one that was free to pursue its own agenda as regards sex education. They accepted the need for practical lessons as a matter of course. And, clearly, it’s done me no harm. Look at me now!”

Mr. Sleaze, who attended the Bernard Law Catholic School for Boys in Boston, Massachusetts,  before pursuing his political career in the United Kingdom, added that “though the Conservative party is obviously not in favour of lowering the age of consent, or encouraging that kind of thing in general, it is undeniably true that young people are not sufficiently educated in these matters. Education is vital if one is to hold a sensible, informed opinion on anything.”

Mr. Sleaze was unwilling to comment on the reluctance of parliamentarians to introduce compulsory politics, ethics and citizenship classes into the national curriculum.

Critics of his proposal have claimed that primary school children are too young to be educated in matters relating to sex, let alone involved in practical demonstrations. However, the notoriously outspoken peer has been unrepentant. 

“Most of my critics have mothers and fathers who were fourteen or fifteen at the time of conception. So, yes, I suppose I should declare an interest in this matter, as many of these thoughtless cretins wouldn’t have been born had my proposals been enforced two or three decades ago.”

Lord Sleaze has made the news in recent weeks after being linked with the loss of a Home Office dossier containing information of suspected paedophiles within the political system. However, he does not look kindly on those who accuse him of wrongdoing.

“This is exactly why [Home Secretary] Theresa May’s proposed reforms on free speech and the human rights act are necessary,” he said. “This nonsense. This lurid speculation. Of course I wasn’t involved in Operation Cover—err, in this matter. The loss of this document is tragic, to be sure, but to suggest that I had anything to do with it?! Nonsense. Sedition. Seditious nonsense. I’m as fervent an advocate for free speech as anyone you’ll meet, but free speech comes with responsibility. Namely the responsibility not to slander me.”

Lord Sleaze’s speech to UKMBLA UK will be broadcast live on TNNTV from 13:00 tomorrow.

The real threat to free speech? It’s us.

The real threat to free speech? It’s us.

 “All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.”

George Bernard Shaw is too seldom referenced in discussions on free speech. This is a shame, for two good reasons.

Firstly, his statements on the subject are useful because they highlight the value of criticism. Simply put: “It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize one's uncles.” 

Secondly, his record should serve to educate one on a dangerous compulsion. Allowing criticism of views and ideas he disliked, Shaw’s support for Stalin, ‘moderate’ eugenics and the doctrine of Lysenkoism is a lesson in the uncritical. Partisanship is one thing; wilful blindness is quite another.

It is worth remembering that Shaw was writing at a time when cultural and ideological differences between East and West could manifest themselves in any place and at any time. Lysenko was to the East what Mendel was to the West: it was not uncommon to hear or to meet someone who genuinely believed that there was a difference between Eastern science and Western science, or communist science and capitalist science. But whilst Lysenko’s theories were eventually shown to be little more than nonsense wrapped in a thin layer of plausibility, the years in which it was the sponsored pseudoscience of the Stalinist state (which imposed  its ‘official science’ on large parts of the Eastern bloc) had already done immeasurable damage to knowledge and to society in the Soviet Union. Not so much a brain drain as a brain purge, the 1948 declaration that the whole field of genetics was nothing more than “bourgeois pseudoscience” led to the arrest, imprisonment and even the execution of an astonishingly large number of once-prominent and celebrated scientists.

That Shaw expressed much of his support for Stalinism in the years after Arthur Koestler had stumbled out of love with the regime, and after Victor Serge had been imprisoned by the state he once worked for, and after Rosa Luxemburg had penned many vital criticisms of the decline of Leninism, is something for which the English author deserves to be criticised. Serge, the man who exposed the Tsarist origins of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and who may well have coined the term ‘totalitarianism’, did not have the benefit of the same hindsight that could and should have been enjoyed by Shaw. It makes his criticisms of the secret police and of Stalinism in general all the more remarkable. And Orwell, who was by no means silent on the ills of capitalism or the follies of ‘The West’, could never be accused of having overlooked the equivalent flaws of ‘The East’. Much of what we now know about Stalinist Russia we owe to those brave individuals who did write, who did speak up, and who did not censor themselves out of fear for their own safety, much less of causing offense.

Judgements on the critiques of the two systems that originated on either side of the iron curtain could only be made after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War; only after the communication of ideas ceased to be counterrevolutionary; only after introspection and self-criticism ceased to be so wholly un-American.  Shaw would have been wise to stay true to his principle: ‘the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.’

If the Cold War was a clash of civilizations, then we are now living through a clash between civilization and its antithesis. Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, Jabhat al-Nusra: these are not glimpses of a proto-civilization informed by an alternative ideology. They are the sworn and self-professed enemies of the very premise of civilization.

When we grant even a modicum of respect to their nihilistic worldview, we assume that they are an expression – however vulgar, however loathsome, however perverted - of an idea that is fundamentally equal to the foundation of any civilization. And in doing so, we insult the memory of the many peoples, societies and cultures that once occupied and still occupy what we now misguidedly call ‘the Muslim world’. These, after all, are the people who destroyed the ancient statues of Buddha at Bamiyan, who bombed the al-Askari Mosque, who burned museums and their priceless collections and to whom countless historical documents and artefacts have been lost because their very existence was deemed to be an implicit criticism of Islam. We see a good deal of misplaced handwringing after attacks on ‘our own’ culture, but the masochists – those who prefer to blame Salman Rushdie, Jyllands-Posten, South Park and Charlie Hebdo than defend them – tend to have very little to say about the cultural atrocities inflicted on societies ‘over there’, atrocities that are not committed by ‘us’ but by the ‘them’ that we supposedly oppress and provoke.

But countries and regions and the legacy of the people who did so much to preserve the relics of ancient Greece and Persia, whilst the forces of Christendom were doing their best to wipe all traces of pre-Christian art and culture from the world, are not and will never be represented by the bin-Ladenists, by the Salafists and the Wahhabis, or by the followers of Khomenei or Zarqawi or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. And if we want, as we should, and as our friends in Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan certainly do, to be allowed to enjoy the art and the writing and the music and the poetry of the region – whether that be the old, like Rumi and Tabrizi, or the new, like Khaled Hosseini and Kanan Makiya – then it is vital that we do not lessen our own commitment to freedom of speech and expression in some stupid attempt to appease the fanatics. Instead, we should hold to it and fight for it all the more, not just for us but for those who lack those rights.

Yet in Europe and the United Kingdom we are increasingly being told that we have a duty to be silent. That we have a responsibility not to offend. That we are morally obliged to keep our criticisms, thoughts, jokes and ideas to ourselves. As though the other side would simply disarm and go away if we only stopped publishing cartoons! Specifically cartoons depicting a certain illiterate peasant who lied about a revelation that never took place, and who built on that lie a military campaign with the aim of creating an empire. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions,” and there are few propositions more unintelligible than the premise of religion.

The trend is particularly worrying on this side of the Atlantic. Our lack of a written  constitution and a codified bill of rights, coupled with and partly caused by the position of the monarchy and its relationship with government, and exacerbated by our continuing involvement with a European Union that has no interest in protecting free speech and no constitution of its own that protects it, leaves us in a uniquely vulnerable situation. It adds significant and unnecessary weight to a burden we seem reluctant to bear. It requires us to stand as the sole protectors of our most important right, and the only defense against ourselves.

This is an exceptionally dangerous state of affairs. George Orwell’s essay, The Freedom of the Park, makes the point that the real threat to free speech in this country comes not from a capricious and totalitarian government but from a capricious and tyrannical compulsion toward self-censorship.

 “The relative freedom which we enjoy depends on public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech... if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them. The notion that certain opinions cannot safely be allowed a hearing is growing.”

This can be allied with another of Thomas Jefferson’s statements—“the only security of all is in a free press”—to make, in summary, the case: If we are truly concerned with free and equal rights, not just for white middle-class men on this island but for everyone, then it is vitally important that we do not allow the censorship, by ourselves or by anyone else, of thoughts and ideas that offend a minority, and especially not the majority. Noam Chomsky is right when he points out that “Goebbels was in favour of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favour of free speech, then you’re in favour of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favour of free speech.” 

This is an effective summary of Milton, of Mill, of Paine, of Voltaire, of Jefferson, and of the many others besides, whose work forms the scaffold on which the principle of free speech and a free press has been erected.

To adopt anything less than complete adherence to what those in the United States call First Amendment absolutism is to pre-emptively condemn the very people you think you are trying to protect. (The irony of that title is that, as Christopher Hitchens so eloquently put it, “It commits us to an unshakable principle while it obliquely reminds us that absolutism is what the freedom of speech actually makes impossible.”) The point is well made in the dialogue between Roper and Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All seasons. When Roper tells More that he would happily cut down every law in England to get after the devil, More issues the following response.

 “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? ...Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”

For the avoidance of doubt, I am fully aware of the logical consequences of this position. And I’ll make it very clear: I have no time for hate speech laws of any kind. The Austrian government might have congratulated itself for arresting the historian and holocaust denier David Irving for thought crime, but I would defend his right to hold, speak and publish his views even if he had no redeeming features whatever.

Nor do I have time for nonsense non-words like ‘Islamophobia’, the wilful conflation of race (which doesn’t exist) and religion, which is designed with the express purpose of silencing criticism of the latter. The reader is welcome to attack me with speech or in writing and on any topic they choose. It takes a lot to make me cry. But I reserve the right to reply in kind and I reserve the right to attack any person, any idea, any religion, any ideology, at any place and at any time.

Again, and whether it is an expression of self-flagellation or an imposition from outside: “The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.” We may hope that this condition is reasserted and enforced by the governments – our own amongst them – that seem to be denying its proud entailments. But we must first recognise and acknowledge its value ourselves.

#JeSuisCharlie: A View from London

#JeSuisCharlie: A View from London

I am, as I write this, standing at the edge of a small crowd of people gathered on the steps of the National Gallery in London. It is one of a series of such gatherings now taking place around the world; a show of solidarity with the journalists and cartoonists of the magazine Charlie Hebdo who were murdered by Muslim fanatics yesterday.

It also purports to be a demonstration in support of free speech and expression. Paris briefly became the latest battleground in the fight between free speech and the forces of jihad, and it is a relief to see people on the streets in support of right side of that dichotomy. Never mind that many of them will not have read the magazine in question, and never mind that many of those gathered here, if they had seen some of Charlie Hebdo’s more risqué cartoons and caricatures, would have, under other circumstances, decried the magazine as a racist screed not worth the paper it’s printed on. Tonight at least, the principle is the right one.

The demonstration began some time before I arrived. I overheard one reporter as she was speaking to her camera; apparently there had been as many as seven hundred people in the crowd before I arrived. And there are still over a hundred of them here now, some holding pens and notepads, some holding cartoons, and some holding signs and placards bearing the Twitter hashtag that has come to represent the movement: #JeSuisCharlie.

The reverent atmosphere here feels slightly out of place. The magazine in question, and its spiritual counterparts in countries around the world - the likes of South Park, the offices of which were attacked in 2010, and Jyllands-Posten, the Danish magazine that caused its country so much trouble when, in 2006, it printed a set of cartoons that were deemed offensive by rabid mobs in Pakistan and elsewhere – celebrate irreverence. That is the crime for which they have been deemed worthy of death and destruction, and that is the reason their offices are now, and have been for many years, under heavy police protection. These are the sorts of magazines that would shout to interrupt a vigil, and so, with that in mind, this seems to me to be a very quiet demonstration in support of free speech.

It is, though, pleasingly diverse. There will undoubtedly be people who want to excuse these attacks or misdirect the blame for them; people to whom the notion of moral responsibility is alien; people who will look at the attacks in Paris, and those that have happened before and will almost certainly happen again, and claim that they are in some way excused by our own actions. “We had it coming,” in other words, for our criminal governments and our oppression of Muslims and our drone strikes and our obsession with oil. Well, tell that the man who goes by the name of Ken, and who is one of four or five people here bearing the flags of the Kurdish YPG, and its women’s’ wing the YPJ. They have placed a sign on the floor, adding to the pile of newspapers, comic strips, pens, candles and placards, which reads: “The Kurds will never forget you.” These men and women are themselves an counterargument against the nihilists and the masochists who believe these attacks were a just response to imperialism.

I asked Ken whether he wanted to issue his own pre-emptive response to that line of argument, and he duly obliged. He told me he believed that what motivated him to stand there, in the cold and the wet, holding his flag, was the same thing that motivated his brothers and sisters in Iraq and Kurdistan. He is not in a position to take up arms, but he felt obligated to show, in some way, his support for the values that motivate the Kurdish and Iraqi forces in their fight against barbarism. And he made the point, so often missed by idiot commentators like Glenn Greenwald, that the fight against the likes of al-Qaeda and Islamic State – the fight against Islamic extremism in general – is not one of foreign imperialists against beleaguered freedom fighters, as the likes of Michael Moore would have us believe, any more than it is a regional, territorial struggle between competing tribes. The Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting against Islamic State are, as Ken rightly says, fighting for us in a war that much of our own public would rather not acknowledge or engage with; the war between the civilized world and the forces of jihad who would see it all burn.

It is not a conflict in which our allies in the region enjoy the unqualified support of Western governments, and it hasn't been for some considerable time. Since the US-led intervention became a bungled and, for then-President Bush, a near impeachable farce of an occupation, public opinion in the US and the UK has been marshalled far too easily by those from the ostensibly anti-war movement; those who spoke for far too many people when, in their guise as MoveOn.org, they glibly labelled the impressive General Petraeus “General Betray Us.”

The same bold cowardice provided ammunition for much of the success the Democrats enjoyed in the 2008 election, and was still seen as a sufficient giver of momentum when the Obama administration chose to sabotage the talks with the Iraqi government over the renewal of the Status of Forces Agreement. (I have yet to see anyone make the argument that the complete withdrawal of forces from Iraq made the current crisis less likely.)

But we do occasionally see tentative shifts in the direction of good sense. The crimes committed by the likes of Islamic State have, at the very least, deprived George Galloway of some of the platforms he once enjoyed. And time will tell whether this attack – an attack that took place not in some remote part of the world but in the capital city of France – will move us toward a little righteous blowback of our own. (By blowback, I do not mean the unfortunate and all but inevitable support for Front National, or the Pegida movement in Berlin.) The response has, thus far, been a vast improvement from that seen in 1989 and 2006.

But, still, many high profile news outlets have been reporting on the story – a story generated by images, from an attack which was itself a response to those images, and which has taken place in the age of the image – without showing the images in question. I have asked the question of three different media organisations, including the BBC and ITV: Will you show the cartoons when you report on this story (as the likes of Slate magazine have, to their credit) or opt for the cowards' approach; the one taken by outlets from CNN to The Telegraph? I almost succeeded in cornering Nick Robinson of the BBC, but he was dismissing all questions with the disappointing stock response: “Sorry, I'm in a rush.” The cameramen, who were more talkative, were unable to tell me whether their employers would stand up for the freedom of speech and expression and, as it transpired, the answer was disappointing.

As I finish writing this, I am sitting on the tube. I have looked at stories on the websites of those organisations I have already mentioned; I have not seen a single cartoon.

This is not brave, and this is not 'appropriate', this is capitulation to those who, at their most moderate, believe that free speech is licensed on condition of banality; on condition that it does not offend. Well, brothers and sisters: fuck that. I hope you agree with the sentiment, but it doesn't – or shouldn't – matter either way.