Ian McEwan pays impassioned tribute to 'Charlie Hebdo's courageous writers'

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/20/ian-mcewan-tribute-charlie-hebdo-courageous-writers

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Ian McEwan has mounted a fierce defence of free speech in an address to students at a US college, telling his audience that “freedom of expression sustains all the other freedoms we enjoy”, and that “without free speech, democracy is a sham”.

Giving the commencement address at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania earlier this week, the Booker prize-winning author said that free speech was “the lifeblood, the essential condition of the liberal education you’ve just received”, but that its condition is “desperate” in many places around the world.

“Across almost the entire Middle East, free thought can bring punishment or death, from governments or from street mobs or motivated individuals,” he told students at the arts college, in a speech printed in full in Time magazine. “The same is true in Bangladesh, Pakistan, across great swathes of Africa. These past years the public space for free thought in Russia has been shrinking.”

In China, said McEwan, “to censor daily the internet alone, the Chinese government employs as many as fifty thousand bureaucrats – a level of thought repression unprecedented in human history”.

But the novelist also highlighted issues of free speech in the US, pointing to the case of women’s rights advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose honorary degree from Brandeis University was withdrawn over comments she had made which were critical of Islam, and to the “Charlie Hebdo affair”, where writers withdrew in protest from a PEN American Center gala intended to honour the murdered journalists who worked at the French magazine.

“American PEN exists to defend and promote free speech. What a disappointment that so many American authors could not stand with courageous fellow writers and artists at a time of tragedy,” said McEwan.

“The magazine has been scathing about racism. It’s also scathing about organised religion and politicians and it might not be to your taste – but that’s when you should remember your Voltaire,” he added, referencing the lines which are attributed to the Candide author: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

The British novelist called on students to remember that “religion and atheism, and all thought systems, all grand claims to truth, must be open to criticism, satire, even, sometimes, mockery”, and that “being offended is not to be confused with a state of grace; it’s the occasional price we all pay for living in an open society”.

McEwan also told graduates that they were now standing “on one of life’s various summits”, warning them not to “be taken in by those who tell you that life is short”, because it’s “inordinately long”.

“I was into my twenties when my mother astonished me by saying wistfully, ‘I’d give anything to be 45 again.’ Forty-five sounded like old age to me then. Now I see what she meant,” he said. “Most of you have more than 20 years before you peak. Barring all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic meteor collision, a substantial minority of you will get a toe in the door of the next century – a very wrinkled, arthritic toe, but the same toe you’re wearing now. You have a lot of years in the bank.”