Thursday, May 21, 2015

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

In speech to US students, novelist says free expression sustains all other freedoms and without it ‘democracy is a sham’

Ian McEwan.
‘Being offended is not to be confused with a state of grace’ ... Ian McEwan. Photograph: Karen Robinson
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”.
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