If Salman Rushdie, now bearing 10 stab wounds, loses one eye, he will still see further than most | Opinion | Richard Flanagan
When, in February 1989, I heard from a friend of the fatwa put on Salman Rushdie, it made no sense. When I heard the news on Saturday that the now elderly writer had been horrifically attacked,The idea of writing as freedom, of freedom of expression being the bedrock of all democratic freedoms has, over the decades since, been slowly corroded.
And yet now I can see he spoke from a bedrock of experience of being the hunted. Everything went back to the fundamental question that terrible experience raises: were you free to say what you thought or were you, under the threat of death and violence, unfree? As Rushdie’s beliefs seemed to clarify and simplify into something inexorable and undeniable, the stakes continued rising. A violence of language became the form of everyday publication on social media. Writers were now routinely told to stay in their lane, to not write about this, to not comment on that. If, unlike his friend Christopher Hitchens, his politics did not swerve to the right, he remained willing to call out attacks on free speech no matter from what side they came.
Yet Rushdie also recognised that while cancel culture was “a slippery slope”, in many countries writers and journalists died for what they wrote, and such violent suppression was a far more concerning issue.
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