Sean-DeButts's video: Salman Rushdie is Sick of Talking about Free Speech Humorous

Salman Rushdie answered my question regarding the decline of free speech in the West on Monday, Oct. 7, 2013 at Town Hall Seattle. He was showcasing his memoir, "Joseph Anton", which chronicles his years after the fatwa. TRANSCRIPT: QUESTION: I'm very much a believer in free speech. I agree with the Cato letters that it's the great bulwark of liberty, and I think one of the most disturbing things that's happening in the world right now is how free speech is being eroded across the West. America seems to be a possible exception. In the name of political correctness you see anti-blasphemy laws rising up in Europe, people being arrested for making tweets about Islam. Do you think that there's any hope for the West? Can we turn this around, or is America going to be kind of like the last bastion of free speech? SALMAN RUSHDIE: I think you're quite right to be concerned. I mean, I'm concerned, too. And your answer is it's very important to stand our ground ... I'm kind of sick of talking about free speech [audience laughs]. I'd rather talk about interesting stories I haven't told or would like to tell ... but the point about free speech is it's the liberty without all the other liberties cease to exist. There's no point to having freedom of assembly, if you don't have free expression when you assemble. There's no real way for having justice without free expression. Then you have like kangaroo courts, et cetera. So, the reason it's such an important thing is it's the bedrock of everything else. And you're quite right that it's being eroded, and it is very often being eroded be well meaning liberal opinion, not just attacks from the Right. Those are there too, of course. I'm sure there are plenty of people in the Republican Party who'd prefer that we just shut up and did what we're told [audience laughs]. But there is an attack from the left, which is entirely because people feel that this question of offendedness, of offensive, should become a limiting point on thought, [that] something which offends people should not be said. The trouble with that is everything offends somebody. And who gets to say what offending things should be banned ... I find novels by Dan Brown a little bit [audience laughs] offensive to my sense of literary style, [audience continues laughing] and yet I feel that he [inaudible] properly to write ... you're absolutely right that there is that emotion, and it's done entirely, or very often, for what appear to be virtuous reasons, but they're not virtuous reasons, they're very dangerous reasons. And you know, there's a great line at the beginning of Saul Bellow's novel, "The Adventures Of Augie March", in which, Saul Bellow, speaking through Augie's voice, says there's is no fineness, or accuracy of suppression. If you hold one thing, you hold down the adjoining. You start stopping this happening over here, and you suppress that over there, and that suppresses that over there, and it spreads, it spreads like a cancer. And I think we have to fight against it very much.