All totalitarianisms are alike, but all totalitarianisms are totalitarian in their own way. An Islamist nutjob has just attempted to kill Salman Rushdie for the crime of writing a novel, so as to fulfill the fatwa issued against him many years ago by the demented, murderous tyrant Ayatollah Khomeini. Many on the left today, who are quick to make apologia for radical Islamic terrorism (including Trots) are no doubt at a loss how to respond. Those of us who have dedicated our lives to fighting all forms of tyranny have no qualms as to what side we are on – on the side of free speech and free expression against the gangsters and scoundrels and philistines and illiterates who attempt to suppress it. I do not expect any Trot cult to show solidarity with Rushdie, since they sympathise with Islamofascism and consider freedom of speech to be a ‘bourgeois illusion’, but the fact that people are willing to kill over the exercise of it shows that it is no illusion, but a thing of real value. The fact that the Bolsheviks (along with other totalitarians past and present) censored the press and had people imprisoned and shot for daring to speak out against their criminal regime, proves that freedom of speech is a very real and necessary thing for any society to be worth living in.
I encourage all my fellow anti-totalitarians reading this blog to honour this brave man, now fighting for his life, by going on Amazon and ordering a copy of one of his novels. I just ordered Midnight’s Children, and it joins The Satanic Verses on my bookshelf. Civilisation, and all its indispensable and inalienable aspects such as freedom of artistic expression, must be defended at all costs.