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could win without pain, in bloodless revolutions. After the fall of white South Africa and the break-up of the Soviet Union, fear appeared to be an unnecessary emotion. History’s lesson was that dictatorships would collapse of their own accord without the usual wars and revolutionary terrors. Party hacks and secret policemen, who had never uttered a dissenting word in their lives, had of their own accord given up serving worthless ideologies and embraced the ideals of Western liberalism. ‘The heroes of retreat’, the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, called them – Kadar, Suarez, Jaruzelski, Botha and above all Gorbachev: apparent ‘yes men’ who decided to say ‘no’ to the regimes they had promised to protect. Just like that, without anyone invading their countries or storming their palaces and holding guns to their heads. One day apartheid was there, the next Nelson Mandela was president of South Africa, and the world was granting him a status dangerously close to sainthood. For forty years the Iron Curtain had divided Europe, and then as if a magician had waved his wand, it vanished and tourists could gawp at what was left of the Berlin Wall, before going on to holiday in what had once been the forbidden territory of Eastern Europe.
    Humanity had seen nothing on the scale of the bloodless revolutions of 1989 to 1991 before. Former enemies acknowledged their mistakes. They came to agree with our way of thinking without us having to risk our personal safety. The world lived through an age of miracles; but the trouble with witnessing miracles is that you come to expect more of them.
    The tactless Rushdie spoilt the ecstatic mood. The reaction to his novel showed that history was not over. One enemy of liberalism was not coming round to our way of thinking, holding up its hands and admitting that we had been right all along. It asked questions of liberals that were close to home. Would they be able to defend their values, when their opponents were not Russian communists sending dissidents to Siberia, or right-wing dictators in faraway lands ordering the torture and murders of Latin American leftists, but fellow citizens who were threatening to kill novelists and bombing bookshops in the cities of the West? Would they defend free speech in murderous times? Or would they hold their tongues and accept that they must ‘respect’ views they knew to be false?

Demand a Respect You Don’t Deserve
     
    Do you believe in freedom of speech?
    Are you sure?
    Far be it from me to accuse you of living with illusions, but unless you are a tyrant or a lunatic – and the line between the two is thin – you will rarely speak your mind without a thought for the consequences. You would be friendless within a day if you put a belief in absolute freedom of speech into practice. If you propositioned complete strangers, or told them that they were fools, if you sat down at a meeting and announced that the woman next to you was ugly and the man next to her stank, you would run out of people willing to spend time in your company.
    Humans are social primates, and socialising with the rest of our species requires a fair amount of routine self-censorship and outright lying, which we dignify with names such as ‘tact’, ‘courtesy’ and ‘politeness’.
    The appeal of censorship becomes evident when you consider whether you would be happy for others to say what they thought about you. Even if what they said was true – particularly if what they said was true – you would want to stop them saying that you were ugly, boring or smelly. You would expect them to lie to you, just as they would expect you to lie to them. Humans have a bias in favour of information that bolsters their prejudices and validates their choices. Above all, our species has a confirmation bias in favour of information that upholds our good opinion of ourselves. We want our status confirmed. We want others to lie to us so that we can lie to ourselves. We want to