Book burning in Nazy Germany. via
To have a pen is to have a war, or in Voltaire’s elegant wording of this aphorism, “qui plume a, guerre a.” Never quite sure who might take offense at what he’d exposed, he took the precaution to live close enough to the Swiss frontier to make a dash for it if he had to. From his day to ours, this war inherent in writing has had the simplest of objectives, which is to get hold of public opinion either by describing things as they are, or by trying to prevent things being described as they are. Any infringement or limitation of discussion, any attempt at imposing a version of reality, is a sure sign that someone, some group, or some interest is pushing for privilege. In a random example that could be reproduced any day of the week, the President of Estonia was reported in a newspaper quite rightly complaining that Russian aggression against Ukraine was directed against liberal democracy, free speech, the freedom of the press, tolerance, and the rule of law, all of which he summed up as a “civilizational argument.”
A fierce round in the war Voltaire considered a permanent feature in the to-and-fro of human affairs has recently been fought in London. A number of journalists had found out how to hack telephone calls, and were listening in on the private conversations of all sorts of people in the news, and then putting
