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    You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom
    You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom
    You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom
    Ebook385 pages5 hours

    You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

    By Nick Cohen

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    About this ebook

    The uncompromising Nick Cohen exposes the reality behind the freedoms we enjoy in the book that won Polemic of the Year at the 2013 Political Book Awards.

    After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communism, and the advent of the Web which allowed for even the smallest voice to be heard, everywhere you turned you were told that we were living in an age of unparalleled freedom.

    ‘You Can't Read This Book’ argues that this view is dangerously naive. From the revolution in Iran that wasn't, to the Great Firewall of China and the imposition of super-injunctions from the filthy rich protecting their privacy, the traditional opponents of freedom of speech – religious fanaticism, plutocratic power and dictatorial states – are thriving and in many respects finding the world a more comfortable place in the early 21st century than they did in the late 20th.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateJan 19, 2012
    ISBN9780007436453
    You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom
    Author

    Nick Cohen

    Nick Cohen is a journalist and commentator for the Observer and Evening Standard. He is also the author of ‘What’s Left’? – the most important and provocative commentaries on how the Left lost its way.

    Read more from Nick Cohen

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    • 4/5
      Nick Cohen is a fine polemicist, with a strong liberal outlook, and in this books, he considers if the internet has made us freer on not.

      And he concludes not. In reaching this conclusion he looks at the religious persecution that is administered from the smallest thing said or written, looks at the way the global elite use their massive wealth to keep the general public in place, and political leaders in check, and the UK libel law to suppress all manner of truths. He then goes onto look at the new dictatorships around the world, that can be utterly brutal in keeping their populace in control.

      At the end he makes a short series of suggestions that democratic governments need to implement to improve freedom of speech, including wholesale revision of UK libel law, which has been condemned by the Un of all people.

    Book preview

    You Can’t Read This Book - Nick Cohen

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