BOOK REVIEW

Free Speech in Fearful Times: After 9/11 in Canada, the U.S., Australia and Europe

by James Turk and Allan Manson, eds.

Free Speech in Fearful Times is an accessible, must-read anthology for those concerned about the current state of civil liberties in the West. Despite the seemingly limited focus of its subtitle, the collection is in fact a comprehensive, well-documented read that leaves readers with a message as simple as it is frightening.

Editors James Turk and Allan Manson have pulled together an impressive array of writers from the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia to show that the current climate of fear and repression is in fact part of a centuries-long historic trend. Indeed, these essays – on topics that run the gamut from Cambridge University’s dismissal of professor Bertrand Russell during the First World War right through contemporary U.S. denials of travel visas to eminent Middle Eastern scholars – provide a reminder that in times of crisis, governments have no compunction about cracking the whips and tightening the screws.

And while some of the topics (the U.S.’s Patriot Act or Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act) may be familiar to cursory readers of the daily papers, this collection is especially important for the range of coverage it provides to legislation that often sneaks in under the public radar. Everything from biometric identification and plans for mass registration to warrantless wiretapping, massive data mining, and secret hearings are documented and analyzed here.

Lest potential readers think that not being Arab or Muslim leaves them unaffected by the current climate, there is plenty of material here to show how the terror hysteria creates a spillover effect with respect to other legislation. As numerous essays illustrate, the use of the fear of terrorism (which is, essentially, the fear of fear) to strengthen government powers over all areas of public life has resulted in the implementation of draconian measures affecting everyone from teenagers in trouble to university researchers who risk jail and heavy fines for co-authoring scholarly articles with citizens of certain target countries.

The anthology occasionally suffers from repetition, and at times some of the essays read a bit like first drafts for public presentations. But these are minor problems that can only be expected with work written in a time of ongoing crisis.

Reviewed by Matthew Behrens (from the April 2007 issue)

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