Prior to the English Civil War, Lilburne, then young and not well-known, had shown himself as willing as Tyndale had been a century earlier to suffer for his beliefs. In the mid-1630s, William Prynne, the Puritan controversialist, wrote a pamphlet titled News From Ipswich, in which he slammed a particularly intolerant and regressive bishop and took aim at the Star Chamber, too – the institution of royal control over public printing. For this, he was himself dragged before the Star Chamber in 1637 and charged with seditious libel. He was fined, publicly whipped, put in the pillory, had the tops of his ears cut off, and his cheeks were branded with the letters ‘S’ and ‘L’ for seditious libel. Or consider another great heretic of old, John Lilburne (1614-57). Lilburne was a political agitator. He was a Leveller during, and after, the English Civil War – that portion of the rebels that believed in a greater expansion of democratic rights than Cromwell was willing to concede. Lilburne coined the term ‘freeborn rights’ to describe the fundamental liberties we all just have, or ought to have. The liberty to think and speak for ourselves and to choose who should govern us. By ‘EU values’ what is really meant is hyper-federalism, multiculturalism, diversity and the mainstreaming of gender-identity ideology. The plot against the Hungarian presidency is ultimately an attempt to prevent the Hungarian government from having a platform to promote its own values, such as its attachment to national sovereignty and to tradition. Some MEPs go so far as to claim that these values are incompatible with membership of the EU.

The war on disinformation is really a war on dissent - spiked

So, yes, words hurt. But not as much as receiving 500 lashes and a bloodied gob for the crime of expressing dissident thoughts, of using your speech to ‘hurt’ authority. Too often today, believers in the liberty to speak baulk at the truth about words: they hurt. No, they are not violence – equating speech with violence is foolish and wrong. But speech is powerful, it can wound, it can induce pain in some of those who hear it. If speech did not have this power – to unsettle, to overthrow, to change minds and worlds radically – what would be the point of defending it? Surely we defend speech precisely because it contains so much extraordinary energy, because it can be a ‘blizzard’, because it does wound. No, we are no longer deprived of English-language Bibles. But we are discouraged from reading certain texts, lest they unsettle or inflame our small minds. ‘Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?’, as the prosecutor in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial of 1960 infamously asked. Today, good and noble people still believe that for certain books ‘to be placed in the hands of the common people [is] a dangerous thing’. Only now they don’t crush or pulp said books, as the ecclesiastical authorities did with Tyndale’s Bibles, but rather add trigger warnings to them. That’s the new form of shepherding, where experts, rather than priests, attach danger signs to books so that we sheep will know of the risk involved in reading them, and might avoid reading them entirely. There are other ways censorship hurts us, and society, more than speech does. Censorship dulls our critical senses. It infantilises us by imploring us to trust others to decide on our behalf what we should think about the world. It implicitly instructs us to suspend thought and analysis and instead let the wisdom of the more learned, of today’s secular shepherds, wash over us. Censorship is an invitation to revert to a childlike state, which makes it unsurprising that modern zones of censorship – Safe Spaces – so often resemble kindergartens for adults. Those spaces are a real, physical manifestation of the childish nature censorship asks us all to embrace. The plot to deprive Hungary of its rightful turn to take the presidency is not just about Hungary itself. It is more than just an attempt to humiliate a small Central European nation. It is about the broader culture war that is engulfing Europe.We must point out that where words hurt – and they do – censorship hurts more. Physically, spiritually, existentially, censorship is more wounding to the individual, and to society, than unfettered speech is. Those in the 21st century who claim to feel bruised and bloodied by words should take some time to read up on the heretics of history, and even the heretics of today. You want to see wounding? Witness their trials. spiked is free for all to read. But to keep it that way, we ask loyal readers like you to support our work. Remi Adekoya – author of It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s About Wealth – is the latest guest on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Remi and Brendan discuss the truth about racial inequality, the dangers of racial identity politics and how Africa can realise its potential. But to keep spiked free we ask regular readers like you, if you can afford it, to chip in – to make sure that those who can’t afford it can continue reading, sharing and arguing. Consider William Tyndale (1494-1536), one of the great heretics in the history of England. Tyndale was a 16th-century religious scholar who would become a leading light in the Protestant Reformation. His crime, his utterance of words that hurt, was to translate the Bible into English. That was forbidden at the time. Biblical knowledge was for priests only, for men versed in Latin, for men of learning and insight, not for the English-speaking throng. As FL Clarke put it in his great 19th-century biography, The Life of William Tyndale, ‘good and noble’ men thought that ‘for the Bible to be placed in the hands of the common people was a dangerous thing – the poor and ignorant should be content to hear only those portions that the priests might think fit to read in the churches; they were the shepherds who were appointed to feed the sheep’.

The revolutionary power of heresy - spiked

No, the slaughter of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo offices in January 2015 was not officially sanctioned, as was Tyndale’s strangulation and Lilburne’s public torture. But it can be viewed as a violent expression of an official idea – namely, that it is wrong to give offence, including to Islam. The European Parliament has long been committed to cutting Hungary and its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, down to size. Last month, MEPs drew up a long resolution that calls into question Hungary’s ability to manage a successful presidency. It was passed by the parliament this week.It is difficult to overstate Tyndale’s contribution to freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. In translating and printing and spreading the Bible, Tyndale was doing more than challenging the stranglehold that the Catholic Church had over religious ideas, over the Word of God itself. He was also, in turn, expressing a great faith in ordinary people’s ability to understand things for themselves. To no longer require ‘shepherds’ to instruct them and guide their thoughts. His trust was not only in God, but also in the capacity, as Clarke had it, of ‘the ignorant and the unlearned’ to enlighten themselves. It was a searingly radical idea. It remains a radical idea, still unfulfilled in so many ways. Australia’s libel laws, like England’s, are deeply illiberal. They’ve been described by one legal expert as the ‘most media-hostile laws in the common-law world’. Between 2008 and 2017, media organisations in Australia were dragged to the courts 300 times. And the claimant normally wins – in just 29 per cent of those cases were the defendants successful. Then there are the unseen impacts of libel law, the stories that are never published because editors understandably fear being sued and potentially destroyed. This is ‘ the chilling effect’, where ‘fear of a prohibitively expensive loss’ stops a news story at the very start. The three newspapers deserve praise for refusing to be chilled by this ominous, always-present threat. We are being gaslit morning, noon and night. We see a man and they tell us it’s a woman – literally, legally a woman. We see a dude with a beard and they say it’s a lesbian. ‘Let her associate with other lesbians’, they say, every word a lie. We see a pregnant woman on the front of this month’s Glamour magazine and they say it is a ‘pregnant man’. The truth – that only women get pregnant; that no man has ever been pregnant or ever will be – is cruelly overridden. It is burnt at the stake of ideology. The delusions of the elites carry more weight than truth itself – that is how arrogant the new authoritarianism has become; how determined our rulers are to remake reality in the image of their own fevered opinion. Most entitled of all are the interviewees who demand to know why there even has to be a discussion about gender identity. ‘Why can’t we just be accepted for who we say we are?’, is their plea. They may smile sweetly while raising this question, but a group of Scottish women’s rights campaigners reminds us that they are really asking women to allow men into all the places where they are most vulnerable. And while they’re at it, they’re asking women to give up their claim to the word ‘woman’. This is how twisted libel law is. It births a world in which a celebrity’s hurt feelings matter more than a working man’s lost eye. In which Roberts-Smith’s view of himself potentially carries more weight than a journalist’s honest, serious investigation of his behaviour. In which a judge enjoys an almost godly authority to decree what is true and to punish anyone who deviates from this ‘truth’. So, just two cheers for the newspapers’ victory in Australia. The third cheer won’t come until Australia’s libel laws, and our own, have been radically reformed, or scrapped entirely.