AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Today we hear a voice not often heard in this country, one of the world’s most acclaimed writers, Salman Rushdie. An Indian British novelist, Salman Rushdie’s book Midnight’s Children was published in 1981. It won him the Booker Prize and brought him international fame. But it was his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, that Rushdie is most known for. One of the main characters in the book is modeled on the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. The novel was quickly banned in India and South Africa. In Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to execute the writer and publishers of the book, and offered a million-dollar reward for Rushdie’s death. Rushdie was forced into hiding and lived underground for many years. The fatwa was finally lifted in 1998, although not all — it was lifted in 1998.

In a rare appearance in the United States, Salman Rushdie spoke at an event last week sponsored by the PEN American Center, a fellowship of writers to advance literature, to promote a culture of reading, and to defend free expression. This is Salman Rushdie.

SALMAN RUSHDIE: I wanted to start by saying that I don’t think any of us who arranged this event delude ourselves about terrorism. Terrorism does exist. In this city of all cities, we know that. We know what it exists — what it exists to do, what it has done, what it tries to do. We know that it exists and must be fought. I don’t think any of us would question that.

How we fight it, in my view, is going to be the great civilizational test of our time. Will we become our enemy or not? Will we become repressive as our enemy is repressive? Will we become intolerant as our enemy is intolerant, or will we not? Will we fight with different weapons, weapons of openness and acceptance and seeking to increase the dialogue between peoples rather than decrease it? This is a big test. Will we become, you could say, the suits of armor that our fear makes us put on, or will we not?

It seems to us, in PEN, to many of us in the last months, that we are not passing this test very well at present, and that there are serious reasons to say that there is a crisis in this country of civil liberties, freedom of speech and human rights, of exactly the kind that PEN has spent over 80 years protesting about when it happens in other countries, exactly the things that — not exactly, because nothing, no parallel is ever exact, but the kind of things that we have tried to highlight, whether it was in Cuba or Burma or Iran or China, those sorts of problems are beginning to crop up here, problems of what it is possible to say without being in trouble, what it is possible to have access to the information media to talk about, the terms in which it is possible to talk about these things when one does have access to the news media, the way in which the government is becoming increasingly intrusive into areas of our lives which the government has no business to go into — what books we read, what shops we go to, what books we borrow from universities, what do we think about. That is — you know, this gets very close to the thought police, and is something which is not acceptable in a free society.

PEN has identified three particular areas of concern in the PATRIOT Act and the many related laws and executive orders which have been enacted since September 11, 2001. These concerns have to do with privacy, access to information, and compliance with international law and human rights standards. And we have launched the campaign which this event is here to support, which we are calling the Campaign for Core Freedoms, in an effort to restore fundamental protections in these areas.

You know, people like me came to America because of our admiration for the protections afforded by the First Amendment. And it is extremely saddening to see those protections being eroded. And so, this is not — it is really not a question of left or right. It seems to me whatever kind of American you are you, you should know that the First Amendment is the jewel in the crown. And to erode that is to do terrible damage to one’s sense of what it is to be an American and a citizen or a resident of this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Salman Rushdie, speaking at a PEN America event just a few days ago. Each of the authors read from other writers’ works, beginning with Salman Rushdie. This is Democracy Now!

SALMAN RUSHDIE: And just by way of starting it off, I’m going to read one paragraph of the great text, John Stuart Mill’s text, On Liberty, written — well, getting on for 200 years ago but feels fresh as a daisy. And just to — the warning he offers us is that if we do not fight for our rights, we lose them.

“The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed for ever, it may be thrown back for centuries. To speak only of religious opinions: the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther, and was put down.” There’s another very long list of such things. “It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it is made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.”

AMY GOODMAN: Salman Rushdie, speaking at the PEN America event. Many authors then got up and read other writers’ works, and finally Salman Rushdie concluded the evening by reading from the works of two others.

SALMAN RUSHDIE: I’m going to finish just by reading two short pieces sent in by writers who were not able to be here today. The writer Francisco Goldman sent in this piece, which is written by the Cuban independence hero and poet, José Martí, who was actually for rather a long time a New Yorker. He lived in New York from 1880 to 1895, observed the politics of the time very closely, and wrote a piece about the presidential election of 1884, which pitted James G. Blaine against Grover Cleveland and is often called the dirtiest campaign in American history, during the course of which the Republicans found that Cleveland had had a child out of wedlock, and he acknowledged paternity and won the election anyway, by 48.5% to 48.2%, including Florida. This is what Martí said about that election.

“It’s brutal, and nauseating, a presidential campaign in the United States. The mud comes up to the chairs. The white beards of the newspapers forget all about the decorum of old age. They dump buckets of mud on all our heads. They knowingly lie and exaggerate. They stab each other in the belly and the back. Any defamation is treated as legitimate. Every blow is good, as long as it staggers the enemy. He who invents an effective slander proudly struts… A good faith observer has no idea how to analyze a battle in which everyone considers it legitimate to campaign in bad faith.

“But he who observes this country without rancor, as much as he is disgusted by the primacy ceded to the appetites here, and the forgetfulness, if not the disdain, in which the generous qualities are held, also has to recognize that whenever it appears that a danger is imminent, or that an institution has been profaned beyond redemption, or that some vice has half devoured the nation, there arises, with the reliability of a law, and without great apparatus, and when the evil can still be cured, the men and systems that can avoid ruin. They appear, do what they have to do, and drop from sight. And it also appears that a condition of this law is that the evil has to be extreme, as if the prosperous peoples never decide to change direction, or perturb their habits, until the reality becomes so dire that it is impossible to ignore.

“This was the law affirmed by the election of Grover Cleveland. The evil was very grave: the Republicans, entrenched in power, cynically abused it; they subverted the integrity of the vote, and of the press; they mocked the spirit of the Constitution through partisan legislation, and copying the tactics of tyrants, used overseas wars to deflect attention from their actions.” It’s history. “Who had a chance to compete against them? Defeat them? — if elections are won by the force of money, if the Republicans have a free hand with the national coffers?

“But a wave rose up that no one saw forming on the margins, and no one knows how it came, breaking over the heads of all the ambitious and illustrious politicians of the nation — despite the anger of the members of his own Democratic party, despite time-proven practices and conceits — and landed in the White House a man just a little more than barely known, a tough but humble man, fit for the task of fearlessly and patiently reforming the corrupt government … the wave brought Cleveland.

“Up close you see that the change has not been essential or durable, but circumstantial and like a proof: an eruption proving that it can be done: that the eruption of a fistful of men, a fistful of honorable people, nothing more than that, have given victory to Cleveland — a thousand votes less, among ten million voters, and the president would have been an impure and sinister man, a brilliant sofist: he would have been” Bush — sorry, “Blaine.” He would have been Blaine.

And finally, from former president of PEN, Norman Mailer, he sent us the briefest contribution of anybody. Yeah. From John Dos Passos in U.S.A.: “All right then, we are two nations.”

However, I also wanted to read from — from what Norman said in the interview that is in the current issue of the New York magazine, in it, a conversation with his son. And this is how it ends. Norman writes, or says, “Wisdom is ready to reach us from the most unexpected quarters. Here, I quote from a man who became wise a little too late in life:

“’Naturally, the common people don’t want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.’

“That was Hermann Goering speaking at the Nuremberg trials after World War II. It is one thing to be forewarned. Will we ever be forearmed?” Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Author Salman Rushdie, speaking at an event sponsored by the PEN American Center at Cooper Union in New York.