Salman Rushdie Quotes
We live in a frightened time, and people self-censor all the time and are afraid of going into some subjects because they are worried about violent reactions.
Rushdie, Salman. Interview on Free Speech. The Telegraph, 2012.
What oven gets overlooked in the history leading up to the Civil War was the terribly repressive atmosphere that developed in the South itself over the issue of slavery. There were some abolitionists in the South, and most of the slaves were held by a relatively few wealthy men. Many with no slaves or only one or two, might go either way on the slavery issue and the various fugitive slave laws. And Northern abolitionists sometimes would come South to investigate and report on the conditions of the slaves of the South. While still in the Union, many Southern areas made a mockery of the Constitutional protections of freedom of speech, freedom of the press. Censorship and repressive activities invaded privacy, and the South, for both Northerners and English travelers, no longer had the charm of the past. Note the use of the term “reign of terror”. Bunch was a seasoned diplomat experienced at reporting on conditions.
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie FRSL is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His work, combining magical realism with historical fiction, is primarily concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, with much of his fiction being set on the Indian subcontinent.
