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. 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.

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Consider this: what if Justice Besanko had given the thumbs down to the three papers? What if he had decreed in his infinite, jury-less wisdom, by his moral judgement and his moral judgement alone, that the claims about Roberts-Smith were not true? Would we have had to accept that as fairly dispensed ‘justice’ too, despite the chilling impact it would have had not only on the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Canberra Times, but across Australia’s media landscape? Many are saying Besanko made the right decision, and I agree. But his power to make such a decision still chills me. It is an offence against public life, against democracy itself, when truth is determined by bewigged elites rather than by open discussion among the people. 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. 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’.

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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. 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. We need to stop doing this. We need to stop countering the new censors by accusing them of exaggerating the power and the potency of words. We need to stop responding to their painting of speech as a dangerous, disorientating force by defensively pleading that words don’t wound because they’re just words. We need to stop reacting to their branding of speech as a weapon, as a tool of ambush and degradation, by effectively draining speech of its power and saying: ‘It’s only speech.’ As if speech were a small thing, almost an insignificant thing, more likely to contain calming qualities than upsetting ones, more likely to help us overcome conflict rather than stir it up, more likely to offer a balm to your soul than to stab at it as a knife might stab at your body. 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.

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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.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 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. 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.