Timothy Garton Ash Puts Forth a Free-Speech Manifesto

After the murders at Charlie Hebdo last year, the public intellectual Timothy Garton Ash — once a dashing foreign correspondent, long since a scholar amid the spires of Oxford — issued an appeal to news organizations: Publish the offending cartoons, all of you together, and in that way proclaim the vitality of free speech.

“Otherwise,” he warned, “the assassin’s veto will have prevailed.”

By this reckoning, the assassins triumphed, for most publications ignored his entreaty, to protect their staffs from danger or to protect their readers from offense. Elsewhere, different free-speech issues abounded: college campuses in convulsions over who should opine and how; tech behemoths pondering how to control (and profit from) the blizzard of online chatter; authoritarian governments snuffing out digital dissent.

Despite floods of online expression, free speech is on the defensive, Mr. Garton Ash argues, and he is trying to rally the resistance. He has established a multilingual website to seed tenets of free expression in nations where it is hindered. He travels the world promoting his ideals. And now, he has written a scrupulously reasoned 491-page manifesto and user’s guide, “Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World,” due out in the United States on Tuesday, which includes his case for defying threats, his opposition to hate-speech laws and his view on whether another’s religion deserves your respect.

In an interview in his book-lined Oxford University office, this frosty-bearded 60-year-old professor of European studies sketched out his high ambitions. “What I want to achieve is to animate thinking and activism,” he said. ...