By Somi Jun, Correspondent
Novelist and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie said that authoritarian governments attack the arts to try and rewrite history, in a talk yesterday at Princeton University to an audience of more than 500 people., Rushdie referenced the Trump administration’s first federal budget, which proposed to cut endowments for the arts and the humanities. Although the final budget did not defund arts endowments, Rushdie compared President Donald Trump’s budget proposal to other states’ attempts to edit history and collective memory., “The more authoritarian the people in power, the more tightly they want to control the narrative,” Rushdie said. “We have an administration that is very determined to not only control but also radically rewrite the narrative of this country.”, Rushdie famously received death threats from Ayatollah Khomeini, the former political and religious leader of Iran. After more a decade of living under this state-supported death threat, Rushdie commented on how literature interacts with politics., “It became evident that simply the act of responding in a book to the world as you know it can be a source of political conflict,” Rushdie said., Rushdie said that the Trump administration’s attack on truth gained traction because of existing distrust of mainstream media. According to Rushdie, people ceased to have faith in objective truth well before election night. In this age of fake news, Rushdie called for artists to continue creating work and writing fiction, because beauty and truth are intertwined., “Should we be writing fiction when the world is so full of lies?” Rushdie said. “We have to keep on doing that because if those things are not existing, there’s nothing left to defend.”, Rushdie encouraged creative artists to continue their work, because people today understand the past through literature, movies and other art forms. Correspondingly, Rushdie said that people in the future will understand the present based on what artists create today., “Authoritarian regimes may for a moment control the present, but we control the future,” Rushdie said.
