Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

Love, above all things, and work, of course, but there was a war to fight on many fronts—against the bigoted revisionism that sought to rewrite history, whether in New Delhi or in Florida; against the cynical powers that sought to erase the two original sins of the United States, slavery and the oppression and genocide of the continent’s original inhabitants; against fantasies of an idealized past (when exactly was America “great” in the way those red hats wanted to re-create?); against the self-harming lies that had taken Britain out of Europe. I could not sit idly by while these battles raged. In this struggle, too, I would—I had to—remain involved.