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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Category Archives: Freedom

How Thomas Friedman Gets China Wrong

04 Friday Dec 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Interview, Journalism, Politics

≈ Comments Off on How Thomas Friedman Gets China Wrong

Tags

Benito Mussolini, Capitalism, Charles Lindbergh, China, Chinese Politics, Communism, democracy, economics, Fascism, history, Hoover Institution, innovation, interview, Iran, Japan, Journalism, New York Times, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Peter Robinson, Russia, Taiwan, technology, Thomas Friedman, Uncommon Knowledge, Victor Davis Hanson

Peter Robinson: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes that,

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages… It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.

What do you make of this “Beijing Consensus,” this view that maybe they are better suited for the future than our form of government.

Victor Davis Hanson: If you gave me ten minutes and the internet, I could give you an almost verbatim quote from what left-wing people said about Mussolini in the twenties, and what right-wing people like Charles Lindbergh said about Germany in the thirties. They make the trains run on time…

But China has a rendezvous with radical pollution problems and clean up; demographic problems, a shrinking population that will grow old before it grows rich; one male per family, imbalance between the sexes. Somehow their brilliant foreign policy cooked up a nuclear Pakistan, a nuclear North Korea, a nuclear Russia, a soon-to-be nuclear Iran, and maybe, in the future, a nuclear Taiwan and Japan — all right on their border.

So I don’t get this fascination that, just because you fly into the Shanghai airport and everything looks great in a way that Kennedy doesn’t, suddenly they’re the avatars of the future.

What Thomas Friedman would need to do is get on a bicycle, cross rural China, then compare that with biking across rural Nebraska to see which society is more resilient and stable.

Victor Davis Hanson

__________

A counterpoint made by VDH in his interview with the Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson several years ago. To read more, you can take a look at Hanson’s much praised study of nine of history’s most pivotal battles, Carnage and Culture.

Or you can read on:

  • VDH outlines how a Greek conception of human nature can shape your politics
  • Thomas Sowell discusses the “obvious problem with a ‘living wage'” in his interview with Robinson earlier this year
  • Martin Amis dissects how Britain, Germany, and France have each reconciled their 20th century legacies

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Free Speech Is the Whole Ball Game

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Freedom

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Cartoon Crisis, Copenhagen, Danish Free Press Society, Death Sentence, Douglas Murray, Fatwa, Free Speech, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Speech, Henryk Broder, Iran, liberty, Mark Steyn, Muhammad, New York Times, One Thousand Days in a Balloon, religion, Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

Salman Rushdie

“What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: ‘Not a lot.’ But I refuse to give in to despair because I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world, in which a novelist can be accused of having savaged or ‘mugged’ a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its victim) and the scapegoat for its discontents. (What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?)

I refuse to give in to despair even though, for a thousand days and more, I’ve been put through a degree course in worthlessness, my own personal and specific worthlessness. My first teachers were the mobs marching down distant boulevards, baying for my blood, and finding, soon enough, their echoes on English streets…

‘Our lives teach us who we are.’ I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else’s description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I’ve always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I’ve lived in that messy ocean all my life. I’ve fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.

‘Free speech is a non-starter,’ says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”

__________

Excerpts from a speech by Salman Rushdie which was given at Columbia University on December 11th, 1991, and later adapted into his essay “One Thousand Days in a Balloon”. You’ll find the essay in his perfectly titled collection of nonfiction Step Across This Line.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been in touch with the folks at the Danish Free Press Society, who recently hosted the free speech conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the Jyllands-Posten “Cartoon Controversy”. The process is moving slowly — the result of busy schedules, different time zones, and a language barrier — but I’m working to grow their support network into these United States. I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I point you to three speeches from the event. The first two are from Douglas Murray and Mark Steyn, two of the feistier bulldogs on this issue. Then there’s Henryk Broder, an imposing Teuton whose vision of the future of continental Europe (summarized in his 20-minute talk) is compelling and scary.

It’s more than symbolic that the three speakers, who addressed an audience of about one hundred, had to convene in the Danish parliament: it’s the only building in Denmark with enough fortification to guarantee some level of security for attendees. (If you think that’s hyperbole, listen to this bone-chilling recording.) We can’t fault the Danes on this one, however, since they can boast that six of their newspapers ran the highly relevant and globally newsworthy cartoons, while only two tiny papers in all of North America had the guts to show the public what all the fuss was about. As a result, we not only conceded to the murderers’ blackmail, but also failed to show the public just how trivial these cartoons were which precipitated the murder of over 200 people around the globe.

This isn’t a joke. The cartoons may’ve been funny, if also crude and rude, but the fact the civilized world now lives under a shoddy, mutant, violently imposed blasphemy law is alarming.

Among the near-endless blessings of the right to free speech, there is perhaps none greater than its individuating power. It’s a freedom that accentuates the identity and dignity of the individual — to challenge popular consensus, think openly, argue candidly; to demarcate her mind against mob opinion and coercion; and to come to accept or reject certain ideas by herself, for herself, and without fear. Rushdie’s opening sentences above are a sure nod to this fact as well as the ways it is chipped away as freedoms disappear.

Read on:

  • Jyllands-Posten editor Flemming Rose coolly explains why liberty is so critical
  • Neil Gaiman discusses how defending free speech will take you out of your comfort zone
  • On life with a death sentence: reflections on 25 years of the Rushdie fatwa

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The Problem with Qatar

07 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Debate, Freedom, Religion

≈ Comments Off on The Problem with Qatar

Tags

Charlie Hebdo, Daily Beast, David Cameron, Douglas Murray, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Hate Speech, Islam, Islamism, Jamie Dettmer, Mosque, Nick Clegg, Sa’ad Ateeq al Ateeq, Terrorism, World Cup

Qatar World Cup

“In Doha last Friday, the sermon given by the Imam at the biggest mosque in Qatar. Just reflect on this: biggest mosque in Qatar. You might have noticed Qatar is doing quite a lot of business in this city these days.

But what did the Imam say at Friday prayers? He said, among other things, this:

Allah strengthen Islam and the Muslims and destroy your enemies — the enemies of the religion. Allah destroy the Jews and whoever made the Jews, [and destroy the Christians and Alawites and the Shiites.]

This has been and is being pumped around by the ministries of the Qatari government. They’ve been sending around the video. They’re proud of it!

Is any leader in this country going to raise their voice about this sort of thing? I doubt it, because people don’t even raise them when it gets preached in this city, which it does. It really does.

[…]

It’s as bad as Je suis Charlie, which I’m deeply, deeply aggrevated and upset by… People weren’t Charlie, ladies and gentlemen. They really weren’t. They aren’t. If they were, Charlie Hebdo cartoons would’ve been published in every newspaper and on every TV station.

You know when Nick Clegg and David Cameron and all the other political leaders say Je suis Charlie, no they’re not. No they’re not. If Charlie Hebdo had been published here, it would have been decried as a far right wing, racist, Islamophobic magazine, and would have been shut down years and years ago. And don’t think when people say Je suis Juif that they mean that any more. They really don’t. It doesn’t mean anything more than Je suis Charlie. It’s a bit of sentimentality.

But hold them to it. Hold them to it, for God’s sake.”

__________

Pulled from Douglas Murray’s spot on, fervent opening on a recent panel with Maajid Nawaz and others discussing radical Islamism in Modern Europe:

The bracketed part of the pulled quote above is sourced from Jamie Dettmer’s article in the Daily Beast “An American Ally’s Grand Mosque of Hate,” which I’m assuming is where Murray found the quote.

Here is Dettmer’s more detailed account:

On the Friday before ISIS posted the horrific footage of the burning [Jordanian] pilot, a preacher sermonizing from the [Doha] Grand Mosque’s minbar prayed for the destruction of the faithful of other religions. “Allah, strengthen Islam and the Muslims, and destroy your enemies, the enemies of the religion,” intoned Saudi cleric Sa’ad Ateeq al Ateeq. “Allah, destroy the Jews and whoever made them Jews, and destroy the Christians and Alawites and the Shiites.”

His comments wouldn’t have been out of place in ISIS-controlled Mosul or Raqqa. He also beseeched Allah to save the al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third-holiest site in Islam, from the “claws of the Jews.”

Al Ateeq, who was on his sixth visit to the state-supervised Grand Mosque since 2013, reserved his most bellicose remarks for the part of the sermon called the du’aa, when the preacher encourages the faithful to join in guided prayer.

Within minutes, Qatar’s Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs promoted al Ateeq’s remarks on Twitter. And the sermon was broadcast on several local television channels, including Qatar TV, the official state channel, signaling another stamp of approval…

If the thousands of dead slave laborers, gross violations of basic human rights and criminal extortion involved in Qatar’s hosting the 2022 World Cup are not enough to force us into even threatening to boycott the games, then surely the above facts and their attendant, sordid details should. Our only consolation so far is that hosting the World Cup is an enormous economic boondoggle.

Read on:

  • “I don’t have an Israel”: Murray explains why we have to preserve our own societies — because most of us have nowhere else to run
  • Maajid Nawaz, the great hope for a modern, moderate Islam, explains why our leaders should call ISIS “Islamic”
  • The cartoons the media will show us

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On the Twisted Need to Defend Pamela Geller

09 Saturday May 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Interview

≈ Comments Off on On the Twisted Need to Defend Pamela Geller

Tags

Charlie Hebdo, free expression, Free Speech, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Glop Podcast, Islam, John Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg, Muhammad Cartoons, Pamela Geller, Podcast, Rob Long

Pamela Geller

John Podhoretz:

It’s an extraordinarily distressing phenomenon and very telling fact about Western culture now…

You know, the great battles over censorship and free expression in the course of Western history over the last three centuries have largely been about high art. The suppression of Ulysses, the suppression of Lolita. The jailing of Voltaire and Diderot. The mistreatment of Flaubert over Madame Bovary and Theodore Dreiser over Sister Carrie.

And now — a fascinating phenomenon — that it is this kind of gleefully sophomoric, you know, na-na-na stuff, that we’re now called upon to defend in the name of free expression.

But if this is where the war has been declared, we have to fight for it.

Jonah Goldberg: 

That’s why [the Hebdo massacre] was an unequivocal win for the bad guys, the whole episode. No matter how it plays out, it was a win.

Everyone’s talking about how galvanized Western Europe is, how they sold 3 million copies of the next Hebdo issue.

But there’s a reason Lenin’s philosophy was “The worse, the better.”

When you live in a moment where radicals can create a crisis mentality — and create actual crises — you force everybody to take extreme positions.

In a normal situation where Muslim terrorists weren’t murdering people, none of us would want to run the crap that Charlie Hebdo ran. But we’re left with no choice but to defend running it.

So now we all defend it and we all run to the ramparts, and I’m 100% on that side. But in a healthier society, we wouldn’t even have to do this because it is offensive.

But the problem is you simply cannot be held hostage by people who murder people over this kind of thing.

__________

Podhoretz and Goldberg, talking in the 37th episode of their excellent and embarrassingly named podcast with Rob Long, GLop.

Though I don’t find myself aligning ideologically with them all that often, I’m a listener and fan of G’, Lo’, and P’ — they’re up to date, super well read, awash in cross-cultural references, and, probably more importantly, really funny.

For barely related riffs from both speakers, pick up Podhoretz’s short book on the Hillary Clinton presidential run Can She Be Stopped? or Jonah’s The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.

Keep on:

  • Douglas Murray: Should we call terrorists ‘Islamic’?
  • Neil Gaiman: Why even defend free speech today?
  • When Imams speak English

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How Will Future Historians Appraise the American Experiment?

20 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Interview, Political Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on How Will Future Historians Appraise the American Experiment?

Tags

America, American History, Conversations with History, democracy, Empathy, Freedom, Harry Kreisler, interview, morality, Noam Chomsky, Norman Podhoretz, Patriotism, Philosophy, Wisdom

Norman Podhoretz “People are free to choose whatever view they wish to hold. If it were up to me, all intellectuals would be defending our kind of society. Let me add to this: I think American civilization, as a socio-political system, is one of the high points of human achievement. I compare it to fifth-century Athens. Not in the cultural sense; though we have not done too badly in the creation of artistic monuments, we don’t rank with fifth-century Athens or sixteenth-century Italy or Elizabethan England; but as a socio-political, democratic system we will be seen — if there is a future and there are future historians — as one of the highest points of human achievement, because we have created a society in which more people enjoy more freedom and more prosperity than any human community ever known to human history. And that is not nothing, to put it mildly. I wish everybody recognized that. Many people still don’t.”

__________

Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary, speaking in an interview with Harry Kreisler as part of his “Conversations with History” series. You’ll find more substantial reflections like this in Podhoretz’s political memoir My Love Affair with America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative.

This statement comes toward the tail end of Podhoretz and Kreisler’s hour-long conversation. The interview covers a lot of ground, and I recommend giving the whole thing a listen, though the next reflection, which wraps up their talk, has a special poignancy. Podhoretz is asked to summarize a lesson for his grandchildren in the context of his own strange intellectual journey from Marxist to founding neoconservative. He replies:

I hope that they would first of all learn to place the kind of value on this country that I think it deserves. Secondly, I hope that they would learn to understand how important ideas are… I would hope that they would also understand the idea that was most eloquently expressed by George Orwell who said something like this: the truth to which we have got to cling as a drowning man to a raft is that is possible to be a normal decent human being and still be fully alive. And I endorse that view with all my heart. I would hope my grandchildren would learn to endorse it as well.

Update: I emailed this excerpt to Noam Chomsky last night, with a question about how to square Podhoretz’s patriotism with Chomsky’s hypercritical posture towards American society and government. He replied:

No society deserves “gushing patriotism.” In terms of material prosperity, the US ranks fairly high. In the 18th century the colonies were probably the richest part of the world, and the US has incomparable material advantages, at least after the indigenous population was exterminated or expelled. Huge resources and territory, incomparable security, etc. One can debate how well the society has done considering these incomparable advantages. Similar questions arise in other dimensions. A true patriot doesn’t gush about how marvelous we are, but evaluates successes and failures and seeks to overcome the failures.

If you liked that, you’ll like these:

  • One of my all-time favorite speeches: Douglas Murray’s ten-minute defense of Western values
  • David McCullough’s perfect answer to the question Why study history?
  • What was the Founding Fathers’ view of human nature?

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The Obvious Futility of the Drug War

07 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Political Philosophy, Politics

≈ Comments Off on The Obvious Futility of the Drug War

Tags

Bill Bennet, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the Drug War, Declaration of Independence, Drug Legalization, Drug War, Drugs, Freedom, Johann Hari, Law, Legal History, liberty, Louis Brandeis, Milton Friedman, Narcotics, Wall Street Journal

Milton Friedman 2

“More police, more jails, more stringent penalties. Increased efforts at interception, increased publicity about the evils of drugs — all this has been accompanied by more, not fewer, drug addicts; more, not fewer, crimes and murders; more, not less, corruption; more, not fewer, innocent victims…

Legalizing drugs is not equivalent to surrender in the fight against drug addiction. On the contrary, I believe that legalizing drugs is a precondition for an effective fight. We might then have a real chance to prevent sales to minors; get drugs out of the schools and playgrounds; save crack babies and reduce their number; launch an effective educational campaign on the personal costs of drug use — not necessarily conducted, I might add, by government; punish drug users guilty of harming others while ‘under the influence’; and encourage large numbers of addicts to volunteer for treatment and rehabilitation when they could do so without confessing to criminal actions…

I do not believe, and neither did [the American founders], that it is the responsibility of government to tell free citizens what is right and wrong. That is something for them to decide for themselves. Government is a means to enable each of us to pursue our own vision in our own way so long as we do not interfere with the right of others to do the same. In the words of the Declaration of Independence, ‘all Men are… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the Governed.’ In my view, Justice Louis Brandeis was a ‘true friend of freedom’ when he wrote, ‘Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasions of their liberty- by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning. but without understanding.’”

__________

Pulled from Milton Friedman’s 1989 WSJ article “Bennett Fears ‘Public Policy Disaster’ — It’s Already Here!”. You can find it in his seminal collection of writings on public policy Why Government Is the Problem.

I am certainly in Friedman’s liberty-centric camp. Nonetheless I think arguments against the drug war can rest securely on several other foundations, including the fact that this generations-long “war” has been a fundamentally disruptive, rather than pacifying, force for our society. Johann Hari, whose new book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the Drug War is next on my reading list, shared the following insight about one of the most orderly people on the planet, the Swiss:

Switzerland, a very conservative country, legalized heroin for addicts, meaning you go to the doctor, the doctor assigns you to a clinic, you go to that clinic every day, and you inject your heroin. You can’t take it out with you. I went to that clinic — it looks like a fancy Manhattan hairdresser’s, and the addicts go out after injecting their heroin to their jobs and their lives.

I stress again — Switzerland is a very right-wing country, and after its citizens had seen this in practice, they voted by 70% in two referenda to keep heroin legal for addicts, because they could see that it works. They saw that crime massively fell, property crime massively fell, muggings and street prostitution declined enormously…

The arguments that work well in persuading the people we still want to reach are order-based arguments. I think the Swiss heroin referenda are good models for that. Basically, what they said was drug war means chaos. It means unknown criminals selling unknown chemicals to unknown users, all in the dark, in our public places, filled with disease and chaos. Legalization is a way of imposing regulation and order on this anarchy. It’s about taking it away from criminal gangs and giving it to doctors and pharmacists, and making sure it happens in nice clean clinics, and we get our nice parks back, and we reduce crime. That’s the argument that will win. And it’s not like it’s a rhetorical trick — it’s true. That is what happens.

Hari continues, reflecting on the even more dramatic example presented by the Portuguese experiment:

In 2000 Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of extraordinary. Every year they tried the American way more and more: They arrested and imprisoned more people, and every year the problem got worse…

They convened a panel of scientists and doctors and said to them (again I’m paraphrasing), “Go away and figure out what would solve this problem, and we will agree in advance to do whatever you recommend.” They just took it out of politics. It was very smart…

The panel went away for a year and a half and came back and said: “Decriminalize everything from cannabis to crack. But” — and this is the crucial next stage — “take all the money we used to spend on arresting and harassing and imprisoning drug users, and spend it on reconnecting them with society and turning their lives around.”

Some of it was what we think of as treatment in America and Britain — they do do residential rehab, and they do therapy — but actually most of it wasn’t that. Most of it, the most successful part, was really very simple. It was making sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning. It consisted of subsidized jobs and microloans to set up small businesses.

Say you used to be a mechanic. When you’re ready, they’ll go to a garage and they’ll say, “If you employ Sam for a year, we’ll pay half his wages.” The microloans had extremely low interest rates, and many businesses were set up by addicts.

It’s been nearly 15 years since this experiment began, and the results are in. Drug use by injection is down by 50%, broader addiction is down, overdose is massively down, and HIV transmission among addicts is massively down.

Compare that with the results in the United States over the past few years.

Like I said, I’m on the same page as Friedman. These guys are too:

  • William F. Buckley: “Our drug laws aren’t working”
  • Gore Vidal: “Once there’s no profit in flogging drugs… crime is immediately out”
  • Noam Chomsky: “I think there’s a reasonably good case for decriminalization.”

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George Orwell: What the Left Is Ashamed Of

21 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Politics

≈ Comments Off on George Orwell: What the Left Is Ashamed Of

Tags

British politics, England, George Orwell, Left Wing, Left-wing Intelligentsia, Liberalism, Pacifism, Patriotism, public opinion

George Orwell

“They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the 
general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident 
thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals 
are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always 
felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman 
and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse 
racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably 
true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of 
standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a 
poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping 
away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes 
squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always 
anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it 
certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a 
real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they 
were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual 
sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the New Statesmen and 
the News Chronicle cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they 
had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic 
Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than 
it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed 
forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class 
must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism 
hastened the process.”

__________

From George Orwell’s essay, written during the blitz of 1941, “England Your England”. It can be found in his essential collection of essays Facing Unpleasant Facts.

Don’t extrapolate too far with this one. Still, half a century later, some on the left in America face a similar charge.

More Eric Blair:

  • Orwell on the unavoidable problem with nationalism
  • Orwell, Einstein, and Steinbeck in agreement: the evils of militarism

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The Tyranny of Silence

16 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom

≈ Comments Off on The Tyranny of Silence

Tags

Cato Institute, Flemming Rose, free expression, Free Speech, Jyllands-Posten, liberty, Rights, The First Amendment, The Tyranny of Silence, Why Liberty

FlemmingRose23

“Free speech is being challenged by two fundamental processes that are a fact of life in a globalized world.

The first thing is globalization, the fact that people move across borders in numbers never before seen in the history of mankind, and it makes every society more diverse in terms of culture, ethnicity, and religion.

The other factor has to do with communication technology and the internet. Everything is being seen everywhere when it’s published.

People may be offended by what their co-citizens are saying, and there are basically two ways to solve this challenge. One way is to say if you respect my taboo, I’ll respect yours. If you do not criticize my religion, I will not criticize your religion. If you do not criticize my ideology, I will not criticize your ideology.

I believe that that will lead to a tyranny of silence.

The other way is to ask ourselves what are the minimal limitations on speech in order to be able live together in peace and enjoy that very fundamental right. And I believe that the only limitation we need on speech is incitement to violence; we should not be allowed to call for the killing of other people. But the price we have to pay for living in a democracy is that from time to time people may say something that we find offensive.

You have many rights in a democracy — a right to free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and so on and so forth — but the only right you should not have is a right not to be offended.”

__________

From the Cato Institute’s series “Why Liberty”: Flemming Rose, the editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which published the infamous Muhammad cartoons in 2005. He is also the author of the new book The Tyranny of Silence.

  • Louis Brandeis reflects on how central free speech was to the American founding
  • Salman Rushdie argues that it’s alright to be offended
  • Neil Gaiman asks a simple question, Why defend the free speech of others?

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Russia’s Hero-less History

09 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, History, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Russia’s Hero-less History

Tags

Anatoly Zhigulin, Anne Applebaum, British Spectator, Checka, Cold War, Gore Vidal, Gulag, Gulag: A History, Hannah Arendt, Soviet Union, Susanna Pechora, Viktor Bulgakov, Vladimir Putin

Russian flag world war two

“[H]alf a century after the end of World War II, the Germans still conduct regular public disputes about victims’ compensation, about memorials, about new interpretations of Nazi history, even about whether a younger generation of Germans ought to go on shouldering the burden of guilt about the crimes of the Nazis. Half a century after Stalin’s death, there were no equivalent arguments taking place in Russia because the memory of the past was not a living part of the public discourse.

Years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, the country that has inherited the Soviet Union’s diplomatic and foreign policies, its embassies, its debts, and its seat at the United Nations, continues to act as if it has not inherited the Soviet Union’s history. Russia does not have a national museum dedicated to the history of repression. Nor does Russia have a national place of mourning, a monument which officially recognizes the suffering of victims and their families.

But there are reasons for the profound silence. Many Russians experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union as a profound blow to their personal pride. Perhaps the old system was bad, they now feel — but at least we were powerful. And now that we are not powerful, we do not want to hear that it was bad…

Tragically, Russia’s lack of interest in its past has deprived the Russians of heroes, as well as victims. The names of those who secretly opposed Stalin, however ineffectively — the students like Susanna Pechora, Viktor Bulgakov, and Anatoly Zhigulin; the leaders of the Gulag rebellions and uprisings; the dissidents, from Sakharov to Bukovsky to Orlov — ought to be as widely known in Russia as are, in Germany, the names of the participants in the plot to kill Hitler. The incredibly rich body of Russian survivors’ literature — tales of people whose humanity triumphed over the horrifying conditions of the Soviet concentration camps — should be better read, better known, more frequently quoted. If schoolchildren knew these heroes and their stories better, they would find something to be proud of even in Russia’s Soviet past, aside from imperial and military triumphs.

Fall of the Berlin Wall

But in the end, the foreign policy consequences are not the most important. For if we forget the Gulag, sooner or later we will find it hard to understand our own history too. Why did we fight the Cold War, after all? Was it because crazed right-wing politicians, in cahoots with the military-industrial complex and the CIA, invented the whole thing and forced two generations of Americans and West Europeans to go along with it? Or was there something more important happening? Confusion is already rife. In 2002, an article in the conservative British Spectator magazine opined that the Cold War was “one of the most unnecessary conflicts of all time.” The American writer Gore Vidal has also described the battles of the Cold War as “forty years of mindless wars which created a debt of $5 trillion.”

Thus we are forgetting what it was that mobilized us, what inspired us, what held the civilization of “the West” together for so long; we are forgetting what it was that we were fighting against. If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is…

Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the ‘objective enemy,’ as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why — and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.”

Anne Applebaum

__________

Excerpted from Anne Applebaum’s powerful, seminal work Gulag: A History.

These reflections, pulled from the book’s final chapter, clearly have broad political implications right now, 12 years after Gulag was first published. During last year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, I was struck by how little reference was made to the Soviet Union in general and its cultural history in particular, as well as by how much of that scant attention was mere metaphor — an animated hammer and sickle or War and Peace reference whizzing by on the jumbotron.

There was during the closing ceremony a tribute to Russia’s writers, a lineup, perhaps the strongest of any modern country, which was paraded out as if each had been lionized by the state all along. Thirteen total were honored, including Dostoevsky (censored; forced into hard labor in Siberia), Pushkin (exiled), Gogol (exiled), Turgenev (exiled), Vladimir Mayakovsky (repression; suicide), Anna Akhmatova (censored), Marina Tsvetaeva (exiled; suicide), Joseph Brodsky (exiled), Mikhail Bulgakov (censored), and Solzhenitsyn (Gulag). Only two of them — Tolstoy and Chekhov — were able to live in their home country and use a pen without state retribution.

Go deeper into Russia:

  • Applebaum reveals the sentence Putin said that horrified her
  • How nice of a father was Stalin? (hint: not very)
  • Go inside Vladimir Lenin’s surreal last days

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America’s Threat from Within

26 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Politics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

America, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, democracy, Freedom, Joseph Story, Law, Order, The Constitution, The United States

Joseph Story

“Let the American youth never forget that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capable, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence.

The structure has been erected by architects of consummate skill and fidelity; its foundations are solid; its compartments are beautiful as well as useful; its arrangements are full of wisdom and order; and its defences are impregnable from without. It has been reared for immortality, if the work of man may justly aspire to such a title. It may, nevertheless, perish in an hour by the folly, or corruption, or negligence of its only keepers, THE PEOPLE.

Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people in order to betray them.”

__________

From the 2nd edition of Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1851).

More on the threat from without:

  • George Washington rips party politics
  • Andrew Jackson on why the the rule of law is primal
  • Tom Paine talks about how governmental tyranny is the worst tyranny

Joseph Story

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Andrew Sullivan: What I Believe

18 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Freedom, Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

America, Andrew Sullivan, Freedom, liberty, Life, morality, Patriotism, Philosophy, political philosophy, The Pursuit of Happiness

Andrew Sullivan 345

“I believe in liberty… I believe in a system of government that places that liberty at the center of its concerns, that enforces the law solely to protect that freedom, that sides with the individual against the claims of family and tribe and church and nation, that sees innocence before guilt and dignity before stigma. I believe in the right to own property, to maintain it against the benign suffocation of a government that would tax more and more of it away. I believe in freedom of speech and of contract, the right to offend and blaspheme, as well as the right to convert and bear witness. I believe that these freedoms are connected — the freedom of the fundamentalist and the atheist, the female and the male, the black and the Asian, the gay and the straight.

I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.

And I believe in a country that enshrines each of these three things, a country that promises nothing but the promise of being more fully human, and never guarantees its success. In that constant failure to arrive — implied at the very beginning — lies the possibility of a permanently fresh start, an old newness, a way of revitalizing ourselves and our civilization in ways few foresaw and one day many will forget. But the point is now. And the place is America.”

__________

From Andrew Sullivan’s article “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”.

  • Andrew answers: If you could live in one country, which would you choose?
  • Can we be optimistic about America’s future? (Krauthammer says yes)
  • Reinhold Niebuhr on the role of forgiveness in the good society

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