Monday - October 05, 2015

erosion of free speech

I found myself at the Spiked site and have no idea how I made that link.  Busy looking for something I read in hard copy, total student stupidity and usual pc at work.  But I found Spiked and couldn’t stop reading. 

What I have posted here is just a small part of what Mr. Adams wrote and posted.  I think many of you might find the site of some interest.  No doubt many of you already know about it.  I’m a late comer to the party.  Adams writes very well I think.  OK, so there were a few words I had to look up.
No shame in that. 

I hope you visit them and read this unedited from the beginning.

SPIKED.COM

Islamism and identity politics – a destructive mix

The strange alliance between leftists and extremists is eroding free speech.

Alexander Adams
from Spiked

Towards thought reform

Post-liberal identity politics promises emotional justice, but it betrays its own partiality. It supports favoured minorities under the auspices of ‘hate speech’, but hesitates to censor blasphemy. Encouraging individuals to validate themselves through identifying with cultural subsets – and maintaining a double standard separating anti-religious speech from hate speech – strengthens the agenda of Western Islamists.

Another problem with pre-emptive censorship for the sake of protection is that it is effectively impossible. The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists knew they were creating provocative images and could expect a backlash. Consider the case of Salman Rushdie. His book The Satanic Verses is a work of literary fiction. It included references to Muhammad dreamed by a fictional character in a delirium. It led to a fatwa being issued against Rushdie, subsequent attacks against publishers and the murder of a Japanese translator. Rushdie and his colleagues had no reason to expect that instances of blasphemous delirium in a work of fiction might provoke violent hostility. Due-caution caveats cannot be applied in practice as there is no way of predicting how any work of fiction or art touching on Islam may be represented or misrepresented by extremists. The only way to be safe from extremists is never to say anything that touches upon religious culture, never associate with anyone who has and never be in the vicinity of an exploding bomb. But even that position will not hold. 
Even if you avoid opposing extremists, the restrictions they force on others will affect you. Furthermore, accommodation will not work because Islamist demands will never end. Even if another image of Muhammad is never exhibited or published in the UK again, extremist pressure will continue, applied in other areas of the arts. Images seen as denigrating Muslims (especially Muslim women) will be targeted; ‘disrespectful’ art by artists of Muslim heritage will be threatened; artists who take an avowedly atheist stance will be subject to violent protest. There is no way of following ‘rules of safe speech’, because extremists make rules arbitrarily, opportunistically and unilaterally. What may be halal today may be haram tomorrow , with no possibility of reasoned appeal.
How can the apparently alien outlook of the Islamist radical find any succour in secular Western society? To understand how an extremist can be nurtured by a schismatic environment – part Muslim immigrant culture, part secular European – we have to consider the way social discourse in modern Britain changed in the 1970s and 1980s.

If that picture of identity politics and policed civility seems exaggerated, think back 20 or 30 years. Would you then have expected people to be sacked from positions in public and private organisations for expressing contentious political or social opinions, even in private settings? Now, those accused of infractions of civility are only offered the possibility of rehabilitation if they express sufficient contrition. These sound like the tactics of totalitarian regimes, where enforced self-criticism and public shaming were used to suppress dissent and discredit troublesome individuals.
However, these are now the norms we have grown to expect in Western democracies.

While many of us may feel confident that the evident extremeness of religious fundamentalism means it will never make inroads into our way of life, we overlook the willingness with which post-liberals (who are in the mainstream of society and in positions of power) offer concessions to religious sentiment and give away our freedoms to assuage their guilt. The freedom to speak our minds has already been snipped away by post-liberals, religious extremists, New Left supporters, commercial lobbyists, social conservatives and paternalistic governments.
The only way to preserve free speech is to exercise it. Otherwise, the opportunity to use it will be taken from you (by means both overt and covert), the channels of speech will atrophy, and when your time to speak comes, you will be unable to do so.

Posted by peiper     on 10/05/2015 at 10:08 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials •  
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It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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