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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Steyn: Complications and Curating |
| 2016-10-18 |
| An excerpt: One of the more depressing moments of my Australian tour a few months ago was a private dinner with a handful of prominent conservative parliamentarians - by which I mean men and women to the right of Mr Turnbull. The most eminent among them declared confidently that scrapping 18C was "not a first-order priority". We then moved on to discuss what he regarded as the first-order priority, Islamic terrorism in Australia and elsewhere. I pointed out that one of the reasons why the former (free speech) most certainly is a first-order priority is because, without it, the latter (Islam and the west) cannot be honestly addressed. Theodore Dalrymple a decade ago: Steyn is right that the main struggle is one of ideas. Unfortunately, political correctness, which is to thought what sentimentality is to compassion, means that the intelligentsia of the West has disarmed itself in advance of any possible struggle. Political correctness enforced by state power has castrated public debate on the supposed "first-order priority" of our time - to the point where the Dutch courts prosecute opposition politicians over their election platforms, the French courts prosecute novelists over things their fictional characters said, the British police investigate Twitter jokes ...and once free peoples have so internalized these constraints that, even without state intervention, a supposedly free press punishes even the most footling departure from conventional bromides with public humiliation and career derailment. Free speech is always a first-order priority - because, without it, you can't truly discuss any of the others. |
| Posted by:badanov |