18/01: Free Speech is Dying
Category: American Culture
Posted by: an okie gardener
Christopher Hitchens writes in Vanity Fair to tell the truth about free speech in the West: it is dying because those who should be its champions fear violent Islam.
Read the essay.
These are among the things that have happened, and have become depressingly taken for granted, since the fatwa of the ayatollah. We live now in a climate where every publisher and editor and politician has to weigh in advance the possibility of violent Muslim reprisal.
Most readers are aware that Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 concerns the burning of books. What you may not know, unless you have read it, is that Bradbury's future society began to burn books after it was granted that everyone has a right not to be offended.
Read the essay.
These are among the things that have happened, and have become depressingly taken for granted, since the fatwa of the ayatollah. We live now in a climate where every publisher and editor and politician has to weigh in advance the possibility of violent Muslim reprisal.
Most readers are aware that Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 concerns the burning of books. What you may not know, unless you have read it, is that Bradbury's future society began to burn books after it was granted that everyone has a right not to be offended.
