MARK STEYN; THE WITHERING OF FREE SPEECH
Sunday, October 11, 2009
The Withering of Free Speech [Mark Steyn]
As some readers will know, Ezra Levant and I testified at the House of Commons in Ottawa a few days ago on Canada’s Section 13, the “corrupted and diseased” (my words) legislation that licenses government apparatchiks to police the opinions of the citizenry. You can watch our encounter with Members of Parliament here.
Why is this relevant to Americans? Because the superficial fluffily benign language of multiculturalism that comes so naturally to our rulers provides a lot of cover for the shriveling of free speech: See, for instance, what the Administration and its chums in Cairo (that bastion of liberty) have recently been up to at the disgusting UN Human Rights Council. The indefatigable Anne Bayefsky is one of the few journalists even following this story. But I was struck by something Dennis Miller said to me on the radio the other day:
I think if Obama had the chance to put something like Canada’s Human Rights Commissions down here, he’d do it tomorrow.
As Canadians have discovered, liberty is lost very quietly and quickly. And trying to get it back is slow and painful – particularly at a time when artists, universities, publishers and others who congratulate themselves incessantly on their truth-telling courage find increasingly pre-emptive self-censorship the better part of valor.
The Europe of 2020 will have considerably less freedom of expression than today. American exceptionalism is going to have to be exceptionally exceptional to hold out against that trend.
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