- TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY FOR FREE
- TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY HOW TO
- TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY UPDATE
- TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY FREE
Whether the accused defend themselves or recant, they incriminate themselves. Like Vyshinsky at Stalin’s show trials, the commissars of correct speech contrive a foregone conclusion from edited statements and unfounded inferences. Old tweets are dug up in the digital equivalent of raking through someone’s trash. People today are traduced for making mistakes, cracking jokes, having the wrong beliefs or just thinking out loud. It’s hard to read their accounts and not be distressed and appalled. In this issue, Toby Young, Amber Athey, Gavin McInnes, Bridget Phetasy and Meghan Murphy describe how they fell foul of the mob. It is driven by the interactions of a righteous mob and an intimidated institution. Cancel culture is that intolerance’s most unpleasant expression. Combined with various forms of intimidation, this falsification of the record is integral to the workings of ‘doublethink’.ĭespite the ostensible defeat of totalitarian governments in the Cold War, a new strain has developed in the subsequent decades - a sinister intolerance that silences in the name of liberal progress. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Truth sends embarrassing truths down the ‘memory hole’. George Orwell identified the same impulse in the airbrushing of Stalin’s chums in and out of Soviet propaganda.
TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY HOW TO
The Romans, who knew how to run a circus, slaked the passions of the mob by erasing unpopular emperors from official memory. The Greeks knew that ostracism, by separating us from the living, was a fate worse than death.
In many ways, cancel culture is as old as mankind. As Arthur Miller and the more reasonable inhabitants of old-time Salem knew, its emergence suggests a sickness in the body politic. The appeal of cancellation is deep-rooted.
TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY UPDATE
The appellation ‘witch hunt’ is apposite, and not just because the malice and folly of the modern cancellation resembles a digital update of The Crucible. Cancellation, installed in the universities as political correctness and in the media and the boardroom as cynical pandering, has become part of the institutional culture of the modern left. Now more than ever, we need people of Roger’s erudition, compassion and principle. He refused to be canceled and, by addressing a broader public, became perhaps the most important conservative thinker since Edmund Burke. But Roger, with the characteristic resolve that sent him behind the Iron Curtain to build the anti-communist ‘Underground University’, would not be intimidated. He was accused of racism and fascism in the media, and threatened with physical assault when he ventured to make the case on campus. In the early 1980s, Roger was effectively expelled from the academy for expressing conservative opinions in public. He was one of the first people to undergo ordeal by ‘cancel culture’, or persecution by progressives, which is why we dedicate this free-speech issue to him.
TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY FREE
Sir Roger Scruton was a fearless and humane advocate for art, beauty, faith, peoplehood and tradition a fierce defender of the right to free and honest speech and a clear-eyed advocate for the legal inheritances and cultural unity of the English-speaking peoples. The response to all this is commensurately loud and bitter.De mortuis nil nisi bonum, the Romans used to say: ‘Of the dead speak only good.’ We can speak nothing else of the friend and longtime Spectator contributor we lost in January. Germaine Greer and Jordan Peterson are accordingly “de-platformed”, Suzanne Moore virtually forced to resign, “white privilege” excoriated.
TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY FOR FREE
Yet currently the demand for free speech is often condemned as reactionary, as itself a form of silencing by those who for too long have silenced others, and as deserving to be curbed because it does indeed cause harm – the offence felt by the marginalised. Partly thanks to the free speech he advocated, rights, liberties and “experiments in living” that were then unthinkable are now taken for granted. Creativity, change and progress, he said, require freedom of thought, and expression should be curbed only when it is liable to incite harm. In 1859, John Stuart Mill warned of “the tyranny of the majority” – the way widely held public opinion had replaced kings, barons and dictators in pre-empting dissent and crushing it into conformity.
Intellectual Freedom and the Culture Wars
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