The War on Freedom

Timothy Garton Ash is right on in this excerpt from an editorial in the LA Times [via the indispensable Political Theory Daily Review].

...the jihadists are not alone.

Even as I write, news reaches me of a friend, Tony Judt, a historian and outspoken critic of recent Israeli policy, finding that a talk he was to give about "the Israel lobby and U.S. foreign policy" at the Polish Consulate in New York was canceled after phone calls to the host institution from "a couple of Jewish groups," including the Anti-Defamation League, according to the Polish consul. Such phone calls are, of course, not comparable with death threats. But this is all part of a many-fronted, incremental erosion of free expression, even in the classic lands of the free such as the U.S., France and Britain.

What is to be done? First, we need to wake up to the seriousness of the danger. We need a debate about what the law should and should not allow to be said or written. Even John Stuart Mill did not suggest that everyone should be allowed to say anything any time and anywhere. We also need a debate about what it is prudent and wise to say in a globalized world where people of different cultures live so close together, like roommates separated only by thin curtains.

The discussion Ash proposes actually does take place, but mostly in academia and only trivially and incoherently in workplaces. I've mentioned before that I'm not willing to promote freedom of speech as an absolute value as many with libertarian bents are predisposed to say. Freedom of speech, as with any other freedom, always ought to come with responsibility. Otherwise, it's meaningless.

But the key here is that the assault on various freedoms of expression and behavior taken for granted especially in liberal democracies is a broad one. Islamic jihadists are simply the most sensational assailants. Christian fundamentalists, while generally not using violence quite yet, are just as bad. And so is the US president. In the latter case, however, the whole war business is supposedly a fight for freedom, not one against it. I don't expect President Bush to have any terribly sophisticated sense of what "freedom" means, but as the head of the largest liberal democracy (ostensively), you'd think he would at least point in the right direction. What these people all have in common in a shared notion of freedom that should operate only in a highly constricted sphere. In other words, they all wish to circumscribe the sphere in which the rest of us live out our liberties. For the religious fanatics - whether Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, etc. - that sphere must correspond to their own sophistic religious and cultural norms. For Bush, the sphere must conform to whatever he deems proper political speech.

Yeah, there's a real war on.