They Are Where We're Headed

Europe and Canada are killing free speech, and the U.S. is not far behind. The late Oriana Fallaci was indicted by an Italian judge for the "crime" of vilifying "any religion admitted by the state." The censorship-seeking religion is Islam. Recently in France, the actress Brigitte Bardot was convicted and fined about $25,0000 (the prosecutor asked, unsuccessfully, for jail time) for expressing the view that Muslims are wrecking France.

Canada, ever since the infamous "Butler" case in 1992, has been on a similar anti-free speech campaign. This time, Maclean's magazine is being prosecuted by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal for the alleged crime of publishing an article that argues that the rise of Islam is a threat to the West. Islamic leaders in Canada want the government to bar the magazine from expressing similar opinions in the future, publish a rebuttal, and pay monetary "damages." (For more on this, see the 6/12/08 NYT article "Outside U.S., Hate speech Can Be Costly.")

In the U.S., we have PC-driven "speech codes" at government colleges and universities, various feminists pushing the government to ban images and words that they deem "degrading" to women, and militant Muslims filing bogus lawsuits in the attempt to silence their detractors. (For more on the last item, see the work of Daniel Pipes.)

All of these assaults on free speech are a dramatic illustration of how epistemology -- in these cases, the corrupt epistemologies of mysticism and emotionalism -- is fundamental to politics. If free speech, the last pillar of freedom in this country, is destroyed, it will be because two false and destructive epistemologies undermined its philosophic foundation of reason. (For more on how a corrupt epistemology such as emotionalism harms a culture, see Chapter 8, "The Emotionalist Republic," of The Ominous Parallels, by Leonard Peikoff.)