Thursday, January 08, 2015

The correct response

More speech, not less. [Link]
From Ross Douthat
If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill you for saying something, then it’s something that almost certainly needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn’t really a liberal civilization any more. Again, liberalism doesn’t depend on everyone offending everyone else all the time, and it’s okay to prefer a society where offense for its own sake is limited rather than pervasive. But when offenses are policed by murder, that’s when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.In this sense, many of the Western voices criticizing the editors of Hebdo have had things exactly backward: Whether it’s theObama White House or Time Magazine in the past or the Financial Times and (God help us) the Catholic League today, they’ve criticized the paper for provoking violence by being needlessly offensive and “inflammatory” (Jay Carney’s phrase), when the reality is that it’s precisely the violence that justifies the inflammatory content.
Read the whole thing. Surprisingly, there are a number of readers who comment that this is the first time they’ve ever agreed with Douthat.
And in a bit of a disconnect, it’s ironic how Douthat’s piece is in the NYT but the paper has seemingly opted not to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoon.

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