Rethinking Respect for Unfree Speech
Voltaire's philosophy was once summed up pithily as "I disagree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it". It's a rather simplistic summary of a complex body of thought, but here's the rub: it breaks down when not everybody accepts it.
We've recently seen Anna Soubry react with fury at being labelled as a "Nazi", while in an interview with Sky TV she dished out the same sort of invective at people she disagreed with.
Last year her parliamentary colleague Daniel Zeichner called for tolerance in his constituency of Cambridge. This is the same man who, while Labour Parliamentary Candidate, did a Hitler salute at the Cambridge Union to demonstrate his opinion of the elected government of Poland and as an encore compared British members of the Conservative Party to Nazis.
Zeichner and others like him have demonstrated their hatred for views outside the range they think it is proper for the rest of us to believe through their membership of antifascist organisations, which exist to chase all views outside that range out of the public arena.
Opposing fascism sounds good, but this is something I deal with in Planets and Meaning: A phenomenology of fate.
In its earliest editions, the New European backed a second referendum in which over-55s would be barred from voting, which would amount to dismantling the system of full and equal suffrage in which each citizen has a vote that counts equally to that of every other citizen.
Here we have the nub of the problem - the Establishmentarian belief that views that conflict with their own are less authentic than views it supports. But it doesn't stop there: the Establishment believes that the holders of those views are less authentic than people whose views do not threaten it.
The doctrine of authenticity goes back to Martin Heidegger, Hitler's philosopher. In his work Being and Time, he contrasted "the authentic" to an amorphous mass of others who he called das Man, which is usually translated as "the they" but can also be rendered as "the anybody". His brave new Aryan students would have learnt that only they were human, while the rest were cattle to be herded - into factories, prisons or concentration camps. It was the most profound possible contempt for views toxic to the Establishment and those who hold those views.
It comes as no surprise that Heidegger remains a deep influence on the Left, having been carried there by Jean-Paul Sartre, who was radicalised by Heidegger's writing while a prisoner-of-war before escaping by means that have never been satisfactorily explained.
But it would be a grave mistake to assume that all left-wingers are parafascists, witness the exodus form the Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn elevated a cadre of antisemites to leadership posts. It would be an even graver mistake to assume that the poison has not migrated outwith the Left. Until the UK's 2016 European Membership Referendum, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties formed a political cartel along with the Labour Party, whereby they functioned covertly as one super-party to stitch up the lion's share of the popular vote, so that their agenda - European unification - could be pursued regardless of which one of them was in power.This was noted as early as 1957 by Otto Kirchheimer, a member of the far-left Frankfurt school who was nevertheless a committed democrat and helped the US effort against Nazis. The title of his paper says it all - The Waning of Opposition in Parliamentary Regimes - and it's well worth following the link to get a free JSTOR account and read it. He states that the cause of European integration rides on the back of parties who previously opposed each other and competed for votes now collaborating and effectively sidelining the airing of adversarial views in systems that can only work adversarially.
If we respect the views of individuals and organisations - political or otherwise - that demand our views be suppressed, we will become little more than serfs in a technocratic system run by fascist with rounded corners and soft shoes. We will be enslaved and we will be dispensable.
We need to rethink what, when and why we exercise respect when that is not reciprocated. To rethink or reimagine is to remake, as shown by the Gramscian project to destroy not only what needed destroying but everything that stood in the way of creating a totalitarian state within what looks like a democracy.
It can't be nice to be called a Nazi, but what we're seeing is a case of individuals who threw the first stone now finding that stone heading for their own glass houses. If we want to grab victory from the jaws of defeat and prevent Establishmentarian contempt for us from descending into full civil war, we need to turn Aretha Franklin's sentiment on its head, and exercise some disrespect.
We've recently seen Anna Soubry react with fury at being labelled as a "Nazi", while in an interview with Sky TV she dished out the same sort of invective at people she disagreed with.
Last year her parliamentary colleague Daniel Zeichner called for tolerance in his constituency of Cambridge. This is the same man who, while Labour Parliamentary Candidate, did a Hitler salute at the Cambridge Union to demonstrate his opinion of the elected government of Poland and as an encore compared British members of the Conservative Party to Nazis.
Zeichner and others like him have demonstrated their hatred for views outside the range they think it is proper for the rest of us to believe through their membership of antifascist organisations, which exist to chase all views outside that range out of the public arena.
Opposing fascism sounds good, but this is something I deal with in Planets and Meaning: A phenomenology of fate.
the lessons of jackboots fascism’s military defeat have been learnt, and it has been the preliminary tasks of contemporary fascist leaders to wrap themselves in the iconography of antifascism in order to enlist sincere people, including politicians and public figures, to what appears to be a worthy project as long as one doesn’t penetrate too far beneath appearances. Democrats are, correspondingly, cast as fascists by such leaders using “freedom is slavery” arguments that George Orwell warned us of in Nineteen Eighty-Four.In 2016 the UK electorate voted to leave the European Union, a decision that has enraged the Establishment that demands our respect for its right to smear democrats as racists, fascists and Nazis, while it treats our views with sneering contempt in Parliament, its elected rump, and in its cultural wing, mainly the BBC but also in publications such as The Economist and The New European.
In its earliest editions, the New European backed a second referendum in which over-55s would be barred from voting, which would amount to dismantling the system of full and equal suffrage in which each citizen has a vote that counts equally to that of every other citizen.
Here we have the nub of the problem - the Establishmentarian belief that views that conflict with their own are less authentic than views it supports. But it doesn't stop there: the Establishment believes that the holders of those views are less authentic than people whose views do not threaten it.
The doctrine of authenticity goes back to Martin Heidegger, Hitler's philosopher. In his work Being and Time, he contrasted "the authentic" to an amorphous mass of others who he called das Man, which is usually translated as "the they" but can also be rendered as "the anybody". His brave new Aryan students would have learnt that only they were human, while the rest were cattle to be herded - into factories, prisons or concentration camps. It was the most profound possible contempt for views toxic to the Establishment and those who hold those views.
It comes as no surprise that Heidegger remains a deep influence on the Left, having been carried there by Jean-Paul Sartre, who was radicalised by Heidegger's writing while a prisoner-of-war before escaping by means that have never been satisfactorily explained.
But it would be a grave mistake to assume that all left-wingers are parafascists, witness the exodus form the Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn elevated a cadre of antisemites to leadership posts. It would be an even graver mistake to assume that the poison has not migrated outwith the Left. Until the UK's 2016 European Membership Referendum, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties formed a political cartel along with the Labour Party, whereby they functioned covertly as one super-party to stitch up the lion's share of the popular vote, so that their agenda - European unification - could be pursued regardless of which one of them was in power.This was noted as early as 1957 by Otto Kirchheimer, a member of the far-left Frankfurt school who was nevertheless a committed democrat and helped the US effort against Nazis. The title of his paper says it all - The Waning of Opposition in Parliamentary Regimes - and it's well worth following the link to get a free JSTOR account and read it. He states that the cause of European integration rides on the back of parties who previously opposed each other and competed for votes now collaborating and effectively sidelining the airing of adversarial views in systems that can only work adversarially.
If we respect the views of individuals and organisations - political or otherwise - that demand our views be suppressed, we will become little more than serfs in a technocratic system run by fascist with rounded corners and soft shoes. We will be enslaved and we will be dispensable.
We need to rethink what, when and why we exercise respect when that is not reciprocated. To rethink or reimagine is to remake, as shown by the Gramscian project to destroy not only what needed destroying but everything that stood in the way of creating a totalitarian state within what looks like a democracy.
It can't be nice to be called a Nazi, but what we're seeing is a case of individuals who threw the first stone now finding that stone heading for their own glass houses. If we want to grab victory from the jaws of defeat and prevent Establishmentarian contempt for us from descending into full civil war, we need to turn Aretha Franklin's sentiment on its head, and exercise some disrespect.
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