Free speech is the foundation of civilisation. Without it, it’s not possible for a person to express their discontent with the way things are, and without an outlet for discontent it will inevitably turn into violence. As John F Kennedy told us, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
There are powerful political movements in the world today who have calculated that criminalising free speech benefits their agenda, despite this risk. These movements usually have a kind of feminine logic at their core, in that they consider themselves to be righteously resisting masculine excesses like discrimination.
Most are predicated on the moral assumption that, in any conflict between two forces, the weakest force must automatically be the morally correct one, on the grounds that the weaker side would not start a conflict that they would lose.
After some decades of percolating away in sick heads disconnected from reality, this assumption has led the social justice warriors to now believe in the moral imperative of destroying all hierarchy on the grounds that it is necessarily masculine and therefore inherently evil.
No consideration is given to the concept of correct hierarchy that leads to good order – such a thing is simply axiomatically defined as impossible. All order is bad, therefore all must be destroyed.
Such a morality naturally leads to the idea that all weakness is inherently good – hence the resurgence of what Nietzsche would have called “slave morality” in the West.
This explains why so many are bleating the catchphrase of the modern moron: “Hate speech is not free speech” – where hate speech is defined as the promulgation of facts that, despite being true, are politically inconvenient to those who are anti-hierarchy.
In particular, any fact which suggests that a particular hierarchy might be natural and inevitable has to be the most strenuously opposed. As Nietzsche pointed out, the reason for this is the resentment that these weaklings have towards those strong enough to impose good order upon themselves, for it is good order imposed upon oneself that leads to rising in worldly hierarchies.
For instance, the proposition that the text of the Koran will lead inevitably to violence is vociferously opposed by those who want to propagate the impression that the wars in the Middle East are caused primarily by Western interference.
Likewise, the proposition that Islamic terrorism in Europe is a natural consequence of the text of the Koran is opposed by those who want to propagate the impression that the terrorism is blowback for Western interference.
Unsurprisingly, such propositions – entirely independent of any historical or logical validity they might have – are increasingly lumped under the general rubric of “Islamophobia.”
They join propositions such as statements about racial differences in intelligence, or about gender differences in propensity towards certain patterns of behaviour, as politically incorrect ones.
The latest frontier in the war on free speech is attempts to criminalise the free expression of such propositions.
Already there is a concerted movement that means to make it illegal to point out the obvious connection between Koranic verses calling for violence and Islamic expressions of violence, or the obvious connection between the belief that a paedophile was the perfect man and culturally lax attitudes to paedophilia.
The tragedy is, the only reason why the West is no longer an oppressive shithole like the Islamic World is that we have spent the last four centuries using our freedom of speech and expression to destroy the evil of Abrahamism in its manifestation of Christianity.
And, in much the same way that the West was an oppressive, miserable shithole when it was illegal to criticise Christianity, so too will it be an oppressive, miserable shithole when it is illegal to criticise Islam.
What has to happen is a cultural shift where screaming “Racist!” or “Bigot!” at someone is no longer socially sanctioned as legitimate discourse. There needs to be a mass awakening to the fact that this strategy of political manipulation has the overall effect of suppressing honest discussion, and therefore is detrimental to everyone in society, and to society as a whole.
This will require sane people uniting around the spirit of genuine inquiry into the nature of reality, and in opposition to the egomaniacs who are trying to remake the world in their image by force.
And that means uniting around a shared appreciation that free speech keeps us safe from all kinds of excesses, even politically correct ones.
After all, it’s not a coincidence that the Anglosphere, with the strongest cultural appreciation of the value of free speech, has kept itself safe from totalitarianism for the longest time.