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Activism See other Activism Articles Title: Permission to Speak Freely Permission to Speak Freely January 30, 2006 by Taki Back in February 2003, The American Conservative ran an editorial under the heading “Free Taki.” Mind you, it was a shot across the bow of Scotland Yard’s “Diversity Division,” which was investigating me for an article I had written in the Spectator of London about British drug gangs. “The freedom of political speech is one of the bedrock institutions of the West,” we thundered, but it would be stretching it if I now wrote that Scotland Yard got our message and let me go. First of all, I was never arrested, just investigated. I had written that most of the drug gangsters were Afro-Caribbean, just like their fathers and grandfathers. In this, I had echoed the great English historian and polymath Paul Johnson, who had previously written that black immigrants ought to be paid to go back to their country of origin to make room for Asian immigrants. Throwing people in jail for things they’ve said or written is hardly new. I suppose old Socrates was among the first to be punished in my old hometown of Athens, the state claiming that he was corrupting its youth. Actually he was preaching sedition, but they got him to drink hemlock by threatening to expose him as a Woody Allen type, except for preferring boys. But selective free speech and democracy for minorities being very in vogue nowadays, I shall stick to recent times. In merry old England last month, for Joe and Helen Roberts, sincere Christians whose principles led them to object very politely to their local council’s policy of promoting gay rights, freedom of speech did not apply. Although they committed no offense, that didn’t stop the council reporting them to the fuzz, who raided their home for two hours, questioning them and then warning them about their non-offense. The Robertses’ views on homosexuality may be unfashionable in liberal circles but are shared by millions of Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Another Brit, ... < bonk > < / debonk > When David Irving was refused entry into New Zealand on the grounds that he had been deported from Canada in 1992, a Kiwi Green Party spokesman said, “His fatally flawed analysis has been rubbished in open debate. Banning him only gives him publicity. His deportation from Canada is irrelevant. What next: are we going to ban Salman Rushdie because Iran doesn’t like him?” No free speech for fascists is a no-no. Fascists, communists, even vegetarians should be allowed to speak—at least in free countries, which are becoming fewer and fewer . Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative
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