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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/05/25/speech-by-conservative-speaker-milo-yiannopoulos-shut-down-by-protesters-at-depaul-police-and-security-dont-intervene/ For those who aren't aware of who Milo Yiannopoulos is, he is one of the younger far-right voices from the Breitbart circuit. He goes to college campuses and college liberal events (like "Slutwalk") and basically lampoons the people there. Like a crusty, unfunny, right-wing version of Max Blumenthal, but unintelligent and with no actual substance or content to back up his funnier gags. He showed up at DePaul, the same place that denied Norman Finkelstein tenure for his support for the Palestinians, and apparently some of the students did not take kindly to his hateful speech. I always cringe a little bit when authors like this one invoke the memory of people who died in World War II to malign domestic social movements. For one thing, the people who died at Normandy died during the final stages of a war that the United States had entered after millions of Russian soldiers had already died preventing the expansion of fascism. Moreover, US soldiers die because they are ordered to invade other countries; not for any kind of lofty ideals. So invoking the memory of those who die in US wars as though they were fighting specifically *for* freedom of speech, let alone the freedom of speech of right-wing agitators in the United States, is little more than a whitewash of US foreign policy. And moreover, I wonder what the author would make of the laws that exist in Normandy itself designed to prevent people like Milo Yiannopoulos and his ilk from making racist and demeaning statements about marginalized groups of people, precisely to prevent the rise of fascism? In my younger days as a volunteer at the ACLU, I thought it was very lofty to see liberals defending the freedom of speech of the KKK, the Nazis, and so on. But nowadays I feel differently. "Freedom of speech" is simply the category that is used to validate and protect those ideas that manage to seep through the institutional barriers that prevent marginalized groups from influencing discourse. I could care less about protecting such opinions expect possibly as a strategic matter to prevent left-wing opinions from being suppressed in the same spaces, as happened at DePaul. - Amith _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
