The Columbia Law Review Unintentionally Teaches about Freedom of Speech: the Myth and the Reality
"Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue" and Columbia University proves it
Francois de la Rochefoucauld said that “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” Columbia University, bless its heart, has kindly agreed to illustrate with a wonderful example what this wise quotation means: that those who practice vice pretend to honor virtue as the price they must pay to get away with their vice.
The example of this so recently provided to us by Columbia University’s pretending to honor the principle of “Freedom of speech” while in fact suppressing speech is visible in the form of a series of screen shots of website images that pretty much speak for themselves: Here they are in chronological order:
Those who have the power to control what speech is allowed and what speech is not allowed, and who affirm their respect for the principle of freedom of speech, engage in this hypocrisy as the price they must pay to get away with the vice of suppressing speech that helps people resist oppression. It is not complicated.
I have written about the bogus nature of “Freedom of speech” here and here. Please take a look.
In order to make a just, equal and democratic world—what I call an egalitarian world—a world in which class inequality is abolished, a world that does not permit a wealthy and privileged upper class to treat other people like dirt as our ruling billionaire plutocracy does today, we need to remove such oppressors from power and not allow them to use speech (as I explain here and hope you read it if you disagree) or anything else to oppress people. This is the point of the two articles of mine about “Freedom of speech” linked to in the above paragraph and again in this one.
It is thus a mistake to think of our goal as wanting “Freedom of speech” for everybody. When good people—people opposed to oppression—say that that is their goal, they do so because they fear that if they said what their actual goal is—abolishing class inequality and outlawing oppression and outlawing anything done to defend oppression including speech done for that purpose—that they would lose the support of the general public. But in fact they would GAIN the support of the general public because this is in fact what the vast majority of people would LOVE (as I prove here.)
Postscript (file under “ultra-ironical”)
