Freedom of speech

Subject: Freedom of speech

Is it right that the so called "right to freedom of speech" has, in a perverse way, cast out words which, in the past denigrate people because of their colour, culture, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference, the list goes on. Have we in the past terrorised people for being different to ourselves. Clearly the answer is yes. Was this done because we were ignorant or was it because we were fearful of the changes to our society, changes which we imagined would somehow diminish our role in the society, and take away our control of the leavers of power.

I am reading a series of articles about "freedom of speech". From our indignation at the "Snowflake" mentality which seeks to shut down university debate making some subjects taboo, racist, misogynistic, inappropriate, plain unhelpful, as we seek to meld a new society out of a multicultural hotchpotch which we are busy evolving into. 

Viewed from the position of a person who in the past held less power to have their say, people of colour, women, homosexual and transgender, then the past was a dark place. It can't be argued that oppression was ever a good thing and yet we did and still do as we try to come to terms with the fact that people who appear unlike us have much in common. Their needs are the same, respect, tolerance and understanding.

Under perfect circumstances these intolerances should be banished but laying in and amongst this tolerance of difference for the sake of unity lies the unpalatable fact that unity often means recognising something which we are not, that is, we are not all the same. 

Dictating a common agenda, that of seeing all people as the same flesh and blood is an etherial view much favoured by religious teaching because of an understanding that we were created by the hand of God and therefore must be in essence the same. But hiding amongst the remarkable likenesses there are a number of cultural dislikenesses  and if there are traits of activity which distort our sense of right and wrong how are we to square the circle.

To close down the freedom to say you don't like such and such a thing for the sake of an accord which is only tenuously growing, since at the same time our sense  of taste and acceptance is being eroded by the bombardment by a politically correct elite who wish to round us all into some sort of amenable shape, a smooth exterior to silence, once and for all people who do not accept that the world, its people and customs are anything but uniform.

It's hard to disagree with the young black woman who clearly has faced a great deal of prejudice in her life and wishes simply to be recognised for who she is and not branded by the colour of her skin. 

Historically the Seafaring Explorers. European white man denigrated the people  they conquered as being savages. These seafarers were of course much more benign than than say Genghis Khan who routinely butchered those he conquered and saw as savages,  but the mindset of the "reformers" is singleminded in blaming all intolerant history on white men. 

Rewriting history and taking out the context (Genghis was a traveling man and didn't want to be weighed down with a baggage train of defeated slaves) is a deceit that all modern day socio commentary writers fall into. As the song says, "times they are a changing" and it was ever so. Our present is not the same as our past even though many of the problems remain the same.

'Fear of difference' is countered by 'there is no difference' and yet we would be fools if we didn't recognise that the bonds formed by difference are as strong as they ever were. The collegiate bond, be it Etonian or Religious, be it cultural or linguistic is so elementally strong that the human rights logic of Aufa Hersch, as much as I would wish to embrace it, is not true to the evidence of realpolitik.