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Charles Murray, controversial author of The Bell Curve, which promoted links between intelligence and race, was shouted down by protesters at Middlebury College last Thursday. PBS reports:
Murray had been invited by Middlebury's student group affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank at which Murray is a scholar. [...] Prior to the point when Murray was introduced, several Middlebury officials reminded students that they were allowed to protest but not to disrupt the talk. The students ignored those reminders and faced no visible consequences for doing so. [...]
After the students chanted for about 20 minutes, college officials announced that the lecture would not take place but that Murray would go to another location, which the college didn't name, and have a discussion with a Middlebury faculty member — livestreamed back to the original lecture site.
According to Middlebury officials, after Murray and the professor who interviewed him for the livestream attempted to leave the location in a car, some protesters surrounded the car, jumped on it, pounded on it and tried to prevent the car from leaving campus.
Other sources note that political science professor Allison Stanger, who agreed to moderate the discussion, was attacked while accompanying Murray to the car, ultimately requiring treatment at a hospital for neck injuries caused by protesters pushing her and pulling her hair.
Murray himself later gave an account of his experience on the AEI blog. He emphasized that Middlebury's administration and staff displayed in exemplary ways their encouragement of free speech:
Middlebury's stance has been exemplary. The administration agreed to host the event. President Patton did not cancel it even after a major protest became inevitable. She appeared at the event, further signaling Middlebury's commitment to academic freedom. The administration arranged an ingenious Plan B that enabled me to present my ideas and discuss them with Professor Stanger even though the crowd had prevented me from speaking in the lecture hall. I wish that every college in the country had the backbone and determination that Middlebury exhibited.
But Murray notes that the outcome was very different from his previous controversial appearances:
Until last Thursday, all of the ones involving me have been as carefully scripted as kabuki: The college administration meets with the organizers of the protest and ground rules are agreed upon. The protesters have so many minutes to do such and such. It is agreed that after the allotted time, they will leave or desist. These negotiated agreements have always worked. At least a couple of dozen times, I have been able to give my lecture to an attentive (or at least quiet) audience despite an organized protest.
Middlebury tried to negotiate such an agreement with the protesters, but, for the first time in my experience, the protesters would not accept any time limits. [...] In the mid-1990s, I could count on students who had wanted to listen to start yelling at the protesters after a certain point, "Sit down and shut up, we want to hear what he has to say." That kind of pushback had an effect. It reminded the protesters that they were a minority. I am assured by people at Middlebury that their protesters are a minority as well. But they are a minority that has intimidated the majority. The people in the audience who wanted to hear me speak were completely cowed.
The form of the protest has been widely condemned even by those who vehemently disagree with Murray, as in the piece by Peter Beinart in The Atlantic that claims "something has gone badly wrong on the campus left." He argues strongly that "Liberals must defend the right of conservative students to invite speakers of their choice, even if they find their views abhorrent."
Meanwhile, student protesters have responded with their own account, disclaiming the hair-pulling incident as unintentional and "irresponsible" but condemning the Middlebury administration for their "support of a platform for white nationalist speech." They further claimed "peaceful protest was met with escalating levels of violence by the administration and Public Safety, who continually asserted their support of a dangerous racist over the well-being of students."
Personal note: My take on all of this is that the actual subject of Murray's Middlebury talk has been lost in the media coverage, namely his 2012 book Coming Apart, which (ironically) is a detailed discussion of the problems created by a division of the intellectual elite from the white working class. He explicitly dilutes his previous connections of social problems with a black underclass by noting that many of the same issues plague poor white communities. While his argument is still based on problematic assertions about intelligence and IQ, the topic of his book seems very relevant given recent political events and issues of class division. There's some sort of profound irony in a bunch of students at an elite school refusing to allow a debate on the causes and results of division between elite intellectuals and the (white) working class. I personally may think Murray's scholarship is shoddy and his use of statistics frequently misleading (or downright wrong), but I don't see how that justifies the kind of threats and intimidation tactics shown at this protest.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:32PM (6 children)
but had Hitler been censored early on, had the signs been heeded, Europe would not have needed to be destroyed for the second time in decades.
That's based on a number of incorrect assumptions. The Nazis were censored early on and very frequently thereafter, particularly with libel and hate speech laws. The trials became great propaganda tools for the Nazis. Second, Hitler may not have been inevitable but a dictator and the rearmament plans (which predate the Nazis!) were. There were a variety of powerful players including the German military and industry engineering the fall of the Wiemar Republic. They just thought they could control Hitler.
The invasions may have been inevitable too. The rearmament plans were to bring Germany back up to a high level of military capability before the rest of Europe could respond. What can you do with a temporary advantage of military power, but fight with it?
but what's wrong with silencing and censoring the right people at the right time to keep bad things from happening?
The fact that it fails so hard in practice and doesn't actually do anything constructive. Let us also keep in mind that hate speech can be redefined to mean speech that opposes whoever is in power.
Remember: Free speech is not hate speech. Why? Because preventative measures must be taken to ensure the future for a peaceful civilization-- and thanks to history, we know what the signs are.
Which is why I oppose hate speech at every turn. It is the destruction of free speech. Free speech means we allow speech of parties we don't agree with even when they are being hateful.
The universities are protecting themselves from regression, but I see clearly that there are some who do not know what progress looks like-- and it is to say what is right at the right time, and this is the wrong time to say the wrong thing.
Nonsense about the universities. Those speech restrictions undermine the intellectual freedom universities used to be known for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:59PM (5 children)
> The trials became great propaganda tools for the Nazis.
You bolded that, did you mean to make it a link so we could actually verify your claim?
That would have been the right thing to do.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 09 2017, @12:00AM (4 children)
Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher’s newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher’s campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.
and for the latter:
As the head of Berlin's Nazis, Goebbels chose Bernhard Weiss, the Jewish deputy chief of the city's police force, as a target of his anti-Semitic agitation. Goebbels nicknamed him "Isidore" and, after Weiss sued Goebbels for libel and won, he called him "Weiss, whom one isn't allowed to call Isidore." Goebbels derided Weiss's police officers as "Bernhardiner" ("St. Bernard dogs") and "Weiss guardsmen."
Allegedly, the Nazis lost dozens of libel lawsuits brought forth by Weiss personally. Wikipedia claims [wikipedia.org] over 40 were filed with none settled in the Nazi's favor.
In any case, we have exactly the same tools that supposedly will prevent a Nazi resurgence now were helpful in creating the Nazi menace then.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday March 09 2017, @04:54AM (1 child)
Not coincidental to current events, methinks:
(scroll down to "The Palestinian Muslim Who Inspired Hitler’s Final Solution")
http://www.focusonjerusalem.com/rememberingthemuslimwhoinspiredHitler.htm [focusonjerusalem.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2017, @08:49PM
Really?
You think a source that is about "bible prophecy" isn't just a a little bit biased?
Dude you aren't seeking knowledge, you are seeking confirmation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2017, @08:57PM (1 child)
You've got one guy claiming the lawsuits were a PR tool for the nazis.
And he's got quite the reason to make that argument - he published the mohammed cartoons and then was prevented from publishing holocaust cartoons, almost lost his job just for saying he would publish them.
Your other citation says some suits were filed but not that they were effective PR tools for the nazis.
You should be a little less credulous.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 09 2017, @09:30PM
You've got one guy claiming the lawsuits were a PR tool for the nazis. And he's got quite the reason to make that argument - he published the mohammed cartoons and then was prevented from publishing holocaust cartoons, almost lost his job just for saying he would publish them.
Your other citation says some suits were filed but not that they were effective PR tools for the nazis.
Notice that you aren't saying that my sources are incorrect. And really all sources are someone making a claim. Are you going to claim (and I take seriously for some reason) than every claim is equally unreliable because it is a claim? We have demonstrated here repeated trials for hate speech, particularly against Jews, and libel cases. None of these worked as advertised.
Instead, I'll build on that prior claim to state that repeated, very public passage through the legal system and repeated ineffective persecution by the authorities was a key factor in the transformation of the Nazi party from a regional group of nuts to the most powerful political party of 1932. The key trials were the 1923 trials for treason of the current Nazi leadership for their Beer Hall Putsch [wikipedia.org], a failed attempt to overthrow the state government of Bavaria. In the wake of those trials, Hitler achieved national prominence and then published "Mein Kampf", a key propaganda work/autobiography which he had written while in jail.
That established the overall narrative/myth: that the Nazis were working towards a better society, but were held back by the powers, ultimately controlled by the Jews, that made German society weak. Every impotent trial that resulted in an inconsequential fine, sentence, or seizure of equipment generated publicity and stoked the image of the Nazis as a persecuted minority fighting a corrupt and sinister force.
Sorry, but I believe hate speech laws help make the very problems they are meant to fight worse. And they do other, lasting damage to the society such as hushing speech that challenges the powerful.