[lbo-talk] Link to Muhammed cartoons

www.leninology. blogspot.com leninology at hotmail.com
Thu Feb 2 11:36:34 PST 2006



>I believe in freedom of speech and all, but these cartoons are rather
>racist and stupid. And, at the bottom of the page cited there appears:

Those cartoons are very similar to the sorts of illustrations of threatening Oriental outsiders that appeared in Europe at a darker period in our history:

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6998/196/1600/jews%20communists.jpg

Strange to see how this stuff is recrudescent (even if, weirdly, the charges are almost the opposite: the Jews were cosmopolitan, too Bolshevik, too capitalist - the Muslims are insufficiently cosmopolitan, not liberal enough, not capitalist enough, too traditional).

On a separate note, I hate to be an old Leninist authoritarian, but isn't "freedom of speech" an interesting phrase? It's a logocentric fallacy, since what we're talking about is an entirely different mode of expression. It sort of occludes the fact that we're talking about a kind of action which has ramifications beyond who hears what. At any rate, no freedom is absolute and actions which harm others are generally prohibited. Political expression is conative, has to be, and racist expression ought to be banned as it is likely to cause injury to those targeted, in my view.

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