Rallying the Enlightenment Defense of Free Speech

(p. C1) OXFORD, England — After the murders at Charlie Hebdo last year, the public intellectual Timothy Garton Ash — once a dashing foreign correspondent, long since a scholar amid the spires of Oxford — issued an appeal to news organizations: Publish the offending cartoons, all of you together, and in that way proclaim the vitality of free speech.
“Otherwise,” he warned, “the assassin’s veto will have prevailed.”
By this reckoning, the assassins triumphed, for most publications ignored his entreaty, to protect their staffs from danger or to protect their readers from offense.
. . .
. . . , free speech is on the defensive, Mr. Garton Ash argues, and he is trying to rally the resistance.
(p. C4) . . . , he has written a scrupulously reasoned 491-page manifesto and user’s guide, “Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World,” due out in the United States on Tuesday [May 24, 2016] which includes his case for defying threats, his opposition to hate-speech laws and his view on whether another’s religion deserves your respect.
. . .
“We as a society have to hold the line,” he said in the interview. “There has to be less appeasement.” For this, solidarity is required: Law-enforcement authorities must safeguard those who speak up, and taxpayers must be willing to pay the high costs this will incur. “Otherwise,” he added, “yielding to violent intimidation is itself objectively a kind of incitement to violence, right? Because you encourage the next guys to have a go.”
. . .
A vulnerability of Mr. Garton Ash’s project is that his principles are so deeply rooted in Enlightenment ideals, which are not universally shared.

For the full commentary, see:
TOM RACHMAN. “A Manifesto Extolling Free Speech.” The New York Times (Mon., MAY 23, 2016): C1 & C4.
(Note: ellipses,and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MAY 22, 2016, and has the title “Timothy Garton Ash Puts Forth a Free-Speech Manifesto.”)

Ash’s manifesto in defense of free speech, is:
Ash, Timothy Garton. Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.

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