Category: Free Speech

Muzzled Chinese Historian Dares to Publish Truth of Cultural Revolution

(p. 7) BEIJING — It seemed that China’s censors had finally muzzled Yang Jisheng, the famed chronicler of the Mao era. Last year, he had finished writing a widely anticipated history of the Cultural Revolution. But officials warned him against publishing it and barred him from traveling to the United States, he has said, and he stayed muted through the 50th anniversary of the start of that bloody upheaval.
Now Mr. Yang has broken that silence with the publication of his history of the Cultural Revolution, “The World Turned Upside Down,” a sequel to “Tombstone,” his landmark study of the famine spawned by Mao’s policies in the late 1950s. The 1,151-page book is the latest shot fired in China’s war over remembering, or forgetting, the dark side of its Communist past, a struggle that has widened under the hard-line president, Xi Jinping.
“I wrote this book to expose lies and restore the truth,” Mr. Yang writes in the book, which has been quietly published in Hong Kong, beyond the direct reach of Chinese censors. “This is an area that is extremely complicated and risky, but as soon as I entered it, I was filled with passion.”
Since Mr. Xi took power in 2012, the Communist Party authorities have denounced historians who question the party’s lionization of its past and exhume grim events like the Cultural Revolution, which Mao started in 1966, opening a decade of purges and bloodshed.
Tens of millions were persecuted and perhaps a million or more people were killed in that convulsive time. But officials say dwelling on such events is subversive “historical nihilism” aimed at corroding the party’s authority.

For the full story, see:
CHRIS BUCKLEY. “Historian’s New Mao Book Turns Acclaim in China to Censure.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., JAN. 22, 2017): 7.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 21, 2017, and has the title “Historian’s Latest Book on Mao Turns Acclaim in China to Censure.”)

The English translation and condensation of Mr. Yang’s earlier book, is:
Yang, Jisheng. Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962. Translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

Dignity and Equality Before the Law Unleashes Creativity in the Poor

(p. A23) We can improve the conditions of the working class. Raising low productivity by enabling human creativity is what has mainly worked. By contrast, taking from the rich and giving to the poor helps only a little — and anyway expropriation is a one-time trick.
. . .
Look at the astonishing improvements in China since 1978 and in India since 1991. Between them, the countries are home to about four out of every 10 humans. Even in the United States, real wages have continued to grow — if slowly — in recent decades, contrary to what you might have heard. Donald Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University, and others who have looked beyond the superficial have shown that real wages are continuing to rise, thanks largely to major improvements in the quality of goods and services, and to nonwage benefits. Real purchasing power is double what it was in the fondly remembered 1950s — when many American children went to bed hungry.
What, then, caused this Great Enrichment?
Not exploitation of the poor, not investment, not existing institutions, but a mere idea, which the philosopher and economist Adam Smith called “the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” In a word, it was liberalism, in the free-market European sense. Give masses of ordinary people equality before the law and equality of social dignity, and leave them alone, and it turns out that they become extraordinarily creative and energetic.

For the full commentary, see:
DEIRDRE N. McCLOSKEY. “Economic View; Equality, Liberty, Justice and Wealth.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., SEPT. 4, 2016): 6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date SEPT. 2, 2016, and has the title “Economic View; The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice.”)

McCloskey’s commentary, quoted above, is related to her book:
McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital, Transformed the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Peter Thiel Asks “What Happened to the Future?”

(p. B4) Mr. Thiel has been an important player in Silicon Valley since the first dot-com boom, but he has recently taken on a much more public role. He was born in Germany and came to the United States as an infant when his father, a chemical engineer, found work here. He was raised in Silicon Valley and went to Stanford, where he developed the views in his first book, “The Diversity Myth,” about the multiculturalism debate on campuses, written with the entrepreneur David O. Sacks.
In 1998, Mr. Thiel helped found the online payments company PayPal, an immediate success. He was the first outside investor in Facebook. Forbes estimates his net worth at $2.7 billion. Last year, he became a part-time partner at Y Combinator, a loosely defined advisory position.
A handful of others in Silicon Valley have similar investing track records. Where Mr. Thiel really separates himself from his peers is his skepticism that Silicon Valley is building a better world for all. His investment firm, Founders Fund, used to begin its online manifesto with the complaint, “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters,” a reference to Twitter. Now it says simply, “What happened to the future?”
San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington, D.C., are doing well, but the presidential campaign has laid bare the angst of many other places. Feelings of decline are rampant. “Most of the millennials have lower expectations than their baby boomer parents,” Mr. Thiel said. “Where I differ from others in Silicon Valley is in thinking that you can’t fence yourself off. If it continues, it will ultimately be bad for everybody.”

For the full story, see:
DAVID STREITFELD. “Peter Thiel, Contrarian Tech Billionaire, Defends His Support of Trump.” The New York Times (Mon., OCT. 31, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 29, 2016, and has the title “Peter Thiel Defends His Most Contrarian Move Yet: Supporting Trump.”)

The book mentioned above, that was co-authored by Thiel, is:
Sacks, David O., and Peter A. Thiel. The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford. Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute, 1995.

Mather and Boylston Risked Much to Fight Smallpox

I enjoyed reading the book reviewed below. From the title, and from reviews, I had the impression that it would mostly be about the smallpox epidemic and the innoculation conflict. I was surprised that of equal, or greater, importance in the book is the role of James Franklin’s newspaper in laying the intellectual groundwork for the American Revolution. I learned from that part of the book too, but some might feel misled from the title about what the book was mainly about. (I think “fever” in the title is intended as a double entendre, referring both to a fever from smallpox, and a fever from the ideas of liberty.)

(p. A11) Inoculation was proposed by Cotton Mather, a figure much diminished in the 30 years since Salem. He had suffered a terrible sequence of tragedies, losing his wife and 10 of his children to accidents and epidemic disease. He had also been marginalized within the religious community by quarrels and scandals. But he had become an assiduous student of science, corresponding with the Royal Society in London and learning from its “Transactions” that inoculation against smallpox had long been practiced in Constantinople. Mr. Coss shows how Mather’s investigations led him to consult a source closer to home. His slave Onesimus, when asked whether he had ever had smallpox, replied “both Yes, and No”: He had been inoculated as a child in Africa, receiving a mild infection and subsequent immunity.

Inoculation was commonplace across swaths of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, Mr. Coss explains, but this inclined the doctors of Enlightenment-era Europe to regard it as a primitive superstition. Such was the view of William Douglass, the only man in Boston with the letters “M.D.” after his name, who was convinced that “infusing such malignant filth” in a healthy subject was lethal folly. The only person Mather could persuade to perform the operation was a surgeon, Zabdiel Boylston, whose frontier upbringing made him sympathetic to native medicine and who was already pockmarked from a near-fatal case of the disease.
“Given that attempting inoculation constituted an almost complete leap of faith for Boylston,” Mr. Coss writes, “he spent surprisingly little time agonizing over it.” He knew personally just how savage the toll could be. On June 26, 1721, just as the epidemic began to rage in earnest, Boyston filled a quill with the fluid from an infected blister and scratched it into the skin of two family slaves and his own young son.
News of the experiment was greeted with public fury and terror that it would spread the contagion. A town-hall meeting was convened, at Dr. Douglass’s instigation, at which inoculation was condemned and banned. Mather’s house was firebombed with an incendiary device to which a note was attached: “I will inoculate you with this.”

For the full review, see:
MIKE JAY. “‘BOOKSHELF; An Ounce of Prevention; When Cotton Mather advocated inoculation during a smallpox outbreak, young Benjamin Franklin helped foment outrage against him.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., March 3, 2016): A11.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 2, 2016, and has the title “‘BOOKSHELF; When Ben Franklin Was Against Vaccines; When Cotton Mather advocated inoculation during a smallpox outbreak, young Benjamin Franklin helped foment outrage against him.”)

The book under review, is:
Coss, Stephen. The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.

The Most Popular Kremlin Line

(p. A4) In an interview, Mr. Gorbachev shrugged off the fact that 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he remains among the most reviled men in Russia. “It is freedom of expression,” he said.
. . .
Some adore him for introducing perestroika, or restructuring, combined with glasnost, or openness, which together helped to jettison the worst repressions of the Communist system. Mr. Gorbachev led the way, albeit haltingly, toward free speech, free enterprise and open borders.
“Some love him for bringing freedom, and others loathe him for bringing freedom,” said Dmitri Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, one of the few remaining independent newspapers and one in which Mr. Gorbachev holds a 10 percent stake.
. . .
Mr. Muratov said they often recounted the same joke, based on Mr. Gorbachev’s infamous campaign to lower alcohol consumption:
Two men are standing in a long, long vodka line prompted by the limited supply. One asks the other to keep his place in line, because he wants to go over the Kremlin to punch Gorbachev in the face for his anti-alcohol policy. He comes back many hours later and his friend asks him if he had indeed punched Gorbachev. “No,” the man answered despondently. “The line at the Kremlin was even longer.”

For the full story, see:
NEIL MacFARQUHAR. “Reviled, Revered, and Still Challenging Russia to Evolve.” The New York Times (Thurs., JUNE 2, 2016): A4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JUNE 1, 2016, and has the title “Reviled by Many Russians, Mikhail Gorbachev Still Has Lots to Say.”)

“Hong Kongers Will Not Bow Down to Brute Force”

(p. A1) HONG KONG — Blindfolded and handcuffed, the bookseller was abducted from Hong Kong’s border with mainland China and taken to a cell, where he would spend five months in solitary confinement, watched 24 hours a day by a battery of Chinese guards.
Even the simple act of brushing his teeth was monitored by minders, who tied a string to his toothbrush for fear he might try to use it to harm himself. They wanted him to identify anonymous authors and turn over data on customers.
“I couldn’t call my family,” the man, Lam Wing-kee, said on Thursday. “I could only look up to the sky, all alone.”
Months after he and four other booksellers disappeared from Hong Kong and Thailand, prompting international concern over what critics called a brazen act of extralegal abduction, Mr. Lam stood before a bank of television cameras in Hong Kong and revealed the harrowing details of his time in detention.
“It can happen to you, too,” said Mr. Lam, 61, who was the manager of Causeway Bay Books, a store that sold juicy potboilers about the mainland’s Communist Party leadership. “I want to tell the whole world: Hong Kongers will not bow down to brute force.”
. . .
(p. A14) In the months since Mr. Lam and his colleagues disappeared, the industry has fallen on hard times. Causeway Bay Books has closed, and many Hong Kong bookstores have pulled titles about Chinese politics from their shelves.
The disappearances shocked people in Hong Kong and reverberated internationally. Many saw the episode as an expansion of China’s authoritarian legal system beyond its borders, in clear violation of the “one country, two systems” framework that allows Hong Kong to maintain a high degree of autonomy from Beijing.
Thousands of people took to the streets of Hong Kong to demand the booksellers’ release. Diplomats from Britain, the European Union and the United States also registered concern.

For the full story, see:
ALAN WONG, MICHAEL FORSYTHE and ANDREW JACOBS. “Defying China, Hong Kong Bookseller Describes Detention.” The New York Times (Fri., JUNE 17, 2016): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JUNE 16, 2016, and has the title “Defying China, Hong Kong Bookseller Describes Detention.”)

Bourgeois Ideology Caused the Great Enrichment

(p. A13) What accounts for the wealth and prosperity of the developed nations of the world? How did we get so rich, and how might others join the fold?
Deirdre McCloskey, a distinguished economist and historian, has a clarion answer: ideas. It was ideas, she insists–about commerce, innovation and the virtues that support them–that account for the “Great Enrichment” that has transformed much of the world since 1800.
. . .
. . . , this monumental achievement was caused by a change in values, Ms. McCloskey says–the rise of what she calls, in a mocking nod to Marx, a “bourgeois ideology.” It was far from an apology for greed, however. Anglo-Dutch in origin, the new ideology presented a deeply moral vision of the world that vaunted the value of work and innovation, earthly happiness and prosperity, and the liberty, dignity and equality of ordinary people. Preaching tolerance of difference and respect for the individual, it applauded those who sought to improve their lives (and the lives of others) through material betterment, scientific and technological inquiry, self-improvement, and honest work. Suspicious of hierarchy and stasis, proponents of bourgeois values attacked monopoly and privilege and extolled free trade and free lives while setting great store by prudence, enterprise, decency and hope.

For the full review, see:
DARRIN M. MCMAHON. “BOOKSHELF; The Morality of Prosperity; Grinding poverty was the norm for humanity until 1800. It changed with the rise of values like tolerance and respect for individual liberty.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., June 13, 2016): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 12, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital, Transformed the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Universities Limit Free Speech

(p. F10) Ask Andrea M. Quenette if she thinks that colleges and universities are doing a good job refereeing the debate over free speech, and she’ll respond with an emphatic ‘no.’
“Schools are not doing enough to protect free speech,” Ms. Quenette, a communications professor at the University of Kansas, said in an email. “Specifically, they are protecting the speech of some, those whom they fear or those voices which are loudest, but they are not protecting the speech of those whose voices are easier to silence. Generally, these quieter voices are those of faculty and staff who should rightfully fear for their jobs should they use unpopular, but legally protected, words.”
. . .
According to a poll recently released by the Gallup Organization, 78 percent of 3,072 students from 32 four-year private and public colleges believed their campuses should strive to create an open environment where they would be exposed to a range of speech and views. Twenty-two percent noted that “colleges should prohibit biased or offensive speech in the furtherance of a positive learning environment.” But 69 percent favored limitations on speech when it came to language that was deliberately upsetting to some groups.
An October 2015 survey of 800 students nationwide, sponsored by the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale, reported that 63 percent favored requiring professors to use “trigger warnings” to alert students to subject matter that might be unsettling. By a 51 percent to 36 percent margin, students also supported speech codes to regulate speech for students and faculty.

For the full story, see:
ABBY ELLIN. “Studies in Free Speech.” The New York Times (Thurs., JUNE 23, 2016): F10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JUNE 22, 2016, and has the title “Studies in the First Amendment, Playing Out on Campus.”)

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.

Feds Encourage Costly, Intrusive, Confusing Title IX Bureaucracies

(p. A1) CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In a brightly lit classroom here at Harvard, Mia Karvonides was trying to explain to a group of bemused student leaders the difference between a romantic encounter and “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” as the university’s relatively new code of sexual misconduct defines it.
She tried to leaven the legalistic atmosphere at the town-hall-style meeting with realistic-sounding examples, defying gender stereotypes. Jose and Lisa, chemistry students, are working late at night in the lab, she began, when Lisa comes up from behind and kisses Jose on the neck.
Such a surprise move, she suggested, could be the beginning of a sexual misconduct complaint.
. . .
Ms. Karvonides is Harvard’s first Title IX officer, leading a new bureaucracy that oversees how the institution responds to complaints of sexual violence under Title IX, the federal law that governs gender equity in education. She is one of a rapidly growing number of Title IX employees on campuses nationwide, as colleges spend millions to hire law-(p. A3)yers, investigators, case workers, survivor advocates, peer counselors, workshop leaders and other officials to deal with increasing numbers of these complaints.
. . .
The expansion of Title IX bureaucracies — often at great expense — is driven in part by pressure from the federal government, which recently put out a series of policy directives on sexual misconduct on campus. More than 200 colleges and universities are under federal investigation for the way they have handled complaints of sexual misconduct, up from 55 two years ago.
. . .
. . . in a report last week, a national association of professors said that the Title IX bureaucracy had started to infringe on academic freedom, by beginning investigations into faculty members’ lectures and essays.
. . .
At a minimum, federal rules require colleges to designate one Title IX coordinator, at least part time.
Many colleges have gone far beyond that, at a cost ranging from thousands to millions of dollars.
. . .
At the University of California, Berkeley, officials said, Title IX spending has risen by at least $2 million since 2013, though they declined to give the total.
“Certainly, colleges are spending more related to Title IX than ever in history, both preventatively and responsively,” Mr. Sokolow said. He estimated that dealing with an inquiry could cost “six figures,” and that responding to a lawsuit “can run into the high six or even seven figures, not counting a settlement or verdict.”
. . .
Some campuses have adopted “affirmative consent” rules, in effect a written or unwritten contract, requiring a yes before the first kiss and at every step along the way. Harvard has opted instead for what Ms. Karvonides called a more nuanced standard of “unwelcome conduct.”
This has led to criticism by some that the policy is not strong enough, and by others that it could punish behavior as mild as flirting.
“This is ubiquitously on the mind of everyone at Harvard,” said Daniel Banks, the undergraduate council vice president, who helped organize the recent town-hall-style meeting on the subject. Many students have concluded that the best solution is not so much compliance as avoidance.
“You either don’t date at all,” said Daniel Levine, another student leader, “or you’re like a married couple.”

For the full story, see:
ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS. “In Battling Sexual Misconduct, Colleges Build a Bureaucracy.” The New York Times (Weds., MARCH 30, 2016): A1 & A3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 29, 2016, and has the title “Colleges Spending Millions to Deal With Sexual Misconduct Complaints.”)

The AAUP report expressing concerns about how Title IX bureaucracies violate academic freedom and due process, is:
American Association of University Professors (AAUP). “The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX.” Draft Report, March 24, 2016.

Trump Threatens Antitrust Action Against Innovative Amazon Entrepreneur Bezos

(p. A11) Donald Trump, an innovator in all things, is now in the process of changing the rules in America with his threat to bring legal action against Amazon on antitrust grounds and, if we hear him correctly, on tax grounds as well.
Mr. Trump couldn’t have been clearer about his motivation. He complained about Washington Post reporters calling up and “asking ridiculous questions,” “all false stuff,” apparently related to Mr. Trump’s tax returns, which in defiance of all tradition he has refused to release, as well as Mr. Trump’s real-estate dealings.
Mr. Trump says the Post was purchased as “a toy” by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (who bought the paper with his personal funds in 2013). Mr. Trump says the paper now is being used to attack Mr. Trump in order to protect Amazon’s alleged tax-dodging practices even though Amazon, after long resistance, has begun in recent years to collect state sales tax.
All this seems to arise because the Post, the dominant newspaper in the nation’s capital, has assigned reporters to investigate the business career of the candidate who champions his credibility to be president by referring to his business career.

For the full commentary, see:
HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR. “BUSINESS WORLD; Donald Trump’s Amazon Adventure; Does he really want to be president–or is his attack on entrepreneur Jeff Bezos a cry for help?” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 14, 2016): A11.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 13, 2016.)