To the Editor:
Noam Chomsky, professor at MIT, said: “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”
This insight was given powerful expression recently, by the worldwide reactions to a free-expression movie trailer supposedly degrading the Prophet Mohammed. Riots ensued, innocent civilians were killed – all because one American decided to use his right of freedom of expression as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, born in the Enlightenment.
There are millions of U.S. Citizens who stridently stand up for the Second Amendment, but I will argue that the First is more important, because a “well armed militia” bearing arms, citizen-reinforced, is no guarantee of freedoms without freedom of speech/expression.
Without freedom of speech, curtailment of rights and the denial of differences of opinions will lead to the tyranny so often mentioned in the Declaration of Independence.
Without freedom of speech and free expression, rights will not be protected and promulgated for all the people. Every tyranny suppresses expression which does not agree with its propaganda. In the Islamic-ruled countries, freedom of speech belongs to rulers and clergy working hand in hand, combined with the tyranny of the majority-believers who follow them.
This system guarantees that anyone who challenges their authority will be suppressed and/or, severely punished, sometimes, murdered.
We should not be surprised at the Islamic reactions to challenging beliefs in their religion-state entanglement. There is something very familiar about this (and a major reason why there is a First Amendment of separation of state from church and free speech in the same text).
In the Western civilization, believers of the Christian faith also engaged in destruction and slaughter against those, even amongst themselves, who challenged traditional beliefs in their speech. Free speakers were suppressed, tortured, killed, their properties seized, their families sometimes sent into exile or outright killed. Those who dared to speak up, or even expressed a difference of opinion challenging that status quo, were declared “anathema, heretics, witches,” etc. – and all to keep the masses from hearing what they had to say, to keep anyone else from imitating them.
It also became common practice to handle all factions which disagreed.
It is ironic that both freedom of religion and freedom of speech occupy the same text in the First Amendment, given religion’s historical suppression of free speech, of opinions and opinion-makers.
It is also ironic that, in a nation which prides itself as a beacon of freedom; of liberty enshrined in free speech, that such free speech, difference of opinion, and even information to the contrary, is still not permitted in its houses of worship. Within those houses, children are taught, via tradition and implication, that denying differences of opinion is acceptable in our country. Do you think this is fair?
When I was a child, my Christian teachers praised the martyrs who died for the faith, but did not mention those martyrs who suffered and died because they questioned the faith.
Those who demand respect for their beliefs are not respecting the free speech of those who disagree with those beliefs.
There are many places in the land of the free where free speech is suppressed, where it is not allowed any more than it is in Islamic – ruled lands. This is quite an enigma, isn’t it?
Carl Scheiman, Walpole
