Standing up Against "Speech policing" : Lessons from George Orwell and Heberto Padilla

The closest my generation got to the great George Orwell must have been the great and unfortunately late Christopher Hutchins, who wrote precisely about the former explaining why going against "group thinking" is so important.

Hitchens and Orwell criticized with some of the most beautiful English prose I read the anomalies and hypocrisy of the Left. Here is a brief excerpt from Orwell's "1984" explaining "newspeak" (bold is mine):

"Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed— would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper— the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you [...] 

“Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”

Orwell charged against totalitarian control of the language back in the 1930s, when the Left (to which he belonged to the point of volunteering to defend Barcelona during the Civil War) was in full ascent, before the Moscow trials shredded the last vestiges of civility in the Bolshevik dictatorship.

Silencing dissenting voices was (and is) a lamentable characteristic of Left-wing incivility, one that is required for suppressing unpleasant facts.

I was young enough to witness one equivalent to the Moscow trials when Castro's dictatorship jailed and forced laureate poet Heberto Padilla to the humiliation of public apology for "crimes against the revolution" for his poetry. On top of being critical of the government (very midly, for our standards), Padilla was also homosexual, another condition that the Cuban regime treated as an "illness" (here an eerie parallel with our Christian Right) with internment camps and electroshock "cures".

I am old enough also, to witness the suppression of free speech and tolerated infringement of our First Amendment rights by Left wing campus organizations, as in the case of Charles Murray, a scholar whose work -which the protesters haven't read- was deemed "unfit" for a presentation in campus to the point of physical aggression to the liberal hosting professor.

This kind of uncivil behavior in campus is not only condoned by intimidated administrators that do not take stronger measures to guarantee the speakers' (and a majority of the students interested in listening to different ideas and points of view) but also by those Far Left web and press venues that justify and created the concept of "political correctness" and now extended it to its natural logical sequel, the institution of "free zones" where free speech is not tolerated on behalf of not hurting "beliefs" or racial, gender or sexual orientation "identities".

Gross infringements on freedom of speech like these come in two forms of uncivility: "hard" , suchs as mobbing and physically impeding free speech and "soft", with the institution of "speech policing" under "political correctness" rules (as defined by those in control of speech) and the most recent institution of "safe zones" where those claiming to be "harmed" by "hate speech" can demand free speech to be turned off.

A good discussion -and rejection- of these abuses is long overdue. They have turned upside down the function of higher education institutions -from safe places for dissent and argument to congregations of mutually intolerant sects and their dogmas.

Those in the moderate, classical liberal Left of the spectrum -as President Obama is widely considered to be (with the probable exception of the Alt and Far Right that equate him with Saul Alinsky) have spoken against "safe zones" and other forms of Left-wing incivility:

Yet, they seem not to be strong or convincing enough for some campuses administrators to act like the University of Chicago did, formulating explicit condemnation of incivil practices.

For those who defend "safe zones" as if college students were unable to survive a debate of ideas without suffering irreparable psychological harm, perhaps this commencement speech by Chief Justice John Roberts may give some healthy suggestions:

Few things are more mind-building that a stern practice on scholarly debate. That's what our universities and high schools have been teaching for more than a century:

Civility can't harm anybody. Or perhaps we should debate it?

Here is an example from Intelligence Squared debates about this topic:

References & Sources:

IQ2us
Orwell, G. Politics of the English language