Multicultural Censorship

Campus Report ^ | June 13, 2008 | Emily Miller

[bs9021]

Multicultural Censorship

by: Emily Miller, June 13, 2008

Historian and author Victor Davis Hanson argued in a lecture addressed to the Heritage Foundation that there is a new narrative defining the debate between security and liberty that is more characteristic of a post-9/11-plus-hindsight world.

Hanson suggested that the government is not infringing upon American individual rights, as was generally feared in the past, but rather Americans themselves pose the greatest threat to their freedom of speech by practicing self-censorship. This consequently stifles thought and discourages freedom of expression.

“Right now at this time, there is a collective mood in the West that is self-censoring, is not self-reflective, and has had a deleterious effect on free expression,” said Hanson. “And while we have a history of state coercion of the individual, the problem right now is not in the stars, so to speak. It’s within ourselves.”

Hanson attributed the change in the narrative to three post-modern ideologies in the West: multiculturalism, utopian pacifism and moral equivalency.

Multiculturalism has caused confusion in muddling the United States’ national identity, Hanson argues. “We are a multi-racial society that largely abides by the protocols of western culture, society and civilization,” Hanson said. “We confuse that by suggesting that we are simply a menu of equal cultures, which we’re not.”

Multiculturalism is problematic, Hanson alleges, because it creates a different standard to hold non-western countries to. For example, the west does not want to reprimand genital circumcision practices in the Sudan or “honor killings” in the West Bank because “we either think that we have a bad history in our past of projecting our values on colonial sins on other people or we feel that multiculturalism is part of the post-modern idea that there is no right or wrong,” explained Hanson....

[Billthedrill]

...multiculturalism, utopian pacifism and moral equivalency.

Nicely laid out, IMHO. Throw a fondness for the intellectual shorthand that is Marxian class analysis and you have the very core of modern progressivism. BTT.

[AbeKrieger]

One of the biggest fears of an Obama presidency I have is the unwillingness of the media or even his peer politicians to criticize him aggressively because they do not want to be perceived a racist. Thus, as a president he is unacceptable and intolerable.

[griswold3]

You mean to tell me that the MSM will censor differing opinions of his policies?
Yeah, I know. When they talk about his economic plan, you can point out that demand economics failed miserably, but they’ll pump them up anyway. After all we didn’t have Barack Hussein Obama implementing central planning back then did we?