Free Speech – Page 8 – artdiamondblog.com

China May Have Higher Incomes, But India Has Freedom and Hope

(p. A11) The author remains generally optimistic about India’s prospects. Economic reforms that began in 1991 have quickened growth. On average, GDP has grown nearly 7% a year since then. Thanks to a media revolution that began in the 1990s and has exploded over the past decade, a state-owned monopoly over television news has given way to upward of 450 raucous channels that make Fox News look staid by comparison. The author argues that together these two trends have sparked a kind of virtuous cycle: Better-educated and better-fed Indians are demanding more from their politicians. A take-no-prisoners media will keep them on their toes.
. . .
Educated Indians can’t stop complaining about the politicians who lead them. Yet, echoing the historian Ramachandra Guha, Mr. Denyer argues that India’s main success since its independence in 1947 has been political rather than economic. It has strengthened its democratic institutions and nurtured religious and cultural pluralism. Despite the fact that the average Indian earned $1,500 last year, less than a fourth of the average Chinese, it is in New Delhi, not Beijing, that you can afford to call the president (or prime minister) a blithering idiot without worrying about a midnight knock on the door.

For the full review, see:
SADANAND DHUME. “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘Rogue Elephant’ by Simon Denyer; The average Indian earns less than the average Chinese. But it’s in New Delhi–not Beijing–where you can call the prime minister an idiot without worrying about a knock on the door.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., July 28, 2014): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 27, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘Rogue Elephant’ by Simon Denyer; The average Indian earns less than the average Chinese. But it’s in New Delhi–not Beijing–where you can call the prime minister an idiot without worrying about a knock on the door.”)

The book being reviewed is:
Denyer, Simon. Rogue Elephant: Harnessing the Power of India’s Unruly Democracy. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014.

Cardinal Explained to Emperor that It Is OK to Lie to Heretics

Notwithstanding the assurances that the pope, the council, and the emperor had given him, Hus was almost immediately vilified and denied the opportunity to speak in public. On November 28, barely three weeks after he arrived, he was arrested on order of the cardinals and taken to the prison of a Dominican monastery on the banks of the Rhine. There he was thrown into an underground cell through which all the filth of the monastery was discharged. When he fell seriously ill, he asked that an advocate be appointed to defend his cause, but he was told that, according to canon law, no one could plead the cause of a man charged with heresy. In the face of protests from Hus and his Bohemian supporters about the apparent violation of his safe-conduct, the emperor chose not to intervene. He was, it was said, uncomfortable about what seemed a violation of his word, but an English cardinal had reportedly reassured him that “no faith need be kept with heretics.”

Source:
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
(Note: this quote is from somewhere on pp. 167-168; I bought the Kindle version which does not give page numbers correctly and I can’t recover pages on this one from Google books; I would guess it is all on p. 168.)

“Et La Liberté!”

(p. C7) [A] milestone in the diary comes in 1943 when [Guéhenno’s] students are drafted into compulsory work service in Germany; many escape to Spain or join resistance groups. Nor was Guéhenno exempt from the repression. That same year he was demoted by the Vichy education minister to the rank of a beginning instructor, assigned to teach 17 hours of class a week rather than the usual six and faced with supervising hundreds of students. “Stammering with fatigue,” he wondered how he would have time to keep his diary going. But he cheered up whenever he contemplated how many of the authors in his curriculum were bona fide revolutionaries: “Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Danton, Robespierre, Chénier, Hugo, Michelet …, I have nothing to discuss but suspects.” He liked to end his class sessions by shouting “Et la liberté!”

For the full review, see:
Alice Kaplan. “Shedding Light on Nazi-Occupied Paris.” The New York Times (Thurs., JUNE 26, 2014): C7.
(Note: ellipsis in original; words in brackets were added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JUNE 25, 2014.)

The book being reviewed is:
Guéhenno, Jean. Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris. Translated by David Ball. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Dogs, and Movie About Dog, Banned in Iran

(p. D6) In Jafar Panahi’s new movie, a writer in Iran smuggles his pet dog into his home inside a tote bag. The film, “Closed Curtain,” addresses Iranian lawmakers’ recent ban on dog-walking in public, part of an effort to curb perceived Western influences including keeping pets. For two decades, Mr. Panahi has captured such vagaries of life in his native country.
“Closed Curtain,” which won the best screenplay award at the Berlin Film Festival in 2013, opens at New York City’s Film Forum on July 9. It is Mr. Panahi’s second film since December 2010, when Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court banned him from making movies for 20 years.

For the interview with Panahi, see:
TOBIAS GREY. “An Iranian Director’s Best Friend.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., June 27, 2014): D6.
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date June 26, 2014, an has the title “Iranian Director Flouts Ban on Filming.”)

The Unintended Consequences of Requiring Monks to Read

(p. 28) The high walls that hedged about the mental life of the monks–the imposition of silence, the prohibition of questioning, the punishing of debate with slaps or blows of the whip–were all meant to affirm unambiguously that these pious communities were the opposite of the philosophical academies of Greece or Rome, places that had thrived upon the spirit of contradiction and cultivated a restless, wide-ranging curiosity.
All the same, monastic rules did require reading, and that was enough to set in motion an extraordinary chain of consequences. Reading was not optional or desirable or recommended; in a community that took its obligations with deadly seriousness, reading was obligatory. And reading required books. Books that were opened again and again eventually fell apart, however carefully they were handled. Therefore, almost inadvertently , monastic rules necessitated that monks repeatedly purchase or acquire books. In the course of the vicious Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century and their still more miserable aftermath, the last commercial workshops of book production folded, and the vestiges of the book market fell apart. Therefore, again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks carefully preserve and copy those books that they already possessed.

Source:
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Summers’s Unbreakable Washington Power Elite Rule: Insiders Don’t Criticize Other Insiders

(p. 5) A telling anecdote involves a dinner that Ms. Warren had with Lawrence H. Summers, then the director of the National Economic Council and a top economic adviser to President Obama. The dinner took place in the spring of 2009, after the oversight panel had produced its third report, concluding that American taxpayers were at far greater risk to losses in TARP than the Treasury had let on.
After dinner, “Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice,” Ms. Warren writes. “I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”
“I had been warned,” Ms. Warren concluded.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Summers did not respond to a request for comment.

For the full commentary, see:
GRETCHEN MORGENSON. “Fair Game; From Outside or Inside, the Deck Looks Stacked.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., APRIL 27, 2014): 1 & 5.
(Note: italics in original commentary, and in Warren book. I added a missing quotation mark.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date APRIL 26, 2014.)

The Warren passages quoted above are from p. 106 of her book:
Warren, Elizabeth. A Fighting Chance. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014.

In China “Overwhelming Evidence of the Leaders’ “Moral Vulnerability””

Source of book image: http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/t/the-peoples-republic-of-amnesia/9780199347704_custom-d21f4e2d0281b692c74781102e750ff1e27b7cc9-s6-c30.jpg

(p. 21) During the night of June 3-4, 1989, when the Chinese Army was slaughtering demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Wang Nan, a young student, was shot in the head. As he lay dying at the side of the road, soldiers threatened to kill anyone, even some young doctors, who tried to help him. In the morning, finally dead, he was buried in a shallow grave nearby. A few days later, the smell of Wang Nan’s body was so great that it was dug up and moved to a hospital.

After 10 days, his mother, Zhang Xianling, was called to the hospital to identify her son’s body. It took eight months, in the face of official obstruction, for Zhang to uncover what had happened to her son. In 1998 she held a modest remembrance service on the spot where he had died. The next year, on that day, she was barred from leaving her apartment. When she met Louisa Lim, Zhang said she longed to go to the fatal place again to pour a libation on the ground and sprinkle flower petals. “However,” Lim observes, ”someone will always be watching her. A closed-circuit camera has been installed” and “trained on the exact spot where her son’s body was exhumed. . . . It is a camera dedicated to her alone, waiting for her in case she should ever try again to mourn her dead son.”
Until I read about that camera in “The People’s Republic of Amnesia,” I imagined, after decades of reporting from and about China, that nothing there could still shock me. As Lim contends, Zhang’s “simple act of memory is deemed a threat to stability.” Lim’s overwhelming evidence of the leaders’ “moral vulnerability,” together with her accounts of the amnesia of many Chinese, make hers one of the best analyses of the impact of Tiananmen throughout China in the years since 1989.

For the full review, see:
JONATHAN MIRSKY. “An Inconvenient Past.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., MAY 25, 2014): 21.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MAY 23, 2014.)

The book under review is:
Lim, Louisa. The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

“Tanks at the ready in Beijing on June 6, 1989, two days after the Tiananmen Square massacre.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited above.

Bowen Receives Standing Ovation for Calling Student Protesters “Immature and Arrogant”

BowenWilliamHaverfordCollegeCommencementSpeaker2014-06-01.jpg

“William Bowen, speaking at Haverford College on Sunday [May 18, 2014], criticized students who staged a protest over another scheduled speaker.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) William Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, criticized students who had objected to Haverford’s invitation to Robert Birgeneau, a former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, to speak at commencement.
. . .
“He is a person of consequence,” Mr. Bowen said. He said he told students, “If you expect to agree with commencement speakers on everything, then who will you get to speak? Someone totally boring.” He added that he also called the subset of students who had objected to Dr. Birgeneau “immature and arrogant.”
. . .
Phil Drexler, president of the Haverford Students’ Council, said some in the audience were upset but others gave a standing ovation. “I felt validated by the speech because I had wanted to hear Dr. Birgeneau talk,” said Mr. Drexler, a graduating physics major. On the plus side, he added, he likely won’t soon forget his commencement.
A number of commencement speeches have been derailed by student and faculty protests this graduation season. Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, withdrew last week from speaking at Smith College. Similar outcries foiled engagements by former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice at Rutgers University and human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Brandeis University.

For the full story, see:
NATHAN KOPPEL. “Commencement Speaker Blasts Students on Protest.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., May 19, 2014): A3.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 18, 2014, and had the title “Haverford Speaker Bowen Criticizes Students Over Protests.”)

June 16th Is Liberalism Day

In the old days a “liberal” was someone who believed in freedom, including free markets and minimal government. Milton Friedman defended “liberal” in its original sense in his article “Liberalism, Old Style.”
At some point the left hijacked the word, at least in the United States. (I understand that in much of the rest of the world “liberal” still retains more of its original meaning.)
Maybe there’s some defensible justification for hijacking a word, but most of the time it seems like a dishonest and cowardly way to win an argument by muddying up the debate.
Dan Klein and Kevin Frei are trying to reclaim the word “liberal” from the pirates of the left. As part of their effort, they have proclaimed June 16th to be “Liberalism Day.”
I believe their cause is just, but I am not sure it is efficient. Time and effort are scarce, so we must pick our battles.
On the other hand, the meaning of “libertarian” has narrowed over recent decades. It used to be that most libertarians believed in minimal government; increasingly more libertarians endorse anarchism. It used to be that most libertarians believed in national defense; increasingly more libertarians endorse total isolationism.
I do believe in some minimal night-watchman state, and I do believe that sometimes there is evil in the world that must be fought. So maybe I should start calling myself a “liberal” in the original sense, what Friedman called a “classical liberal”?

#LiberalismDay

Bloomberg Blasts University Faculty Intolerance for Conservative Ideas

(p. A11) From former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s commencement address at Harvard University, May 29:

Repressing free expression is a natural human weakness, and it is up to us to fight it at every turn. Intolerance of ideas–whether liberal or conservative–is antithetical to individual rights and free societies, and it is no less antithetical to great universities and first-rate scholarship.
There is an idea floating around college campuses–including here at Harvard–that scholars should be funded only if their work conforms to a particular view of justice. There’s a word for that idea: censorship. And it is just a modern-day form of McCarthyism.
. . .
In the 2012 presidential race, according to Federal Election Commission data, 96% of all campaign contributions from Ivy League faculty and employees went to Barack Obama.
Ninety-six percent. There was more disagreement among the old Soviet Politburo than there is among Ivy League donors.
. . .
Diversity of gender, ethnicity, and orientation is important. But a university cannot be great if its faculty is politically homogenous. In fact, the whole purpose of granting tenure to professors is to ensure that they feel free to conduct research on ideas that run afoul of university politics and societal norms.
When tenure was created, it mostly protected liberals whose ideas ran up against conservative norms.
Today, if tenure is going to continue to exist, it must also protect conservatives whose ideas run up against liberal norms. Otherwise, university research–and the professors who conduct it–will lose credibility.
Great universities must not become predictably partisan. And a liberal arts education must not be an education in the art of liberalism.

For the full commentary, see:
Mike Bloomberg. “Notable & Quotable: Mike Bloomberg at Harvard.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 31, 2014): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 30, 2014.)