Free Speech

There may be more than two ways of protesting about something you do not like or disagree with. However it seems that protest is either of a violent character or it is by gentle persuasion and rational argument. Sometimes a protest falls between these two. Such was the recent performance of the protesting classes at the Oxford Union debate. Much of the rhetoric, however, seems to have been to reject the gentle persuasion and rational argument in favour of more direct action. How sad, that the violent right should be opposed by a threat of unreasoning belligerence from its opponents.

As they demand that the Leader of the British National Party and the Historian who denies the Holocaust be prevented from using the debate as a platform for their views they also lower themselves to that same nonsensical level. Is it that student protest still sees itself through romantic spectacles as they perceive themselves to be manning the barricades of rebellion against the forces of tyranny and of repression? Do they see themselves as the defenders of freedom when in fact they are the real fascists who deny that freedom to others?

Such protests serve to open the way for the real hard men of violence to take over what could be a peaceful protest. Such protests show both the ignorance and the arrogance of those who organise and support them.

In a few years time, many of the students who support such protests, will become leading members of the political classes. Many of them will find well-paid middle class jobs as lawyers, teachers, or top-level civil servants. There is some arrogance with which members of the present political classes today look back on their own youthful protesting. They view it with complacency as if it were somehow meritorious or some sort of slightly misguided though understandable youthful enthusiasm. Where, one wonders, are the real intellectuals who consider their possible actions to decide the likely outcomes and whether they are desirable?

The suspicion arises that it is, not the cause that matters, but the opportunity to join a crowd. Any cause would do as long as it engenders a feeling of being part of a movement and of doing something in the name of freedom, or justice, or right. No one asks whether what they are doing is just, or right, or free, it just has to feel that way. Being part of a crowd one is easily susceptible towards doing something foolish, as long as everyone else is doing it.