Over at Ann Althouse, she quotes commenter "Vesuviano" under the New York Times article (not linked) about free speech at Stanford.
In 1969 I was a student at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland. Members of the American Nazi Party were allowed to visit the school and present their point of view that the Holocaust had not happened. The event was held after school in the cafeteria, and expectations for students who chose to attend were made absolutely clear to us by the principal. We were to be respectful at all times; we were not to interrupt the speakers; anything we had to say could be said in the Q & A afterwards. Those of us who attended prepared ourselves extremely well and did as we had been directed. During the presentation we took notes, sat on our hands, kept our mouths shut, and did not interrupt the speakers in any way. Then afterwards in the Q & A we absolutely shredded them. When they left, they knew they had been soundly trounced by a bunch of high school history geeks. It was a very valuable experience to me, and a lesson that ideas, no matter how vile, should be argued, defended, and defeated in public.
Sounds about right.
4 comments:
Yeah, but when "Vesuviano" was in high school, ideas and words were merely ideas and words ... no big deal ("sticks and stones" and all that, no?).
Still, that was a LONG time ago. Nowadays, we have been awokened to the understanding that ideas (at least some ideas) are literal genocide; and words (certain words, anyway) are actual violence.
Nobody has to _refute_ fascists anymore. All good anti-fascists are perfectly free (nay, entitled) to do pre-emptive violence unto anyone who might dare use "violent" words unto them.
It does sound about right, yet when I read "When they left, they knew they had been soundly trounced" I can't help but think of the frequent occasions of congressional testimony, tv interviews, etc. where the next day I see reports from both-sides that their guy "demolished" the position of the opposing person.
I recall in campus Christian groups that there was always a philosophy-du-jour that speakers were brought in to teach us how to resist: secular-humanism, postmodernism, etc.
There always seemed to be some students who would take away that the best method of disputation was peg the opponent as an adherent of some "-ism" that they'd been trained to oppose -- no matter how ill-fitting that peg might be -- and then spew one-by-one the bullet points against that "-ism" that they had worked to memorize. The always thought that they'd "won" after such a debate/discussion -- they had completed the list of bullet points after all.
Not saying that this is what happened here, just raising the possibility. And I'm certainly on the side of "more speech" in the more-speech vs. censorship debate.
An excellent point. Yet we can at least say the the students don't seem to have been harmed by the experience, except, as you note, that they might become overconfident and arrogant.
Thos.
And it never occurs to them that they might actually be creating martyrs.
Post a Comment