New York Times "reporter" Chris Hedges was booed off the stage recently when he started to give a thoroughly anti-American commencement address to graduates at Rockford College near Chicago. The fact that he wasn't allowed to finish is deplorable according to the principles of free speech and free inquiry. But it was also a well-deserved audience response in the context of countless examples of suppression of free speech by Leftists on college campuses across the nation. Ask Clarence Thomas, Henry Kissinger, and plenty of other conservatives if freedom of speech is really practiced in the university setting. Maybe now that a new generation of college students is leading the counter-revolution against Leftist culture of higher education we can look forward to free speech for everyone.
Meanwhile, Chris Hedges has expanded his remarks on Amy Goodman's left-wing radio program "Democracy Now." His conclusion: patriotism turns Americans into rabid animals.
You know, as I looked out on the crowd, that is exactly what my book is about. It is about the suspension of individual conscience, and probably consciousness, for the contagion of the crowd for that euphoria that comes with patriotism. The tragedy is that – and I've seen it in conflict after conflict or society after society that plunges into war – with that kind of rabid nationalism comes racism and intolerance and a dehumanization of the other. And it's an emotional response. People find a kind of ecstasy, a kind of belonging, a kind of obliteration of their alienation in that patriotic fervor that always does come in war time.As I gave my talk and I looked out on the crowd, I was essentially witnessing things that I had witnessed in the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina or in squares in Belgrade or anywhere else. Crowds, especially crowds that become hunting packs are very frightening. People chanted the kind of cliches and aphorisms and jingoes that are handed to you by the state. "God Bless America" or people were chanting "send him to France" – this kind of stuff and that kind of contagion leads ultimately to tyranny, it's very dangerous and it has to be stopped.
via Democracy Now
Posted by Alan at May 26, 2003 09:00 AM