“Fuck Your Free Speech”: Leftism, Libertarianism and the Death of Free Speech

It’s true, you know: foul speech is a sure sign of a foul mind. It’s also a sure sign of a foul ideology. That’s why the f-word is so popular among leftists. It packs so much into so little: self-righteousness, aggression, intolerance, lack of self-control, contempt for reasoned debate, and the unashamed rejection of civilized values. You could say that the f-word is a bawl of barbarism. And here it is in action, illustrating all those leftist values, among students protesting against eugenics and “scientific racism”:

A bawl of barbarism as students protest eugenics and “scientific racism”

The faces of five protesting students are visible. Four of them seem to be either White gentiles or Jews. But the young woman holding up a sign saying “FUCK YOUR FREE SPEECH” seems to be an East Asian, quite possibly with a high IQ and from a long line of civilized, law-abiding ancestors. Nevertheless, she wants to destroy “your free speech” — that is, the free speech not just of Charles Murray, but of Whites in general. After all, whatever her precise origins in East Asia, that young woman and her co-ethnics don’t come from a culture that values free speech or has any tradition of free speech. And now that she’s in America she’s working to “fuck free speech.” No sane observer of political reality should be surprised by this.

The glass house of free speech

But I know a group of intelligent, educated and articulate people who are surprised by it. The group are called libertarians. Alas, you can lead libertarians to reality, but you can’t make them think. For example, most libertarians are passionate supporters of both free speech and open borders. This is a lot like supporting both glass houses and throwing stones. And indeed, free speech is a lot like a house built of glass. Free speech is rare and fragile and much easier to destroy than to create. It hasn’t existed in the vast majority of cultures for the vast majority of human history.

Rare and fragile: The Crystal Palace in London

And it’s no coincidence that nineteenth-century Britain saw both the rise of free speech and the construction of the Crystal Palace, a giant house of glass built for the Great Exhibition of 1851. To create the ideological structure of free speech and the physical structure of the Crystal Palace required high intelligence, ingenuity, cooperation and, you might say, a love of light and openness. But the Crystal Palace burned down in 1936 (shortly before another interesting burning, as we shall see). The Palace was rare and fragile and didn’t last long. Free speech faces the same fate. After all, Britain has imported millions of non-White stone-throwers and arsonists from the Third World. They don’t build glass houses: they smash and burn them.

This is why libertarians and secularists on the left can’t be honest when they defend the glass house of free speech against its stone-throwing and gasoline-pouring non-White enemies. For example, when non-White Muslims machine-gunned cartoonists and writers at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015, the staunchly secularist Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson responded not with a bang, but a whimper:

Staunch secularist Martin Rowson responds to the Charlie Hebdo massacre

Rowson didn’t dare to draw Muhammad, because he was (quite rightly) scared of being murdered for intruding on something sacred to Muslims. But look at these two examples of how Rowson has regularly intruded on something sacred to Christians, the death of Christ on the cross:

Banal blasphemies: Martin Rowson’s unfunny crucifixion cartoons

Rowson’s crucifixion cartoons — and there are lots more where those two came from — are both unfunny and foul-minded. Rowson is effectively saying “Fuck you!” to Christianity. His cartoons are banally blasphemous and he seems to enjoy dragging the crucifixion in where it isn’t relevant. After all, he knows that he’s in no danger from effete modern Christians. But when Muslims machine-gun Rowson’s fellow cartoonists in the name of Muhammad, he doesn’t dare even draw, let alone mock or satirize, anything representative of Islam and least of all Muhammad himself. In short, Rowson is frightened of Islam. He isn’t frightened of Christianity.

Whites are to blame!

And why is he frightened of Islam? Because mass immigration has firmly established Islam and its violent adherents on British soil. Muslim immigration has been disastrous for free speech, but Rowson and other secularist leftists can’t admit this. Nor can libertarians, who knew instantly what was to blame for the Charlie Hebdo massacre. It wasn’t Muslim immigration, which had flooded France with millions of illiberal, corrupt aliens who didn’t believe in free speech. No, not at all, it was the policies of the French government and the attitudes of French Whites. The government hadn’t supported free speech strongly enough and Whites hadn’t argued for Enlightenment values hard enough.

If they had, then all would have been well. All those millions of low-IQ Muslims from illiberal cultures with absolutely no tradition of free speech would have embraced the Enlightenment, founded thriving Voltaire societies, and chuckled wryly when Charlie Hebdo published a foul-minded cartoon of a naked Muhammad bending over to display a star over his anus and a pair of dangling testicles. It would have been so easy to turn those non-White Third-Worlders into dedicated students of Voltaire and fans of Charlie Hebdo. But French Whites betrayed their Muslim brothers and sisters by not sufficiently promoting the Enlightenment values that, deep down, Muslims all over the world are longing to embrace.

Meteorizing murder

And the same was true in Britain when Muslims in the heavily enriched northern city of Bradford set fire to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1987). For libertarians, Whites were again to blame, not mass immigration. As in France, Whites hadn’t promoted free speech and the Enlightenment hard enough to all those non-White Third-Worlders who, deep down, were longing to embrace it. Again, it would have been so easy to turn the Muslims into dedicated students of John Stuart Mill. Again, Whites betrayed their Muslim brothers and sisters. Or so many libertarians continue to argue. They’re not being honest and I think that, deep down or otherwise, they know it. That’s why so many of them didn’t raise a squeak of protest when a gentle and tolerant Muslim called Asad Shah was stabbed to death on British soil by an avowed enemy of Asad Shah’s free speech.

But libertarians weren’t alone in making little of that brutal and portentous crime. Asad Shah was the victim of what I call a “meteor murder,” that is, a murder that flashes across the headlines and then disappears, despite bearing great political and cultural significance. Or rather: a meteor murder flashes and disappears precisely because it bears political and cultural significance. The leftist media have a narrative of White evil and non-White saintliness. If a murder or other significant crime contradicts that narrative, it’s meteorized.

“Hang the blasphemer!”

And Asad Shah’s murder did contradict that narrative, just like the viciously sadistic murders of the White teenagers Kris Donald and Mary-Ann Leneghan in 2005, and the horrible mass rapes of elderly White women in London between 1992 and 2009. In all these cases, non-Whites were the perpetrators, so all these cases flashed across the headlines and disappeared. Similarly, Asad Shah was an Ahmadi Muslim stabbed to death by a Sunni Muslim, Tanveer Ahmed, who thought that Ahmadi Muslims are death-worthy heretics (and Tanveer Ahmed still thinks that in his $50,000-a-year prison-cell). Leftists dropped Shah’s murder down the memory-hole because it didn’t fit their narrative of non-White saintliness.

Pakistani Muslims express their longing for free speech

And libertarians ignored Shah’s murder because it didn’t fit their narrative of how Muslims and other non-Whites would happily embrace free speech if only Whites worked harder to make them realize their true desires. Alas for libertarians, there is abundant evidence, both contemporary and historical, that Muslims despise free speech and are eager to destroy it wherever it rears its repulsive, White-supremacist snout. After all, Tanveer Ahmed was inspired by a Pakistani Muslim called Mumtaz Qadri, a body-guard who assassinated his employer, the Muslim politician Salmaan Taseer, because Taseer had “advocated reform of Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws” and taken up the cause of “Asia Bibi, a poor Christian woman … sentenced to death for allegedly insulting the prophet Muhammad.”

A Pakistani book celebrates the martyr-hero Ilm-ud-Din

And Mumtaz Qadri had been inspired in his turn by Ilm-ud-Din, a young Muslim who stabbed the Hindu publisher Mahashay Rajpal to death in 1929 for insulting the Prophet Muhammad. That took place under the British Raj and Ilm-ud-Din faced British justice: he was hanged for murder. His fellow Muslims, by contrast, celebrated his forthright defence of the Prophet and in modern Pakistan he is known as Ghazi Ilm-ud-Din Shahid, that is, Hero Ilm-ud-Din the Martyr. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Mumtaz Qadri became ghazi, “hero,” when he assassinated his employer, and shahid, “martyr,” when he was executed for murder by the Pakistani authorities. The judge who passed the death sentence on him had to flee the country. If he hadn’t, he would sooner or later have met the same fate as Salmaan Taseer, Mahashay Rajpal and many others, including Dr Muhammad Shakil Auj, a “Pakistani academic known for promoting liberal views on Islam” who was “accused of committing blasphemy in a speech he made in the US.” He too was shot to death.

Muslims in Maryland

In other words, there is a long and vibrant tradition of censorship-by-murder among the Muslims of what is now Pakistan (and elsewhere). After Asad Shah’s murder in Glasgow, a human rights lawyer called Aamer Anwar announced: “We do not want to see the importing of sectarian bigotry and hatred from Pakistan to the UK.” In other words, Anwar thinks the Britain can import Pakistanis without importing Pakistani culture. Like the libertarians and secularists who think the same, he’s either stupid or dishonest or both. The United States has also imported Pakistanis and so has also imported murderous Pakistani culture. This is the flyer for a mosque in Maryland that hosted a celebration of the Hero-Martyr Mumtaz Qadri:

Maryland mosque and martyr with machine-gun: Muslims in the US celebrate the murderer Mumtaz Qadri

Note how the Urdu script protects Muslims from outside scrutiny just as Hebrew or Yiddish script protects Jews. Even some libertarians and secularists might have second thoughts about Muslim immigration if the flyer were in English and openly stated the nature of the celebration and its martyred hero. But the mosque probably uses Urdu for uncontroversial topics too, because keeping up a foreign language is an excellent way to avoid assimilation and maintain cohesion.

Muslims assert their rights

And Muslims will happily burn books in public and march against free speech, as Britain saw during the Satanic Verses controversy in the 1980s. A Labour minister in Tony Blair’s government revealed the solipsistic nature of leftism when he reminisced to a journalist about “a meeting of Muslims at his constituency surgery … during which one of them had taken Rushdie’s book and kicked it furiously across the room.” The minister, probably the part-Jewish Jack Straw, commented: “That’s when I knew that everything had changed.” No, all that had changed was the then-MP’s awareness of what Muslims are like. After all, Muslims in Britain were burning books and marching against free speech long before the 1980s. They did both of those things in London way back in 1938, two years after the destruction by fire of the Crystal Palace:

Muslims “assert their rights” by book-burning and marching against free speech in London, 1938

Members of the Jamiat-ul-Muslimin, a British Muslim organisation whose members were predominantly working-class South Asians, gathered at one of their regular meetings in King’s Hall on Commercial Road, east London. Here, according to the Guardian of 13 August 1938, they “ceremoniously committed to the flames” a copy of H. G. Wells’s A Short History of the World because of references to the Prophet Muhammad which they considered offensive. This was followed by a protest march by members of the organisation to India House, Aldwych, which accommodated the Indian High Commission in London’s West End. Contrary to the public perception that Britain’s Muslim minority began to find a voice of dissent only as recently as the 1980s, here we have evidence of a group of working-class East End Muslims marching west into the heart of London to assert their rights as Muslims and plead their cause with government officials. (Muslims Protest Against H. G. Wells Book in 1930s Britain, The Huffington Post, 19th September 2012)

Note the approving tone of that report in the leftist Huffington Post. By burning a book and demanding censorship, Muslims were “asserting their rights.” The authors of the report were the leftist academics Rehana Ahmed, “Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University,” and Florian Stadtler, “Research Fellow in Literature at The Open University.” You might expect even leftist academics to disapprove of book-burning, which has uncomfortable associations with the Nazis. But book-burning is obviously acceptable to leftists when non-Whites are “asserting their rights” thereby. Rehana Ahmed herself is non-White and Florian Stadtler, apparently non-English, is undoubtedly a staunch anti-racist and supporter of open borders to the Third World.

Poisoning Western civilization

And note that these two bibliocaustophilic academics drew on the leftist Guardian for details of the book-burning and march in 1938. Leftists saw clearly before the Second World War that Muslim immigration would be very bad for free speech and secularism. After the Second World War, leftists fully supported Muslim immigration. They then gasped in horror at the way Muslims behaved towards Salman Rushdie and Charlie Hebdo. Or some leftists gasped in horror, anyway. Others were happy to see Muslims begin their assault on Western civilization. As for libertarians: if they were sincere about supporting both free speech and mass immigration, then they were also exceedingly stupid.

But I don’t think some libertarians were or are sincere. After all, great figures of libertarianism, like Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, were Jewish. I would read the movement as yet another way for Jews to encourage individualism and atomization among White gentiles who are under collectivist attack. By supporting open borders, libertarianism has helped to kill free speech. Leftists say: “Fuck your free speech.” Muslims say: “Damn your free speech.” In Muslim eyes, it’s a literally damnable doctrine whose practitioners are worthy of death and consignment to the fires of Jahannam, the Muslim hell. Muslim immigration is poison for free speech and Western civilization. But libertarians won’t admit this. Nor will Martin Rowson and the other staunch secularists at the Guardian. So let’s end with a cartoonist who is prepared to tell the truth about Islam, leftism and free speech.

A cartoonist tells the truth about Islam, leftism and free speech