Will Congress Ban Free Speech
Will Congress Ban Free Speech?
by James Owens (1999)
Late in January a top white official in D.C. government was forced to resign because he had offended others by a (non-existent) racial slur during a staff meeting. He was urging budget cuts by necessary “niggardly” measures. Although the word merely means “stingy,” with no racial connotation at all, an instant and emotional outburst against “racism” ended the meeting – and the man’s job. (Later the mayor gave him a job elsewhere, after the harm was done.)
Such hyper-sensitivity to words, even when perceived as possibly “racist,” now infects Congress. In February a resolution (H.RES.35) was initiated by Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) and Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-SC), that Congress “condemn the racism and bigotry espoused by the Council of Conservative Citizens.” H.RES.35 has rapidly gained over 150 co-sponsors (as of May), including Republicans, and is moving routinely through Congressional committees toward passage. When (or if) it passes, hundreds of other pro-white groups, such as ANU and NAAWP, could be hunted down for similar Government censure. As a member of many pro-white groups including CofCC, I’ve studied its official platform. Allegations in H.RES.35 are unfounded stereotyping. The CofCC does not espouse racism; its published platform only promotes the preservation of the white race. Open advocacy of white culture is no more “racist” than NAACP’s lobbying for the advancement of America’s blacks. Whites, Hispanics and Asian-Americans deserve the same rights to freedom of speech.
Such unthinking and automatic stereotyping about race, as in H.RES.35, has soared into a dangerous epidemic in today’s America and inflames racial tensions rather than resolving them. We are resurrecting the paranoid atmosphere of medieval Inquisitions and 17th-century Salem witch hunts when sheer fear of prohibited words or associations silenced everyone. No one dared speak up to defend a Salem witch he knew to be innocent (fearful of being instantly branded a witch himself). Today, few will defend someone smeared as a “racist” (for fear they will be so branded and lose careers).
Today’s federal “civil-rights” machinery and the liberal/left mass media (aided by anti-white bloodhounds like the Southern Poverty Law Center) target “hostile” groups and enforce the Government dogma of “political correctness.” This includes increasingly severe sanctions against open advocacy of any serious solutions to America’s race crisis – except the Government’s forcible integration of the races.
This NAZI-like intimidation and silencing of dissenters turns upside-down the Constitution’s principle of freedom of speech. The framers’ genius was to recognize that without protected free speech, any majority could seize control of the public media, silence all dissent and thereby entrench their undisputed power. The framers therefore made freedom of speech the first and foremost of all the Constitution’s Amendments. Supported by the keystone of free speech, their Constitution would be an enduring structure of individual freedoms; without this bulwark, all of it would crumble. They knew well the age-old formula for powerful central governments: first, silence or purge all dissenters. Thus, by design, the First Amendment protects purposely the most dissenting and offensive voices in open debate, since these precisely are the vigilant foes of all attempts at tyranny.
If anyone, as I do, proposes consideration of some degrees or forms of racial separateness as a reasonable path to racial peace, he is instantly branded a “racist.” It is “politically incorrect” – and soon maybe outlawed as “hate” crime – to openly advocate such heresy. For example, I happen to oppose President Clinton’s “One America” “racial reconciliation” policies as a self-contradictory means to his purported ideal of an America of rich racial and cultural diversity. It seems obvious that full-scale racial integration will result in exactly the opposite. After a century of inter-racial mixing and marriages, the races will merge into one and wipe out all diversity rather than preserve it, pure races (including white) ultimately extinct.
Let’s examine Government’s taboo-word “racism,” ignoring all inflammatory stereotypes now etched into them. Objectively defined a “racist” aims to suppress, subjugate or harm those of a different race. Thus, by clear definition, a supremacist, whether white or black, is a racist. But “separatism” is an entirely different concept.
Separatists are neither supremacists nor racists. I happened upon the writings of Emanuel McLittle, a black philosopher, publisher and public speaker who advocates exactly this separatist view of America’s future. He opposes, for example, interracial marriage, reasoning that this pattern would ultimately extinguish his own and other races. Advocating neither superiority nor harm to other races, only separateness, he is, by definition, not a racist. I am not arguing his view (or mine) here, only that he has America’s free-speech right to advocate his view – without being branded a “racist.” White preservationists are no more racist than he.
H.RES.35 contains the essence of centralized thought control. It would be a horrendous precedent, with far more ominous consequences than merely crushing the currently targeted CofCC. It would launch ever-widening and vicious witch hunts and persecution of hundreds of pro-white groups which dare disagree with current federal policies such as the President’s “One-America” program. In a jugular thrust at America’s bloodstream of free speech, Government’s “political correctness” police will silence all dissent and ruin political “enemies.” If we enter the slippery slope of Government as the enforcer of approved speech, crushing dissent, the First Amendment will become gutted. Dissenters will become as intimidated as in Communist China and its state-controlled mental uniformity of “cultural Marxism.”
Let me end with Voltaire’s apt summation of what “freedom of speech” truly means: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Dr. Owens is a B-school professor and director of Executive Publications at: owensva@ix.netcom.com
