Demosthenes, the Athenian rhetorician and champion of liberty, pointed out around
In 1689, the British passed a law guaranteeing freedom of speech in
I mention all of this because every time I read or hear about the pathetic state of affairs at the
Yes, I know there was a thing called the
But the movement for free speech is thousands of years old and runs like a deep river across the landscape of Western Civilization.
Indeed, I can't help but get the impression that a lot of people don't realize that the
Whatever perfunctory regulations of free speech existed, then-
As for Savio, his mission was broader than merely wanting to allow vigorous debate. He wanted students to be able to participate as much as possible with the civil rights movement, which, obviously, was a very political movement. He was on the right side of that argument.
But Savio was also a passionate leftist. (When he got married to his fellow FSMer Suzanne Goldberg, The Daily Worker's
Savio had a romantic hatred -- in the tradition of Rousseau -- for liberal democratic capitalism. His most famous statement came in his speech at Sproul Hall in 1964:
"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
Whatever legacy Savio has for the cause of free speech is dead, but this mindset lives on. The rioters and goons -- along with their pusillanimous enablers in the administration -- are carrying on this tradition. It is a tradition that says this is our sacred place and anyone not loyal to our faith must be resisted, rejected and renounced. All the talk of "hate speech" is clever marketing -- like the label the "
What these petty, secular theocrats despise is heresy speech. And they will throw their bodies into the gears to silence it.
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Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor-at-large of National Review Online.