By Jesús García Calero
We live in a volatile time and it has become fashionable to organize summits against hatred. Democracies live on the defensive, powerless to safeguard their principles, with the public sphere crossed by the polarization and the arrival of a world without rules, where the … autocrats camp, and in which the institutions are wounded and in question, from the UN down. The implicit question is: who should be silenced and why?
The essay ‘Freedom of expression has fallen into my hands these days. A global story from Socrates to Social Media, by Jacob Mchangama, published by Ladera Norte. A look that amazes because it analyzes the problem with a unique perspective. Everything that affects us has already happened a thousand times and is in the books, also in the censored.
The question is why we repeat the failed strategies, the errors that gave the tiptoe to the Roman Republic (Kicero’s murder after the ‘Philippics’), to that of Weimar (rise of Nazism), the decisions that made inexorable, for example, the backwardness and the fall of the Ottoman Empire (the prohibition of the printing press), or the unleashed ambitions that led to the stage of the Retro.
But after looking at the story, let’s look at the present. What lessons we draw from Iran, from Russia or China, where it is censored with cranes and their ‘strange fruits’, the hanged; or with poisons, and with polonium, or more hygienically with AI, where that freedom is repressed without which the others hardly matter, that of expression, the one that made us as we are.
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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).