The aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack has brought an encouraging reaction. You can see it on the streets of Paris and other cities. Last week, tens of thousands of people joined vigils in solidarity for the murdered journalists. Upwards of a million Parisians took the streets on Sunday. “Je Suis Charlie” read the signs. Online the corresponding hashtag has swept across social media. Some news outlets — more than I expected — have reprinted Charlie Hebdo cartoons. But what's more, the outlets that have refused to publish the images (or pixelated them) have been deservedly bashed. They shame themselves by cowering.
The Yaron Brook Show premiered on Wednesday. Broadcast on the BlogTalkRadio network, the show covers news, culture, and politics from the perspective of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. Following the shooting in Paris, the first episode of the show was a special edition focusing on freedom of speech.
Following the massacre of journalists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, the intimidation of Sony Pictures over The Interview, and a growing climate of self-censorship, ARI will host a panel discussion on the freedom of speech with Flemming Rose.
For too long the right to free speech has been undermined by the weak and apologetic intellectual and political leaders of the West — leaders who are more concerned about not offending the assailants than they are about standing up for the victims and their right to speak their minds. And for too long we have seen the results of that appeasement in an endless series of shocking headlines. The senseless slaughter at Charlie Hebdo is just the latest in a long list of death threats and attacks going all the way back to 1989 with the fatwa on Salman Rushdie.
Following the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, Onkar Ghate, senior fellow at ARI, writes that “When foreign governments, religious leaders and their faithful followers threaten and murder individuals for daring to speak, anyone who values his own life and freedom must stand with, and speak for, the victims.”
There’s something entirely fitting in the fact that the most sensible thing said about Sony’s decision not to release The Interview comes from a place not known for saying sensible things — Hollywood itself — while the most risible comments come from a place that is supposed to have serious responses to things like foreign nations threatening American citizens for exercising their constitutional rights. That’s Washington, D.C. (in case you’ve forgotten that it’s supposed to be a serious place). Comparing the two views expressed is illuminating and goes a long way toward explaining why North Korea felt free to threaten Sony — indeed, all of us—in the first place.
In September, ARI’s executive director Yaron Brook traveled to China to promote the newly published Chinese translation of Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government. We recently had the chance to sit down and talk about his China trip.
Is there a climate of self-censorship regarding Islam? Has fear led artists and writers to avoid discussion and criticism of Islam? So it seemed to the journalists at Jyllands-Posten, Denmark’s largest daily paper, in the fall of 2005.
The Debt Dialogues is a weekly podcast that aims to educate young people about the welfare state and how it will affect their future. In this episode, I interview Steve Simpson, director of legal studies at the Ayn Rand Institute, on inequality, democracy, and money in politics.
