For crying out loud, how much more explicit can I be? I disagree with everything that William Barr represents and does. The man is a fascist, finding out that he's a member of the chapter of the fascist organization Opus Dei* along with Brett Kvanaugh and the man Republicans have allowed to choose federal judges, Leonard Leo has explained why Barr is AOK with Trump stealing babies from their parents, Opus Dei had a child stealing and selling operation during the Spanish Civil War. It is a secretive mafia style heresy which the CIA's Pope, John Paul II elevated to power within the Catholic Church, much to the opposition of many other Catholics who were familiar with the group. It is a fascist cult, membership of which should disqualify them from participation in a democracies government and, especially, its judiciary. I thought I'd start with that because I'm still getting trolls lying about Barr and I saying the same things.
I have slammed the ubiquitous and stupidly held "enlightenment" notion that it is the business of egalitarian democratic government and law to be totally and absolutely neutral in matters of ideological expression. It is even stupider for allegedly egalitarian-democratic culture to. That idea runs head long into this controversy over William Barr spouting neo-fascist-Trumpian lies at Notre Dame University, as demonstrated by those who, like myself, despise what Barr said but who, unlike me, like Voltaire strike a pose of defending his right to say what he did. In his case, to the death of someone else. Well, him being able to say what he did isn't the question, as if the criminal AG doesn't get heard, it's if Notre Dame's allowing him a prominent podium to spout neo-fascist and dangerous crap from is a decision that is beyond criticism.
Before going into my criticism of what Michael Sean Winters said on my point, I will point out that his is one of the best criticisms of what William Barr actually said from the podium Notre Dame gave him (they certainly don't let every person speak there, I should point out, so there was an element of choice in them giving Barr the microphone).
Some people took to Twitter to complain about Notre Dame even hosting
this man, given his apparent willingness to do everything and anything
possible to shield the president from legal trouble. Bosh. A major seat
of learning should feel free to invite any member of Congress or Cabinet
to speak on campus. I dislike the censoriousness that has blossomed
improbably on the left. My rule of thumb: Draw the line at Holocaust
deniers. Everyone else should be heard. If you do not like what the
person has to say, argue with them. That is what universities, and
public discourse more generally, should be all about.
What you might lose in the generally held view that Holocaust deniers should be excluded from who should be heard, is that the Nazis are hardly the only or the last people to engage in genocide. Stalin and Mao murdered more poeple than the six million Jews and millions of others who the Nazis murdered. What about people who deny or dismiss those scores of millions of murdered people? What about this years Nobel Laureate in Lit. Peter Handke, who has denied the mass murders of recently fascist Serbia under the gangster Slobodan Milosevic and acted as a denier of that more recent mass murderer? What about those who lied about the murders of, largely, Catholic peasants in Central America WITH ILLEGAL AMERICAN AID during the Reagan and Bush I administrations, which William Barr helped to cover up by drafting the pardons George H. W. Bush issued to his fellow criminals who were part of those crimes?
What about someone who is paid to lie EFFECTIVELY for gangsters - masking their PR campaign in the requisite disguise as an ideology as is generally the case with the Anglo-American-fascist right and, yes those who have held the torch for such foreign gangsters as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, . . . ? Ah, yes, PUTIN? What if the person has such enormous powers of speech that he can hold people spellbound so as to gain power for himself or his employer and the results are things like six million dead? The obvious example shows what's wrong with Winter's upholding of the conventional, allowable view of "unlimited" free speech? Speech has consequences, good as well as bad. To pretend that we must remain neutral in view of the evil consequences of speech because, you know it's "speech" is one of the most amorally stupid ideas to have survived the 20th century blood bath.
Egalitarian democracy owes its opponents no quarter, given what the opponents of egalitarian democracy would do to the free speech of those who might effectively promote egalitarian democracy, - NO, NOT WHAT THEY "MIGHT" DO, WHAT THEY ARE GUARANTEED TO DO - violently suppress such speech, if their promotion of whatever form of gangsterism they advocate gained control, Nazi, fascist, quasi-fascist, Marxist, Stalinist, Maoist, Trumpian, "Federalist" . . . it is absolutely stupid and morally abominable for people who scribble articles and speeches and books and who feel they are in little danger, themselves, to piously declaim for the rights of such enemies of equality and democracy to have the chance to gull the gullible in numbers effective to give them power. It is especially true when, as Winters' notes, they lie through their fucking teeth like Barr did at Notre Dame, breaking the commandment against bearing false witness on behalf of the neo-pagan Mammonist who Barr serves to keep in power.
The lessons of what happens when lies are successfully peddled, as is done so well by those who make it their business to figure out how to sell lies successfully is written in the blood, in the bones, in the ashes of those who are killed by those lies. Those lessons are not unknown to anyone of any education - I am certain that even Peter Handke and the establishment hacks who award the Nobels know that Bosnians and others were murdered even as he chooses to lie about that. But are writers writing on the formerly presumed safety of having their flabby asses on writing chairs on North America any less dishonest in saying that such liars as Handke, like Barr "must be allowed to" get a chance to continue and commit crimes as part of a gangster government by lying from a podium at a nominally Catholic, PRIVATE university?
No. I don't think we owe those who want to kill people, to destroy egalitarian democracy, the advocates of gangster governance of whatever ideological cover, a chance to lie themselves into a position where they can do that. We used to be able to pretend that "it can't happen here" but with Trump, as with the Bushes, we can see it can and is happening here. It is happening here largely through those who spout idiotic 18th century slogans pretending that the subsequent history of genocide sold through freely spoken words is of secondary importance to their feeling all nice and free speechy about playing Voltaire and Madison.
The idiocy that, today, we can draw the line over those who deny the decades ago Holocaust happened while we cannot draw it on those who want to reproduce it is one of the most astonishing and telling defects of modern libertarian-liberal culture. It is sheer idiocy shown to be such through the subsequent history of mass murder and genocide by anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic governments and movements. If you can't learn the lesson of your own time, whining about those who refuse to learn from history rings entirely hollow. Such free speech advocacy is supremely irresponsible and immoral. Egalitarian democrats owe absolutely nothing, including allowing them a hearing. Those hearings they were granted are how they got in a position to murder people to start with. If you want to know who and how will make those decisions, the same way all human decisions are made, they are made by people hopefully as honestly as they can be. Once the gangsters get power, they make their decisions as dishonestly as they figure they need to to get what they want. Pretending that nature just sorts it all out better than we can is to give the gangsters what they want by irresponsible chosen impotence.
* Knowing it's the first resort of so many, I wouldn't trust the Wikipedia article on Opus Dei, it's obviously been "edited" by apologists for it. I had not known that NPR's and PBS's once go-to guy on everything Catholic John Allen seems to be an apologist for the mob.
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