The US confront the “freedom of expression”

A gaping hole is being dug out of the heart of US society on how freedom of expression should be conceptualized. The tradition has been that all opinions, even the most blinkered, could be expressed and propagated in the US – that former British colony.

Thus, in the eighteen hundreds, the Puritans who had been banished from England and who had sought refuge in the Netherlands, could freely board the Mayflower and emigrate to the other side of the Atlantic. And there they were free to establish in Plymouth, a community of their sect. However today, the Far Left is challenging freedom of expression as traditionally conceptualized.
This new current of thinking is not sourced in the font of European thought. Instead its tributaries originate from the thinking of the Puritans of Plymouth. Just like that sect prohibited voices that chimed out of harmony with theirs and inflicted severe corporal punishment against the “heretics”, so too the Left in the US intends to ban dissenting opinions (in this case, the voices of White Supremacists).

So, these recent events do not mark a positive evolution in the US political philosophy and brings it closer in line with progressive societies that limit freedom of expression when “public security, public order, health or public morals or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others” so require it (Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights). On the contrary, the US Left is trying, through this hole created in the heart of US society, to deprive oxygen and thus life, to the First Amendment made to the US Constitution. The US Left’s intention is that then the Constitution in its unadulterated form, as originally drafted by the founding fathers, would govern…. yet the original Constitution did not address this issue.

Thus the US Left unanimously condemned the fact that President Donald Trump delayed in condemning the protest (which resulted in one death) organized by the extreme right in Charlottesville. In actual fact, President Trump had attributed culpability to both the Far Right and the Anti-Fascists.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) which defended the First Amendment and had in this regard filed a declaration of the protest at Charlottesville, is delighted. It has issued a statement that from now on, it would refuse to defend the rights of Extreme Right groups.

A number of associations, most of which have been taken over by the Democratic Party, are now asking for the destruction of all the statues built to honour those who supported slavery. This request would therefore have to be applied to other giants of US’s history such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (the author of the First Amendment).
Carried away by this tide of thinking, the media now militate for blasting the statutes carved out of Mount Rushmore, like the Taliban destroyed the Buddha of Bâmiyân (see above a tweet from the magazine Vice), whilst other associations call for the destruction of a statue of President Bill Clinton whom they accuse of rape.