Posted on 06/26/2009 7:50:50 AM PDT by PaleoCon28
Paul Gottfried is a professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College... I asked him a few questions on his thought and the current political scene.
Q:You seem to think that the US is the source and universal enforcer of political correctness. How do you square that with the perception that America is conservative compared to Europe and the election of Obama?
A: I’m not sure that Obama’s election will have much of an effect of any kind on the progress of multicultural ideas in Europe. Those ideas follow a course independently of what goes on here....European intellectuals and politicians who rant against Americans for not being sufficiently multicultural remind me of the Turks who after their conversion to Islam attacked the Arabs for not being real Muslims. In any case the current European Left is made up of idiots and impostors, unlike the old-fashioned Marxists who at least had minds...
Q: You said that 8,000 Germans are put on trial a year for thought crimes and that there are more political prisoners in Germany today than there were under communism. That’s truly remarkable. What are Germans being put in jail for besides World War II revisionism?
A: Although the Communists used spies to report on dissenters, I see no indication that by the end of the DDR, its rulers were openly harassing as many people for their dissent as the present ‘democratic” German government is doing. Thousands have been found guilty of verbal criminal offenses but not all of the offenders have been summarily jailed...The list of verbal criminal offenses in EU countries goes well beyond questioning Nazi crimes. Hate speech also involves saying insensitive things about minorities like gays and transgendered; although denying the Holocaust may be seen as the most punishable offense that an insensitive, fascist-prone personality could commit.
(Excerpt) Read more at hbdbooks.com ...
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