The Encroachment of the Unsayable. Our compromised liberalism has left a generation of writers weighing their words in fear.

New York Times ^ | October 19, 2020 | Bret Stephens

[karpov]

In January, in what now seems like a bygone age, the writer George Packer delivered a memorable speech, “The Enemies of Writing,” for the honor of winning the Hitchens Prize. “Why is a career like that of Christopher Hitchens not only unlikely but almost unimaginable?” Packer asked. “Put another way: Why is the current atmosphere inhospitable to it? What are the enemies of writing today?”

For a sense of what Packer meant, consider that in 2007 Hitchens wrote — and Vanity Fair published — an essay titled, “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” It was outlandish, but also learned, and maybe not entirely serious. Imagine that ever running today, in Vanity Fair or any other mainstream publication. Or take another Hitchens column from the same year, in which he called Islam “simultaneously the ideology of insurgent violence and of certain inflexible dictatorships.” Try finding a line like that today in Slate, where it first appeared.

What these examples show, and what Packer brilliantly captures in his speech, is what might be called the encroachment of the unsayable. It’s an encroachment that, in its modern form, began with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie for the publication of “The Satanic Verses,” which was deemed blasphemous. In short order, the world got to see who in the liberal world really had the courage of liberalism’s supposedly deepest convictions.

Since that episode — which resulted in nearly a decade of hiding for Rushdie, the killing of his novel’s Japanese translator and the shooting of his Norwegian publisher— there have been all-too-many similar moments: the slaying of the Dutch director Theo Van Gogh in 2004, the Danish cartoon affair in 2005-06, the “Charlie Hebdo” massacre in 2015, and, last week, the beheading of French teacher Samuel Paty by a Chechen refugee

[billyboy15]

Well of course.

“As ye sow so shall ye reap.”

[ClearCase_guy]

You can pick a number of different years or events to make the point, but I usually point to 9/11 in 2001. Less than 20 years ago and we live in a totally different world. And it didn’t all change in just one night. It’s been a gradual, slippery slope with each year seemingly worse than the year before. Of course, 2020 is an amazing example of that principle.

As a Conservative, I’d like the decline to stop and I’d like us to try and make our way back to a world worth living in. But I guess that would offend some people.

[tbw2]

Hitchens was also good at criticizing Islam AND the liberals who defended it in the name of multiculturalism.

[T Ruth]

Why the NYT Must Die

NY Times is the enemy of your free speech