“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” ― George Washington As of January 6, 2021 Twitter decided to suspend US President Donald Trump’s account, for all intents and purposes putting a sock into the man’s mouth for IT didn’t feel like entertaining…
When we founded the Voltaire Network in 1994, our first concern was to defend freedom of expression in France, and then around the world. Today, however, this concept is, in our view, distorted and fought against. We will therefore try to define this ideal further. The circulation of ideas experienced a considerable boom with the…
Revisiting Theodore W. Adorno’s work on the ‘authoritarian personality’ and the ‘F Scale’ reveals that in 2020, it is actually liberals, progressives and the so called ‘Left’ that manifest 8 out of the 9 most problematic, antidemocratic and authoritarian attitudes. The theory of an authoritarian personality was introduced in the 1930s in an attempt to…
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has run a fascinating long report this week offering a disturbing snapshot of the political climate rapidly emerging across Europe on the issue of antisemitism. The article documents a kind of cultural, political and intellectual reign of terror in Germany since the parliament passed a resolution last year equating support for…
What is a ‘digital Iron Curtain’? It is when Big Digital, as Professor Michael Rectenwald terms these western Tech Goliaths, become ‘governmentalities’, using a word originally coined by Michel Foucault to refer to the means by which the ‘governed’ (i.e. ‘we the people’) assimilate, and reflect outwardly, a mental attitude desired by the élites: “One…
Joe Biden’s victory instantly obliterated the Democratic Party’s longstanding charge that Russia was hijacking and compromising U.S. elections. The Biden victory, the Democratic Party leaders and their courtiers in the media now insist, is evidence that the democratic process is strong and untainted, that the system works. The elections ratified the will of the people….
