Can an outsider say what society’s standards ought to be?

At the What’s Wrong with the World discussion thread, which is still continuing, commenter Steve Burton wrote:

This whole dispute between you and David Mills over whether you did or did not call on Peter Brimelow to dump Paul Craig Roberts once and for all seems more than a bit silly. If you didn’t, you probably should have.

Here’s the reply I posted:

I’m in a difficult position. Roberts is an offense. But a lot of people regard me as an offense. Now I don’t think there’s any comparison. I think I’m a rational person who speaks civilized language. I think Roberts is an insane hate-monger and trafficker in conspiracy theories about President Bush planting bombs in the WTC. Still, people look at me and say, “You want your marginal ideas included, yet you’re trying to exclude others with marginal ideas.” So, to the extent possible, it’s better for me to be a limited censor and say that just Roberts’s bad insane articles should be spiked. And that’s all I care about anyway. I have no interest in Roberts. My concern was that the paleoconservative and immigration restrictionnist movement has morally discredited itself by publishing such things as Roberts’s insane columns.

However, I have to make an exception to what I said before about shunning. I do believe that Christopher Hitchens should be shunned, meaning, I think he should not be published at all by conservative publications. Not that that will happen. I’m talking about the way things ought to be. If we had a decent society, if we even had a society with the standards of 40 years ago, a person like Hitchens would not be published anywhere, except maybe in some atheist magazine, and of course he would not be on television. I believe in standards for society. And a society that treats with respect someone like Hitchens is destroying itself.

And by the way, just so there’s no misunderstanding, I never said that David Horowitz had any obligation to publish me. If he regards me as too extreme, that is his right (though I think he’s wrong); what I objected to was the shockingly dishonest and treasonous way he handled the situation. At the same time, the fact that Horowitz goes on publishing a true hater like Hitchens, a man who wrote a book called “How Religion Poisons Everything,” while he excludes me, who have never written anything remotely of such a vile nature, shows how so-called conservatism today is really a form of liberalism—and shows the true scale of values operative in liberal society. You can demonize Christianity, and continue to be published everywhere. But if you say there are racial differences in civilizational abilities, or if you say that America should remain what it has always been, a white majority country, then you’re a non-person.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 12, 2007 04:30 PM | Send