February 20, 2006
Government responsibile for actions of the governed?
Eugene Volokh notes:
I'm glad that even against the backdrop of murderous thuggery by Muslim extremists, some people are willing to repeat that, no, free nations and governments are not responsible for what their newspapers publish.
I'm not sure he is entirely right about this. For example, our justification for invading Afghanistan and ridding it of the Taliban was that they could not disavow the actions of Al Queada (then residing in Afghanistan) simply because they did nothing illegal in Afghanistan.
Now, if a team of hackers in another country was releasing computer viruses that did substantial damage to US systems (e.g. hospital and DoD), we might also hold the government of that country responsible.
Is publishing a computer virus different from publishing a cartoon? Isn't the point of free speech that it should be content neutral?
Finally, the underlying assumption of viral marketing programs is not very different from the assumptions underlying computer viruses. Humans, like computers, have vulnerabilities that can be exploited to cause them to redistribute some payload and infect others.
So, if the US is right to object to computer viruses, are Muslim leaders right to object to the spreading of memes that cause their populations to freak out?
Posted by Alex at 05:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (12)
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Comments
well, of course, muslim leaders are 'right' to object to ideas that delegitimize their authority. But you are also, in this question, supposing a uniform functionality to that system of belief in likening the cartoon situation to what is presented by a computer virus; computer viruses never improve a system (unless you are thinking quite radically). While, in this instance I personally think that with the cartoons, the supposition is not far off (only in the most chauvenistic sense could these cartoons have been considered constructive), I'm not ready to allow that Khomeini's fatwa on Salman Rushdie is 'right', though the same logic would presumably apply (and actually, Rushdie's book *was* a far more destructive idea in regard to political Islam than those cartoons). While it's reasonable to accept that what is and isn't acceptable to muslim populations is accurately reflected by their leadership, being conscious of Islam isn't the same as being neutral towards how it relates to itself and the rest of the world.
I've become increasingly aware of the degree to which we are no longer in the era of Globalization, but one of Nationalism (the forest David Goodhart does not see for the trees in "The Discomfort of Strangers" in challenging the practicability of multiculturalism in Britain's school systems)- where most conversations about the world begin with it's borders as extant of culture rather than it's borderlessness as emergent from economic theory. But what prevents me from subscribing to the crudely racialist take on the world of Samuel Huntington is that it is important to critique what distinguishes positive nationalism from negative nationalism, which involves a more complex reading of people as individuals than allowing that they are simply 'the muslims', 'the chinese civilization', 'anglo-saxonry', 'latin-catholic', 'orthodox' etc (I don't think africa got a civilization). But part of understanding that complexity in people also means not equating humans and computers.
One of the more imaginitive evocations of these dynamics has been the example of Israeli cartoonist Amitai Sandy, who has announced a no-holds-barred competition for anti-semitic cartoons open to Jewish participants only. This brilliantly undercuts the Iranian posturing on this issue with a powerful attempt to broker individualism and national political identity.
Posted by: ooghe at February 21, 2006 10:40 AM
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