A Free Speech Lesson From Karl Marx
There’s a basic principle of free speech that the censors always seem to forget. Namely, the act of suppressing speech only tends to add more fuel to the speaker’s fire.
Don’t believe me? Just ask Karl Marx.
In 1842, Marx was an up-and-coming radical journalist and chief editor at a Prussian publication called the Rheinische Zeitung. His readers thrilled to his biting pen and caustic attacks on the Prussian monarchy. But when Russian Emperor Nicholas I happened to read one of Marx’s articles, which also savaged Prussia’s then-key ally, Russia, the boot of censorship came stomping down. Russia lodged an official complaint about Marx’s writings with the Prussian regime and the Rheinische Zeitung was repressed by state censors in 1843.
“I am tired of this hypocrisy and stupidity, of the boorishness of officials, I am tired of having to bow and scrape and invent safe and harmless phrases,” Marx told a correspondent. “In Germany there is nothing I can do.” So Marx departed for Paris and the rest, as they say, is history.
“Two years later,” the political philosopher Isiah Berlin wrote in his illuminating 1939 biography, Karl Marx: His Life
Article from Reason.com
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