Every other government regime in the world
So far Tillerson seems to be a dreadful Secretary of State.
He said some words on Friday about how we all condemn hate speech yadda yadda – of course without mentioning his foul-mouthed hate-spewing boss.
In a speech announcing a new effort to expand diversity at the State Department, Tillerson did not explicitly mention either Charlottesville or President Trump’s reactions to the presence of white supremacists and neo-Nazis there, but he said the events of the past week were on everyone’s mind.
“We do honor, protect and defend freedom of speech, First Amendment rights,” he said. “It’s what sets us apart from every other government regime in the world, in allowing people a right to expression. These are good things.”
That right there? That’s some terrible secretary of state-ing. He said only the US defends freedom of speech. Way to antagonize a great many allies who also defend freedom of speech, Rex.
“But we do not honor, nor do we promote or accept hate speech in any form. And those who embrace it poison our public discourse and they damage the very country that they claim to love. So we condemn racism, bigotry in all its forms. Racism is evil; it is antithetical to America’s values. It’s antithetical to the American idea.”
Well now there again – that’s just silly. Which of America’s values? What American idea? Racism has certainly not been antithetical to America’s values throughout its history, and indeed it was firmly entrenched in government until well into the 1960s. It took marches and broken heads and deaths to get a Civil Rights Act and a Voting Rights Act, and that barely scratched the surface. He makes himself less than convincing if he can’t even acknowledge the truth about the US.
But he did go on to talk about taking real steps to make the State Department less white, so that’s good.
Tillerson said he has ordered that at least one minority candidate be included for every ambassador post that comes open. That will help target future leaders, he said, so their careers can be nurtured.
“We need a more deliberate process to cultivate the abundance of minority talent we already have in the State Department,” he said.
Tillerson said the State Department will step up recruitment of African Americans at historically black colleges and universities. Colleges in Miami and Chicago with large Hispanic populations will also be seeing State Department recruiters, he said. And he said the recruitment and promotion drive should include women and members of the LGBT community.
Ok then.
Wait, “government regime”? I thought those were two different forms of the same irregular noun – where “government” means “government we like” and “regime” means “government we are thinking of overthrowing”.
Maybe his speech read “government/regime” and he forgot to pronounce the slash.
I noticed Tillerson’s claim that only the US defends freedom of speech. If only Americans realised how offensive that nonsense is to citizens of other democracies. The US wasn’t founded as a democracy either.
Some of us realize it…but not nearly enough.
I’m sure the Free Speech absolutists would point out, with some justification, that only the US has a constitution that is interpreted to allow quite such unfettered speech. Many other western democracies that also believe in free speech (intentional lower case) have hate or obscenity laws, or defamation laws that are somewhat less flexible than those in the USA.
I’m in two minds whether that matters frankly. You can draw all sorts of hypotheticals about what happens with reduced freedom of speech. However, I don’t look at NZ, Australia, Canada, the UK, Germany, France the Netherlands etc etc as being countries that suffer badly or are less functional democracies than the USA as a result speech laws.
In fact, I suspect that as long as speech is treated with a presumption of being broadly free, the value and functionality of the democracy depends very much on other factors than speech alone. From the outside it almost seems that much of the US dysfunction stems from almost religious worship of the 1st and 2nd amendments for their own sake, beyond any ability to have a discussion (the point of free speech surely). The result is ideologues shouting at each other while the majority who want to get on with their lives muddle along with varying degrees of success.
Rob,
The utility of ‘unfettered’ free speech is rather diminished if the ruling oligarchy is able to exclude certain ethnic, religious groups or classes from the electoral process. In other words, say what you like without the threat of hate speech or restrictive defamation laws, however your vote might be made worthless by some creative gerrymandering or corruption of the electoral rolls.
RJW, indeed. The blatant discrimination and gerrymandering being displayed in so many States is frankly sickening to anyone with a sense of fair play.