If you express a thought that's somewhere off the index card of allowable opinion, expect to be demonized.
If over 30 years of writing you've written three sentences that might seem shocking in isolation, expect them to be repeated by your enemies over and over again until you depart this vale of tears.
Evidently the British philosopher Roger Scruton is being hit with this tactic.
(Scruton, whose 40+ books include two on architecture, has been appointed to an unpaid position as chair of a small commission on the design of public housing, and this is why he's under scrutiny.)
The tactic is used two ways:
(1) Indignantly quote the offending sentence with no attempt to demonstrate how it is wrong, as if it's of course obvious that the idea expressed is incorrect and no right-thinking person could hold it.
(2) Take it so out of context as to make it mean something like the opposite of what it really does.
Scruton, it turns out, got a twofer.
Let's take a look at how they've used the second tactic against him.
Scruton gave a speech in Hungary in which he said that a substantial portion of the intelligentsia in that country are Jewish and "form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire."
Get him! He's an anti-Semite!
Except the rest of the passage reads:
People in these networks include many who are rightly suspicious of nationalism, regard nationalism as the major cause of the tragedy of central Europe in the 20th century, and do not distinguish nationalism from the kind of national loyalty that I have defended in this talk. Moreover, as the world knows, indigenous anti-Semitism still plays a part in Hungarian society and politics and presents an obstacle to the emergence of a shared national loyalty among ethnic Hungarians and Jews.
Thus his point is that Jews there have legitimate reasons to be wary about nationalism, and that anti-Semitism still plays a part in Hungarian society.
They actually tried to use that passage against him.
Well, not the passage. The first sentence without the rest of the passage.
In another phase of the controversy, we learn that "BuzzFeed News has unearthed footage of a lecture he gave in the US in 2005," in which Scruton made reference to the phenomenon of "date rape."
By "unearthed," they mean they went to YouTube and watched a lecture that had been sitting there for over five years. (Crack investigators, these.)
Scruton has written an entire book called Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation, but he is to be judged by a ludicrously decontextualized sentence or two.
Then, out of millions of sentences written throughout a distinguished career, this sentence is used against him: "If you express outrage at crimes committed by Muslims against women, and hint that Islam might have something to do with it, you will be accused of 'Islamophobia.'"
Whatever the truth of the matter there, we can't even be permitted to discuss it? And someone is to be demonized even for pointing out that people are under intense pressure never to raise it?
This kind of hysteria could hardly have come as a surprise to him. "Once identified as right-wing you are beyond the pale of argument," Scruton wrote. "Your views are irrelevant, your character discredited, your presence in the world a mistake. You are not an opponent to be argued with, but a disease to be shunned. This has been my experience."
As Douglas Murray puts it, "It appears that Scruton’s detractors will continue to mine the columns Scruton has secretly published in all the national papers in order to expose his wrong-think. They will continue to ‘unearth’ his public lectures. And they will continue to pretend that none of the complex things in life – including the complexity of human relations – should ever be opened up or explored by anyone."
Originally Posted by Swordsmyth
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