MCLC: Why You Haven't Been Banned Yet (2)

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
Why You Haven’t Been Banned Yet (2)
I, too, found Professor Wasserstrom's comments refreshing (something I've often felt dating back to the time when I was a student of his now many years ago).
I would just like to add, in reference to Professor Clark's observations, that the point here is precisely that social pressure is also pressure. I think we all know -- and I hope do not take for granted -- that we are not in danger of being imprisoned in the middle of the night for our political views. This, I would say, goes without saying. What we need to recognize is that our discourse in many sectors of the United States is now curtailed (witness today's news about Virginia school closure: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/arabic-calligraphy-shuts-schools_56737382e4b06fa6887cdc1f), a concerning trend. Whether what we are now seeing falls under "ai guo" or "ai dang" doesn't matter much to me. What matters is that with each step into this quagmire of delusional "us and them" -ism we sacrifice some degree of freedom that might give cause to "ai guo" in the first place. For those of us engaged in China related research, comparisons like the one Wasserstrom provides are useful; among other things, they give us occasion to appreciate the benefits of living in a free society, but also occasion to observe and I hope inveigh against the limits of that freedom. Now is such an occasion.
Paul Manfredi <manfredi at plu.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on December 18, 2015
You are subscribed to email updates from MCLC Resource Center  
To stop receiving these emails, click here.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/mclc/attachments/20151218/d3c6d81a/attachment.html>