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August 29th, 2007 issue

Speak freely

Freedom of speech is a two-way street (“Watchdog to monitor hate speech,” News, Aug. 15–21).
You can choose to ignore the speech you hate and praise the speech you love. You educate your family about what is right and proper, and hate will flow off them like water on a duck’s back.
The more educated your society is, the less likely people will be swayed by hate speech — unless, of course, they are swept up in fervent nationalism.
“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” — Noam Chomsky
 
Chris Bock
Arlington, Virginia, U.S.A.
Diversity’s downside
Peter Josika’s opinion column (“Diverse tongues,” Opinion, Aug. 22–28) is based on a misunderstanding about what kind of diversity we actually want.
When we promote nation-states, the diversity that they bring is clearly seen at the European or global level only.
We don’t assume that an individual nation state should become an example of ethnic diversity. It’s only the whole continent or the whole world with a lot of nation-states that has this feature.
Mr. Josika criticizes Czechoslovakia for its decreasing percentage of Poles and Germans. A high percentage of Poles and Germans was indeed never one of the goals of the state. Nevertheless, this doesn’t reduce diversity, because Poland and Germany are much larger and their percentages of Poles or Germans are not so catastrophically low.
Mr. Josika has apparently forgotten about the existence of these countries.
Why does he want to change the Czech Republic and Slovakia into multicultural countries?
The more unified and multi-ethnic the whole territories are, the more pressure there is for people to assimilate with the dominant ethnicities.
I don’t believe there can be any reasonable doubt about that. This mechanism is amplified in the case of politicians.
It is almost necessary for politicians at the European level to learn the “major” languages.
That’s no good, because languages — and the detachment from the politicians’ nations where people usually don’t speak too many languages — become more important than the actual political questions and desires of their citizens.
Politicians at the European level are pretty much a uniform, nondiverse group of people who like to learn the “major” languages, travel and usually don’t like if they are responsible to the citizens who elected them.
 
Luboš Motl
Plzeň, west Bohemia


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