The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the | The New Republic: But Rose’s most intriguing argument for freedom of expression is the idea that censorship isn’t just a political crime, a violation of fundamental civil rights, but also a crime against human nature. It reduces people to passive objects; it denies the innate human instinct to language, expression, and narrative. There is an existential, not merely political, quality to Rose’s argument here, and this is perhaps what has sustained his nearly decade-long defense of a few cartoons.
And if censorship is a violation of human nature, it begs the question: Is the push to be culturally “sensitive” forging a different kind of political subject in the West? What are we becoming? We’ll end, Rose responds, “in the title of my book, in a tyranny of silence. That’s what I fear.”