Free speech
, the freedom of speech - how these words run through history, always sued, often trampled on.
How threatened is this freedom today?
In England no one has fought for this freedom more magnificently and more convincingly than John Milton, author of Paradise Lost and Found Again.
In 1644 he published an indictment against Parliament, which was in the process of passing a law to censor the press. A pathetic, disdainful, and useless aberration, so Milton ironically in his famous pamphlet, "Areopagitica", which is quoted again and again today: curtailing this freedom is about as successful as if a rich landowner closed his park in the evening and thus believed that he locked the birds out.