It seems that at least some people at ‘A Newspaper’ are starting to finally grasp a glimmer of understanding of what free speech actually means.
In fact, they’ve gone so far as allowing the Free Speech Coalition to tell the remaining readers of ‘A Newspaper’ exactly what we have been trying to tell them for years:
- “Hate speech” is a nonsense term that is impossible to define, let alone write into law.
- Quangos like the Human Rights Commission are speaking through their backsides.
- Laws restricting free speech do nothing to curtail hate and are nothing but political cudgels which end up enabling oppressors.
Controversy around recently-cancelled talks in New Zealand raised important questions about free speech. Ostensibly it was threats of violence that led to speakers being “de-platformed” but there is a strong whiff of political bias. Either way, accusations of “hate speech” have been raised, and some commentators have suggested that we need laws against the expression of hateful ideas.
This is an argument that has been implicitly put forward by the Human Rights Commission with a special emphasis on “religious hate speech directed at Muslim New Zealanders” and is predicated on the assumption that we need to protect people from harmful words, much like we outlaw harm caused by physical violence.
There is no good evidence that offensive language or challenges to ideas, however provocative or unreasonable, creates such severe harm as to require legislation. However, there is reason to argue that direct threats or speech that incites direct violence should be illegal — and it is already prohibited under our existing laws.
If genuine harm is already prohibited by law, then we don’t need new laws.
The suspicion that those advocating new laws do so with bad intent can easily be judged by their blatant hypocrisy.
Yet, even with such a seemingly objective test as inciting violence it is even difficult to determine what is and is not speech that incites violence. For example, the Human Rights Commission did not think that shouting ” […] bash the Jewish, cut their heads off…” in an Auckland protest was worthy of investigation, let alone prosecution.
Part of the reasoning of the commission was that no violence followed and so it did not incite anything. This is logical reasoning.
Well, no it isn’t. It also doesn’t pass the simplest test of the law. Incitement is the encouragement of another person to commit a crime. It doesn’t matter whether the other person does so or not. The simple fact of encouraging them to do so falls foul of prohibitions against incitement.
The fact that the HRC is obviously willing to ignore existing laws when it suits them should be enough to disqualify them from being taken seriously about proposed new laws.
But opponents of free speech are not just mendacious, they’re also ignorant (or, perhaps not so ignorant, but deceitful enough to blatantly lie about what we know is historical fact).
Some commentators have made an argument for banning speech that claims racial superiority or inferiority (the definition of racism) by claiming that if only there were such laws in 1920s Germany, six million Jews and others might not have been systematically murdered.
As compelling as that argument sounds, it is not based in reality. There were hate speech laws in the Weimar Republic, including against “insulting religious communities”. Hundreds of Nazi affiliates were prosecuted under these laws.
Even worse, once in power, the Nazis used and expanded those very same laws to ruthlessly suppress all speech they didn’t like: anyone, in other words, who spoke against the Nazi regime.
As Christopher Hitchens wisely said, “every time you violate or propose to violate the free speech of someone else…you’re making a rod for your own back”.
In the words of Holocaust survivor, Aryeh Neier, “Those who call for censorship in the name of the oppressed ought to recognise it is never the oppressed who determine the bounds of censorship”.
A Newspaper
If all that is just so much blah-blah-blah to the Legacy media, here’s a one-sentence rule that even they should be able to commit to memory:
The response to hate speech is not legislation, but better ideas expressed with more speech.
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