There is no free speech without hate speech. That is a simple fact. That doesn’t mean we have to like genuine hate speech – even if anyone could accurately define it – or even listen to it. But banning free speech is worse than any hate speech you can name.
As I wrote for Insight, banning so-called ‘hate speech’ has far worse consequences than the speech itself. After all, the Nazis’ speech was vigorously suppressed under Weimar’s ‘hate speech’ laws. Hitler was banned from speaking at all in Germany.
How’d that end, again?
But if silencing even genuine Nazis, with a well-organised membership up to half a million, not only didn’t stop them, but actually enhanced their allure, what’s the point of banning less than a dozen edgelords in Melbourne?
There have been calls in recent months for legislation to prohibit the Nazi salute, particularly after it was used by some of the participants in a demonstration in Melbourne.
The salute was not in fact confined to Hitler’s administration but a similar version was used, for example, by the regimes of Francisco Franco in Spain and Benito Mussolini in Italy after they took power in the years before World War II.
And in America for half a century. The “Bellamy Salute”, as it was called in America, after the author of the Pledge of Allegiance. Besides writing the Pledge, Bellamy in 1892 came up with a standard form of salute when reciting it:
Extending one’s right arm straight ahead, slightly upward, with the fingers directed at the flag (if present).
In other words, identical to the Heil Hitler salute.
The Bellamy Salute was hurriedly dropped in 1942 and replaced by the hand-on-heart gesture familiar today. America’s version of the Roman salute has been conveniently memory-holed.
And we all know why.
So, the salute itself isn’t inherently horrible – only its modern connotations. But, should that see it banned?
It is the expression of utterly offensive views that provides the real test for a belief in freedom of speech. As American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes said in a judgment of the US Supreme Court in 1919: “All life is an experiment … while that experiment is part of our system I think we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.”
Would-be censors can blither about ‘incitement’ all they like, but simply doing a Hitler salute isn’t actually incitement. And actual incitement is already illegal.
So, what’s the point? Is the very sight of a Hitler salute likely to rally masses of nascent Nazis lurking in Melbourne’s suburbs?
It is not as if the handful of persons in Australia who seem to have some affection for this period of German history are taken seriously by the general community. No regime in modern history is more discredited, and anyone displaying Nazi salutes or symbols would rightly be considered an embarrassment to himself or herself by almost every member of Australian society.
In any case, if we’re going to ban the offensive symbols of mass-murderous regimes, half of the left will have to be stripped of their favourite T-shirts and badges.
What about the hammer and sickle – the flag of the Soviet Union – a regime under which millions were killed or sent to gulags? Or what about the Confederate flag, the banner of the old south, in a war fought to preserve the institution of slavery? Should the music identified with these regimes, such as The Internationale and Dixie, be banned as well?
And all those student edgelords parading the visage of homophobic, racist, mass-murderer Che Guevara?
Should we also register self-declared communists as ‘terrorists’?
There have also been calls for those calling themselves Nazis to be declared by legislation as members of a terrorist organisation.
There is, of course, a large volume of legislation at both the federal and the state level in Australia on the subject of terrorism, but this is designed to deal with individuals or organisations who are dedicated to acts of carefully planned violence, often on a large scale, that might result in the deaths of hundreds of individuals through bombs placed at public events or the sabotage of airline flights.
It is hardly suitable to apply to political agitators, however offensive and misguided.
The Australian
The thought of seeing a large swathe of the loudmouthed, extremist, agitators lecturing at our universities, or lecturing from the taxpayer-funded pulpit of the ABC outlawed as terrorists might be tempting to some on the right. Just as the left cheered on censoring right-leaning voices on social media.
Only to find themselves being banned under the same rules.
And that’s the only iron rule of censorship: the censor you arm against your enemies today, could be turned against you by your own enemies, tomorrow.