I was reading this article about free speech on college campuses, and in the section about Berkeley they discussed hate speech. From the article:
At the University of California at Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement during the 1960s, administrators replaced the school's broad ban on "fighting words" a year ago with a more narrow policy that prohibits harassing speech toward a specific person. Generally, hate speech is allowed against a group, but not an individual, said university counsel Maria Shanle....
It reminded me of a conversation I recently had with a German friend of mine. I would consider him (from what I know) to be of what's generally referred to as "liberal" in terms of believing in personal freedoms, sane and rational socially-progressive policies, yet eschewing any sort of extremism, be it on the right or the left. In other words, our general attitudes toward public policy were similar.
We got to talking, though, and we realized that our respective cultural backgrounds affected our oppositional viewpoints on the subject of hate speech. My friend expressed appalled amazement that in the US hate mongers (the KKK, neo-nazis, etc.) could be legally allowed to spew their venom. "But these are lies!" he said. How could lies be protected speech?
For me, I see it less as an issue of permitting lies. In fact it has little to do with the contents of the speech at all. The problem with forbidding lies is deciding who gets to be the arbiter of what is a lie and what is the truth. Truth is often relative under the most innocent of circumstances, and history has shown that over-reaching governments frequently designate what is truth only to serve their own power-grabbing ends.
What my friend couldn't fathom was the legal tradition which understands that equation, which understands that there are bigger issues at stake than simply being exposed to lying. It's a belief that no idea is too dangerous to be expressed; that the true danger comes from putting someone in power over deciding which ideas can be expressed at all.
Comments (3)
Hey Cathy, I didn't know you kept a weblog! Anyways, I am working on mine, I am finding the integration process a bit painful... :( Here's the URL: http://www.jhimb.net/DesignType/ it's still under construction, got any tips on using MovableType? ~NJ
Posted by Navdeep | June 3, 2003 4:00 PM
Posted on June 3, 2003 16:00
Thanks for calling me liberal and I still disagree to your point of view. The example I gave was that ca. 6 Million Jews were killed by Nazis. This is a fact and it's considered a crime in Germany to say that this has never happened. Any racists in the USA or elswhere who claim that no Jews were killed are not only lying there is more to it. That's exactly why they should be punished. To say that 'truth is often relative' doesn't seem right to me (here).
Posted by Stephan | June 25, 2003 9:37 AM
Posted on June 25, 2003 09:37
I see what you are saying, and far be it for ME to deny the Holocaust(!) But I see that allowing the government to control what people think or say, regardless of its factual validity, puts the government in a position of dominance that, taken to extremes (see the Holocaust as an example), poses a greater risk to society than allowing egregious opinions to be advocated by its citizens.
(Remember that places such as Dachau weren't originally set up as extermination camps: rather they were designed to incarcerate political dissidents, people who advocated opinions the government didn't like or think were "true." Perhaps this seemed like a small and reasonable measure at the beginning, but over the years, such reasonable interdictions compounded into an unreasonable horror. And by then how could people object? The government had decided such objections were invalid and muted dissent through the threat of similar incarceration (or execution).)
I agree that, left unchecked, people such as Holocaust deniers pose a tremendous danger to society. Horrible lessons were learned, and they must not be forgotten. All citizens must be wary of allowing ignorant and twisted rhetoric corrupt or obfuscate the historical record, or for allowing hateful and hurtful ignorance to become de facto socially-acceptable beliefs. I don't think, therefore, that it would necessarily be inappropriate for the government to assert an alternative opinion on matters such as these as part of civic policy: the government could fund education, museums, memorials, etc.
But to criminalize people, even the most maliciously stupid people, on the basis of what they say and not what they actually DO seems
extremely dangerous and an abuse of government's power.
Posted by Cathy | June 25, 2003 10:18 AM
Posted on June 25, 2003 10:18