THE DISCOMFORT OF FREE SPEECH
Freedom of speech is uncomfortable; it should make someone somewhere feel uneasy. This includes woolly liberals.
Last week a man was arrested at Heathrow airport in transit to the Middle East on a German extradition warrant. His crime representing not what he has done but what he thinks and writes for he is a holocaust denier.
Now I know very little about the man, but I know something of 20th Century history. It is still extraordinarily difficult to place the mass murder, the genocide of Europe’s Jewish population into any kind of meaningful perspective. For someone to set out to deny the reality of recorded mass murder, the Nazis were after all extraordinarily thorough statisticians, strikes one as about as odious a position as it is possible to imagine. At best these grubby little people are reduced to quarrelling about numbers. The Nuremberg laws are an established fact, the Einsatzgruppe a historical reality, the existence of Bergen Belson and Auschwitz undisputed. So the question becomes reduced to how many were murdered, how systematic was it? People capable of this moral bankruptcy are beneath contempt; to describe these arguments as squalid is to dignify them. But should they be criminalised? [1] As a side point should anyone ever be subject to extradition for something that would not be an offence in this country.
At a time when western culture is preaching the value of free speech, particular in the face of strident Islam it can only strike a horribly false chord when people are extradited purely on the basis of ‘thought crime.’ In essence such surrender to the fear of the written word exactly mirrors the fears of fundamentalist religious fanatics in their desire to protect the ‘sacred text.’ Similarly the attempt to prosecute the puerile poetry of a young Islamic shop assistant, the so called ‘Lyrical Terrorist,’ who seems to have amused herself with masturbatory fantasies of beheading people, can only serve to give ammunition to those who accuse us, correctly in this instance, of hypocrisy. Let these hideous people say what they will, in my school playground they used to sing ‘sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me.’ Well the truth of this can be disputed however can anyone seriously believe that placed within the arena of open debate either of these cases, particularly the former, represented any kind of threat to public safety? Isn’t it time to assert the power of a culture that is robust enough to withstand offence?
[1] In a thoughtful piece in this weeks Guardian Timothy Garton Ash outlines this new and sinister trend of criminalising some trends of historical interpretation.
Last week a man was arrested at Heathrow airport in transit to the Middle East on a German extradition warrant. His crime representing not what he has done but what he thinks and writes for he is a holocaust denier.
Now I know very little about the man, but I know something of 20th Century history. It is still extraordinarily difficult to place the mass murder, the genocide of Europe’s Jewish population into any kind of meaningful perspective. For someone to set out to deny the reality of recorded mass murder, the Nazis were after all extraordinarily thorough statisticians, strikes one as about as odious a position as it is possible to imagine. At best these grubby little people are reduced to quarrelling about numbers. The Nuremberg laws are an established fact, the Einsatzgruppe a historical reality, the existence of Bergen Belson and Auschwitz undisputed. So the question becomes reduced to how many were murdered, how systematic was it? People capable of this moral bankruptcy are beneath contempt; to describe these arguments as squalid is to dignify them. But should they be criminalised? [1] As a side point should anyone ever be subject to extradition for something that would not be an offence in this country.
At a time when western culture is preaching the value of free speech, particular in the face of strident Islam it can only strike a horribly false chord when people are extradited purely on the basis of ‘thought crime.’ In essence such surrender to the fear of the written word exactly mirrors the fears of fundamentalist religious fanatics in their desire to protect the ‘sacred text.’ Similarly the attempt to prosecute the puerile poetry of a young Islamic shop assistant, the so called ‘Lyrical Terrorist,’ who seems to have amused herself with masturbatory fantasies of beheading people, can only serve to give ammunition to those who accuse us, correctly in this instance, of hypocrisy. Let these hideous people say what they will, in my school playground they used to sing ‘sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me.’ Well the truth of this can be disputed however can anyone seriously believe that placed within the arena of open debate either of these cases, particularly the former, represented any kind of threat to public safety? Isn’t it time to assert the power of a culture that is robust enough to withstand offence?
[1] In a thoughtful piece in this weeks Guardian Timothy Garton Ash outlines this new and sinister trend of criminalising some trends of historical interpretation.
