The late, great Christopher Hitchens tried to remind us that, “Every time you violate or propose to violate the free speech of someone else… you’re making a rod for your own back.” We’re already seeing the proof of this: left-wing groups who advocate banning “hate speech” are suddenly whining that they’ve been banned by Facebook, for “hate speech”.
Whining, “But it’s not hate speech when we do it!” isn’t any use: because, as Hitchens also pointed out, “Whose going to decide?”
In New Zealand, at least, the “who” seems to be a ranting loon whom even far-left bloggers think is “insane”. Someone who is so committed to openness and transparency that she hid her own Twitter account.
That still leaves the problem of defining exactly what “hate speech” actually is.
The traditional position is that speech should only be illegal if it advocates someone is actually harmed. Merely being offensive is not enough. The distinction is workable in practice and vital in principle, as being ‘offensive’ can mean many things.
That’s not entirely correct. The position of JS Mill is the same as that of the legal definition of “incitement”: that is, advocating physical harm, where there is a high probability of that harm being carried out.
But even that slightly incorrect definition is positively libertarian, compared to National Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism co-leader Joanna Kidman, who thinks that words are literal violence.
Kidman is just one of the voices – mostly on the extreme left – who want to frame everything they don’t like as “harmful hate speech”.
Morgan Godfery and fellow left-wing apologists routinely seem to believe that the focus of extending criminalised speech can only be “right-wing” opinions. Clumsily partisan, these protagonists need to be careful of what they wish for. While the nature of our current government is left and (very-left) Green, laws once enacted, have a way of taking on unexpected trajectories. And the colour of the government will one day change.
Hypocritically, many of today’s Establishment left, like old-school commissars trying to big up their prole credentials, like to brag about their participation in the anti-Springbok protests. They might want to ponder what Robert Muldoon would have done, empowered by “hate speech” legislation.
They might also want to consider that, their dearest wishes aside, Jacinda Ardern will not be in power forever.
The left should not be surprised at how little public concern might then be expressed over union suppression. Nor, next, as to the silencing of spokespeople for Extinction Rebellion, Tax Justice Aotearoa or Auckland Action Against Poverty. One can also theorise that median voters are hardly going to demonstrate when politicians with foot-in-mouth proclivities of the Trevor Mallard flavour, find themselves in the gun […]
Alas, our flaccid “unwritten constitution” provides no US-style system of checks and balances for overruling legislative intention and, if parliament passes a bill to crush opinions, we are stuck with it.
So, the loud voices of the left might not be so secure in their longer-term liberty if our current government gets its way.
NZ Herald
Appealing to the left’s partisan self-interest (“You’ll be next!”) is a weak argument for free speech. Free speech ought to be a good in its own right. But it’s a sad sign of how repressive and debilitated our democracy has become that we even have to try and appeal to the left’s self-interest.
In vain, it would seem. No matter how many little Robespierres end up on their own guillotines, they always labour under the delusion that, like communism, repressing free speech will work this time.
