Evasion
This again. I seem to have this argument every ten days or so. The issues are just never framed properly – instead they’re framed evasively and euphemistically, and how can anything be discussed properly when the air is clouded by evasion and euphemism? I ask you.
What argument? The free speech one. The one that swirls around the thought that free speech is not about the easy cases but about the hard ones. One version of that is the discussion of hypocrisy and double standards, as in Mark Steyn’s inaccurate whinge about Hampstead big guns who ‘lined up’ to defend Rushdie but wouldn’t (according to Steyn) line up to defend Lynette Burrows, and as in this one about Orhan Pamuk and David Irving. Why are people making free speech noises about Pamuk and not about Irving?
Two European writers have recently fallen foul of European governments for expressing their views about genocide. Both are threatened with trial and imprisonment for something they said or wrote. Yet one is supported by EU politicians and the international literati – who have rallied around to defend him from censorship and to champion the right of writers to speak freely – while the other has been ignored, or even told that he got what he deserved.
Yes. That’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. It leaves a great deal out. It oversimplifies – drastically. The two writers didn’t say or write the same thing, about the same subject, in discussing the same genocide, with the same implications. That paragraph tries to make it look as if they did, but they didn’t. Just saying ‘for expressing their views about genocide’ and ‘for something they said or wrote’ is not good enough. You might as well say both Martin Luther King and Timothy McVeigh went to jail for protesting against the government. You might as well say that both Osama bin Laden and Irshad Manji are controversial. Both are true statements, but incomplete – to put it mildly.
This is bad news, because when it comes to free speech it’s all or nothing: we either have it or we don’t. And if we were to have free speech for one writer but not for another, then we wouldn’t have free speech at all.
Is that true? It seems to me to be quite untrue. It seems to me to be a rather stupid oversimplification, and unargued besides. Why is free speech all or nothing? Why do we either have it or not? Why can’t we have it in some things and not in others? As in fact we already do – for good or ill, or both. And why do we not have free speech at all if we have it for one writer but not another? What if one writer’s entire output consists of exhortations to murder certain groups of people? If that writer does not have free speech, does it follow that none of us do? I don’t offhand see why.
Brendan O’Neill does finally get around to saying that the two writers ‘could not be more different’. But then –
Yet their cases are the same: both could be incarcerated, not for physically harming another person or for damaging property, but for the words they spoke; both could have their liberty removed because they expressed views that the authorities – in Turkey and Austria – decree to be distasteful.
But that is not the point. That just evades the real point, which is much less easy to deal with. And that’s what is so irritating – free speech absolutists are so predictably apt to do that: to evade the real difficulties in their position by resorting to adjectives like ‘distasteful’ – or controversial, offensive, shocking, objectionable, or the like. As if the only issue were emotional reactions. But that is not the only issue, and it’s very dishonest to shove the real issue behind the sofa and hope no one will notice. Austria doesn’t make Holocaust denial illegal merely because it is ‘distasteful’ but because, rightly or wrongly, they think it is dangerous. Obviously there is plenty of room for argument on that: it’s an empirical question as well as a question of principle, and there’s a lot to say. But that is the issue, not anything so silly and trivial as distaste.
OB, granted that Irving’s holocaust denial is dangerous. However, the easy slide from “Why can’t we have it [free speech] in some things and not in others?” to “Austria doesn’t make Holocaust denial illegal merely because it is ‘distasteful’ but because, rightly or wrongly, they think it is dangerous,” evades the problem of the we and the they — who decides about free speech? It is certainly not Austria that decides, but the government of Austria — and it is a government decision that, in effect, is self-interested insofar as the suppression of political speech by an established power facilitates the continuation of that power by the suppressor.
Furthermore, it is unclear how you get from the idea that Irving’s holocaust denial is “dangerous” to the idea that the danger is solved by banning the speech. It is dangerous to do heroin, but the fifty year attempt by the state to ban it has been an unmitigated failure. In fact, I think that it would be easy to make that case that the mechanisms of banning speech are
a. inefficient — they don’t really suppress the speech, which circulates clandestinely among those who use it; and
b. in order to become efficient, must expand in such a way that it injures democratic procedure. In the same way that the attempt to ban heroin leads to giving more and more leaway to the police to erode more and more rights of the citizen, so, too, banning holocaust denial speech leads to more and more supervision of the medium of expression – government intervention, for instance, on the internet — which leads to the concrete erosion of all one’s right to expression. To think that the government can be counted on to use its power selectively in the latter case defies what we know about recent history — in fact, just the other day, it turned out that the NSA has been data mining internet communications just as the free speechers warned it would do back in 1996, when Congress was re-forming the laws regulating the telecommunications industry.
These aren’t logical arguments hypothesizing a slippery slope, but arguments about bureaucratic behavior and forms of governance in a democracy. I would say that surely, there are times in the formation of a democratic state where restriction on free speech might be necessary — in 1946, for instance, in Austria. And the reason I’d accept that argument is that, in the efficient pursuit of a speech ban, the state would not damage democratic forms — since those forms are just forming. But in 2006, those circumstances are long gone.
Roger,
True – the Austrian government, not Austria as a whole (although, to be fair, that is a usual way to refer to a country’s laws, I think – the UK has ferocious libel laws, etc).
“it is a government decision that, in effect, is self-interested insofar as the suppression of political speech by an established power facilitates the continuation of that power by the suppressor.”
Do you know that about this particular decision, or is that just a generalization about suppression of political speech overall? I’m not sure I see why that would necessarily be the case.
“Furthermore, it is unclear how you get from the idea that Irving’s holocaust denial is “dangerous” to the idea that the danger is solved by banning the speech.”
Oh but I don’t. I’m not arguing here that the danger is solved by banning the speech – I’m only arguing that the danger is what’s at issue, rather than mere distaste.
But I take your point about recent history and so on, and don’t disagree. I don’t know what I think about the Austrian law – I’m ambivalent about it at best. My point really is just that the discussion is not helped by evasively euphemistic ways of labeling the speech in question.
There are many complexities here (should Turkey legislate as if it had experienced Austria’s history, or vice versa?), but regardless of the considerations at play in both cases, it strikes me as heavy-handed in the extreme to lump the two of them together as if there were no difference, even if the writer eventually admits there is one. I am not at all saying that free speech is a right only Pamuk but not Irving should have. I am saying that writing an article the main point of which is to equate between these two radically dissimilar cases is a thoroughly misbegotten idea in the first place.
“Furthermore, it is unclear how you get from the idea that Irving’s holocaust denial is “dangerous” to the idea that the danger is solved by banning the speech.”
Well the Holocaust denial laws have a rather obvious provenance. I think the time may have come where they serve more harm than good, but it is a pretty odd position that cannot see the reasons behind banning Holocaust denial in Austria.
Well, yes. Kind of another major difference I didn’t go into. Usually people/bodies/states/nations/religions, if they engage at all in either libel suits or prosecutions in response to an exercise of free speech, are concerned with things they consider negative, slurs. That’s absolutely the case with Pamuk (as, of course, was Irving vs Lipstadt). The Holocaust denial proscription is the only example I can think of offhand where this is reversed: the crime consists of verbally absolving of a crime, of making someone or something look more innocent than it insists it is. And the one absolved is the one bringing suit. One more reason not to go comparing Irving with Pamuk, just because they both got into hot water in the wake of things they said about a genocide.
Stewart nails it again…Most reputable opinion thinks Irving was lying but that Parmuk is telling the truth. That should be the basis of the comparison and is why Irving v Lipstadt and Pamuk v Turkey are, in the end, a better way of testing free speech than heavy-handed legislation about one specific, if horrific, historical event.
The old cliche about shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre is only a problem if there isn’t a fire…
How about shouting “No fire! Everybody go back to their seats and relax!” as the flames are about to engulf the whole building?
I doubt that Irving is lying. I suspect he belives his deluded version of what happened.
And anyway, free speech cannot depend on that difference. The Turkish government probably believes its version of what happened – the result of generations of “education”.
I guess I am pretty close to being a free speech absolutist but going back to where this started, i do not accept the ‘if you believe this, then you must believe that, or you are a hypocrite”.
And I agree that false analogies are dangerous. Truth and logic and argument are all much to complicated for simple formulae.
But then i am sure we have all said this before.
G.,
I admit to knowing less about the Armenian genocide than the Jewish one, so I don’t know whether the figures Pamuk used are ones that – how to put this? – not-obviously-biased historians consider reliable. Wasn’t he being charged with something like “insulting Turkishness,” rather than lying?
Ken,
It is true that self-delusion can accomplish a great deal, but I have to wonder about Irving. I read most, if not all, of the libel trial transcripts and the judge’s decision. I think you’d have to want to be obscenely charitable to Irving to attribute all his interpretations to wishful thinking. Rather than waffling on about examples from memory, here’s the judge’s most relevant statement on the subject:
“Finding as to Irving’s motivation
13.163 Having reviewed what appear to me to be the relevant considerations, I return to the issue which I defined in paragraph 13.138 above. I find myself unable to accept Irving’s contention that his falsification of the historical record is the product of innocent error or misinterpretation or incompetence on his part. When account is taken of all the considerations set out in paragraphs 13.140 to 13.161
above, it appears to me that the correct and inevitable inference must
be that for the most part the falsification of the historical record was deliberate and that Irving was motivated by a desire to present events
in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs even if that
involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence.”
“I doubt that Irving is lying. I suspect he belives his deluded version of what happened.”
The trouble with that is that he altered evidence to make his case – for instance changing a plural to a singular (or vice versa – I don’t remember exactly) in a quotation. See Richard Evans, here at B&W and elsewhere. It’s hard to do that unawares.
“And anyway, free speech cannot depend on that difference.”
Never? Under any circumstances? So manufacturers of dietary supplements can say ‘prevents cancer’ or ‘will extend your life by a century’ on their labels no matter how inaccurate that is? So manufacturers of high fat muffins can say ‘Zero fat!’ on their labels? And so on?
Wo – that was weird. We crossed, Stewart. Yeah – what you said.
It helps to see how ludicrous the comparison is if one imagines the cases switched, especially Austria locking up Irving because he accuses the Austrians of complicity in the Holocaust which they deny ever took place…
“Never? Under any circumstances? So manufacturers of dietary supplements can say ‘prevents cancer’ ….”
OK, free speech cannot depend just on the distinction between truth and the other.
In the case OB mentions there is the added factor that the false statements can cause harm (as, in the view of Austria, holocaust denial can).
I cannot think of a case where a false startement which does not cause significant harm should be penalized. Argued with, ridiculed, contradicted, yes, but penalized no.
Ken,
Just so. The harm is the key thing. That’s exactly why the evasive use of words like ‘distasteful’ is so annoying: it conceals the most important difficulty in free speech questions.
The Turks-and Austrians-should simply follow the example of Great Britain (or, to a significant extent, the Americans) and simply “forget” their atrocities. This George Monbiot essay was quite, quite….disturbing. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/27/how-britain-denies-its-holocausts/
I can’t quite look at spectacular European architecture of the late 19th century anymore. A lot of blood and evil went into those carved stone edifices.
Don’t know exactly what this means, but it’s probably an additional reason not to go comparing. From the Guardian’s Quiz on the events of 2005:
“Which country was the last holdout against the European Union beginning membership talks with Turkey?
Correct answer: Austria”
There are other forms of free speech that are at least as dangerous as Holocaust denial but are not criminalized, as Professor Lipstadt herself has pointed out in her recent BBC interview. Why should Holocaust denial criminalized and these forms of speech not?