Free speech: a brief, contentious history | HistoryExtra
"‘I find a tension between what we might call an egalitarian conception of free speech and an elitist conception of free speech. And the egalitarian one has its roots in the Athenian democracy, so 2500 years ago. So if you go to Thucydides’ account of Pericles’ famous funeral oration, and he talks about how the Athenians like to debate things before they rush into action, and he paints sort of a picture of, of tolerance between citizens, you also have an orator like Demosthenes, who, who mentions free speech, in a number of his surviving speeches and very much sees this as a paramount value of the Athenians. Of course, the fate of Socrates shows that the free speech was not an absolute value for the Athenians.
In fact, it's never been an absolute value for, for any human society, ever, not even in our modern liberal democracies as we might get back to, but that's where I find the origins of free and equal speech. And you can contrast that with the Roman Republic, where you have a much more, I would say, regimented, top down elitist conception of free speech. So you don't have, as opposed to the Athenian democracy, you don't have ordinary people being able to be in, in popular assemblies, and it's mostly sort of an elite that exercises free speech, and not what would be considered the mob by people like Cicero and Cato, these type of people who, who saw themselves as an elite who were sufficiently educated to exercise free speech, as opposed to the ordinary plebs...
When you have authoritarian or even totalitarian states, free speech is not a value at all. These societies are almost defined by their absence of free speech. It would be very difficult to imagine Putin being able to launch the war with the propaganda that went before it, if there had been free and equal speech in Russia. I think his sort of aggression depended to a certain extent on the ability to control the public sphere to silence dissent, and basically limit the public sphere to official propaganda... those who serve as the institutional gatekeepers, those who are the elite that enjoy a privileged access to free speech, tend to panic about the consequences of expanding the public sphere...
What I call the Weimar fallacy is a very interesting moment for the history of free speech, because it still has huge ramifications for how we look at free speech in the 20th century, in liberal democracies. And so, basically, the idea is that, because the Nazis came to power through democratic means, even if they never gained an absolute majority, if only the Weimar Republic had been more intolerant of intolerance, then perhaps the disaster of Nazism, and of course, the Holocaust, could have been avoided. And that argument still undergirds a lot of laws restricting free speech in contemporary democracies. But I tried to argue in the book.
First of all, let me put out a disclaimer, I don't think that the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism can be explained through the narrow prism of free speech and censorship quite clearly. Clearly, there are many other factors in play, and some of those factors are likely much more important than free speech and censorship. However, what I show in the book is that the Weimar Republic adopted increasingly draconian laws to limit free speech of extremist movements like Nazis and and communists. For instance, the radio was was strictly regulated, so it was sort of mostly pro government voices that could come on. Communists and Nazis were not allowed to broadcast, and some of the most notoriously anti semitic Nazis were actually often prosecuted.
So take someone like, like Goebbels, who later became propaganda minister. He founded Der Angriff, a Nazi newspaper, because Adolf Hitler was prohibited from speaking in a number of German states and Goebbels proudly proclaimed Der Angriff to be the most frequently banned daily in in Germany because there were these laws which allowed German states to ban, administratively ban newspapers for up to eight weeks if they published false information or if they attacked public officials or institutions or symbols of the government. And you also had the most depraved anti semitic Nazi, Julius Streicher, who was the editor of Der Stürmer, and he was twice convicted under this law that prohibited religious offense and he was convicted for publishing these hideous blood libels…
But what happened was that he was celebrated by his supporters when leaving court. And so less than a year after he was convicted in 1921, in Nuremberg, his hometown, the Nazis gained a huge increase of votes in Nuremberg...
Today, there's a dominant strain of thought which sees free speech as a threat to minorities and as of sort of consolidating unequal power relations. And I argue in the book that it's completely the other way around, that free speech, and equality are not mutually exclusive. They are mutually reinforcing, and that every single persecuted group on minority has relied on free speech to further their cause and stake their claim for tolerance and acceptance, whereas every single oppressive state or authority has used censorship and repression to entrench their dominance of other groups.
And the examples are many, so you could take 19th century America. So if you went to the southern states in the 1830s, they adopted some of the most draconian laws in American history, some of them formally adopted the death penalty for advocating abolitionist ideas. Whereas abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, great African American orator was was actually born a slave, argued that the right of speech is a very precious one, especially to the oppressed, and he protested vehemently when, when these white Bostonians disrupted a meeting in 1860, in Boston, where an abolitionist meeting and he said that free speech is the difference between freedom and slavery. And I think that logic is very compelling.
But you could also go to take the issue of British colonialism for instance. So if you go to India, the Indian Penal Code, a number of speech crimes were introduced against sedition and enmity, and hatred against different classes. And they were used against Indian nationalists, including Mahatma Gandhi, who was, who was sentenced to six years in prison in the early 1920s for for advocating against British rule, and Gandhi actually advocates for a conception of free speech, which was much more speech protective than what were, was the state of the law in Britain, and even in the United States at the time, you know, in 1921, or 22, when when Gandhi was convicted, he says that, you know, everyone should be able to criticize any authority or institution as long as they don't promote or incite violence.
But if you go to the United States at the time, people were being sent to prison for 10 or 20 years for opposing American involvement in World War One. And of course, in Britain, seditious laws were also frequently upheld. And one of the tragedies is that a number of British colonial speech crime laws, both in India but also in Hong Kong, have survived British colonialism and are now being used by, in India, the Modi government, for instance, is using British era, Colonial era laws against sedition to punish dissent. And the same is happening in in Hong Kong. So that I think shows the danger of these, of these laws.
And at the same time, I think, validates the idea that, you know, progress when it comes to tolerance and acceptance of minorities very much depends on the ability of those who are being oppressed to speak truth to power... we must also be clear about the fact that, you know, free speech comes with costs and harms… when it comes to trying to mitigate those harms, restricting free speech through through onerous laws, and censorship is a cure worse than the disease. And that is something that is difficult for human beings to accept, because, you know, if there's, if there's a danger involved in certain kinds of speech, the logic, next step is to say, Oh, well, then we have to ban it.
But as I've tried to show in the book, there are a number of unintended consequences, harmful consequences of that. Plus, it might even be counterproductive, and you might not get the results that that you're aiming for, though, I think all supporters of free speech should should acknowledge that that free speech comes with costs and harms... when we will look back at and sort of the infancy of the the age of social media, I think we will probably look at some of the laws and restrictions being imposed as as constituting sort of a 21st century version of elite panic that has dominated the history of free speech and is likely to break out now and again... I think that hopefully my book can help people have a more detached and cool approach to the principle of free speech and value it as such, and also sort of being able to distinguish between between tolerance and approval’"
So much for liberals using the threat of Nazis to justify their power
grabs. Of course they say that means they need even more powers to crack
down on "hate speech" and "disinformation"
