Legislating to stop hate speech. Using a “hecklers’ veto” to run Posie Parker out of town. Victories against hate. Job done.
I've done my share. My student comrades were on a high after we heckled and shut down a National Front meeting outside our UK Labour Party conference in the 1980s. We didn’t change minds. Just the venue.
Shutting down people who are hateful feels right. But counter-intuitively, banning hateful words is not the best way to stop the hate.
Nadine Strossen is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. She hates Nazis.
She hates them more than she loves free speech. Over coffee, she told me her mission is to get rid of the hate, not the speech.
She has spent decades looking at hate speech through history, and found no evidence that banning it reduces hate. As the former head of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an author and a law professor, she would know.
New Zealand's draft hate speech legislation has been put in the freezer, for now. Extending the Human Rights Act to cover hate speech against religion and politics was a well-intentioned response to the Christchurch shooting. But it is bad law.
The first red flag was the Government's inability to define hate speech. ”You know it when you see it,” the former prime minister said.
You don’t know it when you see it. One person’s hate speech is another’s just cause. Words cannot define precisely enough what is a subjective concept. “Hate is an emotion after all,” says Strossen. “No two thinking people can possibly agree on what is hateful and what is not.”
Every argument today to justify censoring white supremacist speech was made by defenders of slavery to ban abolitionist speakers. She quotes the slavers arguing that the words of abolitionists “libelled the South and inflicted emotional injury”, and were “emotionally upsetting and traumatising”. Laws were duly passed to “reduce the harm”.
More recently, some US politicians denounced Black Lives Matter and “defund the police” advocacy as hate speech against white people and police officers.
It is impossible to write anti-speech codes that cannot be twisted.
Worse still, hate speech legislation distracts from more effective ways of countering hate. A swastika sprayed on a Jewish school is vandalism. Burning a cross on someone’s front lawn is an illegal threat. Planning mass murder in Christchurch was already illegal in 2019, if only our secret services had been paying attention.
Pre-Hitler Germany had anti-hate laws. They didn’t stop Hitler. They turned Nazi prisoners into martyrs while robbing others of their free speech. Exiled German students tried to get Mein Kampf translated into English to warn the world of Hitler’s plans, but failed. The book was banned.
There are better ways to counter offensive speech than running the likes of Posie Parker out of the country.
In 2017 anti-Nazi Germans turned an annual neo-Nazi march into an ”involuntary walkathon”. For every metre the neo-Nazis walked, businesses and locals donated 10 euros to programmes to help people leave extremist groups. “They turned the march into a mock sporting event,” says Strossen. At the end, they thanked the neo-Nazis for raising 10,000 euros towards the anti-Nazi cause.
Posie Parker is not a Nazi. She has a right to speak. The trans community also have a right to protest. It is hard to describe the line between where protest ends and the “hecklers’ veto” begins.
This matters. Because we need to keep talking.
If she had turned up to speak against same-sex marriage, she would have been ignored. Gay marriage has mainstream support. The issue is settled. The talking done. But when people are unresolved, for example, about how to love trans people without erasing the definition of a woman, the talk must continue until it is settled.
This month marks 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement ended decades of violence in Ireland. The power-sharing agreement between Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists has stalled, but no-one would propose a return to Margaret Thatcher’s ban on Sinn Fein “to deprive them of the oxygen of publicity”.
It was forbidden to interview Sinn Fein in the media. Looked tough, but violence continued. It martyred Sinn Fein politicians.
At my university in the UK at the time, we hosted a debate between Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists. The police turned up to stop us. It felt good to push back on a ban that did nothing for the cause of peace by preventing dialogue. We might even have done some good. Feeling good and doing good do not have to be exclusive, as long as you know your history.
Look beyond the things you want to ban and imagine where the same legal principles could be turned against speech that should not be banned.....The full article is published HERE
She hates them more than she loves free speech. Over coffee, she told me her mission is to get rid of the hate, not the speech.
She has spent decades looking at hate speech through history, and found no evidence that banning it reduces hate. As the former head of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an author and a law professor, she would know.
New Zealand's draft hate speech legislation has been put in the freezer, for now. Extending the Human Rights Act to cover hate speech against religion and politics was a well-intentioned response to the Christchurch shooting. But it is bad law.
The first red flag was the Government's inability to define hate speech. ”You know it when you see it,” the former prime minister said.
You don’t know it when you see it. One person’s hate speech is another’s just cause. Words cannot define precisely enough what is a subjective concept. “Hate is an emotion after all,” says Strossen. “No two thinking people can possibly agree on what is hateful and what is not.”
Every argument today to justify censoring white supremacist speech was made by defenders of slavery to ban abolitionist speakers. She quotes the slavers arguing that the words of abolitionists “libelled the South and inflicted emotional injury”, and were “emotionally upsetting and traumatising”. Laws were duly passed to “reduce the harm”.
More recently, some US politicians denounced Black Lives Matter and “defund the police” advocacy as hate speech against white people and police officers.
It is impossible to write anti-speech codes that cannot be twisted.
Worse still, hate speech legislation distracts from more effective ways of countering hate. A swastika sprayed on a Jewish school is vandalism. Burning a cross on someone’s front lawn is an illegal threat. Planning mass murder in Christchurch was already illegal in 2019, if only our secret services had been paying attention.
Pre-Hitler Germany had anti-hate laws. They didn’t stop Hitler. They turned Nazi prisoners into martyrs while robbing others of their free speech. Exiled German students tried to get Mein Kampf translated into English to warn the world of Hitler’s plans, but failed. The book was banned.
There are better ways to counter offensive speech than running the likes of Posie Parker out of the country.
In 2017 anti-Nazi Germans turned an annual neo-Nazi march into an ”involuntary walkathon”. For every metre the neo-Nazis walked, businesses and locals donated 10 euros to programmes to help people leave extremist groups. “They turned the march into a mock sporting event,” says Strossen. At the end, they thanked the neo-Nazis for raising 10,000 euros towards the anti-Nazi cause.
Posie Parker is not a Nazi. She has a right to speak. The trans community also have a right to protest. It is hard to describe the line between where protest ends and the “hecklers’ veto” begins.
This matters. Because we need to keep talking.
If she had turned up to speak against same-sex marriage, she would have been ignored. Gay marriage has mainstream support. The issue is settled. The talking done. But when people are unresolved, for example, about how to love trans people without erasing the definition of a woman, the talk must continue until it is settled.
This month marks 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement ended decades of violence in Ireland. The power-sharing agreement between Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists has stalled, but no-one would propose a return to Margaret Thatcher’s ban on Sinn Fein “to deprive them of the oxygen of publicity”.
It was forbidden to interview Sinn Fein in the media. Looked tough, but violence continued. It martyred Sinn Fein politicians.
At my university in the UK at the time, we hosted a debate between Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists. The police turned up to stop us. It felt good to push back on a ban that did nothing for the cause of peace by preventing dialogue. We might even have done some good. Feeling good and doing good do not have to be exclusive, as long as you know your history.
Look beyond the things you want to ban and imagine where the same legal principles could be turned against speech that should not be banned.....The full article is published HERE
Josie Pagani is a commentator on current affairs and a regular contributor to Stuff. She works in geopolitics, aid and development, and governance.
5 comments:
Ardern told the UN last year that "free speech is a dangerous weapon" (quote).
The NZ MSM to it's eternal shame did not publish that statement - why not ?
Because they were already complying with her demands to control free speech.
The difference between hate speech and non-hate speech tends to be whether the observer agrees with it or not.
It's fine - almost mandatory - to engage in hate speech against White sexually normal males, because that is approved of by a hateful marxofascist elite that seeks to destroy society and replace it with their warped version. They hate me, no problem; I hate them, it's a problem.
We already have laws that prohibit using speech to incite violence against given groups. We also have criminal libel laws. These laws have done perfectly well for a very long time. They do not need replacing with laws that criminalise opinions about social issues.
To respond Josie - "No two thinking people can possibly agree on what is hateful and what is not.” I beg to differ. One assumes you are familiar with Tusiata Avia's recently promoted 'poem' about James Cook? You find me someone who says that's not hateful or inciteful of violence, I'll find you a dozen that say it is. I think that's what "you know it when you see it" relates to, but our Media Council and Human Rights Commission think that one's okay - go figure - although I think you know why, and that hypocrisy is at play? I suspect even our former PM would shy away from calling that one out? But either way, it's probably a very good idea that we don't attempt to enshrine what's okay or not in terms of hate speech in law.
And,
"There are better ways to counter offensive speech than running the likes of Posie Parker out of the country" and "It is hard to describe the line between where protest ends and the “hecklers’ veto” begins." So are we to take it from that, like Minister Wood, the Prime Minister and others, you find her "offensive" even though she never uttered a word - well leastwise publicly at Albert Park? If so, please inform us of what she has said anywhere that is offensive, to who and why, and let the public be judge? Otherwise you are sounding awfully like all those others in msm, labelling her anti-trans and suggesting neo-nazi affiliations etc. without a shred of proof or justification ?
If that's not your position, then thank goodness free speech is currently lawfully permissible, but what is this non existent "hecklers' veto" line you mention? Cancellation of free-speech through physical force is surely a no no, period. And did it not, in the Parker case, deserve Police action?
I'm sorry, but I find your message a little mixed, although the sentiments of your closing comment I, and I'm sure others, would agree with.
Can I bring to the attention of the Author of this Post -
[1]- Nadine Strossen - "former head of the ACLU" - are you aware that this Organization, which has established foundation links to a University in California (and others across America)- is an organization intent on destroying the American way of life - which has been noted within Conservative American Media, but the actions of UCLA are supported by liberal Media across America;
[2] - Northern Ireland (NI) - last election for MP's was May 2022, Sinn Fein (The Green) won the majority vote, beating the DUP (The Orange -Democratic Unionist Party - who collectively decided not to work with Sinn Fein (old habits die hard) so the Parliament of NI has been in limbo since - And to think Joe Biden has the temerity to blame the Govt of England for issues prevailing, when the "other finger in the pie" (over NI) is the EU - which relates to the UK "Brexiting the EU" and the movement of product/produce etc into and across NI. "The Troubles" (in NI) have not gone away (even with the US inference) they are starting to resurface.
"The things that make you feel good in politics don't necessary do good. But boy, are they morally satisfying."
If something does real good how could it not be morally satisfying? Anything less is a just a feel good disaster. Liberalism: disconnecting ideas from real-world outcomes since the 15th Century.
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