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The International Herald Tribune
May 5, 2006 Friday
Civility vs. free speech: A democratic quandary;
Europa
by Richard Bernstein
Some years ago there were a number of unsuccessful efforts at
American universities to enact hate-speech codes that would have
punished students and faculty for expressing opinions or hurling
epithets that would have insulted others because of their race, sex,
sexual orientation or handicap.
Most of these efforts failed, in part because they presented too
sharp a contradiction with the right of free speech. And indeed,
despite the United States' sad history of slavery and racism, the
American value of free speech, even deeply offensive free speech, has
generally taken priority over the value of protecting the feelings of
minorities.
There have been a few reminders lately that this is not the case in
Europe, with its even sadder history of genocide I say sadder
because, however bad American racism has been, it never involved a
systematic effort actually to wipe out a people. David Irving, the
renegade British historian, has actually been sentenced to a term in
prison in Austria for the crime of Holocaust denial.
There is no doubt that Irving denied the Holocaust for years.
Moreover, the law is the law and to fail to enforce it on the
possible grounds that, however objectionable Irving's views may have
been, it seems excessive to toss somebody in prison for them would
sap the law in general of its dignity.
But there have been other signs recently in some European countries
that the effort to protect people from insult has taken priority over
the value of free expression of uncivil views, and these instances
make one wonder whether Europe has made the right choice.
There is, for example, the case in Poland of Kaziemira Szczuka, a
well-known television personality, who, a few weeks ago, mimicked the
high-pitched voice of a severely disabled 18-year-old who frequently
reads prayers on a far-right Roman Catholic radio station, Radio
Maryja. The station that aired Szczuka's little satire was fined the
equivalent of ¤125,000, or $157,000, by Poland's National
Broadcasting Council, which found the satire an unacceptable insult
to a disabled person and to religious belief, even though Szczuka
said she didn't know the young prayer reader was disabled.
One could certainly argue that civil behavior does not allow ridicule
of anybody's religious belief viz: that small Danish newspaper and
its satirical cartoons on the Prophet Muhammad. But mockery, even if
it is in bad taste, cannot be made a criminal offense in a democratic
society.
This is especially true if the mockery is of Radio Maryja, which is
estimated to have four million to six million listeners a day and
does not hesitate to take part in Poland's political battle,
entreating its listeners to vote for President Lech Kaczynski's Law
and Justice party and against Donald Tusk's Civic Platform in
elections last autumn.
The radio's emphasis on piety, exemplified in the broadcast prayers
of the young handicapped woman, provide a kind of support for its
political urgings.
There are other problems with the Szczuka case. A few weeks after her
television station was punished because of her remarks, the Polish
authorities conspicuously did not punish Radio Maryja itself after
one of its regular guests made some remarks that Poland's
professional journalists' association and many others found to be
blatantly anti-Semitic. This unevenness of enforcement suggests that
hate-speech codes can be politically interpreted and politically
enforced.
Several European countries, committed to a sort of absolute civility,
enforce laws against hate speech almost routinely. In March, the
German government banned a group of Turkish nationalists who wanted
to march in support of their tasteless and erroneous idea that the
genocidal massacres of Armenians in Turkey during World War I never
took place.
And there is an ongoing trial in Mannheim of Ernst Zundel, an
Internet purveyor of primitive anti-Semitism and of the notion that
the Holocaust is a Jewish myth created to exact tribute from a
gullibly guilty world. Zundel, who committed his acts of Holocaust
denial while living in Canada and the United States, is a challenge
to free-speech absolutists. Look up ''Zundelsite'' on the Internet
and you will see what I mean.
You will also find on the Web that Zundel is viewed as a sort of cult
hero by an undeterminable number of people who have come to support
his 25-year career of Holocaust denial and who see him, now that he
is on trial for his views, as a martyr to a suppressed truth.
The trial itself has been a circus, well described in the German
press. At one point, Zundel's lawyer was barred from the court after
making what the journalistic observers saw as neo-Nazi speeches, even
finishing up one peroration with the phrase, ''Heil Hitler!'' She
played successfully to a courtroom audience made up of 80 to 100
Zundel supporters who have raised their arms in what appeared to be
the Nazi salute.
The trial itself, in other words, has at least to some extent become
a platform for the propagation of the very ideas whose expression
brought about the trial in the first place. Equally perverse, in
prosecuting Zundel, the state has helped to create a thrilling sense
of illicit community and radical solidarity among those interested in
rebellion against the established moral order.
In Germany, of course, it is not difficult to understand the yearning
to enforce the rules of civility. The victims of the Holocaust are
certainly morally entitled to protection from the vicious calumnies
of people like Zundel.
The question is: Should they also be legally entitled to that
protection? Perhaps, sadly and although this flies in the face of a
near European consensus they shouldn't be.
During the uproar over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons, Muslims
attacked the Holocaust denial laws in several European countries as
rank hypocrisy because those same countries permitted insults to
Muslims, and, as the American legal scholar Ronald Dworkin observed
recently in The New York Review of Books, they had a point. But,
Dworkin continued, the response should not be to broaden the coverage
of the laws against insult to religion but to strike them down.
Free speech, he argues, is an indispensable requirement of a
democratic society, not something that can be bargained away to
mollify this or that offended group.
And so, as an American in Europe and a Jew mightily offended by
Holocaust denial, I nonetheless come down on the side of free speech
rather than on the prohibition of offensive speech. One of the
cultural differences between America and Europe in this regard is
that in America this issue is debated. In Europe it is not.
--Boundary_(ID_WaltCu64u4F1SZUgkZmOtg)--
May 5, 2006 Friday
Civility vs. free speech: A democratic quandary;
Europa
by Richard Bernstein
Some years ago there were a number of unsuccessful efforts at
American universities to enact hate-speech codes that would have
punished students and faculty for expressing opinions or hurling
epithets that would have insulted others because of their race, sex,
sexual orientation or handicap.
Most of these efforts failed, in part because they presented too
sharp a contradiction with the right of free speech. And indeed,
despite the United States' sad history of slavery and racism, the
American value of free speech, even deeply offensive free speech, has
generally taken priority over the value of protecting the feelings of
minorities.
There have been a few reminders lately that this is not the case in
Europe, with its even sadder history of genocide I say sadder
because, however bad American racism has been, it never involved a
systematic effort actually to wipe out a people. David Irving, the
renegade British historian, has actually been sentenced to a term in
prison in Austria for the crime of Holocaust denial.
There is no doubt that Irving denied the Holocaust for years.
Moreover, the law is the law and to fail to enforce it on the
possible grounds that, however objectionable Irving's views may have
been, it seems excessive to toss somebody in prison for them would
sap the law in general of its dignity.
But there have been other signs recently in some European countries
that the effort to protect people from insult has taken priority over
the value of free expression of uncivil views, and these instances
make one wonder whether Europe has made the right choice.
There is, for example, the case in Poland of Kaziemira Szczuka, a
well-known television personality, who, a few weeks ago, mimicked the
high-pitched voice of a severely disabled 18-year-old who frequently
reads prayers on a far-right Roman Catholic radio station, Radio
Maryja. The station that aired Szczuka's little satire was fined the
equivalent of ¤125,000, or $157,000, by Poland's National
Broadcasting Council, which found the satire an unacceptable insult
to a disabled person and to religious belief, even though Szczuka
said she didn't know the young prayer reader was disabled.
One could certainly argue that civil behavior does not allow ridicule
of anybody's religious belief viz: that small Danish newspaper and
its satirical cartoons on the Prophet Muhammad. But mockery, even if
it is in bad taste, cannot be made a criminal offense in a democratic
society.
This is especially true if the mockery is of Radio Maryja, which is
estimated to have four million to six million listeners a day and
does not hesitate to take part in Poland's political battle,
entreating its listeners to vote for President Lech Kaczynski's Law
and Justice party and against Donald Tusk's Civic Platform in
elections last autumn.
The radio's emphasis on piety, exemplified in the broadcast prayers
of the young handicapped woman, provide a kind of support for its
political urgings.
There are other problems with the Szczuka case. A few weeks after her
television station was punished because of her remarks, the Polish
authorities conspicuously did not punish Radio Maryja itself after
one of its regular guests made some remarks that Poland's
professional journalists' association and many others found to be
blatantly anti-Semitic. This unevenness of enforcement suggests that
hate-speech codes can be politically interpreted and politically
enforced.
Several European countries, committed to a sort of absolute civility,
enforce laws against hate speech almost routinely. In March, the
German government banned a group of Turkish nationalists who wanted
to march in support of their tasteless and erroneous idea that the
genocidal massacres of Armenians in Turkey during World War I never
took place.
And there is an ongoing trial in Mannheim of Ernst Zundel, an
Internet purveyor of primitive anti-Semitism and of the notion that
the Holocaust is a Jewish myth created to exact tribute from a
gullibly guilty world. Zundel, who committed his acts of Holocaust
denial while living in Canada and the United States, is a challenge
to free-speech absolutists. Look up ''Zundelsite'' on the Internet
and you will see what I mean.
You will also find on the Web that Zundel is viewed as a sort of cult
hero by an undeterminable number of people who have come to support
his 25-year career of Holocaust denial and who see him, now that he
is on trial for his views, as a martyr to a suppressed truth.
The trial itself has been a circus, well described in the German
press. At one point, Zundel's lawyer was barred from the court after
making what the journalistic observers saw as neo-Nazi speeches, even
finishing up one peroration with the phrase, ''Heil Hitler!'' She
played successfully to a courtroom audience made up of 80 to 100
Zundel supporters who have raised their arms in what appeared to be
the Nazi salute.
The trial itself, in other words, has at least to some extent become
a platform for the propagation of the very ideas whose expression
brought about the trial in the first place. Equally perverse, in
prosecuting Zundel, the state has helped to create a thrilling sense
of illicit community and radical solidarity among those interested in
rebellion against the established moral order.
In Germany, of course, it is not difficult to understand the yearning
to enforce the rules of civility. The victims of the Holocaust are
certainly morally entitled to protection from the vicious calumnies
of people like Zundel.
The question is: Should they also be legally entitled to that
protection? Perhaps, sadly and although this flies in the face of a
near European consensus they shouldn't be.
During the uproar over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons, Muslims
attacked the Holocaust denial laws in several European countries as
rank hypocrisy because those same countries permitted insults to
Muslims, and, as the American legal scholar Ronald Dworkin observed
recently in The New York Review of Books, they had a point. But,
Dworkin continued, the response should not be to broaden the coverage
of the laws against insult to religion but to strike them down.
Free speech, he argues, is an indispensable requirement of a
democratic society, not something that can be bargained away to
mollify this or that offended group.
And so, as an American in Europe and a Jew mightily offended by
Holocaust denial, I nonetheless come down on the side of free speech
rather than on the prohibition of offensive speech. One of the
cultural differences between America and Europe in this regard is
that in America this issue is debated. In Europe it is not.
--Boundary_(ID_WaltCu64u4F1SZUgkZmOtg)--