Way way back before I was born, on the 26th January 1942 to be precise, soldiers of the US Army’s 34th Infantry Division and the 1st Armoured Division, landed in Northern Ireland in preparation for the eventual liberation of the nations of Western Continental Europe from their brutal occupation by the Germans. These units were the first members of the US armed forces to arrive in the UK following the USA’s entry into World War II. This day marked the time when Britain and Britons were no longer alone when it came to facing the might of the German military.
The arrival of these Americans from states and towns that many Britons had never heard of boosted morale among the British people and whilst there was some tension between the locals and the Americans (in some cases over the issue of racial segregation in the US military, which wasn’t the case with British forces) the American’s were seen by anyone with any sense as liberators. The American forces were needed as Britain had worn itself out fighting alone, even when fighting with the great resources of the British Empire.
Now it seems the American’s, or rather the Trump Administration there is looking at coming to the rescue of Britons again. However this time it is not a foreign despot that the Americans are assisting Britons in fighting, but the free speech restrictions being imposed on Britons by the increasingly censorious and authoritarian governing classes of Britain.
According to reports on GB News and Reuters the US government is going to set up a free speech portal that can be used by those in jurisdictions such as that of the UK that are unfriendly to both the concept and the practise of freedom of speech.
GB News said:
“The US is building a website for Britons and other people overseas to see online content which has been banned by their governments.
The "freedom.gov" portal will allow users to bypass bans on "hate speech" in place abroad.
Officials had discussed including a virtual private network function to make a user appear to be in the US. People's activity on the site will not be tracked, according to Reuters.
The project was expected to be unveiled at last week's Munich Security Conference by Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah B Rogers, who has long raised concerns over free speech in Britain, but was delayed.”
Link: https://www.gbnews.com/politics/us/free-speech-online-portal-britons-bypass-labour-content-ban
You can find the new US government ‘Freedom Portal’ here: https://freedom.gov
There’s not much yet on this Freedom Portal site apart from a graphic that ripples to reveal the word ‘freedom’ and an animation of a rider, presumably a reference to Paul Revere who, during the Revolutionary War, carried news of British troop movements to American Patriot forces prior to the battles of Lexington and Concord.
There’s little indication on the freedom.gov site as to how this site will work but the fact that this site was created in the first place is of great consequence. It’s a sort of declaration of war by America not on Britain as a sovereign nation, but instead against an authoritarian political current that for various reasons has gained significant influence in places like the United Kingdom and other European and Anglophone nations.
Many of these nations appear to have taken the decision that the easiest way to deal with their nation’s many social and political problems is to forbid either by social pressure or increasingly by making certain speech criminal, opinions that governments do not like.
To give but a few examples about this sort of governmental behaviour: There’s the issue of how in some nations the response to increased pressures from Islamic fundamentalism and extremism is not to tackle the problem of the extremists directly, but to crack down on those among the public who might be disconcerted by such Islamic extremism from talking about it. There’s also the top down imposition of speech codes surrounding issues such as migration, transgenderism and other societal matters that in healthy countries are the subject of open and sometimes passionate debate but which in unhealthy non-speech freedom respecting nations such as the UK are not. Such debates in nations like the UK, where there is a lack of proper protection for freedom of speech comes with risks, speaking about the ‘wrong’ thing or having the ‘wrong ‘opinion could invite dismissal from employment, or being socially rejected by cowards who just want to go along with whatever path is easiest, or at worst a five AM knock at the door to be arrested for a speech crime.
I don’t know where this Freedom Portal will end up but it is a shot across the bows by the American government to governments in Europe and the Anglosphere who have, to various degrees, not respected the concept or the practise of freedom of speech. The Freedom Portal might go absolutely nowhere or it might be part of a larger geopolitical game being played to get the Europeans especially to deal with their own dire economic and social problems and put more resources into defence. It’s well known that the current US administration believes that some European countries have had a free ride on defence and have relied on protection by the Americans and the US might be using the dire state of freedom of speech in many Western nations as leverage against these nations.
Even if this new Freedom Portal is part of a geopolitical strategy by the current US Administration, the fact that not only was it created at all but many of us can see why it was created, is amazing and earth-shattering in itself. It tells us a lot about how far from the high ideals regarding freedom of expression our governments in places like Britain have fallen and how much these governments distrust their own peoples and distrust them to speak freely.
A confident and well run country would trust its own people to speak freely but the governments in places like the United Kingdom clearly do not. They believe that by suppressing the speech of dissenters who highlight particular problems or those who hold particular political views, no matter whether those views are from the Right, the Left or the Centre, then the numerous problems that the nation suffers from will if not go away, at least not trouble the political and media classes too much. Such a policy might be comforting for the political and media classes in the sort term, when it can work and people can be intimidated, but not maybe in the longer term when people understand that they and their viewpoints are being suppressed.
There’s a warning from history about a society relying on censoring their way out of trouble with ‘hate speech’ laws and that is the German Weimar Republic. This political entity had some of the most comprehensive and punitive speech laws around at the time and the Weimar state used these laws to try to counter the National Socialists and as a result many Nazis were imprisoned. Whilst the intentions of the Weimar politicians and judiciary were good, they wanted to protect German Jewish citizens from Nazi propaganda and its real world negative effects, but these imprisonments of Nazis ended up being exploited as propaganda vehicles by the Nazis themselves.
This had the effect of allowing the Nazis to falsely portray themselves as ‘victims’ of an anti-German judicial and governmental system. It is one of history’s terrible and horrible ironies that a well meaning attempt by liberal and humane Weimar politicians to protect Germany’s Jewish citizens from assault and from hateful words, contributed to the popularity of the Nazis and the spread and acceptance by Germans of Nazi ideology and all the nightmares that came after.
It seems that many Western governments are failing and have failed to learn the lessons of the Weimar ‘hate speech’ laws and their unintended consequences. Problems that may have been much more easily solvable had they been able to be openly debated several decades or more ago and debated without anybody fearing cancellation or arrest or imprisonment for their opinions, have been left to fester and are now much harder to cure than they might once have been. Maybe if Britons had been allowed to have open and unhindered debate about such matters as migration, integration, the position of Islam in British society, how religious values interact with the wider society and various other matters, then we might not be living in the powder keg we seem to be living in at the moment. The silenced have not been removed from society even though their voice has been so removed, but those with opinions that the state does not like and which it criminalises in order to keep the uneasy peace we now live in, are still there, still holding the same views but now they live in echo chambers self radicalising and unreachable by external challenge to their views.
I cautiously welcome the freedom portal, but it is a shameful thing that such a portal is needed and an indication of how many speech freedoms have been taken away from the ordinary person in places like the United Kingdom. It’s not quite the first US Infantry and armoured troops coming to our aid in 1942, but the concern about the diminishing free speech rights of Britons, Europeans and others in the wider Anglosphere from the US government is extremely welcome.
We shall see what happens with this ‘Freedom Portal’ and whether it turns out to be a bit of a nothingburger or whether it shakes the leaders of governments who reach for the opinions ban hammer all too readily, into changing their current unwise course of action. Remember it’s rarely the good guys who engage in censorship on a regular basis, in peacetime and for less than sound reasons and it’s clear that on matters pertaining to freedom of speech too many Western governments, including my own, are not the good guys when it comes to freedom of expression.