Before we begin, I feel I should clarify my political position within the left, so as not to leave anyone in doubt. I am a syndicalist socialist. When I say this, I support state socialism as opposed to anarchism, but not the kind characteristic of the historical Marxist-Leninist states. My preference is towards the socialist industrial republicanism and the All Industrial Congress proposed by Daniel De Leon, as well as the federated state and the Agro Industrial Federation proposed by Pierre Joseph Proudhon, and Titoism. This is in opposition not only to anarchism (which is a silly ideology to begin with) on the basis that it requires state apparatus, but also the model of the Marxist-Leninist states of the 20th century such as the USSR because it rejects the centralized, authoritarian models of governance they operated under. I also align not only with the classical school of Marxism, but with the Praxis School of Marxism as espoused by philosophers like Mihailo Markovic and Rudi Supek, and I have great admiration for the ideas espoused by Gaddafi in his Green Book. I reject unequivocally the dogma of intersectionalism, and the divisive power it wields against the working class, under which the working class goes from a united class to a class divided by mystical axes of oppression defined by race, gender, sexual orientation and even lifestyle, and how it has the perverse audacity to obfuscate the real economic suffering shouldered by the white working class man and present it instead as privilege because of the colour of his skin.
Anyways, with that introduction out of the way, I believe it’s time to address the real point.
The advocates of hate speech legislation proclaim that to say words or trains of thought that are deemed hateful, by whatever standard we’re dealing with, stirs up hatred directed towards given groups, with particular attention given to racial and religious hatred (that is, directed at racial and religious minorities). You may be aware of how my country, the United Kingdom, handled this with the trial and fining of YouTuber Count Dankula over a joke in which he taught his dog to perfom Nazi salutes and respond to phrases such as "gas the Jews". But Britain has been interested in policing so-called hate speech for years now, an example being The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, passed under the Labour government during the tenure of Tony Blair, to curtail speech seen as aiming to inspire religious hatred. One is left to wonder exactly which religion they were aiming to protect. In fact, the law Count Dankula was being prosecuted under was section 127 of the Communications Act of 2003, which prohibits “grossly offensive” electronic communications.
The first problem with this should be obvious to all. There is no material basis by which we measure offense, and any perceived harm it generates to the health of the individual or his/her psyche, let alone how much harm we can say is to warrant legal action. Proponents may say that saying offensive words, telling offensive jokes or explicating offensive ideas is a means of inspiring people to act based on the speech, but if we are to believe that this is true can we not stretch this logic to violent video games? After all, playing a violent video game, through the player’s interface with the game world, supposedly fills the player’s head with ideas and impulses that later motivate him to violent action. But we haven’t seen any evidence that video games actually cause violence, and on the contrary it has been largely shown that the overall crime rate has been on the decline for years, coinciding with the mass proliferation of violent video games.
Another problem with having hate speech legislation is that governments, invariably, decide what constitutes hate speech to suit their interests. In the United States of America, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling that hate speech is not exempted from the First Amendment, the state of South Carolina has instituted a law in which criticism of the state of Israel, including criticism of the current occupation of Palestine, would be counted as anti-Semitic speech and be subject to prosecution. In the Canadian city of Hamilton, a group of anarchists were forced to remove the A symbol from its own headquarters on the grounds that it allegedly was a kind of hate material.
In Spain, however, it is even worse. A rapper named Pablo Hasel has been arrested and faces trial for his lyrics, which apparently contain anti-monarchist sentiments, his Twitter posts, and for publicly praising two groups the Spanish government deems terrorists: the ETA (aka Basque Homeland and Liberty) and the First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups. Similarly, another rapper by the name of Josep Miquel Arenas Beltan (aka Valtonyc) has been sentenced to three years in prison for his anti-monarchist lyircs, and is now fleeing the country for his freedom. The Spanish government has issued an international warrant for his arrest. Not only that, but ordinary people can face jail time for making comments deemed offensive by the government. An example is a Spanish student named Cassandra Vera, who was arrested and tried by the Spanish government for joking about the assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco, who was prime minister of Spain for only six months in 1973 before getting killed in a car bombing by members of the ETA. This to me is about the equivalent of getting arrested for saying Hitler, Stalin, Pinochet or Pol Pot did nothing wrong. In fact, it almost reminds me of Count Dankula being put on trial for joking his dog being a Nazi, or the French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala being arrested on two consecutive occasions for “hate speech” – once in January 2015 as part of a wider crackdown on “hate speech” in the wake of the first Charlie Hebdo attack, and again in November of the same year for making anti-Semitic jokes.
Give the state the apparatus to enforce a limit on speech, and it will not do anything substantial to protect minorities, and will instead use it to silence individuals that it deems subversive, as we now see with individuals like Tommy Robinson here in the UK. In fact, one ought to keep an eye on the state of British hate speech legislation. I personally think that it will not simply be leftie liberal types who will utilize hate speech legislation for their own political goals, but also Tories who whine about how their left-wing opponents are being divisive. Indeed, take note of the latest proposals concerning speech here in the UK. Not only is it being recommended that sharing “hate posts” online should result in a six month prison sentence, but also that public figures (including politicians) receive harsher sentences for “stirring up hatred” on the basis that they are “in a position of authority”.
The latter proposal should be of especially grave concern for the left considering that it will not only be right-wing or far-right activists who become the targets of this law. The Labour Party, along with its current leader Jeremy Corbyn, have been smeared as the party of anti-Semitism on the basis that a few MPs in the party made anti-Zionist or outright anti-Semitic comments online. If a Tory government is given the proper legal apparatus, it will be inevitable that the government starts using this law to take down Labour MPs for taking an anti-Zionist stance with accusations of anti-Semitism. I also suspect that Tory MPs will utilize this law to try and suppress political opponents on the basis that they are “spreading division”, as I have seen a few Tory MPs complain about their rivals, including Labour and the SNP, for supposedly spewing toxic rhetoric about the Conservative Party. Even worse is the fact that there is no civil libertarian opposition to these laws in almost any party, so both Labour and the Tories will likely be OK with this legislation.
All of this is why I think the left in general needs to stand firmly against hate speech legislation and for almost a kind of free speech absolutism, in defence of the right for all citizens to make their arguments no matter how detestable they may seem. And I am not alone in this sentiment. Mike Stuchbery, yes that Mike Stuchbery, agrees with me. He attended the #DayForFreedom rally on May 6th and wrote a thread where, among other things, he said that suppressing the speech of people whose ideas we may find uncomfortable only gives them power, and he even agreed with Count Dankula on the basic premise that giving the state more power to suppress speech is a bad thing. I was genuinely surprised to see him on the right side of this issue, considering the kind of SJW lolcow he’s known for being, but I couldn’t be happier that he agrees on the importance of freedom of speech.
As a final note, leftists should be very concerned with social media censorship as well, because historically speaking it does not solely target the right. In fact, Ben Bours wrote an article for Wired last year on how Facebook’s speech policies will adversely affect members of the LGBT and queer communities by not allowing them to use pseudonyms and blocking users for saying words like “dyke”, “fag” or “tranny” in reference to themselves and fellow community members. I have also seen a surprising number of left-wing YouTubers have their videos put into limited state, partly due to the algorithm targeting references to fascism or Nazism and partly as a result of flagging from the alt-right (which just goes to show how easily the system can be abused by the very people the YouTube team was probably targeting).
Therefore, we cannot allow the right to be the only people who are standing against the rampant censorship of the modern age at the hands of this hate speech nonsense. We must stand against it on principle, or run the risk of being cast aside politically as the overton window shifts to the right.
South Carolina’s new hate speech law: https://www.mintpressnews.com/south-carolinas-new-hate-speech-law/241331/
Hamilton bans the anarchist A symbol: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/hamilton-anarchy-symbol-1.4664192
Pablo Hasel arrested for “praising terror groups”: https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/catalan-rapper-pablo-hasel-trial-spain-spider-operation-20180201-0034.html
Valtonyc flees Spain after being sentenced to prison for his anti-monarchist lyrics: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-44253045
Spanish student gets arrested for joking about the assassination of a Spanish prime minister: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/18/student-cassandra-vera-tweet-case-puts-free-speech-under-spotlight-in-spain
French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala arrested in hate speech crackdown in France: https://news.vice.com/article/france-accused-of-double-standard-after-comedian-arrested-during-hate-speech-crackdown
Dieudonné arrested again in Belgium: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3336097/French-comedian-Dieudonne-jailed-two-months-making-anti-Semitic-jokes-show.html
UK proposes six month jail sentence for sharing “hate posts”: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5707039/Sharing-hate-posts-online-lead-six-months-jail.html
British public figures could face harsher punishments if accused of spreading racial hatred: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/hate-crime-sentences-increased-harsher-influence-social-media-followers-a8341991.html
Mike Stuchbery’s Twitter thread concerning the #DayForFreedom rally:
https://twitter.com/MikeStuchbery_/status/993184162004787201
- MikeStuchbery_
Ben Bours’ article on the possible effects of Facebook’s speech policies on LGBT and queer individuals: https://www.wired.com/story/facebooks-hate-speech-policies-censor-marginalized-users/