“Canada”, says the anthem. “Canada”, I say, as I follow the truck drivers’ protest in the country. That’s a crazy salad, I’ll admit. But when I look at the prime minister, I don’t see rationality either.
Does Justin Trudeau not want anti-vaccine protesters to exert illegitimate pressure on the country’s social and economic life by blocking roads and bridges? I understand and I applaud.
But then, when I look at the state of emergency measures, I swallow hard. Freeze the bank accounts of the protesters, as if the country was being attacked by internal terrorists? Seriously?
Bad omens. Today, it’s truck drivers. Tomorrow, it will be any person or group that the government of the day wants to punish with equal ferocity.
Today, it’s truck drivers. Tomorrow, it will be any person or group that the government of the day wants to punish with equal ferocity.
Not to mention the laws against hate speech that the government wants to pass. There are two in the package that the Economist magazine flags in horror.
The first law is intended to deprive those accused of hate speech of the same legal guarantees that are available to any citizen under common criminal law. As if a hater was worse than a pedophile or a serial killerI suppose.
The second, worthy of a Philip K. Dick story, aims to punish hate speech before it is even delivered. It is enough to suspect that someone is going to cross the limits for the law to welcome a preventive lawsuit.
If these two aberrations take hold, we can bid farewell to Canada as a democratic rule of law. We will be in authoritarian territory where civil liberties have been squashed uselessly – and counterproductively.
Last week, I made a brief reference to the Weimar Republic’s laws against hate speech. I have wrongly claimed that Hitler was imprisoned for his anti-Semitic proclamations. Absurd. Hitler was arrested after the failed coup attempt in Bavaria. Thank you, readers, for taking care of my senility.
But my point about free speech in Weimar does not change. Years ago, Flemming Rose, editor of the Jyllens-Posten newspaper who in 2005 set the Muslim world on fire with his cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, published one of the most important books on free speech I know. The title is “The Tyranny of Silence”, or the tyranny of silence, which analyzes the Weimar Republic in detail.
The author states that, during this period, Germany had strict laws against what we now call hate speech. Insulting religious communities (Protestants, Catholics, Jews) was worth three years in prison. Spreading false rumors with the intention of degrading individuals or promoting class warfare was awarded two years.
Several Nazis were prosecuted or imprisoned for this. Joseph Goebbels was an assiduous presence in the courts. His newspaper, Der Angriff, was confiscated several times — and Goebbels took advantage of his courtroom sessions to hold rallies that reverberated across Germany.
Julius Streicher, editor of the infamous Der Stürmer, has had the paper confiscated on several occasions — and he himself has been arrested, twice for his virulent anti-Semitism.
As Flemming Rose recounts in the book, when Streicher was taken to jail, hundreds of well-wishers joined him in festive tones. When he got out of jail, he had thousands waiting for him in even more hysterical demonstrations.
The moral of this story is not, as some imagine or charge, that hate speech is a good thing. Can we stop being childish? No civilized person likes these fetid pools.
The question is another: what do we gain (or lose) by criminalizing words that we don’t like to read or hear? We won little. The hateful get much more: new audiences and an aura of martyrs they would never have had if they had been ignored.
When we add to this perverse broth a brutal economic crisis, as happened in Germany after the First World War – and especially after the New York Stock Exchange crash in 1929 – the conditions for disaster are met.
Barring extreme cases where there is a real, immediate, and tangible danger to civil peace, the hateful is best dealt with by contempt or intellectual debate.
Using the law to punish those who were born in the sewer is the best way to rescue from the sewer those who only deserve to stay there.
#false #martyrs