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FREEDOM OF SPEECH ENDS WHERE TRUE POWER BEGINS  
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Jorge Majfud

Common Dreams
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_ "I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice,"
William Lloyd Garrison once said. "On this subject, I do not wish to
think, or to speak, or write, with moderation." _

,

 

On January 1, 1831, _The Liberator_, the country’s first
abolitionist newspaper and, later, a defender of women’s suffrage,
appeared in Massachusetts. At that time, Georgia slavers offered a
reward of $5,000 (more than $160,000 in 2024 value) for the capture of
its founder, William Lloyd Garrison. Naturally, this is how power
reacts to freedom and the fight for the rights of others, but this
attempt at violent censorship was not the legal norm at that time. The
freedom of speech established by the First Amendment applied to white
men, and no one wanted to break the law in broad daylight. To correct
these errors there was always the mafia, paramilitarism and, later,
secret agencies that are beyond the law―if not legal harassment
under other excuses.

In his first article, Garrison already reveals the tone of a dispute
that is announced as something long-standing: “I am aware that many
object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for
severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as
justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or
write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to
give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the
hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe
from the fire into which it has fallen…”

_The Liberator_, exercising its right to freedom of the press, began
sending copies to the southern states. The response of the southern
governments and the slave owners was not to prohibit the publication,
since it was against the law―a law that was made so that some rich
white men could protect themselves from other rich white men who never
imagined that this freedom could in some way threaten the existence of
the political power of all rich white men. Actually, that is what
“_the land of the free_” meant when the poet and slaveowner
Francis Scott Key wrote it in 1814: the land of the white men―the
“free race.”

Instead of breaking the law, an old method was resorted to. There’s
no need to break the rules when you can change them. This is how a
democracy works. Of course, not everyone has, nor does they have, the
same possibilities of operating such a democratic miracle. Those who
cannot change the laws usually break them and that is why they are
criminals. Those who can change them are the first interested in
ensuring that they are fulfilled. Except when the urgency of their own
interests does not allow for bureaucratic delay or, for some reason,
an inconvenient majority has been established, which those in power
accuse of being irresponsible, childish or dangerous.

In principle, since the First Amendment could not be directly
abolished, losses were limited. North Carolina passed laws prohibiting
literacy for slaves. The prohibitions continued and spread throughout
the 1830s to other slave states, almost always justified by the
disorders, protests and even violent riots that abolitionists had
inoculated among blacks with subversive literature.

Slavery propaganda was immediate. Posters and pamphlets were
distributed warning of subversive elements among the decent people of
the South and the dangers of the few conferences on the taboo subject.
Harassment of freedom of expression, without actually prohibiting it,
also occurred in the largest cities of the North. One of the
pro-slavery pamphlets dated February 27, 1837 (a year after Texas was
taken from Mexico to reestablish slavery) invited the population to
gather in front of a church on Cannon Street in New York, where an
abolitionist was going. to give a talk at seven at night. The
advertisement warned about “An abolitionist of the most revolting
character is among you… A seditious Lecture is to be delivered this
evening” and called to “unite in putting down and silencing by
peaceable means this tool of evil and fanaticism. Let the right of the
States guaranteed by the constitution _be protected_.”

Abolitionist publications and conferences did not stop. For a time,
the way to counteract them was not the prohibition of freedom of
expression but the increase in slavery propaganda and the demonization
of anti-slavery people as dangerous subversives. Later, when the
resource of propaganda was not enough, all Southern states began to
adopt laws that limited the freedom of expression of revisionist
ideas. Only when free speech (freedom of dissident whites) got out of
control did they turn to more aggressive laws, this time limiting free
speech with selective bans or taxes on abolitionists. For example, in
1837, Missouri banned publications that went against the dominant
discourse, that is, against slavery. Rarely did they go so far as to
imprison dissidents. They were discredited, censored, or lynched for
some good reason such as self-defense or the defense of God,
civilization, and freedom.

After the Civil War broke out, the slaveholding South wrote its own
constitution. As the Anglo-Saxon Texans did, just about separated from
Mexico, and for the same reasons, the constitution of the Confederacy
established the protection of the “Peculiar Institution” (slavery)
while including a clause in favor of freedom of expression. This
passage did not prevent laws that limited it to one side or the
paramilitarism of the slave (well-regulated) militias, origin of the
southern police, from acting as they pleased. As in “We the
people” of the Constitution, as originally the First Amendment of
1791, this “freedom of speech” did not include people who were
neither “the people” nor were they full and responsible humans. It
was referring to the free race. In fact, the constitution of the new
slave country established in 1861, in its section 12, almost like a
copy of the original amendment of 1791: “(12) Congress shall make no
law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the
Government for a redress of grievances. (13). A well-regulated militia
being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the
people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

More equitable and democratic, impossible… The secret was that,
again, like almost a century before, that of “the people” did not
include the majority of the population. If anyone had observed that
then, he would be accused of being crazy, unpatriotic, or a dangerous
subversive. That is, something that, at its root, has not changed much
in the 21st century.

By the time the slave system was legally outlawed in 1865, thanks to
the circumstances of a nearly lost war, _The Liberator_ had already
published 1,820 issues. Aside from supporting the abolitionist cause,
it also supported the women’s equal rights movement. The first woman
candidate for the presidency (although not recognized by law),
Victoria Woodhull, was arrested days before the 1872 elections on
charges of having published an article classified as
obscene―opinions against good customs, such as the law of the women
to decide about their sexuality. As has been the norm for centuries in
the Free World, Woodhull was not arrested for exercising her freedom
of speech in a free country, but under the guise of breaking other
laws.

However, this is not an exclusive characteristic of the slaveholding
South or of the United States as a whole. The British Empire always
proceeded in the same way, not very different from the “Athenian
democracy” twenty-five centuries ago: “we are civilized because we
tolerate different opinions and protect diversity and freedom of
expression.” Of course, as long as they don’t cross certain
limits. As long as they do not become a real danger to our
incontestable power.

In this sense, let us remember just one more example. In 1902,
economist John Atkinson Hobson published his classic _Imperialism: A
Study_ in which he explained Britain’s vampire nature over its
colonies. Hobson was marginalized by critics, discredited by academia
and the mainstream press of the time. He was not arrested or
imprisoned. While the empire that he himself denounced continued to
kill dozens of millions of human beings in Asia and Africa, neither
the government nor the British crown took the trouble to directly
censure the professor. Many, as is the case today, pointed to him as
an example of the virtues of British democracy. Something similar to
what happens today with those critics of US imperialism, especially if
they live in the United States: “look, he criticizes the country in
which he lives…” In other words, if someone points out the crimes
against humanity in the multiple imperial wars and does so in the
country that allows freedom of expression, that is proof of the moral
and democratic goodness of the country that massacres millions of
people and tolerates that someone dare to mention it.

How do you explain all these apparent contradictions? It’s not that
complicated. An imperial power, dominant, unanswerable, without fear
of the real loss of its privileges, does not need direct censorship.
What’s more, the acceptance of marginal criticism would prove its
benefits. It is tolerated, as long as they do not cross the limit of
true questioning. As long as the hegemonic domain is not in decline
and in danger of being replaced by something else.

Now let’s look at those counterexamples of hegemonic power and its
stewards. “Why don’t you go to Cuba where people do not have
freedom of expression, where plurality of political parties does not
exist?”

To begin, it would be necessary to point out that all political
systems are exclusive. In Cuba, liberal parties are not allowed to
participate in their elections, which are called a farce by liberal
democracies. In countries with liberal democratic systems, such as the
United States, elections are basically elections of a single party
called Democratic-Republican. There is no possibility that a third
party can seriously challenge the Single Party because this is the
party of the corporations, which are the elite that have the real
power in the country. Communist parties here were prohibited and now,
after FBI and CIA persecution of suspected sympathizers, it has been
reduced to a virtual inexistence. On the other hand, if, for example,
in a country like Chile a Marxist like the current president Gabriel
Boric wins the elections, no one would even think of imagining that
this president is going to leave the constitutional framework, which
prohibits the establishment of a communist system in the country. The
same thing happens in Cuba, but it must be said that it is not the
same.

Now, let’s return to the logic of freedom of expression in different
systems of global power. To summarize it, I think it is necessary to
say that freedom of expression is a luxury that, historically, those
colonies or republics that struggled to become independent from the
freedom of empires (the “free race”) have not been able to afford.
It would be enough to remember of dozens of examples like the
Guatemalan democracy, destroyed by the Great Democracy of the United
States in 1954 because its democratically elected government decided
to apply the sovereign laws of its own country, which did not suit the
megacorporation United Fruit Company. The Great Democracy did not
hesitate to install another brutal military dictatorship, which left
hundreds of thousands of dead over decades.

What was the main problem of Guatemalan democracy in the 1950s? It was
his freedom of the press, his freedom of expression. Through this, the
Northern Empire and the UFCo managed to manipulate public opinion in
that country through a propaganda campaign deliberately planned and
recognized by its own perpetuators―not by its Creole butlers, it
goes without saying.

When this happens, the young Argentine doctor Ernesto Guevara was in
Guatemala and had to flee into exile in Mexico, where he met other
exiles, the Cubans Fidel and Raúl Castro. When the Cuban Revolution
triumphed, Ernesto Guevara, by then El Che, summed it up remarkably:
“Cuba will not be another Guatemala.” What did he mean by this?
Cuba will not allow itself to be inoculated like Guatemala through the
“free press.” History proved him right: When in 1961 Washington
invaded Cuba based on the CIA plan that assured that “Cuba will be
another Guatemala,” it failed miserably. Because? Because its
population did not join the “liberating invasion,” since it could
not be inoculated by the massive propaganda that the “free press”
allows. Kennedy found out and reproached the CIA, which he threatened
to dissolve and ended up dissolving.

Freedom of expression is typical of those systems that cannot be
threatened by freedom of expression, but quite the opposite: when
popular opinion has been crystallized, by tradition or by mass
propaganda, the opinion of the majority is the best form of
legitimation. Which is why these systems, always dominant, always
imperial, do not allow their colonies the same rights that they grant
to their citizens.

When the United States was in its infancy and fighting for its
survival, its government did not hesitate to approve a law that
prohibited any criticism of the government under the excuse of
propagating false ideas and information―seven years after approving
the famous First Amendment. Naturally, that law of 1798 was called The
Sedition Act, which made it a crime to “print, utter, or publish any
false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government.

These resources of the champion of freedom of expression were repeated
other times throughout their history, always when the decisions and
interests of a government dominated by the big corporations in power
felt its interests were seriously threatened. This was the case of
another law also called the Sedition Act, that of 1918, when there was
popular resistance against the propaganda organized by public opinion
manipulators like Edward Bernays and George Creel (“the white hot
mass of patriotism”) in favor of intervening in the First World
War―and thus ensuring the collection of European debts.

Until a few years before, the harsh anti-imperialist criticisms of
writers and activists like Mark Twain were demonized, but there was no
need to tarnish the reputation of a free society by putting a renowned
intellectual in jail, as they had done in 1846 with David Thoreau for
his criticism to the aggression and dispossession of Mexico to expand
slavery, under the perfect excuse of not paying taxes. Neither Twain
nor the majority of public critics managed to change any policy or
reverse any imperialist aggression in the West, as they were read by a
minority outside of economic and financial power. In that aspect,
modern propaganda had no competition, therefore direct censorship of
these critics would have hindered their efforts to sell aggression in
the name of freedom and democracy. On the contrary, critics served to
support that idea, whereby the largest and most brutal empires of the
Modern Era were proud democracies, not discredited dictatorships.

Only when public opinion was too hesitant, as during the Cold War, did
McCarthyism emerge with its direct persecutions and later the
(indirect) assassination of civil rights leaders, violent repression
with arrested and deaths in universities when criticism against the
Vietnam War threatened to translate into effective political
change―in fact, the Congress of the 1970s was the most progressive
in history, making possible the investigation of the Pike and Church
Committee against the CIA’s secret regime of propaganda and
assassinations. When three decades later the invasion of Afghanistan
and Iraq occurred, the criticism and public demonstrations had become
timid, but the new magnitude of imperial aggression after 2001 made it
necessary to take new legal measures, as in 1798.

History rhymed again in 2003. Instead of the Sedition Act it was
called the Patriot Act, and it not only established direct censorship
but something much worse: the indirect and often invisible censorship
of self-censorship. More recently, when criticism of racism, patriotic
history and too many rights for sexual minorities began to expand
beyond control, the resort to prohibition by law returned. Case in
point with Florida’s latest laws, promoted by Governor Ron DeSantis
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revisionist books and regulating language in public schools and
universities. The creation of a demon called Woke to replace the loss
of the previous demon called Muslims―who replaced Communists, who
replaced N-people.

Meanwhile, the butlers, especially the sepoys of the colonies,
continue to repeat clichés created generations before: “how come
you live in the United States and dare to criticize that country, you
should move to Cuba, which is where freedom of expression is not
respected.” After their clichés they feel so happy and so patriotic
that it is a shame to make them uncomfortable with reality.

On May 5, 2023, the coronation ceremony of King Charles III of England
took place. The journalist Julián Assange, imprisoned for more than a
decade for the crime of having published a minor part of the
atrocities committed by Washington in Iraq, wrote a letter to the new
king inviting him to visit the depressing Belmarsh prison in London,
where hundreds of prisoners are dying, some of whom were recognized
dissidents. Assange was allowed the sacred right of freedom of
expression generously granted by the Free World. His letter was
published by different Western media, which proves the benefits of the
West and the childish contradictions of those who criticize the Free
World from the Free World. But Assange continues to serve as an
example of lynching. Same, during slavery and segregation a few
thousand blacks were lynched in public. The idea was to show an
example of what can happen to a truly free society, not to destroy the
oppressive order itself by eliminating all slaves, poor, workers,
critics, and other inferior people.

_Jorge Majfud is an Uruguayan-American writer and an associate
professor at Jacksonville University._

_Common Dreams is a reader-supported independent news outlet created
in 1997 as a new media model.  Our nonprofit newsroom covers the most
important news stories of the moment. Common Dreams free online
journalism keeps our millions of readers well-informed, inspired, and
engaged.  We are optimists. We believe real change is possible. But
only if enough well-informed, well-intentioned—and just plain fed up
and fired-up—people demand it. We believe that together we can
attain our common dreams._

* Political repression
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* Civil Liberties
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* Free Speech
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* imperialism
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