Why Laws Against Hate Speech Are Dangerous
by Fjordman • January 18, 2020 at 5:00 am
There is a tendency, to censor certain viewpoints because they might "offend" others. The problem is, it is not the inoffensive things that need protecting; it is only the offensive things that do.... Freedom of speech exists precisely to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.
"[T]he freedom of Speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter." — US President George Washington, 1783.
How come it is all right to publish the original source, prescribing murder, but that it is "hate speech" to point out that quote?
"Sometimes, when one points out these rules, people will respond: 'Well, the Bible says such-and-such.' The point is not that these things are written in Islamic scripture, but that people still live by them." — Bruce Bawer, February 8, 2018.
Restrictions against "hate speech" often do not really ban hate speech; instead they may actually be protecting certain forms of hate speech against legitimate inquiry.
In November 2019, Germans celebrated the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany 30 years earlier. That same month, Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a speech to the German federal parliament (Bundestag), advocated more restrictions on free speech for all Germans. She warned that free speech has limits:
"Those limits begin where hatred is spread. They begin where the dignity of other people is violated. This house will and must oppose extreme speech. Otherwise, our society will no longer be the free society that it was."
Merkel received great applause.
Critics, however, would claim that curtailing freedom in order to protect freedom sounds a bit Orwellian. One of the first acts of any tyrant or repressive regime is usually to abolish freedom of speech. Merkel should know this: she lived under a repressive regime -- in the communist dictatorship of East Germany, where she studied at Karl Marx University.
