Abstract
How high is the price of hate speech, asks
It was in l993, four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and two years after the official end of communism, that I became editor and chief executive of Index on Censorship. By that time it was becoming clear that the void left by the fall of communism was not, on the whole, being filled by parliamentary democracies or thriving economies. In the search for new social and economic imperatives in these new states, the temptation to assert identity by expressing intolerance of ‘the Other’, to turn to xenophobia and racism, was becoming a disturbing reality. Yugoslavia was breaking up, and by l993 the Bosnian war, characterised by bitter fighting, genocide and ethnic cleansing, was in full flood.
When we relaunched the magazine in its new format in the spring of l994, with Ronald Dworkin’s seminal essay ‘The New Map of Censorship’ and Umberto Eco’s ‘Tolerance and the Intolerable’, daily reports were confirming the rise of the New Right across Europe, and with it the rise of hate speech – that form of expression that is excluding, dehumanising, abusive, inciting to discrimination and violence. So the paradox of history was turning out to be that racism had increased as democracy spread through the post-communist world. Perhaps not such a paradox: as Hans Magnus Enzensberger once said: ‘With democracy, all the dirt comes out.’
Hate speech, free speech absolutists say, is the painful price we must pay for safeguarding free expression above all other rights. But how high is the price and who exactly is paying it? Dworkin held the absolutist view. Free speech, he said, is what makes people feel human. Each citizen must have not just a vote but a voice, and by silencing people whose words we abhor, who pour race hatred into the culture in which we must all live, we forfeit the right to insist they obey democratic laws. Eco thought differently: we must define the limits of tolerance, he said, and must first know what is intolerable.
Aftermath of the Balkans war, Sarajevo, Bosnia, 1996
Credit: Sipa Press/Rex Features
I drove through Croatia and Bosnia in 1996, just after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement which ended the Bosnian war, with eight busloads of journalists, lawyers, human rights activists from Europe, especially Serbia and the US. We were going to a conference in Tuzla, to support the social democrat mayor there in the post-war world. What we saw in the scorched landscape and shattered villages on our long journey through this beautiful country were the pathological effects of hate speech. Here the Others – people to be eliminated, slaughtered, driven away – were often well known to you: your neighbours, friends, even kin by marriage, made alien and terrifying by unreason perpetrated in the name of higher interests, under set slogans. The houses, streets and villages from which people were driven were not simply ruined by arson and looting; after the fighting they had been systematically crushed and destroyed with bulldozers and dynamite. So hate speech here had resulted in one of the ultimate forms of censorship – the obliteration of memory of a place, as if these lives and communities had never been.
I gave many talks in the mid-1990s on hate speech and in 1998 we devoted an issue of the magazine to the subject. I asked the question, as a dedicated opponent of censorship: if words can turn into bullets, is there a moment where the quantitative consequences of hate speech change qualitatively the argument about how we must deal with it? Is there ever a point of necessary intervention somewhere in the continuum between the ugly, offensive but more localised expression of hatred and the successful establishment in a community or society of a culture of hatred, where the instigators of hatred become the authorisers? And if so, how would it be done? And who decides? I got a lot of flak for writing this, and a lot of support. I was only asking a question. On one occasion I was talking to a group of free speech activists and novelists. At the end of the talk all the free speech activists said I was wrong even to ask the question; all the novelists said I was right. I’m still a passionate proponent of free speech, and I still think that hate speech, in its various manifestations, is the most difficult and tangled question we have to address. ❒