But what about these freedoms in other nations? The freedoms of speech and of the press are human questions, concerning people in every nation.
Compared to other countries, the citizens in the United States enjoyed more freedom of expression, and at earlier dates. Already in the late 1700s, political discourse was essentially unrestrained and unregulated. In spoken and written form, citizens were free to criticize George Washington and even the Constitution - and many did so, including prominent Founding Fathers, like Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and James Monroe.
Elsewhere, such freedoms had not yet emerged: In Germany, newspapers were subject to political censorship in the early 1800s. In France, the revolution which was allegedly undertaken to increase freedom quickly suppressed it. In Russia, czarist censorship morphed into Soviet censorship.
England enjoyed more freedom than some other nations, but even there, the freedoms were not codified as statutes or in constitutional language, but were rather preserved as a tradition within common law.
Thus it was, in 2011, that the Canadian government prosecuted a newspaper reporter, Mark Steyn, because of statements he had made in printed articles. What might be his punishment? He writes that
the statutory penalty under the British Columbia "Human Rights" Code was that Maclean's, Canada's biggest-selling news weekly, and by extension any other publication, would be forbidden henceforth to publish anything by me about Islam, Europe, terrorism, demography, welfare, multiculturalism, and various related subjects. And that this prohibition would last forever, and was deemed to have the force of a supreme-court decision. I would in effect be rendered unpublishable in the land of my birth.
Writers in Canada are both punished for what they’ve written - if their opinions are not the same as the government’s - and they’re also forbidden from publishing again.
Naturally, if a writer happens to have the same political views as the government, she or he is free to write, and no legal action will be taken against her or him.
Any action by a government to reduce freedom of expression is a net reduction in freedom for all its citizens. Convoluted reasoning, which attempts to justify limits on free speech by asserting that such regulation somehow protects other rights, is specious. A government which violates the freedom of speech is obtaining power for itself, and history offers examples which teach us that such a government will soon violate other rights as well.
Germany enjoyed several decades of civil liberty before Hitler took power in 1933. The Weimar government, a coalition-based structure which ruled from 1919 until 1933, is still seen by many as a noble attempt to create a republic with freely-elected representatives. In many ways, the Weimar Republic succeeded. But it succumbed to one of its flaws - limiting political speech. The Nazis would use, among other tactics, that flaw to bring an end to representative government, and to initiate their own horrific totalitarianism.
With doubtless the noblest of motives, the Weimar Republic implemented regulations against “hate speech.” The reasoning was that, by limiting freedom of speech, the other freedoms could be protected: an admirable goal, but flawed logic.
This faulty reasoning - that one could protect the freedoms of some people by limiting the freedoms of others - led to the destruction of almost everyone’s freedoms. Trying to protect the Jews, the Weimar Republic enacted laws against anti-Jewish rhetoric; these laws would be exploited by the Nazis both to topple the republic and to impose their dictatorship on the populace.
The Weimar Republic, with good intentions, limited freedom of speech. When the Nazis appeared on the German political landscape - remember that “Nazi” means “National Socialist” - the citizens had grown accustomed to having their speech restricted, and thus were prone to simply accept edicts from the Nazi government limiting their political expression.
The Weimar Republic’s laws against “hate speech” set the dangerous precedent that the government has the right to restrict individual expression. With that restriction in place, Hitler’s National Socialists had merely to adjust the details of which types of speech were forbidden. Mark Steyn recounts the details:
In the 15 years before the Nazis came to power, there were over 200 prosecutions for "anti-Semitic speech" in Germany — and a fat lot of good it did. But more important than the practical uselessness of such laws is the assumption you're making: You're accepting that the state, in ruling one opinion out of bounds, will be content to stop there.
The temptation to limit personal freedom arises, in some cases, when it seems that by curtailing individual liberty, the government can better serve or protect some alleged victim class. In the case of the Weimar Republic, the effort to shield a group led to the group’s destruction. All citizens, regardless of their demographic or other grouping, are best served by a principled protection of every citizen’s civil freedoms.
The saying, “justice is blind,” refers to, among many other things, the idea that the law should treat citizens equally. The laws must ignore groupings and classes - even the claim that one group is a set of “victims.” When all citizens stand equally before the law, with no special treatments or protections for one class over another, then all citizens have the best chance to exercise their freedoms.
Mark Steyn sees this principle enshrined in the long series of precedents which have informed legal culture in England and North America - the legal culture which gave birth to an unprecedented degree of personal freedom, and codified it in the Magna Carta of 1215, in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, and in America’s Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and Constitution:
One of the great strengths of common law has been its general antipathy toward group rights — because the ultimate minority is the individual. The minute you have collective rights, you require dramatically enhanced state power to mediate the hierarchy of different victim groups.
The freedom of expression is seminal because it can be used to promulgate other freedoms. Given freedom of speech and freedom of the press, thinkers who favor liberty can speak on behalf of freedom of religion or other freedoms.
But when free expression is squelched, other freedoms disappear because no defense of them can be verbalized.
As John Milton wrote in his Areopagitica of 1644, "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."Or as an ordinary Canadian citizen said to me, after I testified in defense of free speech to the Ontario parliament at Queen's Park, "Give me the right to free speech, and I will use it to claim all my other rights."
Conversely, if you let them take your right to free speech, how are you going to stop them from taking all the others?
The freedom of expression is a vital part of any civilization, and cannot be compromised merely because some group claims to “feel offended.” If the freedom of speech disappears because some particular opinion is labeled as “hate speech,” other freedoms will soon disappear along with it.
The Jewish Germans during the Weimar Republic would probably have chosen to endure occasional offensive language and live long lives over having the republic’s misguided efforts at protecting them give way to their annihilation.
