The Ideology of Failure

by Stephen Pax Leonard

  III. Freedom of Speech

  Just living is not enough. […] One must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower.

  — Hans Christian Andersen

  Freedom of speech must surely be the foundation of liberal democracy. No country can have absolute freedom of speech. Otherwise, it would not be able to have an intelligence service or an Official Secrets Act. But we must have the right to offend, and the right to uphold the tradition of satire. As Tallentyre (1906: 198) wrote in a maxim that is often erroneously ascribed to Voltaire: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’.

  It is never wrong in and of itself to discuss a topic, no matter how sensitive it might be. Parrhesia, the right to speak one’s mind without fear or restraint, must be the prerogative. Parrhesia is intrinsic to freedom. Someone is said to use parrhesia if he risks telling the truth. This takes us to the crux of the problem in all of these essays: the cultural context in which telling the truth has been problematised; the courage required to ‘speak out’.

  As Foucault (1983: 1-4) describes it, in the Greek context it was believed that to tell the truth one needed certain moral qualities, but also a sense of the ‘culture of the self’. This takes us back to the Socratic principle of ‘knowing yourself’. Foucault speaks of a ‘parrhesiastic game’ which presupposes that the parrhesiaste has the moral qualities which are required to know and tell the truth. Typically, the parrhesiaste will voice an opinion that other people would not dare to express, perhaps because they just believe it is wrong or because of a culture of oppressive groupthink they feel as if they dare not talk about it. To be outspoken and ‘take the risk’ is to embody authenticity. Today, we are playing a parrhesiastic game between the truth-teller and the liberal groupthink interlocutor. The game might have terrifying consequences. The secular multiculturalists assume they are the embodiment of these moral qualities and thus apparently know the truth. Armed with the truth, they believe they are vindicated in potentially destabilising European nations like Sweden through mass immigration from Muslim countries. Paradoxically, they aspire to moral superiority, but seem to believe in nothing except for feminism and multiculturalism. Their supposed moral superiority has no legitimate foundations. They mock Christianity, but apparently like to ‘do good’. It is these people that sit at the axis of power in Brussels alongside Macron and Merkel.

  The modern-day parrhesiaste such as, say, Trump, Wilders or Farage, challenges the ‘mass’ received opinions of our age, speaks with splendid autonomy, is silenced, scorned and called a ‘[…]-ist’ for speaking the unspeakable truth in these troubled, ambiguous times. It is those who risk speaking out that tell the truth. Telling the truth in such an oppressive context is representative of a certain manner of being, a certain je ne sais quoi.

  As Foucault (1983: 4) says: ‘parrhesia comes from below, as it were, and is directed towards above. […] In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy’. It is a modality of truth-telling, and should be the social imperative of our times. Parrhesia is criticising the majority. The mass-think participants, the silent majority are not parrhesiastes; they are not taking any risks. They are not detaching the search for truth from the ruling cultural hegemony. It is better to be a truth-teller and take the risk than indulging in the normative, self-denying falsehood and canard that surrounds the agora.

  He who wishes to silence debate because the topic itself is in some way ‘controversial’ is surely little more than an anti-free speech totalitarian. There must always be some limits to the freedom of speech, but it should at least be an inalienable right to express an opinion. Freedom of speech was once the ‘line in the sand’. After all, that was the struggle of the twentieth century after the totalitarianism of Nazism and Stalinism. It cost us millions of twentieth-century lives to salvage them, but our freedoms in the West are being eroded bit by bit. Freedom of speech is being eroded by the Islamists and oversensitised Leftists; freedom of national Governments and their sovereignty are being chiselled away by the increasingly dictatorial European Union.

  We are losing freedom of speech through two channels: directly through hate-speech legislation, which is blurring a most important distinction between the legal and civic prohibition, and indirectly through a pervasive culture of political correctness, self-censorship and liberal groupthink. The former pertains to Western Europe, the latter to the West generally, and especially so in the United States. By restricting rhetorical freedom through these means, liberalism and its culture of political correctness is violating its own principles. Freedom of speech has been sacrificed at the anti-racism altar. But the former is far more important. Freedom of speech in the West seems to mean nowadays freedom to support globalist liberalism. But it might be argued in fact that anti-racism itself is a form of covert racism, since it condescendingly treats Pakistanis in Britain or Somalis in Sweden, say, as morally inferior human beings who require some kind of State shielding.

  As for hate-speech, it is a subjective undertaking of course to determine what constitutes and what does not constitute hate-speech, and national legislative definitions vary (although not by very much). The fact that it is so subjective probably means the legislation should not exist in the first place. Much of contemporary rap is arguably little more than hate-speech with its fiery rhetoric promoting violence in chaotic syntax; the repellent invectives are just ignored, or worse still often embraced by young women who are often the object of their abuse. It is important to embrace it because the offending lyrics play presumably into oppressive power structures against ethnic minorities. Some of rap is the cornerstone of an anti-culture that celebrates scoundrels who in questionable grammar glorify rape, physical assault and sometimes rebuke the nations that have supported them.

  A cursory glance at European hate-speech legislation shows how respective Governments have attempted to criminalise free speech, anxious to control the thoughts expressed in the presence of others. One country after another has simply copied and incorporated hate-speech legislation with more or less the same wording. Perhaps aided by social media, packaged opinions on such topics as hate-speech can quickly spread and gather momentum to the point it is inevitable that they are accepted, and often with little discussion. We have witnessed this with same-sex marriage legislation. Hate-speech and hate-crime have become rapidly part of the liberal vocabulary, but these words are often used synonymously with the word ‘insult’: an alarming trend.

  A wave of oversensitised liberalism has come crashing down on our vulnerable shores, leaving people to negotiate the insanity of a panoply of universalising potential hate-crimes. For example, wolf-whistling is now considered hate-crime by the Nottinghamshire police in Britain because it is categorised as ‘misogynistic abuse’.25 Approaching an unknown woman in a flirtatious manner might fall under the same category, and potentially be a criminal offence. Potential victims are strongly encouraged to contact the police ‘without hesitation’. Wolf-whistling is an extreme example of political correctness because it takes a gesture which whilst sexist has always been used to show appreciation, and classifies it as ‘hate’. It is no longer just about legislating against prejudice, but has gone a step further, beyond political correctness. Our Western societies are now being policed for any behaviour that deviates beyond the norm of the neutralised character of liberal managerialism, and as such are rapidly losing their appeal for anybody who has not been blinded by the ideology.

  Sec. 18(1) of the UK Public Order Act of 1986 (POA) states that ‘a person who uses threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, abusive, or insulting, is guilty of an offence if: a) he intends to thereby stir up racial hatred, or; b) having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up
thereby’. Section 5 of the POA states that it is a crime to use or display threatening, abusive, or insulting words ‘within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm, or distress thereby’. Harry Taylor, an atheist who placed drawings satirising Christianity and Islam in an airport prayer room, was convicted in April 2010 under Section 5 and given a six-month prison sentence.26 The Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006 amended the Public Order Act of 1986 by adding Part 3A. This Part states: ‘A person who uses threatening words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, is guilty of an offence if he intends thereby to stir up religious hatred’. Lauren Southern and two other activists were recently permanently banned from the UK after being arrested under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 for distributing leaflets entitled ‘Allah is Gay’. The UK now uses terrorist legislation to arrest young girls distributing silly leaflets, but at the same time welcomes home hundreds of ISIS jihadists who have committed rape and murder in Syria.

  However, when it comes to minorities, hate-speech legislation and actual events on the ground seem at times to have little to say to one another. As an example of this, we may wish to remind ourselves of the response to the Mohammed cartoons.

  On February 3rd 2006, at the demonstrations outside the Danish Embassy in London following the publication of the Muhammed Cartoons in an obscure Danish newspaper, hundreds of Islamists expressed their allegiance to terrorism.

  Thick crowds of bearded men, clad in thobes and taqiyahs wave black flags and shout frantic abuse into megaphones. Their dark eyes are full of hatred and revenge. Film footage on www.youtube.com shows furious Muslims screaming and holding up placards saying: ‘Annihilate those who insult Islam’; ‘Jihad in the name of Allah’‘; ‘May Allah bomb you’; ‘May Osama Bin Laden bomb you’; ‘May we bomb Denmark, so we can invade their country and take their wives as war booty’; ‘Take lessons from Theo van Gogh [the Dutch film maker who was assassinated for criticising Islam] for you will pay with your blood’. The whole crowd shouts: ‘bomb, bomb Denmark, bomb, bomb France, bomb, bomb Spain’.27 The British police did nothing for six weeks even though the written material displayed was unambiguously in breach of the Public Order Act, as described above. Eventually, after much political pressure from Conservative MPs, a handful of men were charged and all except two were released on bail.

  In Denmark, the imam Mohamed Al-Khaled Samha at the Odense mosque in October 2014 called Jews the ‘offspring of apes and pigs’, but no charges were made.28 And yet a Dane who described the ‘ideology of Islam’ as ‘oppressive’ and ‘as misanthropic as Nazism’ on a Facebook post was fined for hate-speech.29 No charges were made either by the Danish police against another imam, Abu Bilal Ismail from the Grimshøj mosque, who in July 2014 prayed for the death of Jews at a sermon in a Berlin mosque. ‘Oh Allah, destroy the Zionist Jews. They are no challenge for you. Count them and kill them to the very last one. Don’t spare a single one of them,’ Ismail said.30

  And yet, in June 2010, the Danish crown prosecutor sought to lift MP Jesper Langballe’s parliamentary immunity so that he could face charges under Article 266(b) for publishing an article about the creeping ‘Islamisation of Europe’ and the subjugated status of Muslim women.31 Similarly, in Germany, a twenty-seven year old man and his wife were recently sentenced to ten months in prison and fined 1,200 Euros because he voiced concerns about the refugee crisis on Facebook.32 Somebody in Lübeck contacted the police about the chat group with its 900 members which he found offensive. He also contacted Facebook, but Facebook confirmed that the group did not breach its rules. But it seems criticism of German immigration policy might fall foul of German hate-speech legislation (Volksverhetzung). The description of this crime reads like a satire, particularly as the Volksverhetzung legislation has normally been used for Holocaust denial. Legislators seem to be putting rather innocuous comments made on a webpage on the same footing as denial of the largest genocide ever recorded. With disproportionate responses like this, we risk creating a culture of totalitarian fear and silence, and that is perhaps the objective.

  The hegemony of Leftist thinking (now written into such laws) claims to have a monopoly on the ultimate truth. Like all totalitarian states, they have to use oppression to impose their worldview. Such incidents represent authoritarian liberalism at its worst, and are cause for great concern. It is the ultimate paradox. As Popper (1945) tells us, totalitarian ideologies were meant to be the enemy of open societies, but the society that describes itself as ‘open’ is now open to using the same authoritarian ideologies. Without borders, they are certainly open in one sense, but they are no longer ‘free’. Sweden prohibits hate-speech, and defines it as:

  Den som i uttalande eller i annat meddelande som sprids hotar eller uttrycker missaktning för folkgrupp eller annan sådan grupp av personer med anspelning på ras, hudfärg, nationellt eller etniskt urpsrung, tros bekännelse eller sexuell läggning, döms för hets mot folkgrupp till fängelse i högst två år eller om brottet är ringa, til böter. (Brotttsbalkan, ‘The Swedish Penal Code’, Chapter 16, Section 8)

  Those who publicly or in some other form threaten or make statements that threaten or express disrespect for an ethnic group or similar group regarding their race, skin colour, national or ethnic origin, faith or sexual orientation may be charged for inciting group hatred and face up to a two year prison sentence or a fine.

  This Swedish law was passed in 2002, and appears in fact to contravene Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights which provides a right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.33 The law is extraordinary for its use of the word missaktning (‘disrespect’). Missaktning could refer to almost anything. There is no objective standard for identifying ‘disrespect’. It is not difficult to show disrespect in a pluralistic society where values are not shared by all. If enforced, one could indeed imagine that Kafkaesque totalitarian nightmare of a police state where acting in accordance with one’s own Western culture could be interpreted as being ‘disrespectful’ to another group, so that one is subsequently charged and sentenced. Surrounded by meaninglessness, we are no longer sure what we should fear. It is a moment of critical self-awareness, an understanding of where we sit in the new existential order where everything is politicised and where friendships have to be forged with great care.

  Pastor Åke Green was prosecuted (but acquitted) under this Swedish hate-speech law. He held a sermon at Borgholm on the 20th of July, 2003 where he explained at length why he felt homosexuality was incompatible with Christianity. He did this with reference to various Biblical texts (Genesis 1:27-8; Hebrews 13:4; Genesis 19:1-5; Romans 1:21-8; Leviticus 18:22-30; Matthew 15:18; Ephesians 5:3-6 etc.).34 The Supreme Court ruled that the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression did not protect him. However, it was conceded in the appeal that the freedom of expression provided by the European Convention on Human Rights which is superior to Swedish law did give him protection. For once, Europe got it right.

  In a not dissimilar incident in 2015, Pastor McConnell faced charges in Belfast for holding a sermon where he described Islam as ‘satanic’.35 Also in the UK, Paul Weston, Chairman of Liberty GB was arrested in 2014 on suspicion of religious harassment for reading a passage from Winston Churchill’s book The River War (1899) about Islam.36 Whilst living in the Sudan, Churchill described Islam as a ‘militant faith’. The interesting point here is Weston was arrested because he was standing in front of the Winchester Crown Court reading out a passage and a passerby heard the word Islam, and called the police. He was not subsequently charged because he had not broken any laws, and was in no way guilty of hate-speech. But a passerby assumed that a white person holding a Tannoy in public talking about Islam must amount to hate-speech. This is how far our public paranoia of any kind of commentary on Islam has gone. If we are going to legislate against the freedom of speech, one would have thought somebody calling for the elimination of a country, as the group of men did outside the D
anish Embassy in London in 2005, would be more likely to be charged than somebody describing a religion as ‘satanic’. In the Weston case, there is a pathological fear of an individual’s rights here; a sinister anti-freedom development that appears to be spreading rapidly in our societies. Had Paul Weston been talking about Christianity, the passerby would have just assumed he was a harmless happy-clappy evangelical. Thus, this is as much a commentary on the culture that is developing as it is on the legislation.

  The logic of hate-speech legislation plays into a therapeutic culture of emotional correctness where every issue has to be judged in emotive terms. The problem of cultural vulnerability is constantly inflated, and any exposure to adversity might be potentially troublesome. The offended (there must be somebody) should be eked out. It is an obsessive mollycoddling of minorities, and the protected group is ethnically defined. This is explicitly the case: the white minorities of Leicester, Slough and Luton have not acquired victim status. Minority status is defined by ethnicity and a miscellany of other variables, but not class and not by being a statistical minority alone.

  Christian morality as written in the Bible might be unacceptable in Sweden, but the Islamic characterisation of non-believers as ‘infidels’ is apparently not problematic. Islam enjoys a degree of immunity from criticism, or even comment. An immunity that Christianity has lost, and Judaism never had. We are witnessing therefore a nihilistic assessment of our own historical values, and an unwillingness to stand up for our own customs and mores, which have defined us for centuries.