This weekend I wrote a column for the Washington Post on the crackdown of free speech in France. The column suggested that, if the French really wanted to honor the dead at Charlie Hebdo, they would rescind the laws used to hound them and threaten them with criminal prosecution for years. (Indeed, at least one surviving journalist expressed contempt for those who now support free speech but remained silent in the face of past efforts to shut down the magazine). Now, however, news reports indicate that the French government is doubling down on criminalizing speech in the name of free speech after the massacre. France has reportedly made dozens of arrests of people who glorify terrorism and engage in hateful or antiSemitic speech.
Prosecutors have gone out of their way to make it known that they are prosecuting people for speech — a remarkably ironic twist since the victims were prosecuted for the very same thing and died defending free speech against such private or governmental speech codes. Some 54 people have been arrested since the Paris terror attacks. The French justice department has encouraged more arrests for speech violations.
Notably, one of those detained was mentioned in my column, the comedian Dieudonne, who has been prosecuted for anti-Semitic jokes. For earlier posts and columns on Dieudonne, click here and here and here. We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in France (here and here and here and here and here and here) and England ( here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). Much of this trend is tied to the expansion of hate speech and non-discrimination laws. We have seen comedians targets with such court orders under this expanding and worrisome trend. (here and here).
The crackdown in France shows that this is really not about free speech despite the rally in Paris. The West seems to be falling out of faith with free speech, which is now something to be prosecuted rather than protected. Of course, the prosecutions will do little to change minds and will only make the West appear hypocritical and arbitrary. Notably, the arrests this week include four minors. The government is also ramping greater surveillance and searches. So, to recap, the French government just rallied millions for liberty this weekend and then used the attacks to further deny free speech and privacy rights.
In the case of Dieudonne, he ran afoul of the laws by posing a Facebook statement that he felt like “Charlie Coulibaly” — merging the names of Charlie Hebdo and Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who seized a kosher market and killed four hostages. It was later taken down. He later wrote to the Interior Minister that “Whenever I speak, you do not try to understand what I’m trying to say, you do not want to listen to me. You are looking for a pretext to forbid me. You consider me like Amedy Coulibaly when I am not any different from Charlie.”
Paul,
It’s not that I ‘want’ the right to speak freely; I already have that. If I lived in the state of nature, I would have absolutely no limits on my speech. But once I entered civil society and participated in the social contract; then my free speech comes with certain responsibilities towards others. One of those responsibilities is not to use my rights to infringe on another person’s rights. So an oral contract for murder would qualify as an infringing use of my right of free speech. Please feel free to correct my reasoning.
Olly – what is the difference between inciting a riot and an oral contract for murder? As in infringing your free speech rights?
This is from The Telegraph newspaper in the year 2009:
By Peter Allen in Paris
5:04PM GMT 16 Feb 2009
The Council of State, the country’s highest judicial body, said the Vichy government of the time held ‘responsibility’ for deportations.
It ruled that Nazi officials did not force them to betray their fellow citizens, but that anti-Semitic persecution was carried out willingly.
But today’s ruling stated there would be no payments for the survivors or families of victims, because all had been compensated ‘as much as was possible, for all the losses suffered’.
Thousands of Jews were deported from France to concentration camps during the Occupation, which lasted from 1940 until 1944.
Post-war French governments refused to acknowledge any role in the Holocaust by the collaborating Vichy regime.
A Paris court had applied to the Council of State for its opinion on a request by the daughter of a deportee who died at Auschwitz concentration camp for compensation.
She also sought damages for her own personal suffering during and after the Occupation.
The Council left it up to the Paris court to rule on her request.
But, in its decision made in Paris, the Council said that it ‘considers that because the acts and actions by the state led to the deportation of people considered Jews by the Vichy regime, they constituted errors and became its responsibility.’
The Council called for a ‘solemn recognition of the state’s responsibility and of collective prejudice suffered’ by the deportees.
Between 1942 and 1944 some 76,000 Jews were deported from France by the Vichy government in collaboration with the German occupying army.
In 1995, former French President Jacques Chirac officially recognised the French state’s responsibility in the deportation of French Jews, putting an end to decades of ambiguity by successive governments.
‘These dark hours forever sully our history and are an insult to our past and our traditions,’ he said.
‘Yes, the criminal folly of the occupiers was seconded by the French, by the French state.’ Today France has western Europe’s largest Jewish community of around 500,000.
Would JT go to court to defend a kid in his own school district in Virginia if the kid was kicked out of school for using the N word in speech class?
The problem in this country is that only some folks want only some speech to be truly free. When the rubber hits the road and someone says something that someone else doesn’t like, the response to that speech is all over the place from people who like to portray themselves as free speech advocates. We all get to have differing opinions and world views and true freedom of speech will always be elusive. And that’s not a bad thing.
See how easy it is to get to a tangential arguments about “free speech”? There is ultimately a responsibility for our freedom. One is that you/we are responsible for insulting others with your/our freedom to express your/ourselves.
Freedom of speech is not an absolute right above all all other freedoms of peacefull existence.
Don’t yell the N word in a crowded theatre in Harlem. Don’t yell: “Gays and lesbians suck!” anywhere in Frisco. Don’t yell: “The Klan sucks” in a crowded Baptist Church in SC. It may not be illegal but it is not recommended.
“freedom of speech does not allow you to contract for a murder.”
Paul,
Why should it?
Olly – if you really want free speech then you should be free to orally contract for a murder.
Pardon my syntax, I am French Speaking. I believe that freedom of speech does not give the permission to say anything. Dieudonné is an example of it. This guy in his shows questions that the Holocaust ever happened. A quote from one of his shows: “Don’t ask me to choose between the Jews and the Nazis, I am neutral”. From being a humorist that likes to provoke he became a specialist of the hate speech, mostly targeting Jews. Don’t know if it is allowed in the USA, but there are laws in France and Canada that forbids that kind of speech, and a vast majority of people are in favor of such laws.
Making jokes about God’s chosen people is the same as holocaust denial and all of this is forbidden by secret memos written by God’s nephew, Bernie, who serves as legal counsel to God and his family. When nations allow the forbidden, they invite the wrath of Him – hurricanes, floods and mimes.
Nipplegate?
So you just watch HBO instead and get your fill.
Banned on 3 networks. Whoopee.
Pogo – you can see male nipples on regular access tv just not female nipples.
Game of Thrones.
Groty,
The problem with Mills’ analysis is that there is no longer any collision of truth with error. Liars are not held accountable as they would, say, in a court of law under rigorous cross-examination. Hate-mongers are not interested in a robust debate. Rather, they preach to the converted and vilify dissenting opinions. This “you are with us or against us” mindset does not allow for the truth to will out.
“Love of truth necessary. He that would seriously set upon the search of truth ought in the first place to prepare his mind with a love of it. For he that loves it not will not take much pains to get it; nor be much concerned when he misses it. There is nobody in the commonwealth of learning who does not profess himself a lover of truth: and there is not a rational creature that would not take it amiss to be thought otherwise of. And yet, for all this, one may truly say, that there are very few lovers of truth, for truth’s sake, even amongst those who persuade themselves that they are so. How a man may know whether he be so in earnest, is worth inquiry: and I think there is one unerring mark of it, viz. The not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant. Whoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain, receives not the truth in the love of it; loves not truth for truth’s sake, but for some other bye-end. For the evidence that any proposition is true (except such as are self-evident) lying only in the proofs a man has of it, whatsoever degrees of assent he affords it beyond the degrees of that evidence, it is plain that all the surplusage of assurance is owing to some other affection, and not to the love of truth: it being as impossible that the love of truth should carry my assent above the evidence there is to me that it is true, as that the love of truth should make me assent to any proposition for the sake of that evidence which it has not, that it is true: which is in effect to love it as a truth, because it is possible or probable that it may not be true.” -John Locke
Nipplegate
Brandenburg v. Ohio
Speech can go down a slippery slope and result in….The Holocaust. Americans wanted to put it out of mind in 1945, but the French had been participants “Governmentally” in the Holocaust against French Jews and Gypsies and others all during the war. Americans forget about Vichy France. Yes. You ask: what the heck was Vichy France? That was a large territory of France which the Germans did not occupy and allowed the Vichy France government under Marshal Petain to rule. Those French were active and willing in the rounding up and killing of Jews. Marshall Petain was punished but no one else. Or few. Because we worried about facing down the Stalin Soviet onslaught we ignored all that and wanted DeGaulle to have a free hand.
Hate speech against Gypsies and Jews is alive and well in France. Jews can still be discriminated against and fear worse.
After the war and to this day the German government has outlawed anti semetic hate speech. To keep the Nazi down they have to keep him quiet. Hate speech is a special problem in Germany and France. Those two so called civilized nation states need to keep hate speech laws in force.
But do not sit back and be smug Americans, all exemplary and better than the rest of the world. We had our German American Bund. They had hate speech. Had Hitler prevailed in Europe our Bund would still be active. Had the Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbour we may not have been in the war.
France still needs to curb hate speech. Jews need to think about moving out.
Nuff said.
“You can’t show a nipple on TV”
Yes, you can.
“but you can say that black people should be killed. ”
What does this refer to?
You can’t show a nipple on TV, but you can say that black people should be killed. Is that what Americans Constitutionalists defend concerning freedom of speech?
olicou, Thanks for the French perspective. However, we have many free speech purists in this country. Hate speech is allowed here. You do make a great point about the political correctness here. It is an attack on free speech in this country. I’m sure it’s confusing to those in other countries because it is also confusing to us free speech purists. The most free speech in this country is political speech. We agree on the perniciousness of PC. And, while we agree on the vileness of hate speech, we disagree on it being criminalized.
“…speaking generally, it is not, in constitutional countries, to be apprehended that the government, whether completely responsible to the people or not, will often attempt to control the expression of opinion, except when in doing so it makes itself the organ of the general intolerance of the public. Let us suppose, therefore, that the government is entirely at one with the people, and never thinks of exerting any power of coercion unless in agreement with what it conceives to be their voice. But I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate. The best[Pg 30] government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in or opposition to it. If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on[Pg 31] many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” — John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty”
I don’t think Mr Turley understands the situation. There is absolutely no equivalency between Dieudonné and Charlie Hebdo.
Dieudonné is a well-known character in France and he is not a comedian anymore. He rides on antisionist conspiracy theories and he is close to extreme and violent right. “Charlie Coulibaly” is just an example of many, many examples of hate speech. He encourages murders and doubts of past genocide.
Charlie Hebdo doesn’t encourage anybody to hate muslims. Nobody in France ever perceived their message as hate-speech since they insult everybody (the pope, the president, …). For God sake, there is a cartoon where the poorly-drawn pen1s of Francois Hollande says that “I am the president”. Nothing close to that was done in the USA about Bill Clinton. There is too much political-correctness and puritanism in the USA for that to be allowed.
Saying that the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo are hate-speech is equivalent to say that the “Last Temptation of Christ” was hate-speech toward Christians. Just because you depict in a negative way the founder of a religion, doesn’t mean that you encourage hatred toward the followers.
Hate-speech is not just offending people or blasphemy, it’s a whole other deal.