THE REAL LESSON FROM IRAN'S HOLOCAUST CONFERENCE
By Harmony Grant
14 Dec 06
Everybody, all together now: Iran’s Holocaust conference is
bad, bad, bad! This is something that can get even Bill O’Reilly
and Kofi Annan to beat the same drum. Hey, they’d probably
march shoulder to shoulder in the same parade.
But what should we be saying about Iran’s conference?
Whether you agree that questions should be raised about the Holocaust,
we should defend the rights of everybody who wants to ask them, or
write books or talk about them. O’Reilly and others worry about
the threat to Western civilization posed by Muslim extremists. But
in their concern, they themselves put one of our most important values
at risk: freedom of speech.
In 1986, the Supreme Court severely restricted workplace speech
with their definitions of an illegal “hostile work environment.” Thousands
of subsequent lawsuits compelled employers to enforce all kinds of
rules about what could be said at work. Crude jokes and sexual come-ons
weren’t the only kinds of speech banned from places of employment;
Christians quickly learned to shut up, too, when they might have
shared the gospel.
One company, for example, was indicted for “harassing” a
Jewish employee by printing Christian-themed verses on its paychecks
(David Bernstein, You Can’t
Say That! p. 27). Courts refused
to let employers use the first amendment as a defense against hostile
environment charges. Employers who were leery of being sued were
quick to write rules way broader than what the Supreme Court had
actually demanded.
A major constitutional problem with hostile workplace laws, like
hate laws, is that they discriminate based on viewpoint. “For
example, hostile environment law potentially penalizes expression
of the viewpoint that “women are stupid and incapable of being
physicists,” but not that “women are brilliant and make
excellent physicists.”” (Bernstein, 31)
Both hate laws and workplace laws end up persecuting specific kinds
of speech, based on the damage claimed by favored groups. This gives
the government (meaning, whichever fallible, biased human beings
are in charge) the power to decide whose feelings to protect and
whose speech to silence. If you’ve read any George Orwell,
you know this is not a good situation.
Employers’ quick compliance with speech laws was motivated
by self-interest, of course, just like Google’s belly-up complicity
with internet censorship in Germany and China. Google just deleted
banned sites from their foreign search engines, without a whisper
of protest. The censorship was never debated in the courts, nor were
the offending site-makers able to defend themselves. Businesses can’t
realistically be expected to do battle for things like freedom and
justice.
But public opinionmakers should. If neocons like Bill O’Reilly
really loved Western civilization, they’d use the Iran conference
as a chance to stand up for freedom of speech, even for those whose
speech we hate. They would challenge the federal hate laws that criminalize
many kinds of speech, including Holocaust reductionism, in Europe,
Australia, and Canada.
After all, the radical Muslim agenda that they fear is set against
the very freedom of speech they’re failing to champion. Isn’t
lack of freedom the very reason we don’t want to turn into
a Muslim state? Arabs set fires in the streets after the publication
of those Danish cartoons of Muhammed, and a third Yemeni editor is
facing prosecution for republishing them. Totalitarian regimes require
stitched-shut mouths, which is one reason Stalin was so quick to
shoot all the intellectuals.
To save Western civilization, we need one of its most essential
stays: the free and open exchange of ideas, including rotten ones.
This is the only hope for our civilization. It’s our only hope
because government can’t be trusted to create our social, political,
or religious orthodoxies or to protect our interests. Freedom of
dissent is one of the checks on power. If it weren’t for freedom
of speech (and people who used it despite the cost) whites would
still own slaves and England would still own the States.
Our founding fathers knew that the nature of power is to increase
and to oppress. In The Federalist Papers, James Madison said one
reason for the right to bear arms is that we may someday need to
take back our freedoms by force, from a government grown large and
despotic. He was comfortable with the image of armed patriots storming
the streets, because he’d lived painfully through the need
for such a revolution.
Today, we hardly guard our right to bear ideas, let alone bullets!
You’d think the twentieth century would’ve taught us
to be even more leery of government power than Madison was, but it
seems we’ve forgotten the lessons of our own history.
Let’s try to remember these lessons. Try hard. When you get
locked up for politically incorrect speech, you won’t be able
to forget them.
