>>> Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at tsoft.com> 10/26 4:44 PM >>>
I want to put together an argument opposed to Charles Brown's admonition to abolish hate speech, which doesn't rely on the Holmes and Brandis concept of a free market in ideas, which I nevertheless believe in any event.
The tactical problem with banning hate speech is obviously that one group's hate is another's succor. While a liberal legal view prevails, then perhaps overtly racist speech and advocacy are considered hate speech and are therefore to be banned. But writing law is a double edged sword. Today's hate is tomorrow's love of purity. When you set up a legal system to prohibit categories of speech and advocacy, then such a system goes about and interprets what can and can not be advocated in a public forum. While today the nazis are prohibited, believe me, tomorrow we will soon join them at least under such prohibitions. __________ Charles: The trouble with this is that "we" were already prohibited YESTERDAY. We don't have the protection you think we have, to lose "tomorrow". Remember Debs was sent to prison by Holmes for SPEAKING out against WW I as a capitalist war not the working class' war. Then there were the Palmer Raids against the Reds (See the movie Reds). Then Whitney, a woman in the Communist Party in California was imprisoned. Brandeis didn't save her. Then there was McCarthyism, when the Communist Party leadership was imprisoned as many as 8 years. All these were for speech and assembly. Meanwhile no Nazi or KKKer has been imprisoned ever for speech.
So, a legally realistic (and I don't mean the Yale law school version of legal realism) analysis shows that "we" have not been protected. So, defending the Nazis right to free speech will not likely protect the Left. See what I mean ? It is not our respecting the fascists' right to free speech that somehow bolsters the First Amendment and protects us too. It is other political currents unrelated to the status of protection of fascists' free speech that mean danger or safety for the Left. ____________
Racist and genocidal motivations are of no use, since I could confess a racist and genocidal motivation to exterminate the rich. ____________
Charles: I wouldn't advocate exterminating the rich. How about expropriate them. Also, being against the rich is not racism. __________---
Well, if racism is a social construction, what isn't racist about wanting to kill the rich? _________
Charles: It is based on other social constructs, not the social construct of race.
______________
It is for sure, we don't like each other and have no interest is working out our inabilities to communicate. They do look different and smell funny, not like other people. I would certainly rest easier at night knowing they were locked away safely in their graves. Wouldn't you? ________
Charles: I wouldn't put it that way. Locked away maybe, but not necessarily in their graves except by natural causes. Afterall , we are the overwhelming majority and if we get our consciousness together we can make the revolution peacefully because we outnumber them by so much. The only violence will be initiated by them, as usual. It is the right wing who tends to terrorism, not us. _________________
But there is a further aspect which is related to the problem of writing law. Laws setting out punishment for various acts on the basis of a definition of criminality, obviously do not prevent these actions, but merely proscribe punishments after the fact. So too with the legality of speech. Certainly laws would have no impact on the speech of neo-nazis or other militant racist groups. If anything, they would become ironically victimized as an authentic disenfranchised and dissent group--even a racial minority! I can just hear their rhetorical moaning now--we are persecuted by the evil government for just wanting to speak our minds. Stand up and be counted. Our message can not be suppressed. The laws against us are laws against the American race--or what's left of it, after the kikes, n-words, spics, queers, and commies have taken over--and so on. _____________
Charles: My study indicates they make those claims right now, but of course they are mendacious. They could only be outlawed with a high level of consciousness in the great mass of the people. See above. However, as I pointed out in an earlier post, France, Canada, the USSR, have and have had laws outlawing forms of fascist racist speech ,and it functions fine. The unimaginability of it is an American political weakness. ___________
Well, absurd or not, banning their speech and then having to listen to their civil rights moaning, also trivializes the concept of civil rights in its moral configuration, by handing that ground over to a corrosive inversion, a mirror of farce whereby the nazis lay claim to their civil rights as a currently discriminated against group on the basis of race! (Ah, the master race that is).
_________
Charles: Basically this is the same that we have now with the infamous "reverse discrimination" doctrine. Only its those pigs on the Supreme Court moaning for the poor discriminated against white, males that we have to listen to.
Charles Brown
Detroit