>>> "Nathan Newman" <nathan.newman at yale.edu> 10/29 11:54 AM >>>
-----Original Message----- From: Charles Brown <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> To: Lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <Lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Most who take an ACLU radical or
>absolute free speech position for
>protecting KKK and neo-Nazi speech
>DO VERY LITTLE IN
>COUNTERING THE FASCISTIC
>RACIST SPEECH in the
>marketplace of ideas.
And your justification for this statement is...squat? ________
Charles: Why on earth would you assume my justification and EVIDENCE for this is squat ? I have been active in the struggle against fascistic racists for many years and I observe directly that the ACLU and its members specifically are not there. especially given that their position on the issue would place upon them an extra burden of raising public arguments in the struggle against racism. It is common knowledge among activists
that the ACLU does not place as much emphasis on the struggle against racism as civil liberties issues. It is reflected in their literature, public statements and the cases they take. The differentiation between the very tems "civil libeties" and "civil rights" reflects this. The ACLU specializes in the Bill of Rights and gives much lesser emphasis to the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.
There are specific organizations in this country that focus on fighting the KKK and Nazis. You don't find a lot of free speech for KKKers in these organizations, whereas they should be if they think the way to fight the KKK is in the marketplace of ideas. ___________
I would venture to say that within the pool of free speech absolutists is a dramatically higher percentage of people who confront racists and fascists on a routine basis. ________ Charles: A "dramatically higher percentage" than what other group ? Not than the group who oppose "freedom" of speech for the KKK. It is not dramatically higher than the militiant anti-racist activists. What is your squat evidence for your "guess" ? _________
The ACLU as an organization may defend racist free speech, but they also defend those fighting racism and fascism even more stoutly ____________
Charles: They don't fight fascistic racism directly as their position of allowing the speech would imply. If the way to defeat fascistic racists is to allow them to speak and then battle their ideas, then the ACLU should not just defend anti-racists' rights to speak (which isn't even challenged much) , but to fight the racist ideas directly. You don't find ACLUs specializing in battling _The Bell Curve_, for example.
That is my point. If you are going to fight unusually hard to let the fascistic racists speech, then coupled with that is an obligation to fight unusually hard directly against their ideas freely floating in the idea "private" marketplace. ACLUers and the like don't take up the implied special obligation of the first aspect of their argument. _________-
- in fact, the main purpose of defending the fascists/racists is to create an absolutist space for the Left to defend its activites. ___________ Charles: Yes, the liberal Left fails to see that for members of target groups of the fascistic racists this is explicitly a statement that liberal left is more concerned with protecting the Left's activities than protecting the targets groups from the murders and the rest of the fascistic racists' activities. Here also we see that the motive is not just that the liberal leftists think that putting fascistic racist ideas in the marketplace of ideas is the best way to defeat them, but that it is the only way for "lefts" to retain their free speech.
But the history of First Amendment jurisprudence shows that the Left has not been protected by the fact that the fascists' speech was protected . See my earlier post on the Abrams case (Holmes famous opinion JAILED LEFTISTS SPEAKING OUT AGAINST THE CAPITALIST WW I INCLUDING DEBS) , the Palmer Raids and Whitney case in the 1920's, McCarthyism the Dennis case etc.. All of this period the KKK and Nazis were not put in jail or arrested. (The KKK had big marches in D.C. in the 20's at the same time that Communists were being jailed ) So, their being protected by the First Amendment did not translate into the Left being protected, as you dream in your utopian fantasy detached from what is really going on on this planet.
By the way, on a related historical note, immediately after the adoption of the First Amendment it was not interpreted by its original intenders to protect the speech of Tory Americans who favored counterrevolution. (See _Early Years of the Republic_ by Herbert Aptheker) In other words, it was not thought that the free market place of ideas was the best place to counter counterrevolutionaries.
________
If you think a weakening of free speech safeguards will harm the Right more than the Left, with Justices Rehnquist and Scalia jailing fascists in the name of the common good, you live on a different planet. ___________
Charles: Funny how you then turn around and trust Rehnquist and Scalia to uphold free speech safeguards for the Left. Your position is that if we, the Left, support free speech for the KKK and Nazis, then Rehnquist and Scalia will have to support free speech for the Left too.
However, it was on this planet that the U.S. Supreme Court put the Communist Party leadership in jail despite the First Amendment at a time when KKK or Nazis were NOT being jailed or even arrested ( right after a world war with the Nazis). In other words, the fallacy in your statement is the assumption that the Left has in US history been protected by the First Amendment, because the Right was protected. The correlation doesn't hold up in fact ( and at law).
Also, if one used Rehnquist and Scalia as the limit on what demands we should raise , the Left's political program would a big blank.
Do you think that because Rehnquist and Scalia are opposed to a woman's right to abortion on demand that only people from other planets would include that as a demand for a legal right in a Left program ? The answer is no.
We don't form our program based on what rightwing Supreme Justices will go for. The demand for outlawing fascistic racist speech
Charles Brown
Earth