>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>No *individual* can *alone* decide what racism is, however powerful he may
>>be. How much concrete freedom -- including freedom of speech & freedom
>>from racism -- we may enjoy gets *politically* decided by the balance of
>>class and other powers. Having laws that protect "free speech" in theory
>>doesn't help you at all if the political conditions are such that no one
>>comes forward to defend you in case you get into trouble. The First
>>Amendment didn't protect the Red-Purged.
>
>Of course not, but we're talking about a principle here.
No, it is *not* a question of principles; it's a question of *political strategies and tactics*. No one -- including the alleged defenders of "free" speech -- can & should defend free speech as such, absolutely, with no qualifications. I'm with Stanley Fish here; as a postmodern pragmatist, he is onto a fundamental truth of _how_ the politics of "free" speech works, even though he doesn't & can't give a historical materialist explanation why such is the case.
The questions of state & non-state restrictions of speech must be determined empirically & historically, case by case: denazification; hate crime laws; laws against sexual & racial harassment at work & in school; restrictions placed on anti-abortion protests; age & institutional limits on consensual sexual relations; and so on.
For instance, Japan, West Germany, & Italy have suffered from the reversal of denazification (which came to an end with the end of the New Deal & the beginning of the Red Purge). We should not allow sexual & racial harassment at work & in school, even when harassment is purely verbal. Anti-abortionists should not be allowed to freely intimidate women & medical workers, even purely verbally. Now, the question is _whether_ such restrictions should be placed by the state or non-state powers & _how_ to protect our freedom from harassment without censoring anything and everything. It's a matter of balance.
>I think
>speech should be as protected as possible, which is one reason I
>object to the red purge. If that means that the speech of Kluxers is
>protected too, so be it. Charles wants to except certain kinds of
>speech - "racist" speech, however he defines it (The Bell Curve?
>should that have been burned?) - from protection. Anti-communists
>could lift much of Charles's argument, substitute a few terms, and
>say they are just protecting society from dangerous ideas.
The point is that anti-communists *will* try to defend capitalism *by any means necessary*, if communists *seriously* threaten the social order as it exists now. This is a historical truth which will hold true, *regardless* of whatever laws on speech we may have.
BTW, lifting the limit on natioalist speech has had a serious real-world consequence in Yugoslavia and elsewhere. In the immediate post-WW2 period, the LCY suppressed extreme nationalist expressions, verbal or physical: "Basic manifestations of ethnic and cultural distinctiveness, such as the use of one's own language or alphabet, were not prohibited -- and in some cases such as Macedonian nationhood were actually fostered for symbolic political reasons -- but traditional expressions of nationalist fervor, particularly religiously based ethnic affirmation, were harshly suppressed" (Lenard Cohen, _Broken Bonds: Yugoslavia's Disintegration and Balkan Politics in Transition_, 2nd ed., Boulder: Westview, 1995, p. 28). For instance, Alija Izetbegovic was incarcerated for his advocacy of Islamic fundamentalism in 1946 (Sabrina P. Ramet, _Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991_, 2nd ed., Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1992, p. 186). After the beginning of decentralization & liberalization in the period 1963-71, the Yugoslav communists had to contend with the ideological reassertion of extreme nationalism, along with the politico-economic effects of devolution; for instance, "Liberalization, decentralization, and appeasement of Croatia had only fed the Croats' ever-increasing hunger for autonomy. Indeed, military intelligence later uncovered evidence that some of the party leaders had been in contact with Croatian _Ustase_ emigre groups in West Germany" (Ramet, p. 129). Even aside from such ultranationalist movements' emergence, at the level of everyday politics, old cadre who shared the experience of war-time Partisan struggles against fascists were beginning to be replaced by young intellectuals: "As...young university-educated Party cadres started to replace the older generation of Partisan cadres, they and the republics' leaders...no longer shared the common experience of Partisan struggle and endeavour. The only alternative experience they shared was that of cultural background, language and nationality...." (Aleksandar Pavkovic, _The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism in a Multinational State_, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1997, p. 63-4). After a brief period of recentralization (1972-73), which jailed such emerging ultranationalists as Franjo Tudjman, Yugoslavia once again embarked upon the fatal road toward political, economic, & ideological fragmentation, culminating in the present disaster.
The saddest irony is that, in this process of fragmentation, nationalists in the poorer regions, for instance Macedonians & Kosovo Albanians, ended up advocating the very political program that would only benefit the rich in the richer republics like Slovenia *at the expense* of the poor in the poor regions: "The expected alignment on economic gounds, however, did not materialize. Slovenian and Croatian liberals were able to exploit fears of Greater Serbian chauvinism and woo southern liberals, who were partial to devolution and greater reliance on market mechanisms in the economy. Thus, although economic interest had traditionally linked the Macedonians to Serbia's centralist program, at least in the postwar period, the Macedonians were, for primarily political reasons, drawn to Croatia's side....The Croats and Slovenes transformed economic issues -- decentralization of economic decision making, dismantling of central planning, and curtailment of aid to unprofitable enterprises in the south -- into political issues -- opposition to Serbian hegemony and support of 'liberalization'" (Ramet, p. 17).
In other words, the general point is that nationalist demagogy -- including nationalist speech -- was *not* in the interest of any Yugoslav. More specifically, nationalist demagogues in the richer republics of Croatia and Slovenia *manipulated* their counterparts in the poor Macedonia, Kosovo, etc., in their argument for *more autonomy and decentralization*. Kosovo Albanians, for instance, needed Serbs, and vice versa, to *counter* the trend toward the widening economic gap, but neither side understood this political fact. Most of them fell for nationalist parochialism and worse yet chauvinism.
Perhaps, the old Partisan cadres should have kept younger nationalist demagogues in prison, or better yet, *expelled them to the West*, for whose capitalist prosperity they yearned anyhow. Castro is lucky he was able to dump anticommunists in Miami, and Uncle Sam has obliged him so far.
Yoshie