In the wake of Charlie Hebdo we are hearing a lot about “protected speech,” the sort we congratulate ourselves on having in this and other “free, democratic” countries. (And deplore the lack of in, say, Castro’s Cuba.) The term is commonly held to apply to a wide variety of speech but to exclude the sort of speech likened to crying “fire” in a crowded theater.
With such unprotected speech the dichotomy in the old saying between words on the one hand and sticks and stones on the other breaks down and some speech is seen as not being above the fray but on the contrary having the harmful, violent effect of sticks and stones. Libel is one such sort of speech, a lie which can do actual harm —damage someone’s career, maybe even make him more likely to commit suicide.
The key seems to be determining what constitutes “fire”.
In France, as we’ve been reading online in the post-Hebdo debate, racist speech of the sort that might come from neo-Nazis is seen as “fire.” Holocaust denial is prohibited as a patent lie that does such harm to Jews—and maybe to The Truth—that it is tantamount to inciting to riot. Some think the anti-Muslim cartoons, like Nazi era anti-semitic cartoons, fall into that category.
Remember (from some cowboy, I believe) “them’s fightin’ words, mister”?
Many liberals, while giving Fidel Castro credit for improvements in medicine and education do not not forgive him his crackdowns on dissidents and other violatons of free speech. But his famous 1961 dictum defining the revolution’s policy on free speech–“Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing” –might not be as far from our own reality as most think. Having risked their lives to get rid of the bad old days of rule by Batista and American sugar capitalism, the revolutionary government would not allow speech which would threaten that hardwon revolution and the reforms that were its raison d’etre.
But safe to say that no speech is protected that is deemed by the powers-that-be to be “fire”– dangerous to the state (which among others things does the protecting of what free speech is protected). It’s an inherent and perfectly logical limit to free speech anywhere. Thus our proud free speech nation unabashedly declares as criminally treasonous the free speech of Edward Snowden.
“…but words will never hurt me,” goes the old saying, But words can hurt, can be treasonous, can bring down nations. Or so the nations themselves think, and of course small, beleaguered Cuba has always been much more vulnerable that way than the U.S., a revolution so well-established and well-defended we can’t imagine speech which would threaten to bring it down.
Since a country gets credit and legitimacy for protecting as much speech as possible, and is better off not being seen as nakedly protecting itself, some are no doubt wondering why our government is being so uptight about Snowden’s revelations—could they really harm us? But it seems that most of us defer to the government’s judgment on that.
Our own founding documents announcing those freedoms we hoped to protect with independence were of course themselves not protected. What was no-brainer inspiration to New World Englishmen was to England a treasonous hanging offense, “fire” which could end up reducing the size of the empire–as recognized in Benjamin Franklin’s famous quip at the signing of the Declaration of Independence about hanging together lest we be hanged separately.
This columnist, grateful for this opportunity to put in his two cents, is under no illusion that this column constitutes an exception to those limits on free speech.
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