The Real Lessen from Iran

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

-- 
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.