Not only do the Canadians not like us, they are not like us (was that hate speech?)
(Note: Commenter John R. from Canada adds a disturbing point below.)
Taking off from the “human rights” suit initiated by several Muslims in Canada against Macleans magazine and Mark Steyn for anti-Islamic hate speech (the supposed hate speech consisting of portraying Muslims as a threat to the West), Adam Liptak in the New York Times brings out the disturbing reality that in Canada and other Western countries, anti-“hate-speech” laws have trumped freedom of speech. I’m no fan of Steyn’s, but this much must be said: with regard to America’s upholding a right of speech which government has no power to abridge, the title of Steyn’s book is correct. America truly is alone. In the name of sensitivity to minorities, liberalism has ended free speech in the rest of the West.
And the Times treats respectfully those who are eager to conform the U.S. to the rest of the West, such as Jeffrey Waldron, a New Zealand born legal scholar who now teaches at New York University, and who wrote in the New York Review of Books last month:
It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken, when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.
I’m going to contact Waldron and ask him this: “If I write, as I’ve written a thousand times at my website, that Muslims are commanded by their religion to spread Islam until it takes over the world, and that therefore the more Muslims there are in a Western society, the more pressure there will inevitably be to replace Western law with Islamic law, would that be hate speech? Second, if your answer to the first question is yes, would you urge that the Constitution and laws of the U.S. be changed so that such hate speech can be criminalized?”
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Meanwhile, even as one of the most fundamental freedoms has been systematically eliminated throughout the West, the neocon organization Freedom House keeps issuing its periodic reports giddily pronouncing that freedom is spreading everywhere. (Was that hate speech? And would Waldron have it criminalized? Remember that Thomas Lifson, editor of American Thinker, told me that “neoconservative” is an anti-Semitic code word.)
Kevin V. writes:
While we are awaiting the professor’s response, which will be what it will be, I wanted to comment on this matter in general. When I was in law school it was very, very clear to me that despite the world-wide trend towards the repression of “hate speech” and the typical liberal dominance of the law as in all other areas of our modern life, the body of case law on the principle of free speech is so robust in the United States that overcoming it represents a real challenge to liberal academics and jurists.
That’s not to say that it will be impossible. It seems to me likely that the line of attack will be along the “fighting words” line of cases, in which speech which provokes a response of outrage and insult is not held to be protected speech. That, along with the Court’s increasing willingness to cherry-pick from European and Canadian cases with which it agrees for persuasive authority, provides an obvious opportunity for shoe-horning “hate speech” into that category of speech never held to have any First Amendment protection.
Despite that weak spot, though, the entire body of law protecting speech rights in America serves, not as a barrier to liberal aspirations, but as a clear sign to those on the other side that nothing short of force (political and/or physical) will stop them. In other words, if liberals are powerful enough to plow through that body of law and impose speech restrictions on us as free men, our choice will be obvious: fight as free men or submit as Canadians.
It pains me to have seen our cousins to the north acquiesce in the theft of their liberty so easily. It is a testament to the power of the liberal cause that the rot introduced by Trudeau and the liberal revolution there has completely remade a society in less than forty years. Like their British cousins, they walk on streets containing monuments to men and causes they can only now regard as criminal. Any Canadian today who thinks about the matter has to conclude, as a matter of course, that he is not a free man, by definition. Who ever thought it would come to this?
In non-Common Law countries, the matter is even worse. By a cruel but foreseeable trick of fate, the fact of European laws criminalizing the denial of the Holocaust or the publication of Mein Kampf makes the right to free speech there already qualified politically. It is an easy thing for Muslim and their left-wing brethren to make a case that if the state forbids certain speech that insults the Jews and offends them, why not the Muslims?
Of course, such laws meant more than merely protecting Jews from offense, but on the question of a fundamental liberty like speech once a state declares a particular subject out-of-bounds for legal discussion the liberty has lost its fundamental nature. To make matters even worse, of course, is that the same harm that European liberals seek to prevent by restricting anti-Jewish and Holocaust denial speech—the demonization of a minority—is seen by them to be the self-same harm restricting “hate speech” prevents.
What really concerns me there is that all of this has been obvious for at least 10 years now. And even now precious few realize the danger. Men like Mark Steyn, who should know better, profess bafflement at the case against him and Macleans when they should know that it follows as a matter of course.
We’re in a fight, not an argument. And we are losing badly.
John R. writes from Ontario (June 14):
I am a frequent reader of VFR in Ontario, and find that the consistently high level of analysis and interpretations of ideas and issues of interest to those who study sociopolitical trends in the West leaves little for me to add to the discussion. Additionally, the fact that I am a Canadian makes me somewhat hesitant to comment considering the (understandably) largely American P.O.V.
However I do wish to make an observation regarding your post on June 12 at 8:08 am. The head was: “Not only do the Canadians not like us, they are not like us … ” Your comments in the body of the post were broadly correct. However, and here I am talking about what used to be known as “Anglophone Canada,” we are something very close to what the so called Blue State elites would impose on your population if they controlled your nation. So it could therefore be said that while we are not like you in the sense of what the U.S.A presently is, we are like what the liberal elite of your nation would like you to be. In this way we may be deeply similar.
LA replies:
Yes, I understand. What the U.S. liberal elite want is that the U.S. become like Canada and Europe. That is really the whole of their politics in a nutshell.
Also, my comment might be seen as insulting if it were taken as applying to all Canadians. I was speaking of course of the liberal Canadians. I know there are conservative Canadians who are not happy with the liberal dominance over Canada.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 12, 2008 08:08 AM | Send