Ira Glasser is a giant in the world of freedom of speech. From his work with the American Civil Rights movement and later on with the American Civil Liberties Union he perceived, quite rightly in my view, that liberation movements cannot effectively operate without freedom of speech. Mr Glasser long ago, in those days when the United States was coming out of the Jim Crow era where Black Americans were second class citizens, understood that you cannot publicise a cause such as Civil Rights or build a movement to change society without the right to promulgate your view.

Writing in Spiked Magazine Mr Glasser tells of the primary importance of free speech in US society and to the Civil Rights movement. Mr Glasser clearly understood that the price of Martin Luther King Jr being allowed to speak in Southern US states and cities where segregation was still holding on, was also to allow those who opposed racial equality to hold their rallies. He’s correct on this in my view.

If, at the time of the Civil Rights movement, liberal states had been allowed to ban rallies by racialists then segregationist states would have had a similar legal justification for banning Martin Luther King’s demonstrations. Mr Glasser said there were good strategic reasons for protecting the speech rights of your opponents. One of those reasons Mr Glasser said was that politics is fickle. The politician who holds views that you despise and attempt to silence might one day be in government and that politician may turn their attention to you, the politician’s opponent, and try to silence you in the same or a similar way. This is why Mr Glasser didn’t want a racialist politician, Governor George Wallace, banned from speaking in New York.

Mr Glasser, writing for Spiked Magazine said:

For example, the First Amendment protects the right to free speech and assembly by barring the government from abridging such rights. That is how I was able to stop the mayor of New York from banning George Wallace from speaking in 1968. Why did I do it? Because what if George Wallace had been elected? He had already been elected as governor of Alabama. He was trying to get elected as president (and he had considerable support). If he had gained political power, he would not have hesitated to suppress or punish my speech, or the speech of others I supported.

Mr Glasser is correct on this. There are free speech rights for all or there are free speech rights for no one. My right to speak freely about various issues comes at the cost of letting my opponents speak as well. My ability, at least on US platforms where the First Amendment prevails or should prevail, to mock the diversity panjandrums of the UK or the nastier aspects of Islam or challenge the beliefs of the wilder shores of the secularist Jewish Left, comes at a price. My freedoms are bought at the cost of having to accept that others will believe differently and will sometimes be hostile to me and my views. In short, the price of being able to speak freely about stuff that I find I’m compelled to speak about, is to accept that idiot Christian Nationalists in the USA can call me a ‘Kike-servative’ or to see my social media timelines polluted with Flat Earthers who believe that there’s a ‘Zionist Plot’ to hide the real flatness of the Earth. Personally I believe that this is a very small price to pay for the ability to speak my mind and voice my concerns about the world.

In the USA the people there are extremely fortunate that they are governed by a Constitution that was put together by some very bright and very far sighted people. The Founders of the USA understood that even those with unpopular views or views outside of those of the majority needed to be protected from the oppression of the majority. The right of US citizens to speak freely, even if what is coming out of their mouths is complete insane bollocks, is one that some, such as those in Britain where 3000 people per year are arrested for ‘speech crimes’, do not enjoy.

The US Constitution protects the right of the citizen to have ideas and to express them but more still it protects those whose view might be called a minority one from being crushed by the majority. America’s Founding Fathers understood that allowing complete majoritarianism, pure unfettered democracy could go bad with majorities behaving like mobs and removing the right to protest or other rights from those with minority views. The US First Amendment prevents that from happening. Both the extremes of the political Left and those of the political Right and everything in between are protected by the First Amendment. Free speech allows those with bad ideas to voice them, that’s true, but these views don’t go away just because they are publicly repressed, they still exist but instead of these ideas being out in the open and therefore open to challenge they are in echo chambers where radicalisation can increase. Free speech allows the opponents of bad ideas to critique and debate these ideas, to pull them apart and expose their flaws. Supporting free speech, even for the right of arseholes to speak their brains, is a truly liberal value.

Mr Glasser also makes the very valid point that in the USA without free speech many movements for change would not have got off of the ground. Absent the constitutionally protected right to freedom of speech neither the movement to liberate workers from truly appalling working conditions nor the various racial equality campaigns would have had the success that they had.

Mr Glasser added:

Historically, in the United States, every fight for social justice began with free speech, depending on speech to initiate and sustain the movement to right wrongs. In the early years of the 20th century, for example, the nascent labour movement critically required (and did not often enjoy) the right to meet, to leaflet, to demonstrate and to picket in order to convert workers’ powerlessness into success against oppressive employers.

Also during the early 20th century, the movement to end the lynching of black people, led by courageous advocates like Ida B Wells, totally depended upon freedom of speech and the right to publish. Without these freedoms, it would not have been able to spread the word about the epidemic of lynchings in the South and to gather and build opposition to it.

Whilst I may disagree with Mr Glasser’s use of the term ‘social justice’, primarily because once you start putting prefixes on the word ‘justice’ then it becomes something other than Justice, his point about free speech stands. The end of segregation and the violence associated with it along with the ability of workers to stand against bad employers would never have come about had the USA been cursed with the sort of unfree speech environment such as exists in the United Kingdom today. Had the sort of unfree speech environment which is based on criminalising ‘offence’ that exists in the contemporary UK context existed when MLK Jr was trying to bring about racial equality, then it’s highly likely that someone would have been offended by MLK and would have used whatever ‘hate speech’ legislation was available to shut up MLK and shut down his movement. Someone, somewhere is offended by something or another which is why terms such as ‘grossly offensive’ when written into law end up eventually eviscerating freedom of speech.

Mr Glasser said:

……….in our own time, the civil-rights movement could not have ended legalised racial subjugation without freedom of speech. The First Amendment protected the early efforts of activists to call attention to the abuses of skin-colour exclusions and build the support needed to end them. In 1955, for example, Rosa Parks sat down on a seat reserved for whites on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, and a then unknown young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr stood up to support her, by organising a boycott of those buses. None of that would have been possible without the protection of the First Amendment.

At the time that Mr Glasser is speaking about there were those who believed that MLK was ‘offensive’, that he disturbed what these individuals who supported segregation believed was the natural order of things. Legal speech restrictions could have silenced MLK just as easily as such laws could have silenced Governor Wallace. Wallace could have been silenced in New York and King silenced in Alabama.

Although the American Civil Liberties Union is a shadow of its former self since Mr Glasser stepped down from leading it in 2001 and is now very much, at least from my observations, a leftist led entity, that does not mean that it’s past was dishonourable. The ACLU, especially under Mr Glasser did fight for the freedom of Americans to speak freely, whether or not those Americans were sensible or whether they were complete fraggles.

If Britain is to survive and thrive amid the slings and arrows of outrageous current and future problems then we all need to be able to speak our minds in order to find a way through these difficulties. On free speech at the least we should be emulating our American cousins and bringing back the freedom to speak that has been consistently lost to well meaning but ultimately damaging ‘hate speech’ and ‘offensiveness’ legislation. We can’t do it by importing the US First Amendment wholesale as it would not fit well with the British Constitutional settlement, but we should at least remove those impediments that prevent necessary, if troubling, debates from occurring. We need to see removed all the ‘hate speech’ and ‘offensiveness’ legislation not just because they are in and of themselves instruments of oppression and repression or because they prevent debate, but because they cause resentment and really, according to historical record, don’t bloody work.

In the contemporary United Kingdom the existence of ‘hate speech’ laws, laws that often only benefit one sector of the community are creating resentment not just against the unjust laws themselves but against those who these laws benefit. A common complaint I’ve heard about this aspect of ‘hate speech’ laws is that group X is given far more leeway to promulgate their political or religious or cultural views than group Y are, to the extent that group Y members are criminalised over speech issues whilst group X members are not. This is not a good or fair way to run a society.

Those who believe that Utopias whether they be racial, religious or whatever can be brought into being by restricting the speech of those who oppose them are not just oppressive and arrogant, they are also profoundly wrong and ignorant of history. The post World War One Weimar Republic of Germany had extensive ‘hate speech’ laws and used them on a large number of occasions against the National Socialist German Workers Party. The result of the continual attacks on the Nazis by the Weimar Republic was that it caused a type of Streisand Effect to create publicity around and about the Nazis and allowed the Nazis to present themselves, wrongly, as victims. Daniel Ben Ami writing on the Socialism of Fools website said of the effect of Weimar’s ‘hate speech’ laws:

Nazi publications were frequently banned during the Weimar years. The Nazi party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, was temporarily suspended many times for anti-Semitic excesses in the early 1920s. After Hitler’s failed coup attempt in 1923 both the Nazi party and its newspaper were banned until 1925. Most German states also banned him from speaking publicly between 1925 and 1927. But in retrospect Hitler concluded that on balance the ban was a benefit as it boosted his fame and popularity.

Two other newspapers, Joseph Goebbels’ Der Angriff (the attack) and Julian Streicher’s virulently anti-Semitic Der Stürmer (the striker) were also subject to what today would be called anti hate speech laws. The former had Bernhard Weiss, the Jewish vice president of the Berlin police force, as one of its favourite targets. But his attempts at legal action helped Goebbels portray the paper as the victim of a Jewish conspiracy to enslave the German people.

It is of course a massive understatement to say that ‘hate speech’ laws failed in interbellum Germany. However it is the truth. They did fail and few of those who call for speech restrictions are aware or even care that the ‘hate speech’ laws of the past failed in the way they did. These laws, for all their very good intentions, did not prevent the evil of German National Socialism from coming to power and may even have inadvertently assisted them by giving them publicity that they didn’t need to buy.

Of course there is a need for societies to crack down on stuff that is truly damaging and which has real world impacts such as child sexual exploitation materials and credible and immediate threats of violence. However America’s experience has shown us that it is perfectly possible to both interdict noncery and stop mobs with flaming torches whilst still protecting the rights of the citizen to speak freely about what’s on their minds. It’s not a perfect system, we only need to look at the Twitterfiles scandal to see examples of government and corporate interference in the speech rights of Americans, but it’s a damned sight better than the situation in the UK, where teenagers get hauled in front of courts for repeating lyrics to a rap song that someone found ‘offensive’.

Ira Glasser is one hundred percent correct when he says that we must fight for the right of individuals to hate. That’s not because hate is good, it quite obviously is not, but because if society silences those it deems as ‘hateful’ today then one day the legislation that allows this silencing will one day be used by some future government, one that sees its opponents as ‘hateful’, to silence those who stand against them. ‘Hate speech’ legislation is a dangerous weapon to leave in the hands of a future government that may wish to silence those who question their policies but free speech to the extent as allowed in the United States, prevents such a weapon being forged in the first place. I believe that it is better for speech to be free and for the government to be securely manacled in this area. The mess that some fear might come from Britain having the greatest possible extent of legal free speech is, in my opinion, far better than the alternative.