In Europe, Hate Speech Laws are Often Used to Suppress and Punish Left-Wing Viewpoints - 0 views
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Many Americans who long for Europe’s hate speech restrictions assume that those laws are used to outlaw and punish expression of the bigoted ideas they most hate: racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny. Often, such laws are used that way. There are numerous cases in western Europe and Canada of far-right extremists being arrested, fined, or even jailed for publicly spouting that type of overt bigotry.
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Does anyone doubt that high on the list of “hate speech” for many U.S. officials, judges, and functionaries would be groups, such as Black Lives Matter and antifa, far-left groups that fight against white supremacists?
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In The Guardian, Richard Seymour went further and said that “Ahmed is the latest victim of a concerted effort to redefine racism as ‘anything that could conceivably offend white people.'”
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A leftist activist in France was convicted and fined for insulting former French President Nicolas Sarkozy by holding a sign that said “get lost, jerk”; ironically, those were the exact words Sarkozy himself uttered when a citizen refused to shake his hand at a public fair (the European Court of Human Rights ultimately overturned the Frenchman’s conviction).
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Even if “hate speech” laws were magically applied by authorities exactly as advocates would wish — whereby only the ideas one hates would be suppressed and punished while the ideas one loves would be allowed to flourish — there would still be very good reasons to oppose such laws.
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As Cole wrote: “When white supremacists called a rally the following week in Boston, they mustered only a handful of supporters. They were vastly outnumbered by tens of thousands of counter-protesters who peacefully marched through the streets to condemn white supremacy, racism, and hate. Boston proved yet again that the most powerful response to speech that we hate is not suppression but more speech.”
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As The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf recently explained, there is a grave irony at the heart of these newfound liberal desires for “hate speech” censorship laws: The people who would implement and interpret them are those in power, people like Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, GOP governors and legislators, and their litany of right-wing judges. It takes little imagination to see how such laws would be applied, and against whom. Indeed, the U.S. history of allowing such restrictions is that they have been used against exactly the groups that censorship advocates think they are protecting.