The case of Holocaust denial differs from many contemporary free-speech issues. With Holocaust denial the focus is on fact, on whether specific statements about the past are true or not. Today, though, many conflicts centre on questions of respect and disrespect rather than opinions, truth, and falsehood. So, for example, in 2004 in Birmingham in England, the first production of the play Behzti (which means ‘dishonour’) by the playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti was disrupted by Sikh rioters, who found it offensive. The plot centres on acts of sexual abuse and murder that take place in a gurdwara, a Sikh temple. The truth or falsehood of what was portrayed was not the issue. What disturbed the opponents of the play was that it disrespected the sacred nature of the gurdwara. This is a common response of religious groups to what they consider blasphemous depictions of their holy figures and places in novels, plays, and cinema. It is not a question of truth, but of whether there should be topics and places that are out of bounds for writers on the grounds that religious (and other) groups will find inappropriate treatment of such topics deeply offensive.
Mill would presumably have defended the performance of the play on the grounds that it expresses views that might be for the benefit of humanity and that it would be wrong to prejudge this. Furthermore, the indirect censorship of the play significantly restricts the playwright’s ability to follow her chosen path in life, despite not directly harming others. But Mill’s general stance on free speech is insensitive to the precise point at issue here, which is the alleged sanctity of certain symbols, a recurrent theme in religiously motivated attempts to prevent expression that disrespects this.
A further ground for censorship in some regimes may be that the viewpoint censored is actually true. This is not something that Mill considers in On Liberty. False views might be relatively harmless to a powerful government, but if, for example, knowledge of how the anti-corruption (and pro-democracy) protestors in Tiananmen Square in 1989 were slaughtered or incarcerated became widespread throughout China, this might be a trigger for political uprising. This might well be the justification for Chinese authorities censoring, with the aid of some Western Internet Service Providers (ISPs), what appears on Internet search engines in China. In other words, Mill’s argument that censors assume infallibility may be beside the point here. What the censors in this case are presumably doing is preventing large numbers of people from learning the truth of the matter, not censoring a view which they sincerely believe to be false. It is the truth (or even an approximation of the truth) that is considered dangerous in this context.
More generally, once we move away from Mill’s implicit assumption that all forms of expression assert facts that may be true or false, then the limitations of his approach become even clearer. Debates about censoring pornographic images, for example, the subject of a later chapter, are not typically debates about the truth or falsehood of what is depicted. Hardcore video pornography aspires to accurate representation of the acts performed in front of the camera. The ‘cumshot’, where a man visibly ejaculates, is a mark of authentic arousal here. It dispels the suspicion that the actors are engaged in a series of choreographed movements while remaining unaffected by the actions they are performing. It exploits photography’s documentary potential to connote truth, to denote facts. It is hard to see how Mill’s arguments could be transposed here, unless we take pornography to be asserting a general position about, for example, the availability of women (or men) for sex or, as some feminists have argued, that it wrongly gives the message that all women desire sexual subjugation and directly encourages crimes such as rape. In such a case the general assertion is delivered via a specific instance, the part standing for the whole.
It might seem to follow from Mill’s views about free speech and the value of falsehoods sincerely expressed that we should actively strive to provide a platform for those with whom we strongly disagree. This is a public way of subjecting our views to the toughest test, the collision with sincerely held error. Whether or not inspired by Mill, some people have argued along these lines. For instance, in a debate in 2007 on the topic of free speech at the Oxford Union Society, the President of the Union, Luke Tryl, justified his invitations to Nick Griffin (of the British National Party) and David Irving by claiming that for a proper debate it was important to hear all views, even if they were obnoxious.
Many people believe there are strong arguments for not giving such speakers a platform. This might literally be a platform, as in the invitation to the Oxford Union Society, or it might be a metaphorical platform, such as being given space in a reputable newspaper or interviewed about their views for a radio or television programme. Those who take the ‘No Platform’ stance (e.g. in the form ‘no platform for racists’ or ‘no platform for Holocaust deniers’) argue that it is morally wrong for anyone to give such people credibility by allowing them access to these channels of communication, channels that often come with an implied stamp of respectability. For instance, by inviting Irving to speak at the Union Society this might be seen to be endorsing his credentials as an academic historian, and so might lead him to be taken more seriously than he should be.
On the other hand, those who invited Irving stressed that the Oxford Union has a long history of inviting controversial speakers, including, in the past, Malcolm X, and that an invitation to that particular platform carried with it no endorsement of the views of the speaker whatsoever. Speakers are often selected on grounds of notoriety rather than on the likelihood of an intellectual contribution to an important debate.
Similarly, at a zoology conference, the organizing committee might well decide that it would be inappropriate to allow a Young Earth Creationist, someone who takes the Bible as a literal account of the origin of life, to speak from a platform alongside reputable scientists, because this would seem to imply that the Young Earth Creationist’s views were scientifically respectable, which they clearly are not. Richard Dawkins cites a wry comment from a scientific colleague on this topic. Whenever a creationist invites him to a formal debate about the evidence for evolution, this scientist replies, ‘That would look great on your CV; not so good on mine.’
~~Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction -by- Nigel Warburton
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