Of Jokes, Cartoons, and Freedom of Speech

The four of us who had dinner on Sunday in Les Halles plunged into a very serious discussion by the time our pizzas arrived. I can't remember how it started (my colleague Nigel would tell me that if I had blogged in real-time from one of the gadgets he loves so much, like an iPhone, I wouldn't have let this memory slip), but we ended up talking about the relative understandings of freedom of speech in different countries and cultures.

One of the first things that was mentioned was how denial of the Holocaust is a crime in France and in some other European countries. I pointed out that while I find the denials both abhorrent and ridiculous, in the U.S. people would have the right to express those opinions — and let the public be the judge.

(I didn't think of Scientology as another example of this. While it is certainly a cult in my opinion, and a harmful one by most accounts, the U.S. protects their expression even to the debatable point of recognizing them as a church, while at the other end of the spectrum Germany, I think, has banned their activity and gone after their financial empire and the way they relieve credulous people of their money).

Back to what we did discuss. I made the point, without actually taking sides, that a tenet of what Americans consider freedom of speech is that it protects even expression with which most reasonable people disagree to the point of finding the ideas objectionable and pernicious. The U.S. constitution still gives the proponents of those ideas the right to express themselves, as long as they do not directly incite illegal action. In that sense, the Bill of Rights follows the position expressed by Voltaire a few decades earlier, when he wrote to someone, "I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write it." And today, the American Civil Liberties Union (of which I am a card-carrying member) also takes that position, although some bloggers have complained about a trend toward a form of "political correctness" among the ACLU's national board, leading it to accept some restrictions on objectionable speech — but I am not sure if those bloggers are correct or are crying wolf on the basis of scant evidence in cases whose complexities should be further scrutinized.

One should note, by the way, that in practice the American principle of protecting objectionable speech unless it directly incites lawless actions is not consistently followed, or at least not without fighting. Professors have been disciplined for expressing objectionable opinions (including Holocaust denial, or the opinion that the state of Israel was illegitimate). Facebook has banned a group called "WP forever" where "WP" stood for "White Power." If you Google "freedom of speech objectionable opinions" you will find multiple examples, as well as many thoughtful discussions of this issue by other bloggers.

Being all computer professionals of one form or another, we touched on the issue of banning the sale of some items, such as nazi memorabilia, on the Intenet, especially on eBay. If this is illegal in France but not in the U.S., and given the difficulty of ascertaining on the Internet where the seller and the buyer actually are, it is not obvious for the intermediary to police these restrictions. As a result, the safe thing for them to do may be to ban such items everywhere, thus arguably denying someone, in a country like the US, the ability to do something that is legal there because of another country's law. And one might argue, in this case, that trading nazi memorabilia is not necessarily a sign of adherence to the ideology (this may be somewhat more credible on the seller's part than on the buyer's...).

When we were discussing whether Holocaust denial should be one of the "objectionable but permitted" expressions in the U.S. sense, one of my new friends mentioned that some of the prohibitions in European countries could "prevent historians from doing their work." I replied that surely, there is a lot of serious work that historians can do without infringing on the restrictions in question. No one is talking about preventing research into how fascism arose, how it was sustained for so many years, etc. One could even study the resurgence of extreme-right groups in various countries without violating the laws against promoting or defending the deniers. So I didn't buy that argument... but the question remained whole.

Another controversy that exposed differences in national attitudes, my friends pointed out, was the issue of the Armenian genocide. This issue has been raised by several countries, including France and the U.S., while the Turkish government seems to essentially prohibit discussing this historic event, and considered the various actions in western parliaments regarding the recognition of that genocide to be meddling in its internal affairs.

Now one could accuse me of steering away from trouble in discussions, and since my companions were all Algerian, I had to say something like, "for a similar situation, look at the controversy about the Danish cartoons." The reaction, while muted and friendly, showed me that "objectionable" is quite relative, and that I still have much to learn. Of course, my acceptance of a cartoon that makes fun of another group's divinity is in part based on my atheism. I can truthfully claim that it wouldn't make any difference to me if it was a cartoon of Jesus, the Buddha, or Mohammad. But my friends thought that while the Iranian or Saudi fatwahs against the catoonist and the publishers were unjustifiable, the negative reaction in the Muslim world was understandable. Of course, based on the earlier discussion, we could all agree that saying that something should be protected free speech doesn't mean that you can't find it objectionable, but I sensed that my friends wouldn't have minded if this particular expression had been judged illegal. And I wouldn't be surprised if one could find something (perhaps along the lines of homophobic opinions) that I would find so abhorrent that my heart would wish it outlawed, while my brain would calculate that it should be protected free speech.