So, the news is full of the rally in Paris – although, just how much you can say about lots of people walking through Paris is astounding as the news channels manage it while actually saying very little – over and over again.
In the aftermath of the bloodshed in France, there has been much soul-searching about freedom of speech. Almost immediately the BBC was wittering about, yes, it was awful but just how much freedom of speech should there be – after all, people have deeply held beliefs and is it acceptable or appropriate to say things that hurt their feelings? Answer: Yes. Indeed, they had a talking head from the Muslim council saying pretty much the same thing – the usual bollocks about hurting people’s feelings.
Look, it’s remarkably straightforward. If you do not have the freedom to offend, you do not have freedom of speech. Simple as. We are under no obligation to respect the deeply held beliefs of others. Freedom of speech means we have the liberty to criticise and ridicule without fear of being arrested by the Twitter watching police looking for speech that may cause offence.
To pick up on something that Rickie said over at Dioclese’s place recently:
I don’t like daft tweets getting criminal but a free for all , anything goes aint right either.
Actually, that is precisely what it is. However, Rickie – that arch defender of free speech – makes the same mistake many make, that freedom of speech comes with the right to a platform. It doesn’t. Free speech means you can say what you like without fear of arrest – or, in the case of the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo – being murdered because you insult the prophet of a religion. However, there is no right to be heard, there is no right to a platform and no one has any obligation to provide one. Providing the state is not going to arrest you and you are not going to be murdered, your freedom to speak is unaffected. That’s how it should be. Mind you, let’s not forget that a couple of years ago, Rickie in his earlier incarnation of Dickie Doubleday waged a mini campaign to shut down blogs that dared to say things he didn’t like. So we will be taking no lectures on free speech from that quarter.
If you pop over to Counting Cats, you will see it displayed succinctly in the sidebar:
Free speech is about the state dictating what is or is not acceptable, it is not about free people freely expressing contempt for contemptible behaviour.
Refusal to finance a platform for thugs to spew their venomous bile does not constitute censorship.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is it in the proverbial nutshell.
This week, we saw a bloody assault on free speech. And today, the vile hypocritical politicians shed crocodile tears for its demise. Let us not forget that the enemies of freedom of speech do not necessarily wield Kalashnikovs to achieve their objective. Look no further than the house of commons. For there you will find a far greater assault on free speech than was found this week on the blood-soaked streets of Paris.
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Update: Right on cue.
These vile creatures are a far greater threat to our freedoms than the jihadists can ever hope to be.
I find myself in a bit of a dilemma over this Charlie Hebdo thing. I mean, where are the limits? There are limits to what can be said and depicted whether you accept it or not. Can I say that I’d like all Muslims to be rounded up and gassed? Is that my right of freedom of speech or is it beyond what is acceptable? Can I print graphic pictures of the Prophet having sex with a child? Probably not, because it would break pornography laws. Maybe those should be removed in the interests of free speech and expression. But, then think of “the cheeldren”.
I was looking through the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo, and a lot of them were seriously anti Semitic, depicting Jews with hooked noses and thick lips, warts on their faces, reminding me of how they were portrayed in Germany under the Nazis. I’m not Jewish, but it makes me feel quite sick and offended, ashamed really. I don’t mind that sort of stuff being banned.
I suspect that Charlie Hebdo was one of those magazines that’d been around for ages. Everybody knew about it, hardly anybody read it. The staff got together every week to discuss who they could insult in the next edition. It wasn’t about satire really; it was just intended to offend for the fun of it and to shock. They’d got away with it for years, with the Jews, the Catholics etc. They were a bunch of leftie intelligensia who thought they were so much cleverer and wittier than everybody else.
Well, they paid the price from a group who decided wrongly that it wasn’t acceptable. I don’t care about the Charlies at all. In some ways, I think they had it coming. By being so “clever” with their pencils, they also got some police and other innocents killed. But hey, by Wednesday the same number of people will have been killed on British roads. Keep the numbers in perspective.
Don’t get me wrong, the people who did these murders deserved to be hunted down and shot. They committed an atrocity. But let’s not get too sentimental about it.
I should finish there, but I’ve had a few and can’t help thinking about Bernard Manning. He was that Mancunian comic you all hated. They told him he was racist. “I’m not racist, I take the piss out of everybody – Blacks, Whites, Chinese, Irish etc”, he said. He was actually one of the quickest minds in comedy. You could say it was a similar mentality to Charlie Hebdo. But, he was fat, and he smoked, and nobody gave a shit when he died.
The short answer to your screed is “yes”. There should be no laws that prohibit what people say. Incitement to violence, defamation and libel are covered by law because they cause actual damage and are therefore not freedom of speech issues. The rest, however, should be unregulated. Yes, even anti-Semitism. Do you seriously think that banning speech makes the ideology go away? I don’t care that these people were leftists – to suggest that they had it coming is appalling. Really? Some off-colour cartoons warranted a hail of bullets? Really? And to suggest that the cartoonists were directly responsible for others getting killed? Fuck me, but that’s stupid. The only people responsible for these deaths were the people who pulled the trigger. No one else.
To draw a comparison with road casualties is a non-sequitur, so I’m not going to get drawn into that one. Maybe you should wait until the sauce has worn off before engaging in debate?
Fair play LR. Point taken
“I take the piss out of everybody – Blacks, Whites, Chinese, Irish etc” He was right and it was comedy; I watched some of his routines recently and they’re a hoot. Now the perpetually offended can make a case out of almost any perceived slight and it’s no wonder so many of today’s “comedians” are simply not funny.