http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4750
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4704
Anthony http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3507
Jeremy Waldron, in the latest NYRB, has reviewed what looks to be a valuable book by Anthony Lewis, “Freedom for the thought that we hate: A biography of the First Amendment.” However, Waldron ends his review with a rather insidious plea concerning the legal restriction of public pronouncements about other races and ethnies. Here’s what he says (p. 44):
“Lewis’s settled position, I think, is that we do better to swallow hard and tolerate ‘the thought that we hate’ than open ourselves to the dangers of state regulation. I am not convinced. The case is certainly not clear on either side, and Lewis acknowledges that. But it is worth remembering a couple of final points.
“First, the issue is not thought that we hate, as though defenders of hate speech laws want to get inside people’s minds. The issue is publication and the harm done to individuals and groups through the disfiguring of our social environment by visible, public, and semi-permanent announcements to the effect that in the opinion of one group in the community, perhaps the majority, members of another group are not worthy of equal citizenship. The old idea of group libel — as opposed to hateful thoughts or hateful conversation — makes this clear, and it is no accident that a number of European countries still use that term.”Well, the term “libel” is a good one. But when applied to the libeling of a private individual, whose reputation has supposedly been unjustly tarnished, the libeler has to have made a false statement. If the statement turns out to be true, it is not libel. “Reputation” is a critical feature of social relations. It can take a long time to establish a good one and an instant to lose it. But when an accusation is valid, the person’s reputation deserves to be affected. The same holds for “group libel” when one calls attention to group differences (e.g., blacks have lower IQ) or mentions the activity of ethnic organizations (e.g., the role of the organized Jewish community in ending immigration policies that favored the European majority in the U.S.).
A court punishes a libeler via due process in which both the falsity and the harmful nature of the statement must be demonstrated to the court’s satisfaction. But truth is a perfectly adequate defense. If the truth is harmful or distasteful to a group, that’s just too bad, just as is the case for an individual. Of course, when people are interacting in good faith, there is no reason for not conveying the truth diplomatically and politely.
One must also consider the fact that to be consistent with principle, any law must apply equally to all parties. Therefore harsh criticisms of ‘whites’, ‘white society’, and ‘Western civilization’ would also have to be examined as potential cases of ‘hate speech’. In that case, would the words of Rev. Wright constitute an offense? Or those of the late literary darling of NY intellectuals, Susan Sontag, who retracted her remark that the white race is the cancer of human history by saying that it slandered cancer patients? To do otherwise would be to violate neutrality, one of the fundamental principles of, dare one say it, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ jurisprudence?
http://theoccidentalobserver.com/authors/Hilton-Waldron.html#Waldron