Laws against blasphemy must be strickenfrom the books and the very concept of blasphemy as a criminal offensemust be expunged from the minds of men.
6.1.2007
By Lars Hedegaard
President of the Danish Free Press Society
Dear organizers, ladies and gentlemen,
Thank you for inviting a representative of Denmark’s Free Press Society to give a keynote speech to this distinguished audience.
Perhaps I am not mistaken if I assume that the fact the a Dane has beenchosen may have something to do with my country’s recent experienceregarding the benefits and limitations of free speech.
Last week, on September the 30th, exactly a year had passed since theby now famous newspaper Jyllands-Posten published its equally famous –or is it infamous? – Muhammed cartoons.
To mark this anniversary – which was topnews all over the Danish press – an editor from the weeklyWeekendavisen asked a few people to write up a so-called democracycanon. To those of you not immediately familiar with the concept, acanon in this sense can be defined as a body of works that may beaccepted as axiomatic and universally binding in a field of study. Soto create a democracy canon means to select those works that may bedeemed indispensable if one wants to understand how democracy and freespeech came about in Denmark. A democracy canon is so to speak a listof sacred books – not in a religious sense, of course.
One of the organizations asked to suggest a democracy canon was theFree Press Society. So we had an occasion to review 250 years or so ofDanish history in order to pick 10-15 indispensable works by people whohad paved the way for the democratic system we enjoy today.
It turned out to be a learning experience.
The Fragility of Freedom: The Danish Example
First of all I was struck by how fragile the entire democratic edificeappears to be and how little it would take to demolish it. As hasactually happened several times over the course of the first 150 yearsof our democratizing process that lasted from approximately 1770 until1915.
It is true that Denmark got its free constitution in 1849 thusabolishing 190 years of royal absolutism. It is also true that thisconstitution established the principle of free speech – or rather theabolition of censorship. But this was really only the beginning of adevelopment that lasted well into the twentieth century and which wasin danger of being reversed or derailed at several junctures.