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crimes against
FREEDOM OF SPEECH

by
NOAM CHOMSKY
_______________________
Noam
Chomsky, University Professor at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, founder of the modern science of linguistics
and political activist, is a powerhouse of anti-imperialist
activism in the United States today. The speech is excerpted
from the 2010 Istanbul Conference and is republished
with the permission of
ZNET.
In this valley
of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.
T.S. Eliot
The
title of one of our earlier sessions was Cogito, “I
think.” That may serve as a useful reminder that even
more fundamental than the right of free expression is the
right to think. And that has not gone unchallenged. Right
here for example. I suppose the most famous case is that
of Ismail Besikci, who has endured many years in prison
on the charge of having committed “thought crimes.”
And even worse, for having dared to put his thoughts into
words, in his documentation of crimes against the Kurds
in Syria, Iran, Iraq — and finally Turkey, the unpardonable
offense.
I am sure you know the facts better than I do, so I will
not review them. If this brave and honorable man had been
suffering this ordeal in Russia, or Iran after the overthrow
of the Shah, or some other enemy state, he would be internationally
known and honored, and outrage about the savagery of his
tormentors would know no bounds. But not in this case. One
reason is that among his crimes is to have refused a $10,000
prize by the U.S. Fund for Free Expression in protest against
Washington’s support for Turkish repression. Respectable
people understand that this is a topic that “it wouldn’t
do” to mention, to borrow from Orwell’s unpublished
introduction to Animal Farm, which I mentioned yesterday.
It certainly wouldn’t do to mention the fact that
Clinton was supplying 80% of the arms as Turkish state terror
in the southeast reached shocking levels through the 1990s,
the flow increasing as the atrocities increased, peaking
in 1997 when the US sent more arms to Turkey than throughout
the entire Cold War period combined up to the onset of the
insurgency. It particularly wouldn’t do to mention
that in the same year, 1997, Clinton’s foreign policy
entered a “noble phase” with a “saintly
glow” according to a distinguished correspondent in
the New York Times, his contribution to a chorus
of self-glorification on the part of Western intellectuals
that may well have no parallel in history. This disgraceful
episode was a post-cold war contribution by the intellectual
classes of the West to provide justification for expansion
of NATO, and to provide some new pretext for intervention
with the collapse of the traditional claim that the Russians
are coming. Under the newly declared mandate, the self-designated
“enlightened states,” directed by their noble
leaders in Washington, must now discard the misguided “old
anti-interventionist structure” instituted after World
War II. They must be ready to act when they believe the
cause to be just, and should not be “daunted by fears
of destroying some lofty, imagined temple of law enshrined
in the U.N. Charter’s anti-interventionist proscriptions.”
I am quoting a distinguished liberal professor of international
law at the prestigious Fletcher School of Diplomacy, but
he was only one of a grand chorus, including many of the
most famous and revered figures in the western Pantheon.
Clearly, such a mission could not be tainted by mere facts,
of which Clinton’s massive support for terrible Turkish
atrocities was not even close to the most horrendous.
But even unacceptable thought without the added crime of
expression has not gone unchallenged. The tortures of the
Inquisition of the Catholic Church, the ordeals of English
common law, and similar devices of medieval and early modern
Europe were designed to unearth and punish unexpressed thoughts,
hidden heresies. And in some respects that remains true
of contemporary torture, including the practices of the
enlightened states: the torture that has been taking place
in Guantanamo, Bagram, and other US bases, and in the countries
selected by Bush and Obama for rendition — meaning
torture — to be sure, with the soothing words that
the torture states to which they are being sent have given
assurances that the prisoners will be treated with the utmost
humanity. The official claim is that the harsh interrogation
procedures — torture, to be honest — are an
effort to elicit information, that is, thoughts that are
in people’s minds, even if unexpressed. It may be
worth nothing that the most respected and successful interrogators,
like Matthew Alexander, view these procedures with contempt,
charging that they elicit no useful information and in fact
create terrorists, and recommending that the US adopt the
much more successful practices of more civilized societies
like Indonesia.
But the leadership of the enlightened states prefers torture
to expose thought crimes. In Guantanamo, so we have learned,
the worst torture was demanded by the highest level of the
government, by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, in their
fanatic pursuit of evidence that would link Saddam Hussein
and Osama bin Laden, and thus provide some shred of justification
for their criminal invasion of Iraq.
The same is true of less brutal state actions, such as the
significant increase in wiretapping in much of the world.
That includes an intensive campaign in the past several
years in the Eastern provinces of Turkey, particularly targeting
the Democratic Society Party (DTP), the party that is “considered
the legal representation of the Kurds in the process for
the solution of the Kurdish question,” in the words
of Emin Aktar, the head of the Diyarbakir Bar Association.
The information collected was the basis for the wave of
arrests and severe charges against non-violent activists
of the Party shortly after it won a stunning victory in
the municipal elections of March 2009. These actions have
“destroyed hopes of a peaceful solution” to
this long and bitter conflict, Aktar commented.
One outcome is the trial scheduled for next week of 151
of the activists who have been detained, some for long periods.
Among them is Muharrem Erbey, vice-chairperson of the Human
Rights Association of Turkey, who has been in prison on
accusations of “membership of a terrorist organization”
for almost a year, charged with such crimes as speaking
on the US government channel Voice of America about abuses
against the Kurdish population. In the words of the official
indictment, by describing these well-documented abuses he
aimed “to put our country in a difficult position
in international platforms by asserting that the state ignores
the supposed maltreatment of Kurdish people carried out
by police and soldiers in eastern provinces” —
hardly a well-guarded secret. The charges include as well
work that Mr. Erbey has carried out with the Dutch embassy
and the Olof Palme International Centre in Sweden. He is
also charged with seeking to find doctors to treat people
who were wounded during demonstrations. Also coming up for
trial is Osman Baydemir, re-elected by a large majority
as mayor of Diyarbakir in the elections which seem to have
triggered the current wave of repression, which some analysts
see as revenge for the DKP electoral victory, a conclusion
that seems all too plausible. Baydemir faces 33 years in
prison for speech and symbolic actions. The sentence might
be considered rather light in comparison, say, to that of
Vedat Kursun, the former editor of Turkey’s only Kurdish-language
daily newspaper, sentenced to 166 years in prison for “doing
propaganda for a terrorist organization.” Even that
could be taken as a sign of the leniency of the courts;
a Prosecutor of the High Criminal Court in Diyarbakir had
demanded a 525 year prison sentence, on the charge of “aiding
and abetting” an illegal organization and “glorifying
crimes and criminals.” His successor as editor has
been sentenced to 21 years for similar crimes (Kurdish HR
Report Legal Review, KHRP 2010 17 KHRP LR). Of special significance
to me personally, and to my MIT colleague John Tirman, director
of the Center for International Studies at MIT, are the
many trials of the owner of Aram publishing House Fatih
Tas for “insulting Turkish identity” by publishing
translations of our documentation of the massive US support
for Turkish crimes against the Kurds, crimes that I am sure
I need not review here — 21 court cases as of July
2006, the latest information I have.
Wiretapping and other forms of surveillance are of course
not limited to Turkey. They are prevalent in the enlightened
West. Many of the constraints imposed in the US years ago
have been lifted by presidents Bush and Obama, though the
courts have struck down some of their efforts, most recently
the attempt of the Obama Justice Department to justify illegal
wiretapping by appeal to the need to protect “state
secrets” — in this case to protect crimes of
the Bush administration from exposure. In this and in other
cases Obama is going even beyond Bush in violation of civil
rights by illegal means, as several civil libertarians have
rightly charged.
In my opening remarks, and again in the Quo Vadis session,
I mentioned that rights are won by struggle, not as gifts
from above, and must be defended the same way. As the framer
of the US Constitution, James Madison, warned, a parchment
barrier offers no protection against tyranny. Words on paper
are not enough, as history most eloquently informs us. I
also suggested that the US and Turkey serve as good illustrations.
Perhaps it may be useful to expand on these comments.
The observation that words do not suffice, and that even
when rights are won on paper they must be vigilantly defended,
applies not only to freedom of speech, but much more generally.
One might think, for example, that the basic rights of Americans
are guaranteed by the 14th amendment to the US Constitution,
passed in 1868 with the primary goal of granting rights
to freed slaves, though virtually never used for that purpose.
Its wording is quite straightforward. It declares that no
state action may “deprive any person of life, liberty,
or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any
person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the
laws.” Clear and unambiguous, but unacceptable. The
powerful and privileged at once considered its scope to
be both too narrow and too broad. The problem was that the
phrase “any person” might be understood to refer
to any person, and that is unacceptable. The issues remain
very much alive today.
The Courts decided long ago to extend the concept “person”
to include collective legal fictions created and supported
by state power: corporations, which now dominate the economy
and the society, and increasingly the political system.
Last January the Bush Supreme Court appointees overturned
a century of precedents and sharply extended the right of
corporations to buy elections. The grounds for the verdict
are that money is speech, and corporations are persons,
so to deprive them of the right to buy elections would deprive
these fictional persons of their constitutional rights of
freedom of speech. These expanded rights of unaccountable
state-backed private tyrannies are being quite effectively
exercised in the congressional campaigns that are underway
right now, in a concerted effort to ensure that Congress
is taken over by an extreme wing of business representatives.
The phrase “any person” in the Constitution
is considered to be not only too narrow, but also too broad.
Taken literally, it includes undocumented aliens, clearly
persons, the naive might think. To remedy this defect of
the Constitution, the courts have been restricting the notion
of person to safeguard the domain of rights from these creatures
of human shape and form. Not being persons, thanks to the
wisdom of the law, they are not persons, hence do not enjoy
the rights of persons. All of this is having much more severe
effects today with the anti-immigrant hysteria that is sweeping
the Western world, a very ominous development with painful
consequences for those excluded from the category of persons
by judicial decision.
The same principles apply to the First Amendment to the
US Constitution, which on superficial reading seems to protect
freedom of speech. Until the 20th century, protection of
freedom of speech rarely received authorization from the
courts. After the first World War, there were some famous
expressions of support for freedom of speech by Supreme
Court justices, but these were in dissents to Court rulings,
and the dissents were quite weak. Severe violations persisted,
backed by the courts, among them the notorious Smith Act,
which banned teaching, advocacy, or association that might
encourage overthrow of the government, in the judgment of
the courts — not unlike the reasoning that the Turkish
government is employing today in its repressive actions.
It was only 50 years ago that the Supreme Court began to
reach decisions that carried the US over the threshold of
serious protection of freedom of speech, in fact to a level
beyond anywhere else in the world to my knowledge. From
1959 to 1974 the Supreme Court dealt with more freedom of
speech cases than in its entire previous history, a reflection
of this new concern for essential human rights. The context
was the rising civil rights movement. The first major victory
for free speech was in 1964, when the Court struck down
the law passed in 1798 that ruled that criticism of the
government is a crime, the doctrine of seditious libel.
It should be noted that the doctrine remains in force in
other Western countries, including Britain and Canada, where
it has recently been invoked. The 1964 US Supreme Court
decision set a very high standard for the charge of libel.
It overturned a libel suit that charged the New York
Times with defaming the State of Alabama by publishing
an advertisement by Martin Luther King and civil rights
leaders that protested the brutality of racist law officers.
Again, that should be familiar here.
Under the impact of the activism of the 1960s, the Court
later reached an even higher standard, one that I believe
is unique in the world. This 1969 decision bars only speech
that incites imminent criminal action. So if you and I intend
to rob a store, you are carrying a gun, and I say “shoot,”
that is not protected speech. But short of that circumstance,
speech is protected. The doctrine is controversial, but
at least in my opinion, it sets a proper standard. Adopting
that standard would be one mark of true enlightenment.
In a review of History and Reality of Free Speech in
the U.S., legal historian David Kairys points out that
“no right of free speech, either in law or practice,
existed until the transformations of law” between
the two great 20th century wars. “Before that time,
one spoke publicly only at the discretion of local, and
sometimes federal, authorities, who often prohibited what
they, the local business establishment, or other powerful
segments of the community did not want to hear.” He
stresses the important point that “the periods of
stringent protection and enlargement of civil rights and
civil liberties correspond to the periods in which mass
movements posing a credible challenge to the existing order
have demanded such rights,” including the right of
free expression. The major agents of defense of civil rights
have been the left, labor, and other popular movements,
forcefully in the 1960s.
More generally, to quote the anarchist writer Rudolf Rocker
in a classic study 80 years ago, “Political rights
do not originate in parliaments; they are rather forced
upon them from without. And even their enactment into law
has for a long time been no guarantee of their security.
They do not exist because they have been legally set down
on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the
ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair
them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace.”
A stronger and sharper version of Madison’s principle.
In conformity with these principles, the highest level of
protection for freedom of speech in the US was achieved
at the peak of activism, 40 years ago. As activism declined,
the courts began to chip away at these protections. The
most extreme attack on freedom of speech was under Obama:
the Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. Supporting the Obama
administration, the far-right Court justices granted the
government rights of repression that carry us back many
decades. The decisions criminalize speech, or any other
action, which the government claims may lend support and
encouragement to organizations on the government’s
terrorist list, a legal doctrine quite familiar here. By
the lax standards on which Obama insisted, even former president
Jimmy Carter could be charged. I was rather surprised that
the defense did not even ask the Court to consider the strong
rulings of the 1960s, which are apparently taken to be too
extreme by now. The case passed with little notice, apart
from a few civil libertarians who condemned it.
But even their criticisms were for the most part too narrow.
They rarely addressed the validity of the terrorist list
itself. The list is proclaimed by the government, virtually
without independent review or any need for supporting argument.
As should be expected under such circumstances, the list
is quite arbitrary, reflecting current political demands.
Just to take one illustration, in 1982 the Reagan administration
decided to provide direct support for Saddam Hussein’s
invasion of Iran. In order to do so, they had to remove
Iraq from the list of states supporting terror. Then followed
Donald Rumsfeld’s visit to Baghdad to arrange badly
needed aid to the murderous tyrant, who, as you know, went
on to use WMD, slaughtering 100s of thousands of Iranians,
then turning the weapons against Iraqi Kurds with lethal
effect, always with the support of Washington; the Reagan
administration barred protests, and even sought to blame
the crimes on Iran. The US finally entered the war directly,
compelling Iran to capitulate. That did not end the love
affair with Saddam. In 1989, President George Bush #1 not
only expanded the aid, but also invited Iraqi nuclear engineers
to the US for advanced training in nuclear weapons development.
In April 1990, Bush sent a high-level senatorial delegation
to Iraq, headed by Senator Robert Dole, Republican candidate
for president six years later. Their mission was to convey
the President’s warm regards to his good friend Saddam,
and to assure him that he should disregard critical comments
by some US journalists, who cannot be silenced because of
the annoying protections for freedom of speech. A few months
later, Saddam made his first mistake, disobeying orders,
or perhaps misunderstanding them, and invaded Kuwait. Instantly
he made the sharp transition from favored friend and ally
to the new Hitler. There is no need to carry the story forward
from there.
When Saddam was tried and convicted under US military occupation,
his major crimes were completely ignored, perhaps because
too many doors would have opened. He was charged with indirect
involvement in killings that were quite minor by his standards,
in 1982, the year in which Washington adopted him as a favored
friend, removing him from the terrorist list.
When Saddam was removed from the list in 1982, there was
a gap to be filled. The Reagan administration added Cuba
to the list, perhaps in recognition of the fact that the
large-scale state terrorist operations that the Kennedy
administration had launched against Cuba were again peaking,
including the shooting down of a Cuban airliner, killing
76 people. The perpetrator is now living happily in Florida,
along with other leading terrorists.
All of this is politely suppressed in the media and commentary,
in the West generally as far as I can determine, confirming
Orwell’s judgment about the suppression of unpopular
ideas in free societies, by voluntary subordination to power.
Such “intentional ignorance,” as it is sometimes
called, is routine, a matter that bears quite directly on
the practical meaning of freedom of speech. Crimes of one’s
own state are typically suppressed or ignored, while those
of enemies arouse a great show of anguish, and wonder that
humans can be so evil. This appears to be close to a universal
principle of intellectual history, though there are some
exceptions. Turkey is perhaps the most striking recent exception,
as I mentioned yesterday. The pathology is rampant in the
free democratic western societies, as has been documented
to the skies. And the moral burden is clearly far higher
when there is virtually no punishment for telling the truth,
certainly nothing like what is faced by honest people in
much more repressive societies.
It is misleading to give illustrations, because the pattern
is so close to uniform. But I will mention just one to illustrate
standard practice. For many years, economist and media critic
Edward Herman has been investigating media coverage of what
he calls “worthy” and “unworthy”
victims, the former those abused by enemies, the latter
our victims, therefore unworthy of concern. As he and others
have demonstrated to a level of confidence rarely found
outside the hard sciences, the worthy victims elicit enormous
coverage and a great show of anguish, and their suffering
is used as justification for increasing our own resort to
violence. The unworthy ones, in contrast, are unnoticed
and quietly forgotten. Ismail Besikci is one of innumerable
examples of an unworthy victim. The Czech dissident Vaclav
Havel is a worthy victim, famous almost to the level of
reverence because of his courageous defense of freedom of
expression under Communist rule, for which he suffered several
years of imprisonment. Among the many unworthy victims at
the same time are six leading Latin American intellectuals,
Jesuit priests, whose heads were blown off by a elite battalion
in El Salvador, fresh from renewed training at the John
F. Kennedy special warfare school. The assassinations were
authorized by the high command, which was in very close
contact with the US Embassy. The facts were at first denied
by the Embassy, then quickly forgotten. With some justice,
one might say, because this was only one short chapter in
Reagan’s murderous terrorist wars in the 1980s.
In a forthcoming study, Herman continues this work, providing
such examples as the following recent pair: Neda Agha-Soltan,
aged 27, shot dead while participating in a peaceful street
demonstration in Tehran last June; and Isis Obed Murillo,
aged 19, shot dead while participating in a peaceful demonstration
in Honduras shortly after. Agha-Soltan was the victim of
an enemy state. She merited 736 newspaper articles and 231
reports on TV, radio, and other sources. Murrillo was the
victim of a government installed by a military coup and
recognized by the Obama administration, though few others.
She merited 8 newspaper articles and one other report. The
100-1 ratio is not in the least unusual.
In further support of the distinction between worthy and
unworthy victims, exposure of standard practice, however
massive, however grotesque, has almost no impact. It is
consigned to that category of things that “it wouldn’t
do to say” — or even to think. Such measures
of voluntary suppression operate with quite impressive effectiveness.
They cast a bright light on how far we have to go in the
self-declared enlightened states for true realization of
the right of freedom of thought and of speech. Even in these
states, which have indeed registered considerable progress
over the past centuries, much more is needed than formal
laws and court decisions. What is needed is a culture of
freedom and intellectual independence, a culture of functioning
democracy.
One might think that this should not be a problem in Western
countries, notably the United States, where political leaders
and commentators passionately proclaim Washington’s
dedication to extending the blessings of democracy worldwide.
So the official story holds. But again, it useful to remember
Orwell’s warnings. Does the story have any validity?
Has US policy really been guided by the dedication to advance
a democratic culture in which freedom of speech and other
rights can thrive?
There has been serious scholarly study of the matter. The
most extensive scholarly work is by Thomas Carothers, former
head of the Law and Democracy Project of the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace. Carothers describes himself as
a neo-Reaganite and is a very strong advocate of democracy
promotion. He served in the Reagan State Department, working
on democracy promotion. He regards these programs as “sincere,”
though a “failure,” and a systematic failure.
He explains that where US influence was least, in the southern
cone of Latin America, progress towards democracy was greatest,
despite Reagan’s attempts to impede it by embracing
right-wing dictators. Where US influence was strongest,
in the regions nearby, progress was least. The reason, Carothers
explains, is that Washington sought to maintain “the
basic order of what, historically at least, are quite undemocratic
societies” and to avoid “populist-based change
in Latin America — with all its implications for upsetting
economic and political orders and heading off in a leftist
direction.” Therefore the US would tolerate only “limited,
top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting
the traditional structures of power with which the United
States has long been allied.”
In broader studies, Carothers shows that the conclusions
generalize. The US consistently supports democracy when
doing so conforms to strategic and economic objectives,
typically in enemy domains; and the US consistently opposes
democracy when it would conflict with such overriding interests,
typically within its own domains, where the opposition can
be extremely brutal. Carothers regards this as a kind of
strange pathology: leaders are “schizophrenic.”
Other commentators take this to show that leaders are acting
inconsistently, observing a double standard. Another way
to describe the facts is that they are acting quite consistently,
observing the single standard of protecting power and privilege.
But that conclusion passes beyond legitimate bounds.
All of this should be quite familiar in Turkey. You will
recall, no doubt, that when the US was planning to invade
Iraq, it sought to mobilize support among its allies. Some
agreed, some refused. That led Donald Rumsfeld to enunciate
his famous distinction between “old Europe,”
the bad guys, and “New Europe,” the hope for
democracy. Old Europe included Germany and France, where
the governments demonstrated their contempt for democracy
by adopting the position of the large majority of the population.
Washington was so incensed that in the Senate Cafeteria,
fried potatoes were no longer called “French fries”;
rather “freedom fries.” The most stellar representatives
of New Europe were Italy’s Berlusconi and Spain’s
Aznar, who demonstrated their love for democracy by overruling
an even larger majority of the population. Berlusconi was
invited to the White House and Aznar was invited to join
the summit where Bush and Blair declared war. At the time
he enjoyed the support of 2% of the population.
The most dramatic example was Turkey, where the government
adopted the position of 95% of the population and rejected
Washington’s demands. Turkey was bitterly condemned
in the national press for lacking “democratic credentials.”
Colin Powell, the official moderate of the Bush administration,
announced harsh punishment for this act of disobedience.
Paul Wolfowitz took the most extreme position. He denounced
the Turkish military for not compelling the government to
follow Washington’s orders, and demanded that military
leaders apologize, and say “We made a mistake”
by overruling virtually unanimous public opinion. “Let’s
figure out how we can be as helpful as possible to the Americans,”
they should say, thus demonstrating their understanding
of democracy. The most prominent leading liberal commentator
for the Washington Post, former editor of the International
Herald Tribune, declared Wolfowitz to be the “idealist
in chief” of the Bush administration, whose sole flaw
might be that he is “too idealistic — that his
passion for the noble goals of the Iraq war might overwhelm
the prudence and pragmatism that normally guide war planners.”
The rest of the elite press in the US and Britain chimed
in as well, declaring that his “passion is the advance
of democracy,” that “promotion of democracy
has been one of the most consistent themes of his career.”
They scrupulously avoided reviewing his career, which is
one of brutal contempt for democracy, much as he revealed
in the case of Turkey’s democratic deviation.
Bush and Blair went to war because Saddam had not ended
his non-existent programs of developing WMD. That was the
“single question,” both leaders forcefully reiterated.
When the “single question” was answered the
wrong way, the state propaganda systems instantly devised
a new reason: the goal was to promote democracy. With very
rare exceptions, the media and scholarship instantly adopted
the new Party Line, hailing Bush for his Reaganite dedication
to democracy. Enthusiasm was not entirely uniform, however.
In Iraq, 1% of the population accepted the claim, 5% felt
that the US intended to help Iraqis, and most of the rest
believed the unspeakable obvious: that the US invaded for
economic and strategic reasons, as was finally conceded,
quietly but clearly, after years of violence and destruction.
From such events as these, we learn again that the task
of achieving authentic freedom of expression remains a very
difficult one, despite many achievements. I have spoken
of the US and Turkey, but to keep to them is misleading.
In free and democratic Europe there are many serious barriers
to freedom of speech. To illustrate with a recent example,
I had an interview a few months ago with the New Statesman
in England, an old and respected journal of the left. I
was asked what I thought about Obama’s winning the
Nobel Prize for peace. I responded that it was not the worst
choice: the prize had been given to outright war criminals,
like Henry Kissinger. The editors informed me that the reference
to Kissinger must be deleted, in fear of England’s
onerous libel laws, which are an international scandal.
In the US, if you accuse me of libeling you, you have to
demonstrate my malicious intent. In Britain the burden is
reversed: I have to prove that I had no malicious intent,
an almost impossible burden. I refused to withdraw the statement
and instead suggested that they include some of the obvious
evidence, for example, Kissinger’s orders to the US
military calling for “a massive bombing of Cambodia;
anything that flies on anything that moves.” It would
be hard to find a comparable call for genocide in the archival
record. The orders were carried out. Rural Cambodia was
subjected to more bombing than the entire Pacific theater
during World War II, with consequences that we do not know,
because we do not investigate our own crimes, though one
consequence is known: the bombing changed the Khmer Rouge
from a marginal force to a huge army of enraged peasants,
bent on taking revenge. Adding that evidence was not enough
to satisfy the editors, and on the advice of their lawyer,
the statements were eliminated. That is far from the worst
case. Britain’s disgraceful laws have even been used
to put a small newspaper out of business for daring to challenge
the claims of major media. Lacking the resources to confront
the power of a great corporation, the small journal capitulated.
All of this proceeded with to the applause of the left-liberal
press.
France is much worse. It has laws on the books that effectively
grant the state the right to determine Historical Truth
and to punish deviation from it, laws that Stalin and Goebbels
would have admired. These laws are used regularly though
selectively. Primarily they are used, with much cynical
posturing, to punish questioning of the Nazi Holocaust.
The term “cynical” is entirely appropriate.
Right at the same time the intellectual classes remain silent
about France’s own participation in monstrous slaughters,
which we would certainly call genocide if perpetrated by
enemies. We are, in fact, witnessing the cynicism right
at this moment. Far worse than denying the Holocaust would
be punishing the victims, exactly what France is now doing,
by illegally expelling Roma — Gypsies — to misery
in Romania. They too were victims of the Holocaust, much
in the manner of Jews. This too passes without comment.
I have only skimmed the surface. It is unfortunately all
too easy to continue. The lesson is stark and clear. Everywhere
in the world there are serious impediments to freedom of
expression, and they often lead to severe punishment. And
even where substantial victories have been won by popular
struggle, constant vigilance and dedication is needed to
defend them. Beyond that, we are very far from having reached
the stage of a genuine democratic culture in which thought
and expression are truly free. That remains a major task
for the future, one with tremendous implications.
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