Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Twitter lost their censorship cherry when they took what was an unprecedented step for them, shutting down an account due to the politics of the owner, a German neo-Nazi group. Like the rest of you, I can’t be bothered to feel sorry for the fascist morons in question. It’s also true that groups like this one are quite illegal in Germany, which is understandable.
While I can certainly sympathize with the desire to keep people like this in check, and Germany is certainly well-motivated to keep control of right-wing extremists in their midst. I’m just not sure they are going about it the right way. Right now there are 25,000 neo-Nazis or similar right-wing extremists in Germany. In the U.S., where such activity is merely frowned upon and socially ostracized, their numbers are tiny in comparison to those in Germany.
I hold firm to the belief that tolerance for extremist, offensive ideas is a more effective weapon against those who hold those beliefs. When you take the German approach of imposing legal sanctions against groups because of their beliefs, it doesn’t have the desired effect. This drives the target underground, forcing them to find alternate means of communication, which actually makes the job of tracking these groups exponentially harder. When they are allowed to exist openly, even if grudgingly as we do here, the authorities know who they are, who to watch, and where to listen. Hate groups that operate in this way are probably more aware they are under closer scrutiny. Those who function as outlaws assume their secrets are safe from scrutiny, and they’re likely to be right about that.
It’s an axiom that is poorly understood by those in power that official sanction is usually counterproductive against things that will continue to exist regardless of the laws against it. Whether it concerns alcohol, drugs, guns, or prostitution, prohibition is often a very effective method of deregulation. By comparison, legal alcohol is tightly regulated. We control who can sell it, who can buy it, where we can sell it, and what’s in it so it’s safer. Despite the laws against it, and actually because of them, there are few actual real-world controls on where dangerous narcotics are sold, to whom they are sold, and how they are made. If a drug dealer wanted to sell crystal meth cut with plutonium from van just outside an elementary school, the only thing actually stopping him is his or her conscience.
Sex workers operating outside the law can be reduced little more than slaves, especially when we’re talking about streetwalkers in the cities. Those who operate legally tend to have the same protections as any employee. You may not approve of the practice, but you can’t deny that the laws against it actually make things worse for those involved. Well, you can deny that, but you’d be practicing self-deception.
In both cases, as it was with prohibition, forcing something underground allows it to slip through our official fingers and operate without actual restriction. Those who advocate for the prohibitionary approach enjoy the Pyrrhic victory of occupying the supposedly moral high ground, but the real-world consequences are often devastating.
Bigotry and racism are time-worn facets of the human condition. Hatred of the “other” has been part of our make-up since the day the first homo sapiens split into more than one tribe. It is not usually affected by laws seeking to stifle it. In fact, hatred of the other can be intensified when those nurturing the hate feel like officialdom is siding with the “enemy” and against them. A persecution complex is almost a necessary component of bigotry, and laws like those in Germany just give the neo-Nazis something else they can blame on Jews and immigrants.
Freedom of speech and association is a double-edged sword, in that we are forced to share this basic tent pole of liberty with those whose opinions we find repugnant. Some of us find ourselves thinking, surely the founders of our nation did not mean to protect that kind of speech. The First Amendment cannot apply to those people, can it? Unfortunately for our comfort, freedom of speech has to be applied to those we most want to censor. Only by protecting the least noble sentiment can we truly guarantee the freedom of expression for the best of us, for the rebels who will someday change the world for the better.
This does mean that the Klan and White Aryan Resistance enjoy the same rights as Occupy Wall Street, as does the freak show we know as Westboro Baptist Church. Their exercise of these freedoms is unseemly and does not reflect well on us as a society, but fortunately those who oppose them enjoy exactly the same freedom, plus the added advantage of not being neanderthals. More importantly, extending freedom of expression to those who least deserve it has the following benefits.
Freedom of speech allows the worst among us to self-identify. When a neo-Nazi gives a “white power” salute in the United States, he is in effect raising his hand to admit that he’s a defective moron and should be watched carefully.
Freedom of speech functions like a pressure relief valve for the small but fevered brains of these useless individuals. Marches, rallies, speeches, blog posts, and tweets give them a (relatively) harmless outlet for their misdirected energies. Those without that freedom will still hate, but they seethe and stew in private and often the first warning we get is a baseball bat to the head of an Ethiopian immigrant. Obviously, freedom does not prevent 100% of hate crimes, but I firmly believe it drastically minimizes the risk.
Freedom of speech forces bigoted ideas to swim in the Darwinian tide pool known as the marketplace of ideas, where they are ill-equipped for survival. Where there is less freedom, bigoted ideas are forced through less public channels, where they are often unchallenged. This appears to have the effect of making recruitment more effective. Racist hate groups do appear to be more numerous and organized in Germany, where their freedoms are explicitly curtailed, than they are in the United States, where they have the same freedoms as the rest of us, but are presently a political and statistical irrelevancy.
It’s obviously unwise to dismiss the danger posed by racists and other bigots, no matter how small their numbers. It only takes one carload of small-minded, dickless yahoos to claim the life of another James Byrd or Matthew Shepard. Still, while organized hate groups remain a dangerous presence in Europe, their American spiritual cousins are a disorganized political non-entity, barely numerous or cohesive enough to constitute a mob. Our approach appears to neutralize such people far more effectively than Germany’s.
So while I shed no tear for Besseres Hannover, the hate group affected by Twitter’s decision, and understand that Twitter is just complying with German law, it doesn’t mean that I agree this is the best way to handle the problem. If results are your barometer, it clearly isn’t.