As I write, Nick Griffin, leader of the far-right British National Party, and David Irving, Holocaust denier-in-chief, are preparing to speak to 500-odd smartly-dressed students and a pack of hacks at the Oxford Union Debating Society.
The OU's decision to invite a racist politician and an anti-Semitic historian to its hallowed halls has caused an almighty stink. A Conservative Member of Parliament resigned his life membership of the Union, and various other British bigwigs— including Des Browne, Secretary of State for Defence, and a black TV presenter called June Sarpong—have cancelled planned appearances at the OU.
The cry goes up around Britain:
"How can supposedly brainy students provide a
Leave the Gag Off So He Can Make an Ass of Himself: The British National Party's Nick Griffin platform for these charlatans?"
For me, the most shocking thing is not that Griffin and Irving have been
provided with a platform—after all, their weasel ideas are better out in the
open where we can at least take potshots at them—but the issue they have been asked
to pontificate about: the right to free speech!
The OU debate is titled "This house believes that even extremists have a right to freedom of expression," and Griffin and Irving are on the side of defending freedom of expression. Neither of them has a libertarian bone in his body. They wouldn't recognise free speech if it jumped them in an alley.
Irving's response to Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust, in which she exposed him as a fact-fiddling denier of the Nazis' extermination of half of Europe's Jews, was to demand that she pulp every copy. He then sued her for libel (and thankfully lost). So Irving supports freedom of expression for extremists, but not for American professors. Especially Jewish ones.
Griffin's British National Party (BNP) is founded on a profoundly authoritarian programme of restricting immigration into Britain. Asking these two characters to defend freedom of expression, or freedom of any kind, is a bit like asking Mark Chapman to speak on healthy hero worship.
That two fascists/fascist sympathisers can hold forth in Oxford about free speech is actually an indictment of the British left and British liberals. So-called progressives have abandoned the cause of free speech in recent years, which has allowed cranky elements on the right to pose as the true upholders of open debate.
Increasingly, the British left's response to outrageous or offensive ideas is to demand censorship. Radical students call for "No Platform" on campus for fascists, Zionists and other "extremists." The radical-left Anti-Nazi League campaigns for the banning of BNP TV broadcasts, and for the closure of BNP bookshops. (I guess asking the police to shut down a bookshop is an eco-friendly alternative to burning all the books inside.)
Meanwhile, mainstream
left-leaning commentators and activists demand tougher legislation against "hat
Um, Yes it Is: By seeking to prohibit "hate speech" and "incitement to religious hatred," the left has damaged freedom of speech itselfe
speech" or "incitement to religious hatred." They seem to believe that if
extremists are allowed to spout fascistic nonsense or diss religious minorities
then the mass of the population—like Pavlovian attack dogs—will go out
Jew-baiting and immigrant-bashing. Their demand for censorship is motivated not
only by a loathing for extremists, but also by a fear of that unpredictable
blob, the public.
It is the left's lack of faith in open democratic debate that has led it to embrace new forms of censorship. Yet the proper way to deal with racist riff-raff is to lance their arguments with the sword of disagreement in a loud and rowdy public debate. Seeking to silence them only allows their ideas to fester, unchallenged, like a boil under the skin of British society.
In taking a censorious turn, the British left has failed to challenge dodgy ideologies head-on—and it has handed the baton of free speech to Irving, Griffin and other chancers. The question is not why were these two provided a platform at Oxford, but why are there so few others willing to defend freedom of expression today?
NEXT: Read about the ruckus over this post, in The Judean People's Front, the Blogosphere, and Jewcy