Scoop
New Zealand, Monday, August 30, 2004 Opinion When Black
Shirts Frighten Us by Jim Peron MOBS of fundamentalist
Christians militaristically marching through our
streets, outfitted in black and giving scary
extended arm salutes scared a lot of people. It was
reminiscent of something more sinister which just
shows how out of touch Brian Tamaki and his
followers really are when it comes to political
reality. The PC Left (which has never been a friend
of freedom) has been in an uproar and is gearing up
to engage in a frontal assault on freedom of speech
yet again. And no doubt they1ll find allies on the
Right. The erosion of freedom has been a joint project
with Right and Left equally being able to take
credit for extending state power and trampling
individual liberty in the process. Now the Left is ready to force freedom of speech
into the boxing ring. The religious crowd landed
the poor victim with a Right hook and now the PC
elite are hoping for a knock out punch with a hard
Left to the jaw. They are proposing so-called hate
speech laws. The very concept of legislating speech
is reprehensible and a violation of the basic
principle of human equality. If all people have
equal rights then how is it that some people have
the right to tell other people what opinions they
may express? The mere process of defining what speech may be
uttered is inherently fascistic. It reeks of the
Übermenschen. The Fascists thought of
themselves as super men with the right to rule
others. As in Orwell's Animal Farm they hold
to the view that "all animals are equal but some
animals are more equal than others." Every advocate
of hate speech censorship is convinced that their
speech should be protected. It's their opponents
whose tongues must be shackled because their speech
is "bad", "incitement", "criminal", "group libel"
or any other of a dozen excuses to act like
mini-Fuhrers of the mind. Hate speech censors are
like the man described in a poem in Ambrose
Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary": "It is hardly fit/
To censure freely and fault to find/ With others
for sins that I'm not inclined/ Myself to
commit." Advocates of such laws know that hate speech is
the speech which they don1t commit. It's their
opponents they want to stifle. So the Right thinks
that vicious and bigoted speech about homosexuals
ought not be defined as hate speech. The Left --
which rankles with hatred for businessmen,
capitalists, fundamentalist Christians, the West,
etc. -- believes their speech should be left
untouched while their critics are gagged. The
hypocrisy of censors, Left and Right, is that
invariably they always want to censor someone other
than themselves. And they always start with the
unpleasant extremes first. 
RECENTLY we saw gleeful faux "civil libertarians"
using badly drafted legislation to keep
controversial historian David Irving from
visiting. Under the law anyone who has violated any
immigration law in any nation can be excluded from
coming here. So the most tyrannical nations in the
world are the criteria by which visitors to New
Zealand may be judged. Of course most of the time
it is not done this way. The law is selectively
enforced and reserved for those times when the
government finds it advantageous. It's tempting to
want to drag in Nanny State with her coercive
powers to put these people down. But real civil
libertarians can't do that.
H.L. Mencken wrote: "The trouble with fighting for human
freedom is that one spends most of one's time
defending scoundrels. For it is against
scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed,
and oppression must be stopped at the beginning
if it is to be stopped at all." Mencken was right. If we want to defend the
freedoms of decent people we have to defend the
freedom of scoundrels. If I want to make sure my
freedom of speech is secure then I have to defend
the freedom of speech of the Irvings and Tamakis of
the world. The well known publisher Victor Gollanz,
a Jew and a man of the Left, wrote in his book
"Our Threatened Values" that fascism is "not
some separate and isolated phenomenon, which can
magically be brought into existence by appealing to
people's reason or playing on their prejudices". It
is the "logical development of certain traits that
are in human nature". By censoring those we see as
fascists we strengthen those traits and "make
fascism more probable." Gollanz wrote: "The
strongest of all the antifascist traits is the
passion for spiritual and intellectual freedom; and
by so much as you restrict its play, by so much as
you nourish instead the sado-masochistic elements
in our nature, by so much as you introduce the
first thin wedge of authoritarianism, by just so
much do you bring a little nearer the very peril
you are anxious to avoid." Those are words that we
should remember when black shirts frighten us.
 Jim Peron is the executive
director of the Institute for Liberal
Values 
Dossier:
attempts by New Zealand Jews to stop David
Irving's 2004 visit FAQ:
Answers to frequently asked questions about Mr
Irving's visit-
Steven
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