Last word
Liberties
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Poor Voltaire. Last year saw the 200th anniversary of his death. He deserved better of posterity, especially in his admired ngland. As it is, his concept of free expression remains at best a stunted growth. This country abounds with men and women who will fight to the death for other people's right to express views with which they happen to agree. The idea that you can detest, say, pornography or, say, racialist propaganda and yet defend the right to publish it is as far from most people's ken as higher "clear physics is from mine. Henry Ford said, Any colour you like as long as it's black. We say, Say what you like as long as nice.
As I remarked last week, this attitude has been institutionalised in the Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1976. Section 70 of the 1976 Act criminalises the act. of speaking or publishing anything by Which 'having regard to all the circumstances, hatred is likely to be stirred .up against any racial group in Great Britain'. The peculiarly objectionable feature of the Section is that it detracts from the vital Principle — one of our hardest-won free that where words are concerned What should concern the law is their effect " People's behaviour, not on their feelings. This was pointed out in a Spectator leading article (10 February) a propos of the case of Robert Relf. Relf, it may be remembe. red, is a fascist propagandist who was nnprisoned for talking of 'niggers out of the lungle'. As he passed sentence the judge 'rilliantly summarised our national attitude r° free speech: Englishmen could say what theY liked as long as they did so in 'temper,ate and moderate language'. Criticising the law and the sentence, we pointed out that nnless free speech could be abused — inteMperately and immoderately — it was not free. The reactions to this leader were as interesting as they were depressing. One letter as from Dr Jacob Gewirtz of the Board of uePuties of British Jews. He took the ell 'worn — indeed, dare I say? hackneyed— line that without such a law the horrors of !he Past might happen again: Relf had °egun to revive Nazi propaganda that had a generation earlier resulted in the mass murder of millions of people'. His letter in. troduced a secondary argument that the law protects individual people from °_,efamatory language (to a preposterous u,Tee, one might add), but his central claim was that Parliament had 'acted with great wisdom in recognising the nexus between racial incitement and genocide'. With respect, this is nonsense. As I tried to I, s..ow last week, the National Socialists did not come to power because there was too much free speech around during the Weimar years but for other reasons — enormously complicated reasons bound up with Germany's singular and ghastly history. Besides that, there is a short riposte to Dr Gewirtz: were the European Jews murdered because of a lack of State power or because of an excess of it? The question answers itself.
There is also a larger argument of principle about freedom of expression. It is one which we might not expect the Board of Deputies to adhere to (though I live in hope). It is one which we should certainly expect the National Council for Civil Liberties to stand by — if, that is, we knew the NCCL only by name. Perhaps I malign the NCCL, but I doubt it. Perhaps it has been furiously defending the civil liberties of National Fronters, but knowing its record it seems a better guess that the NCCL still confines itself to the rights of the Left.
What a contrast the United States presents! One recent controversy illustrates the continuing life there of the libertarian traditon on all parts of the political spectrum. Miss Joan Baez has been organising a petition protesting against the violation of human rights in 're-education' camps in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Put in a less pompous way, this means that there are maybe 200,000 Vietnamese locked in concentration camps for political reasons. Miss Baez's wish to publicise the fact is as much to her credit as it has dismayed some of her sillier followers.
She has come up against fierce opposition. 'A most energetic leader of the peace movement in the '60s and '70s', as he is described by Mr Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice, has told her that she was 'betraying' the Vietnamese. Messrs Dan and Phil Berrigan (ah, how the names take one back!) said that they had been assured by Quakers that the Vietnamese government was 'deeply concerned about human rights' (I have not made that up). Best of all, William Kunstler, whoever he may be, told Miss Baez that her petition was a 'cruel and wanton act', and then came straight out with it: 'I do not believe in public attacks on socialist countries, even when violations of human rights may occur.' That is the dark side of the American Left. The light side is that Miss Baez's name has been joined by those of Messrs Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginz berg, I.F. Stone and Hentoff, among others. I wonder whether a similar petition would be signed by equivalent figures in England. I wonder. But there is a more striking contrast yet between the two coun tries. Compare on the one hand the Relf case — and the whole ethos behind the Race Relations Act, and the British Left's attitude to free speech — and on the other the affair of the National Socialist Party of America and the Skokie march; contrast the NCCL and the American Civil Liberties Union. I shall tell the ACLU story next week.
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