EUDC 2008 Grand fINAL: THW ban Nazi and Soviet symbols.
PM: Will Jones
PM speech:
James and I have this private museum, you might say, just a couple of things of mementos, things that make James smile in the evening. Because we’re not keen on criminalizing ourselves, we’re going to be quite clear about what we are doing.
We don’t think this is a debate about museums, we don’t think this is a debate about the educative function of symbols like hanging up a Nazi uniform in the Imperial War Museum. What we think this is about is the active and ideological use of symbols in political life, in public life.
Therefore, what we are banning in public life is all of this stuff, its use in rallies, its use by skinheads, its presence on monuments, and we accept that there may be a couple of cases where this line is hard to draw, so we say simply, where it’s ambiguous, we're going to ban it. We will not take the risk. You may ask where we’re doing this. The answer is wherever, wherever we find it. We think this is likely to be more of a problem in Poland than it is in Botswana, but if it is a problem in Botswana, we』ll do it there too.
I’m going to talk about two things.
Firstly I’m going to talk about public discourse and communicative action or, if you prefer, I’m going to talk about when it’s legitimate to ban things just because they are offensive and only because they are offensive.
Secondly, I’m going to talk about why we regard these symbols as extremely offensive. I don’t propose to spend too much time on that.
James is going to talk a little bit more about ideology oppression that sort of chat.
Firstly, when is it legitimate to ban things purely and only because they are offensive and when is it legitimate to limit a particular speech act.
Because we think that in general and we think the opposition will agree with me that there is a presumption in favoring free speech. We think it’s a kind of cool quite a lot of the time. But what we also think is that there’s no reason to regard freedom of speech as an overriding good in every circumstance, right. There’s no reason to believe that public debate is always good all of the time unless it’s the right sort of public good some of the time.
What we want to say, what we want to get very clear right from the start is that a speech act can be oppressive.
Not in the sense of me going, 「those Muslims you wanna go and beat them up,」 because that’s incitement, we think that should be illegal. But simply in the sense of saying, 「These people are scum. These people are worth nothing. These people are less than animals and they deserve to be treated as less than animals,」 when their incitement is there.
Now, why is that true?
That is true because the social world, the world in which you live, is constructed through language and through meaning. The way you understand yourself, the way you understand actions, the meaning you impart to actions is mediated through meaning and language, and all the rest of that. But we say that alone doesn’t mean a speech act can be oppressive.
That’s just a first step.
The second thing that needs to be true in order for a speech act to be oppressive is if that act is bound up in relations of power.
That’s why we display it in the museum is not oppressive, but why using it at a rally might be. It is because we think these symbols can and are used across Europe and in other places to intimidate people, to scare people, to make people feel like they cannot go out, to make people feel like they are less, to make people feel like their words do not count the same as other people’s words.
The test for that is: are these used in political and public life in relation to dominations? We are perfectly willing to accept that this may apply in other cases. We think that’s fine. We do want to ban hate media. We think that’s absolutely all right. Our test is quite simple: do citizens get deprived of fundamental goods through permitting these speech acts to take place. And we say that happens when these symbols are wielded by those in power.
POI:
If every element of these people’s lives is focused upon trying to intimidate those who they do not like, then something other than the symbol is going to identify them through their views, through the type of haircut they have, through the new symbol they choose or the clothing they have.
Response:
We may well ban other things. That’s fine. We think hate speech should also be banned. Bye-bye.
The final bit of that point, we think it is entirely legitimate for the state to not just monopolize, but control and shape public discourse in order to secure basic goods for its citizens, such as not feeling afraid, not feeling degraded, not feeling oppressed.
So secondly, why these symbols?
The first thing we say is there may be others. We think in a country James Dray comes from apartheid symbols that may occupy a similar role. We think things like celebrating memorabilia in Congo(unclear) might be similar too. We are happy to say that those principles that we』ve laid down here might work there as well.
But we say more generally, there is a lacuna in the current law, which is that we only pay attention to words when we ban incitement. We only pay attention to words when we ban hate speech or hate media. And we say that a symbol, a symbol is still a piece of shared communication, a symbol is still a piece of shared language, and can function in exactly the same way.
Also, we do think racist hate speech should be banned even if there’s no direct incitement because as I said before, we think it can still be oppressive.
But furthermore, we do think there are reasons to believe that these symbols are uniquely awful because they do not represent valid political ideologies at all.
Now, firstly we do think like a pluralist society is a kind of cool and we do think that in a pluralist society we like that people disagree about what the good is and how society should be organized. That’s fine.
But we also think that in order for a society to exist at all, we must at a minimum agree to live together. We must consent to associate as one society. And so we say a basic commitment to any ideology that wants to exist in a modern world must be a commitment to the equal concern and respect, which every single citizen deserves. We say a genuine pluralism is one where you have an overlapping consensus of people who disagree, but no overlapping consensus of reasonable doctrines of the good.
We say the problem is that these are ideologies that have perpetrated the barbaric slaughter of millions upon millions of people for no better reason than they were enemy of the proletariat or they were Jewish or they were gay or they were disabled or they were a gypsy or dozens of other things. We say that if you deny the basic rights of citizens if you say as an ideology there are people who should be exterminated, you are not of a valid ideology, you are evil. We say, you are not part of legitimate political discourse, and we are going to expunge you.
Therefore, because speech matters, because symbols matter and function as part of the language, too, and because these are really uniquely vile symbols that also matter, I’m very happy to propose.
Transcript+editing: Guangxinyang Deng