Dissenters Are Now “Free Speech Nuts”

A mob hacked to death secular blogger Niloy Chakrabartu, who used the pen name Niloy Neel, on Friday in Bangladesh. He recently posted on Facebook that two strangers followed him after he attended a protest over Ananta Bijoy Das’s murder, the secular blogger murdered in May. He claimed the police “refused to register his complaint.”

“He was critical against religions and wrote against Islamist, Hindu, Christian and Buddhist fundamentalism,” stated Asif Mohiuddin, a blogger who survived an attack in 2013.

Despite all this evidence, the police [in Bangladesh] have lashed out at the blogger community.

“Do not cross the limit. Do not hurt anyone’s religious belief,” exclaimed Inspector General of Police AKM Shahidul Hoque. [breitbart.com 8-10-15]

Who killed this secular blogger in Bangladesh? Obviously, religious fanatics. Islamic terrorist groups were eager to take responsibility for the murder, as always.

Who or what, other than ISIS, makes these killings possible? The police, for one. The police essentially said, “If you cross the limit, you get what you deserve.”

This is the view of many people, not just in Bangladesh but in the United States as well. After anti-Mohammad cartoonists were attacked at a meeting in Garland, Texas, a few months ago, this was the stance of conservative talk host Bill O’Reilly, among many others.

When the police are saying you brought this on yourself, you have a serious problem. The police are not supposed to be making judgments of this kind — not in their capacity as police.

The role of the police, in any civilized society, is to apprehend and restrain criminals, especially violent ones, so peaceful individuals remain safe. The political attitudes of either the criminals or the victims should not be their concern.

You might think this attitude is limited to faraway cultures like India. But consider the following from America’s own publication, The New Yorker:

Speech nuts, like gun nuts, have amassed plenty of arguments, but they—we—are driven, too, by a shared sensibility that can seem irrational by European standards.

In the case of online harassment, that instinctive preference for “free speech” may already be shaping the kinds of discussions we have, possibly by discouraging the participation of women, racial and sexual minorities, and anyone else likely to be singled out for ad-hominem abuse. Some kinds of free speech really can be harmful, and people who want to defend it anyway should be willing to say so. [Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker 8-10-15]

“Speech nuts?” Will this be the new rallying cry against those who offend the politically correct? Even when the politically correct group happens to consist of religious fanatics who hack people to death for daring to criticize or disagree with them?

In this article, Sanneh is basically saying that certain topics are off limits. But freedom of speech does not impose limits — not when the speech is on your own property, at your own expense and involves no fraud or force. In today’s Internet age, private property includes online space that you pay for, and where people willingly go to read what you have to say. Facebook, for example, is not public property; it is a privately owned company, and its owners decide what may or may not be spoken there. However, Facebook is not government property, either.

Those who claim we have a “shared sensibility” and therefore must honor it are prepared to enforce that “shared sensibility” by government law. Call this what you will, but it’s not freedom of speech.

There is no “invisible line” that Kelefa Sanneh, or some police officer in Bangladesh or anywhere else, gets to draw to decide when one has gone “too far” with one’s free speech.

The moment such an indefinable, totally subjective line is asserted and claimed, then freedom of speech is, as a matter of practice, gone.

To some, it sounds “reasonable” and “moderate” to say, “There have to be reasonable limits on speech. You cannot offend other’s personal beliefs.” Since when? Freedom of speech always involves offending someone, somewhere, because human beings tend to disagree on many different kinds of beliefs.

Freedom is precious. Without political freedom, human beings cannot think, act and produce in the way they require in order to survive and flourish. Freedom, including freedom of speech, is not an abstract luxury. The right to free speech and freedom of thought is, arguably, the most precious right of all. It’s so very fragile, and the danger in places like the United States is that most people no longer appreciate or know it.

There’s nothing “nutty” about upholding the right to free speech, even when you intensely dislike the speech being spoken. When we lose the right to express our minds on our own time and property, we have truly lost everything.