Kia ora Koutou, there’s been a lot of talk about free speech recently, about the difference between the right to speak freely and hate speech about how we should let free speech reign anyway, however hate-filled it is.
The shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh demonstrate what can happens when we ignore hate speech on the basis of everyone should be able to say whatever they want. The shooter had, from what I read and hear, been making hate-filled rants against Jews for a while and had been ignored.
I’ve had some experience of hate speech and while it didn’t kill me it left some scars that mean I find it difficult to trust. It has been based around gender, race, age and sexual preference.
I don’t know if National MP Norm Jones felt any better after shouting ‘Go back to the sewers where you belong,’ or whether that Anglican Minister felt better after proclaiming I should be locked up or shot and that people like me were an offence against God. Or whether that nice respectable lady, who no doubt did a lot of good works, said that people like me should be put in a mental hospital and kept there until we came to our senses.
No wonder I said, ever so freely, when the Homosexual Law Reform was passed, ‘We won, you lost, tough shit.’
What is it about us human beings that makes us so convinced that one group of people is a threat to our way of life purely on the basis of their race or religion? Look at the long long misery of the people on Nauru. Will we wake one day to a future generation saying that place was our version of a concentration camp? And like the rest of the world said about Nazi Germany in the 1930s we also said things like ‘Well that’s not our jurisdiction’ or ‘probably exaggerated’. And when Jewish survivors arrived here and World War 2 began they were locked up on that little barren dot of an island in Wellington Harbou
Or in the 1800s launching war on Waikato Iwi because Governor Grey needed land urgently. Settlers were arriving in Auckland and expecting to walk on to the land they’d paid for in advance so something had to be done, thought the Governor. So when the local iwi lost because the other side had guns, they were forced to hand over acres and acres as ‘reparation’?
This deep-seated hatred of one group of people for another has been operating forever it seems. The right to speak has been a constant struggle for lots of groups and races of people. The right to speak and the right to hate seems to go along in tandem, for some.
How far does free speech go before it becomes hate speech? Should obvious hate speech be allowed to be aired on the basis of free speech? Is there a line to be drawn? Who will decide?
We need to discuss these things and keep on discussing them because sure as hell whatever we have at the moment is not working very well.
Renée
