TRISTEN TAYLOR: Democracy diminished as the West balks at free speech

Candice Breitz is an SA artist living in Germany. This March, she was supposed to exhibit a video installation about Capetonian sex workers at the Saarland Museum. The museum cancelled the exhibition in November because it deemed Breitz’s writings to be anti-Semitic.

Breitz wrote, for example, that it is “possible to support the Palestinian struggle for basic rights and human dignity — including liberation from decades of oppression — while unequivocally condemning the horrific carnage exacted on October 7 ... Hamas is not Palestine.”

The Russian-US journalist Masha Gessen was awarded Germany’s prestigious Hannah Arendt prize for political thought last August. In December, the organiser (Heinrich Böll Foundation) cancelled the award ceremony because Gessen criticised Israel in The New Yorker.

Gessen wrote in the essay that “the more fitting term ‘ghetto’ would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoised Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”

Samantha Hill, a biographer of the late Arendt, quipped that even Arendt, a philosopher with no love for totalitarianism and a staunch defender of free speech, wouldn’t win the prize today. In 1952, Arendt said of Jerusalem that: “The galut-and-ghetto mentality is in full bloom. And the idiocy is right in front of everyone’s eyes ... they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.”

Gessen, Breitz and Arendt are all Jewish.

Pro-Palestinian protests have erupted across US universities. In response, the powers that be broke out the teargas and, to date, arrested more than 2,000 people, including 18 elderly peace activists protesting outside the White House. Apparently grandmothers and grandfathers calling for a ceasefire is a heartfelt endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Students have been suspended and academics fired. The protests and arrests have spread to Europe. Arrests follow. Liberté, égalité, fraternité ground to dust under police boots. The West is now conflating any critique of Israel or Zionism with anti-Semitism.

Divisive conflict

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is divisive, rendering societies and pitting countries against each other, and terrible. Ravers massacred, children dying, missiles falling, rockets glaring. Foreign powers are involved in the fighting to one degree or another. Like all wars, it is brutal, nasty and has no place in human society. Yet and with the current repression in both the US and Europe, something more foundational is going on. Something that strikes deep into the heart of democracy itself.

What is fundamental is not which position one holds on the conflict but that one should have the right to hold that opinion in the first place. Without free speech there is no democracy. Free speech is a necessary condition for democracy but not a sufficient one: you still need other conditions such as universal suffrage, liberty of movement and freedom from arbitrary arrest.

Free speech is defined in the extremes, those areas of discourse that are ugly and shameful. Holocaust deniers are dangerous pieces of vile scum. Yet they should be free not just to hold that ill-conceived opinion but to also say it without fear of state sanction: for example, jail or fines. Why? Because democracy is about diversity of thought and includes the realisation that truth is sought after through discussion, not declarations from supreme leaders, bureaucrats or religious zealots holding the reins of power. We had that with Christian nationalism.

Of course, free speech is not an absolute unrestricted right: it ends with incitement to violence. You can say that a greedy cabal of racist white bankers runs the world. You can’t gather a crowd and scream kill all the bankers. You should be able to say from the river to the sea but you aren’t allowed to say shoot the Jew.

But what counts as incitement to violence needs to be very narrowly defined and in terms of a democratic bill of rights. The situation in Europe and the US proves that if the charge is too loosely applied, democracy itself is diminished. And how do we figure out where the boundary is? Though open discussion. Through free speech.

One of misconceptions about free speech regards harm. Democracy is a difficult enterprise and requires a thick skin. The fact that someone is insulted or doesn’t like what you say is insufficient to restrict free speech. This is something that wokeism, whatever that is exactly, gets wrong. If we want democracy, we have to put up with offensive statements precisely because free speech is a fundamental higher order right. Each side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claims emotional damage and often with good cause. But tough luck if you want a democracy.

God only knows that SA has a plethora of failings: a broken economy, devastating crime, endemic corruption and so much more. On free speech, we’ve held the line. We can describe our politicians as a depraved gaggle of self-serving liars milking parliamentary pay and perks for all our taxes are worth. Jacob Zuma can say that black people who own pet dogs are self-hating adopters of white culture.

There’s really only two red lines: hate speech and the k-word. The courts have adjudicated on what counts as hate speech and they’ve erred on the side of caution. While the Constitutional Court declared that columnist Jon Qwelane’s remark that gay and lesbian people were animals was hate speech, Judge Steven Majiedt said in the ruling that “a healthy democracy requires a degree of tolerance towards expression or speech that shocks or offends.”

The use of the k-word is rightly suppressed through societal pressure — your business will go under — and the charge of crimen injuria.

And that’s about it. The Jewish Board of Deputies and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement can duke it out on the opinion pages and we can take sides without fear of incarceration.

Europe and the US are inching closer to their antithesis. Chinese security forces violently closed down the 2019-20 university protests in Hong Kong and killed not just free speech but also the city’s democracy. While the West’s level of curtailment of free speech is nowhere near China’s, you can’t even talk about any other version of Chinese history besides the Party’s, the principle is the same.

The people shall not have democracy.

• Dr Taylor, a freelance journalist and photographer, is a research fellow in environmental ethics at Stellenbosch University.