Mark Steyn and his book America Alone published by Maclean's face a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal next week. The issue is "hate speech" involving Moslems. This is all about defending Western values (eg free speech). Belmont reports on Steyn's speech in Vancouver - a quote:
Steyn's insight -- that the War on Terror is essentially the consequence of a Western disease (ed: multiculturalism) that manifests itself in the newly found power of medieval madmen -- is the key point. All September 11, Iraq, Afghanistan have done is focus attention on a silent struggle that has been going on within Western culture for last hundred years. It is the ideational counterpart of violent struggles of the 20th century. The men who we remember on Memorial Day only buried the physical corpus of totalitarianism. It remains for us, in the twenty first century, to lay its ghost to rest.
Can we do it without restarting the violence of the last hundred years? Perhaps. But can we do it without a mental and legal struggle. Definitely not. And so Mark Steyn continues in defiance of the thought police. Because that's the kind of guy he is.
In an opinion piece in Maclean's last month, Steyn attacked the "totalitarianism" of the Human Rights Commissions, noting:
It's true that "hurtful actions that undermine freedom" and lead to "unspeakable crimes" usually have some fig leaf of intellectual justification. For example, the ideology first articulated by Karl Marx has led to the deaths of millions of people around the planet on an unprecedented scale. Yet oddly enough, no matter how many folks are murdered in the name of Marxism-Leninism, you're still free to propound its principles at every college in Canada.
He goes on to say:
Ah, but that's the Good Totalitarianism. What about the Bad Totalitarianism? You know, the one everybody disapproves of: Nazism. Isn't it obvious that in the case of Adolf Hitler, "hateful words" led to "unspeakable crimes"? This argument is offered routinely: if only there'd been "reasonable limits on the expression of hatred" 70 years ago, the Holocaust might have been prevented.
There's just one teensy-weensy problem with it: pre-Nazi Germany had such "reasonable limits." Indeed, the Weimar Republic was a veritable proto-Trudeaupia. As Alan Borovoy, Canada's leading civil libertarian, put it:
"Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law. Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech. And, in the opinion of the leading Jewish organization of that era, no more than 10 per cent of the cases were mishandled by the authorities. As subsequent history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it."
My humble opinion? Hate speech is in the eye of the beholder. Steyn's book contained none that I am aware of, but he did present unpleasant truths about the Islamization of the West. Regardless, I am in favor of protecting speech, even hateful and insulting speech: poor manners are not a matter for law, and it's difficult to have any opinion without offending somebody, just as Canada's hate speech laws deeply offend me. Cliche: The solution to speech is more speech.
Photo on top: A young librarian searching the stacks for Steyn's dangerous book. (Theo)
