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How they betray our right to say it in safety
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be the first to commentPosted by Tim Gopsill
If he was around in Paris just now the 18th century French satirist Voltaire would have plenty to say about the hypocrites abusing his famous “free speech” slogan for ends opposite to those he intended.
Voltaire famously wrote: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.”
He would have to rejig it in the aftermath of the slaughter of his successors on Charlie Hebdo and the others caught up in the events of 7-8 January, to say: “I agree with what you say, but I’ll oppose your right to say it.”
He would address it to the men and women that the media thoughtlessly describe as “world leaders”—does anyone follow them?—who jumped at the opportunity to parade for freedom of expression even as they plot to restrict it in their own lands.
Since they left Paris, pledging their commitment to protecting freedom from violent assault, most of them have announced measures to tighten the hold of the security services on their populations. There have been widespread round-ups of people who pose alleged threats, which in France at least included people whose only offence was to exercise freedom of speech.
The comedian Dieudonné Mbala Mbala was arrested on January 15 for a post on Facebook, in which he mocked the universally adopted catchphrase “Je suis Charlie”—“Je suis Charlatan” in Private Eye’s British satirical version—by applying it to the jihadist who murdered shoppers in a Jewish supermarket.
Dieudonné is snidely anti-Semitic, yet his point—that freedom of speech is highly selective—was tellingly made, embarrassingly so. In France you go to prison for six years for denying the holocaust (or, strangely, the Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915), but if you satirise Islam you are feted and held up as a martyr when murdered as a consequence.
Charlie Hebdo’s officially celebrated assaults on Islam on have habitually been more savage than Dieudonné’s allusions to Judaism. This pro-Jewish and anti-Muslim bias has become evident throughout Europe and America, with high-profile measures to protect Jewish communities, amid questionable claims of a revival of Nazi persecution, but official silence on the more prevalent reprisals against Muslim communities.
But racial selectivity is far from the worst of it, which is the advantage seized by European rulers to clamp down on the internet. For years now they have been fretting about their need for unfettered and legalised access to everybody’s online communications.
Last year’s sensational revelations by the American whistleblower Edward Snowden showed what many had suspected—that the US and UK intelligence agencies have been exercising this kind of snooping, secretly, for years. But it’s of dubious legality, and there is always the risk that phone and internet providers may not retain the data or decline to hand it over to the spooks.
The UK government has made several attempts to push through a law to legitimise the practice, each one, so far, defeated by the objections of the Liberal Democrats—on whose shifty shoulders our liberties seem to have depended for the last five years. In the last few weeks one spy chief after another has pronounced the importance of unlimited universal surveillance to catch terrorists.
The same argument has been going on in all western countries, and in the EU itself, where the European Court of Justice struck down a law requiring states to legislate to force providers to retain the metadata of digital communications.
The European state with the most strict anti-terror laws is France, so it is a hardly a great claim for them that France suffered this terrible terror attack.
But in Britain—where the requirement on providers to retain data has been put into law—the pressure is really on. An ever-growing file of armchair warriors is lining up to back David Cameron’s determination to leave a super-surveillance state as his lasting legacy.
You could not devise a better casus belli for all this than the Paris attacks. They were just so convenient—so blatantly counter-productive for the jihadis who carried them out. Conspiracy theories playing on discrepancies in the reported accounts, attributing the attacks to western agencies, were all over the internet within hours, and you don’t have to believe them to be suspicious.
This is a perfect example of what Canadian writer Naomi Klein calls the “shock doctrine”—the exploitation of catastrophe to impose draconian laws or economic changes on a society.
The Charlie Hebdo atrocity was just right, handing our rulers the opportunity to pose as defenders of freedom while doing the opposite.
DATELINE: 30 January, 2015
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