Re: When they came for the Jews...

[Alex Strasheim <cp@proust.suba.com>]

> Citing ``the rapidly expanding presence of organized hate groups on the
> Internet,'' a leading Jewish human rights group [the Simon Wiesenthal
> Center] on Tuesday began sending letters to hundreds of Internet access
> providers and universities asking them to refuse to carry messages that
> ``promote racism, anti-Semitism, mayhem and violence.'' 

This is really unfortunate.

Many well intentioned people often forget that groups like the Nazis did
more than simply bombard the public with hate speech -- they suppressed 
opposing points of view.  The problem isn't that the haters were able to 
speak their minds, the problem was that the reasonable people were unable 
to respond.

Censorship is an essential component of totalitarianism, while free speech
is fundamentally incompatible with it. 

There is a marketplace of ideas, and our goal ought to be to make sure
that marketplace has integrity, that the rules are fair.  Anti-semitic
ideas aren't going to succeed in the marketplace because they're wrong,
which is to say that arguments which try to prove anti-semitic points will
always contain logical and factual errors.

Once you start interferring with the market by restricting what can be
said, you run into at least two important problems.  First of all, you
open yourself up to the possibility that some good ideas will be unable to
emerge from the debate.  The nazis suppressed speech, for example, and 
solid arguments against their positions weren't able to emerge.

The second problem is more subtle, and it happens all the time in this
country:  people lose confidence in the market.  I've spoken with people
who believe, for example, that black people are inherently dumber than
white people.  If you ask these people for proof, they say that it's being
suppressed.  In a sense they're right:  arguments that blacks are dumber
than whites are suppressed, not by law, but informally.  But *proof* isn't
being suppressed, because proof doesn't exist.  The suppression of
arguments gives people an out in their own minds, and it allows them to
cling to some silly notions.  Supression of an argument also ends up
eliminating the rebuttal, and when you're dealing with hate speech the
rebuttal is always more powerful than the argument.

If you can win a fair fight, why do you need to cheat?