The walls are closing in for freedom of opinion

I find myself increasingly at odds with this ever-more-popular notion that there are certain things you cannot say. Restricting freedom of expression is just a way of restricting freedom of thought. If you can’t express an idea, you can’t share it. If you can’t share it, you can’t inspire other people to think it.

When I moved to Switzerland decades ago, I remember being quite surprised to hear that it was technically illegal to deny the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. The discussions were not juristic. They were purely anecdotal. The assertions were made by people who’d probably also just “heard” that that was the case.

It’s not even clear whether this applies to Switzerland or only the neighbor to the north. You know how these discussion are. There’s not usually a strong emphasis on evidence and accuracy. You just kind of hear it, absorb it, and move on. You can only hope that such grazing shots don’t influence your mindset too much—although they probably do, more than you know.

Still, even taken at face value…I’m not sure in which contexts this law would apply. Is it for teachers? Journalists? People talking in a bar? At a dinner table at home? What actually constitutes denial? Is it only if you flatly deny that it ever happened? What if you doubt the absolute number of Jews that were killed? What if you quibble with the focus on Jews rather than gypsies, homosexuals, socialists, or communists? What if you broaden the discussion to it having been a human tragedy? What if you have issues with the way the legend of the Holocaust has been weaponized to cause subsequent and more recent tragedy?

What does “denial” actually entail? All of the things above? Perhaps it includes this article, just for broaching the subject? Is my attempt to learn what the law actually is already a transgression of it?

I’m sure it’s buried somewhere in the law, with perhaps more detail on what will get you prosecuted. However, there’s a lot of trouble you can get into before prosecution. If people think that denying the Holocaust is illegal, then they’re not going to bother about nuance. They’re not going to consider the fine points noted above. They’re going to point the finger of accusal and bray at you until the police come and take you away. They’re going to feel great about themselves for having something good and worthwhile—for having punished the heretic. And so it goes.

And the police may not care. Depending on their mood or the pressures on them to increase arrest records or to punish heretics, they might just haul you in, knowing that nothing will stick, knowing that they’re only doing it to inconvenience you. Or maybe the police will be just as fanatical as your accuser.

Even if you’re let go, well, you’re that person, a person with the wrong thoughts, who dares to say the wrong things. Maybe you’ll lose your online platform. You’ll be banned from social-media sites. Your blog will be taken down. Your ISP will drop you. Hell, maybe you’ll even get fired for being a malcontent. Or thrown out of your building. No-one wants to risk you tarnishing their reputation.

Maybe you were asking a perfectly legitimate, reasonable question. Maybe you were trying to learn. Your lesson will be handed to you with demotion of social status, lifestyle, and ability to provide for yourself and your dependents. Perhaps you’ll draw the wrong lesson from that, but no matter. Society will have spoken. Society will have forced you to understand that there are certain things we don’t say—and subsequently allow ourselves to think—else we are punished. Society tells us that things are better this way. The alternative is chaos.

The problem begins with censorship. It begins with people thinking that it’s legitimate to censor others. It doesn’t even matter what’s being censored—the first things are always the ones so obvious that only a monster could disapprove of banning them—because it’s the imposition of the mindset that already does the damage. Society is training its citizens to think that there are good and bad thoughts.

Once you have people trained on that, then you can start to channel their thoughts in the direction that you want by making them avoid bad thoughts. You can freely invent which thoughts are bad and which are good. You can even switch them around if you leave enough time in-between.

It’s not what is being censored that’s the problem. It’s accepting that censorship is legitimate that opens Pandora’s Box.

I, too, could be in trouble when the trend against free expression finds its ultimate culmination in a police state. I will be arrested for saying that I think there should be free expression, freedom of opinion and speech. They will smugly tell me that that isn’t allowed, that I can’t say things like that. That I shouldn’t even think things like that.

I will perhaps try to defend myself, forgetting that even utterring a defense is forbidden. Hopefully quickly enough, I’ll learn the new rules. I will go silent, not in the hope that I won’t be prosecuted farther, but because resistance in a world without free speech is not only futile, it’s impossible.

But…while a world like that doesn’t deserve to hear what you’ve got to say … the people trapped in it do. So you have to persevere, you have to try to figure out how to make yourself heard in a world that wants to be deaf, in a world that thinks there are clear lines to be drawn between what can and cannot be said, a world that believes that everything is cut and dried and that the truth never shifts, that the goalposts never move, that that which was certain can disappear in a mist of lies.

It’s not always easy to reach people, though. Some are absolutely blinded by their ignorance and inability to reconsider anything. For example, from the article An Infinite Distance by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch), we learn that,

“Rep. Brian Mast, the Florida Republican who volunteered for the IDF, compared Palestinian civilians in Gaza to Nazis: “I think when we look at this, as a whole, I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians. I don’t think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazi civilians.””

This is a sitting U.S. Congressman, who volunteered for a foreign army in 2015 (Israel), five years after he’d had his legs blown off in Afghanistan. He has a Bachelor’s degree from the “Harvard University Extension School”, which he somehow earned with only a year of effort after having been in the IDF. He must get up very early in the morning. He’s now a Congressman. He thinks that the people in the concentration camps with the vastly inferior firepower are the Nazis. Incredible. It’s like a mental illness.

However! I recognize his right to say and do these things, just as I recognize my own right to condemn him for his hypocrisy and inhumanity. Which one of us should be allowed to express their opinion? Him? Me? Both? Neither?

Nothing good comes of granting the right to censorship. Instead, we should combat bad ideas with better ideas. We should always try to determine why bad ideas are so appealing. We should think about who is promulgating these bad ideas. We should wonder why we think those are bad ideas. And then we have to put in the hard work of convincing people otherwise rather than hitting them over the head with a stick.