NO
The Government is about to introduce new laws to protect freedom of speech in universities that could end up protecting holocaust deniers. Or maybe not. Who knows? I’m sure Gavin Williamson spent literal minutes thinking about it in between staring out of the window with his mouth hanging open, dribbling over his cool S, so I’m sure he’s right and it won’t. The clown.
But that’s not what I want to blart on about. It’s the arguments it’s given rise to, like this:
This is a false dichotomy, of course. The question should actually be, “do you want Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites to express their views secretly AND in an open forum?”
Them secret online spaces and closed door meetings ain’t going nowhere chum, even if Holocaust deniers and far right shovelheads can give speeches and have debates at universities. And those protests and refutations will have zero effect on the secret weirdoes or the potential recruits you’ve now gifted them.
The author of the above tweet (and I don’t mean to dunk on him in particular, but he’s the one I saw first) blogged about this and said:
I explained that bad ideas (antitheses) must be allowed to engage with good ideas (theses), with the result being the eventual triumph of the best ideas (synthesis).
Ha ha. No. This will never happen. It’s kind of touching that someone might have faith in this in a world that had a term of President Donald Trump, Brexit and Prime Minister Boris bloody Johnson.
I would now like a fanfare like in one of them movies about the olden days with knights and that as I explain why you should not allow the far right to have their ideas debated.
1. You will never get to challenge the bad ideas with good ones
Nuh-uh. No you won’t. Because guess what?
The far right always, always lies.
You will only achieve ‘synthesis’ if both sides are arguing in good faith. Those on the far right never do this, because they know that what they believe is, at its core, abhorrent to most people. So what you get is that core obscured by layers and layers of more reasonable sounding arguments, like an onion. It’s never about ethics in games journalism.
The further away from the core you get, the more reasonable the arguments sound — and they’re all bullshit.
And what is the outer layer, usually?
“Free speech is sacrosanct! By exposing extreme views we can show how wrong they are!”
It’s a great starting point for the shovelheads. It allows them to frame themselves as the reasonable ones and get liberals to argue on their behalf. It’s how the right removed the Fairness Doctrine in the US to make way for far right shock jocks and Fox News.
It’s the same con job the current UK Government are using with the very law we’re talking about to increase visibility of right wing viewpoints while decreasing students’ exposure to left wing ideas.
If you want to show how much the far right care about free speech, just look at any far right government in the history of ever.
The far right are not even playing the same game as you. Even if you make them look like the biggest chump in the world to 99.9% of the audience, they don’t care.
They care about the 0.1% who think they were treated unfairly, or liked some of the things they said but not all of them. The ones they can steer towards those online spaces or closed door meetings. The bigger their new audience, the bigger that 0.1% is.
And here’s the big one — they care about how many layers of the onion they can get to seem more normal, so they can start further towards the core next time around. Because far right public appearances aren’t about winning debates. They’re about normalising horrible nonsense.
2. You will be playing at the far right’s home ground
Any audience for a far right speech or debate in the UK will not be neutral.
The UK has an incredibly right wing government, and an incredibly right wing press, and neither of these are shy about using the same bullshitting tactics as the far right. They’ll make up stories about Muslim foster parents. They’ll scaremonger about the number of white people in the country. They’ll ‘accidentally’ deport black citizens.
The Overton Window has moved so far to the right that a columnist for the unofficial newspaper of record recently argued that Black Lives Matter was involved in a campaign to demonise white society. Not the dog-whistling ‘Judeo-Christian’ society these guys had used for the past couple of decades. White society. We’re there now.
A larger percentage of a potential audience will be more ready to accept those inner layers of the far right onion than you might think, just from absorbing things that are pretty mainstream. Who are they going to be more likely to sympathise with? The guy saying, “that stuff you already think is so right,” or the one saying they’re wrong in the first place?
You might think anyone watching will be weighing arguments against each other with pure reason, but they’ll have been primed to believe half the absolute bum coming out of the mouth of the stupid guy. We’re probably talking about more than 0.1% of the audience too, and none of them will give a flying fuck about synthesis.
3. These ideas have real world consequences
And they’re dangerous.
That columnist I mentioned earlier was quoted extensively in Anders Breivik’s manifesto. The Christchurch shooter titled his manifesto ‘The Great Replacement’, and based it heavily on the birth rates of migrants, something the right wing press has scaremongered about for years.
Do we really want to add holocaust denial or anything else to the list of dangerous bullshit ideas that have been successfully mainstreamed? Really?
I suppose the most annoying thing about the ‘hey, let’s debate things in the open’ argument is the way people making it seem to think it’s the people arguing against them are the naïve ones. It’s like someone saying you should avoid the risk of having your wallet stolen by a pickpocket by sending it away voluntarily for inspection, you silly chump.
