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?