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Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 16:27:34 -0500
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From: "R. A. Hettinga"
Subject: [Clips] The War on Sedition
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http://www.reason.com/0602/co.mw.the.shtml
Reason:
February 2006
The War on Sedition
"Anglosphere" allies crack down on speech in the name of fighting terror.
Matt Welch
If Australian Prime Minister John Howard gets his way, citizens down under
will soon face seven years in prison if they are convicted of "sedition."
That's not entirely new-sedition laws have been on the country's books for
at least 40 years-but the proposed legislation more than doubles the
penalty. It also expands the definition of criminal speech to include
"assist[ing], by any means whatever, an organisation or country
at war with
the Commonwealth, whether or not the existence of a state of war has been
declared."
What comprises such "assistance," and how on earth do you know when an
organization is at "war with the Commonwealth" in the absence of a
declaration to that effect? The answers are not clear, even after one very
heated month of public debate and outcry.
"Taking the puff out of someone in a cartoon, or puncturing an ego in a
play, is a vastly different proposition from encouraging impressionable
young people to become suicide bombers, or inciting violence against our
soldiers," Howard wrote in a November 28 Melbourne Herald Sun op-ed piece,
during a week in which he had to face down a rebellion by legislators from
his own party who objected to the sedition provisions of his signature
counter-terrorism package.
"The distinctions are not blurred, they are as stark as the difference
between day and night.
What will not be tolerated will be actions or words
designed to harm Australian troops [or] language designed to incite action
against our troops in Iraq."
Australia wasn't the only English-speaking American ally to put the squeeze
on speech last November in the name of fighting Islamic terrorism. At the
seat of the monarchy that-on paper, anyway-still reigns over the former
penal colony, Prime Minister Tony Blair pushed through by a single vote
legislation outlawing the "glorification of terrorism," defined as speaking
or publishing words that would encourage the "commission, preparation or
instigation of acts of terrorism." This measure came on the heels of
another Blair bill, also passed by the House of Commons, outlawing
"inciting religious hatred."
In the United States, thankfully, you can glorify terrorism every day. As
you read this, thousands of college kids and even toddlers are walking
around in T-shirts bearing the iconic image of the terrorist Che Guevara
without fear of being tackled by cops. Last year I attended a Hoboken
fundraiser for the city's annual St. Patrick's Day parade in which the band
played several songs glorifying the Irish Republican Army (including "I'm
Backin' the IRA!"); no one was led away in handcuffs. Indeed, the audience
was full of policemen, politicians, and other Irish Americans who have long
sent material and moral support to an organization that has murdered
hundreds of civilians. Ward Churchill, professor of ethnic studies at the
University of Colorado at Boulder, announced last year that "fragging an
officer" by rolling a grenade into his tent "has a much more impactful
effect" than mere "conscientious objection." He has not been jailed.
We tolerate this kind of talk because the American Founders were
hyper-conscious of the thick line separating word from deed. They so
strongly believed the government had no business passing laws restricting
political speech that they dedicated the very first article of the Bill of
Rights to protecting this most elemental of liberties. Two hundred and
sixteen years of practical experience with this free speech-however
curtailed it has been, whether through Woodrow Wilson's sedition laws
during World War I or John McCain's more recent restrictions on political
campaigning-have given the average American a unique insight: that letting
people rubbish the government, even to the point of advocating its
overthrow, serves as an important pressure valve, allowing dark ideas to be
exhumed, debated, and shot down openly, rather than left to fester in the
shadows.
The Brits don't share this ethic, partly because they never got around to
writing a constitution. The Australians managed the constitution part but
left out the whole Bill of Rights thing. Freedom of speech, the Australian
journalist Tim Blair tells me, is more "implied" than codified.
The implication in both countries is more than just a lack of legal
safeguards against a speech-restricting government. British libel laws are
notorious for placing the burden of proof on the accused instead of the
plaintiff.
"Libel tourism" is a growth industry, as Saudi princes and American
celebrities try to harass global newspapers or publishing companies into
printing retractions or quashing U.K. releases of American books, such as
Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud or Rachel Ehrenfeld's similarly
Saudi-bashing Funding Evil.
The Australians are "somewhere between the U.K. and the U.S." on libel,
says Blair, who is the assistant news editor of The Bulletin. Lacking a
constitutional framework, each province sets its own libel and slander
rules, the result of which is that every national publication has to
operate as if it were governed by the lowest-common-denominator regulations
of Queensland, where truth is not an absolute defense, if a court finds the
published information lacks sufficient "public interest."
This situation leads to the kind of libel-proof euphemisms that make
Australian and British newspapers occasionally incomprehensible to Yanks.
Instead of "organized crime lord," Blair explains, you have "colorful
racing identity"; editors expect readers to understand that a "tired and
emotional" celebrity was actually "shitfaced drunk."
So the surprise is not that Prime Ministers Howard and Blair (from the
right-wing Liberal Party and left-wing Labour Party, respectively) have
sought to limit speech in the name of fighting terrorism. It's that their
respective legislatures, newspapers, and populations have fought their
proposals with such vigor.
In London, Blair's counterterrorism package has been his least successful
legislation in three terms and nine years as prime minister. In
mid-November, the House of Commons gave him his first-ever defeat, when
Labour Party backbenchers defected to vote down Blair's proposal to lock up
suspected terrorists for 90 days without charge.
A few weeks before, the House of Lords-once a rubber-stamp hereditary body
of eccentrics, since reformed by Blair into a more meritocratic and
relevant legislature-had restricted the prime minister's ban on "inciting
religious hatred" by forcing prosecutors to prove malicious intent and
adding a provision recognizing the right to "ridicule, insult, or abuse"
other religions. At press time, the House of Lords was threatening to
scotch Blair's "glorification of terrorism" law altogether.
"We need not to worry so much about the loudmouths," the former
Conservative cabinet member and cur-rent Lord Douglas Hurd told reporters,
sounding very much like an American, "as about the quiet acts of subversion
and training by dangerous people, up and down the country, who on the whole
keep their mouths shut."
In Australia every major newspaper has squealed in outrage at Howard's
sedition laws; the bipartisan Senate Constitutional Committee recommended
in late November that they be excised from Howard's anti-terrorism package;
and now the successful four-term prime minister faces a rare open revolt
from within the ranks of his own party.
"There is no doubt," Constitutional Committee Chairwoman Marise Payne, a
Liberal Party member, told the Australian Parliament, "that they are a very
serious incursion into the way in which we currently expect to be able to
live our lives in Australia."
In many unhappy ways, the free speech traditions of England and the
Commonwealth are more in tune with the nervous, fussy bureaucrats of Europe
(where wearing religious insignia to school, or insulting Islam, is
frequently illegal) than with their loose-lipped cousins in the New World.
But the surprising opposition to November's bogus liberty-for-security
trades suggests that there might be something to this "Anglosphere" stuff
after all.
Matt Welch is associate editor of Reason
--
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R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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--
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
