[Clips] The War on Sedition

R. A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Tue Jan 24 13:32:23 PST 2006


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  Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 16:27:34 -0500
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  From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
  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 <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
  The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
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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