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"Don't read it. I don't think you should read it,” said my friend while reading American Psycho. “It will upset you. There’s eye-gouging and ... stuff.” He meant it as a well-intentioned warning. But immediately my mind went to “‘Stuff,’ huh? What could this ‘stuff’ be?”

As someone who is a totally opinionated arsehole on most topics I’m interested in, it annoys me when there is something I’m not sure about. Freedom of speech is one of those things. Freedom of speech has been trapped under the wrath of censorship for as long as anyone can remember. Socrates was sentenced to death after being found guilty of both corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens and of impiety. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was banned in South Africa under apartheid for containing “obscene” or “indecent” material. Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham was banned in 1965 in The People’s Republic of China for its portrayal of early Marxism. But ridiculous examples are part of the same problem as serious ones. The murderer at the Aramoana massacre reportedly owned a copy of the banned book The Poor Man’s James Bond, which had information on how to make weapons and even suggested using them on homeless people. Serial killer Paul Bernardo called American Psycho his “Bible.” Should Destiny Church be able to go ahead with their homophobic protests? Should Holocaust deniers be able to speak in public?

You only have to look at countries where freedom of speech is limited to know how valuable individual expression is. In China, government funded censors detect and delete online posts containing words like “Tibet independence” or “dictatorship.” And North Korea is basically George Orwell’s 1984 put into practise. Freedom of speech is mostly taken for granted in New Zealand, but it is important to remember just how much is at stake if we pass laws to stifle the voices of even the most obtuse, offensive, tasteless, or mean people in our society, no matter how warranted it seems.

Censorship is sometimes confused with responsible editing, where an editor decides what is fit for publication. I asked Critic editor Zane Pocock
what he feels is necessary to screen out in the editing process: “The main things that I’m very conscious of are issues around mental health, issues around heteronormativity, issues around gender-based discrimination, and certainly rape issues. They are all things that have been trivialised by alternative media in the past. I feel like the mainstream trivialises them enough and we actually hold a really important place in trying to change that norm.”

Zane believes that education is more important than censorship. “This is not as cliché as it sounds: media training both here and overseas is severely lacking. When we were chatting to Nikki Hager last week he mentioned that he could have brought into disrepute significantly more people (in the 10s, if not 100s) but he didn’t because he couldn’t justify the public interest in it, even if they seemed to be relatively evil people. He exercises a level of self-editorship and concern for taste and public interest that most of our media outlets would do well to learn from. Media aren’t taught that, though. They just want a set level of readership, and this can mean they overstep boundaries.”

Good taste serves us well for the majority of our lives, but tact cannot be enforced. John Stuart Mill said, “If all in society were agreed on the truth and beauty and value of one proposition, all except one person, it would be most important. In fact it would become even more important, that that one heretic be heard, because we would still benefit from his perhaps outrageous or appalling view.”
The late Christopher Hitchens – journalist, author, and debater – impeaches, “Where are your priorities, ladies and gentlemen? You’re giving away what’s most precious in your own society, and you’re giving it away without a fight, and you’re even praising the people who want to deny you the right to resist it. Shame on you while you do this. Make the best use of the time you’ve got left. This is really serious.”

I asked Associate Professor Selene Mize, who specialises in media law, for an example of free speech that should not be allowed. She replied, “I would be really uneasy about a book, and I would support banning it, if it said, ‘It’s really great to have sex with children. It’s against the law, so you don’t want to get caught. Here’s how to make it less likely that you’re going to get caught. Here’s the kind of child that you can pick up that no one is going to notice the child is missing for longer than this other kind of child. Here’s the kind of things you can tell a child that mean that if that child ever complains to the police and testifies at trial that you’ll be able to impeach the child easily.’”

Speech holds the potential for danger, but I don’t think it should be condemned by the potential harm it could do. British historian David Irving is a prominent Holocaust denier who, in 2006, was sentenced to three years in prison in Austria for nothing more than the potential of uttering an unwelcome thought. He didn’t actually say anything, and wasn’t even accused of saying anything. He is a historian who has committed no crime except for thought and writing. I hate Holocaust denial, but I did feel I got something from reading about the arguments. I don’t agree with it, but I do understand where they are coming from. How do we know the gas chambers were used to murder Jews, and not for de-lousing clothes? Can we really trust that the Nazi records of methodical slaughter were accurate and not exaggerated? Why is there no lock on the door of the gas chamber at Auschwitz? These questions have answers based on very good evidence that, yes, the Holocaust was just as bad as we’ve been taught all along. But they are good questions that deserve investigation, not the silencing and imprisonment of the questioners.

Hitchens, who defended David Irving during his trial in Austria, said this on Irving’s right to be heard: “What he has to say must have taken him some effort to come up with, might contain a grain of historical truth, might, in any case, give people to think about why do they know what they already think they know. How do I know that I know this except that I’ve always been taught this and never heard anything else? What would you do if you met a flat-earth society member? Come to think of it, how can I prove that the earth is round? Am I sure about the theory of evolution? I know it’s supposed to be true; here’s someone who says there’s no such thing and it’s all intelligent design. How sure am I of my own views?” And without hearing his opinion, how can we argue against it?

Most importantly, imagine if the position were reversed: that Holocaust denial was the mainstream thought, and Irving was trying to convince people that it had happened. Imagine the tragedy of his voice being silenced. Holocaust denial is against the law in some countries, and writing positively about homosexuality is illegal in others. Both laws are in place for the supposed good of the citizens of the country. When the men’s rights groups online irk me, I think about how much worse it would be if there were laws against expressing those opinions. And even the most self-pitying, ill-informed, perverted, overblown, squalling mess of sexist ranting may have a kernel of truth buried amid it. Why are these young men so frustrated? What has our society done to create them? How can we argue in a way that will make them see sense?

Selene Mize elaborated on this point: “I think there is good evidence that Irving is wrong – but at times we have believed that there has been great evidence for something, and been wrong. If you think about Galileo who challenged the view that the sun did not rotate around the earth, that the earth rotated round the sun, people were sure he was wrong. To get to a more recent example, the bloody food pyramid! That was kind of stuffed down our throats for the past 30 or 40 years. I definitely took it on board when I tried to lose weight. Now they’re finally doing good research on it. They’re saying it’s all wrong. And I could see well-meaning people 20 or 30 years ago saying “we can’t have people telling people to have high-protein diets. That would be unhealthy. Look at our food pyramid! It’s supposed to be a high carb diet.” So because we don’t want young girls to do these unhealthy high-protein diets, we should just ban that kind of speech. And they would mean well in doing that. Just like countries that ban denying of the holocaust. They mean well. But, I think, it’s too dangerous.”

Avoiding “falling intelligence” fallacies can be difficult. Doctors used to think disease was caused by an imbalance of the humours, and then they thought it was spread by bad smells, and now they have germ theory. This doesn’t mean that germ theory is wrong. And then there is the problem of secrecy: as soon as something is banned, it becomes more interesting. Selene describes how banned texts can “get an air of the forbidden fruit. People get titillated by it – what are these things we’re not allowed to talk about? Whereas if somebody is allowed to talk and present their evidence, and you say I wasn’t convinced, or that pulls into debate another person who has their evidence, then I think that’s all good and I think that’s the way free speech should work. The remedy for harmful speech is usually more speech pointing out how the other person is wrong or the food pyramid is wrong.”

Zane argued how dangerous it is to let some ideas have free reign in the media: “In terms of giving holocaust deniers speaking space, it comes back to this idea of false balance. Media will often give holocaust deniers or climate change deniers a voice, because they think it’s balance. It’s not balance. The Holocaust happened. To use the climate change example, there is a statistical chance that humans have not caused climate change, but it’s something like a 0.001 per cent chance. I’m pretty happy to accept that as a truth. I don’t think deniers should be given the space to voice their opinion in this false-balance sense. They don’t have an equal voice [on the topic]. But then the problem is that flips around because you start to get into minority bashing.”

Selene uses the example of LGBT rights as a minority group who fight to have their opinions heard. “Unfortunately minorities pretty much have to persuade the majority. And sometimes you can kind of despair and think it’s never going to happen. But look at gay marriage. 25 years ago, I was a big supporter of gay marriage and it just didn’t seem to be going anywhere. A lot of people thought it was just never going to change. And it just magically reached a tipping point or something, where in so many places around the world it’s changing. It takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. Some people say censorship is necessary because free speech isn’t working. Free speech in the marketplace of ideas never promised to work overnight, or quickly.”

A case in point on the titillation of banned texts – I want to read the banned copy of Critic, even though from what I’ve heard I would be disgusted if I did. I asked Selene if she would have banned it, and she repied: “I did read the issue. I don’t have a copy. But, yeah, I would not have said that no one could keep a copy of that except Te Papa and the censor’s office. Among other things I think when you have examples of something that has been declared objectionable that people can look at, it gives them guidance about what will be found to be objectionable in the future.” And Zane mentioned the futility of banning something that has already been distributed: “The weird thing about it being banned was that it had done its damage. It had been printed and circulated around campus. I’m not sure how long it took for it to be banned, but it’s not an instant process. I assume it took a couple of weeks.” Both agreed that it was a poor decision to publish in the first place, but once it’s out, banning only makes the issue more interesting. And what gives the people at the censor’s office the moral authority to say what other adults can and can’t read?

In the words of Christopher Hitchens: “To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful, or who is the harmful speaker, or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be that we know enough in advance to prevent? Isn’t it a famous old story that the man who has to read all the pornography in order to decide what is fit to be passed and what is fit not to be, is the man most likely to become debauched? Who do you get to decide for you what you could read? Do you know anyone to whom you would give this job? There’s a law that says there must be such a person, or a subsection of some piddling law that says it. To hell with that law. It’s inviting you to be liars and hypocrites and to deny what you evidently know.”

Selene chastised me on trying to draw a line between freedom of speech and harassment or bullying. David Irving wasn’t picking on particular people with his Holocaust denial, he was writing books and presenting lectures. But Selene pointed out that freedom of speech could also be this: “There’s a neo-Nazi who is following a little old Jewish lady around every time she is doing her grocery shopping, following her and saying stuff about what happened to the Jews in WWII, and going into very elaborate and great detail about some of the worst things that happened, Mengele’s experiments and stuff, with the intent just to totally upset this woman. So he does have a right to freedom of speech, but I think it’s outweighed in that particular case. You’re obviously distinguishing between freedom of speech and bullying. But if freedom of speech is just conveying words, or writing words, it can still be bullying. Let’s assume he’s not blocking her way, he’s just following behind her in public spaces where they both have a right to be. I don’t think you could draw a distinction and say this isn’t speaking or it’s not expression or anything.” Perhaps he should have the right to say this stuff until the lady puts a restraining order against him?

It’s complicated. For the record, I read American Psycho, and it gave me nightmares. But I still want to read the banned copy of Critic, The Poor Man’s James Bond, and the Holocaust deniers’ theories. I don’t want to have somebody else decide for me what is suitable for my own eyes and ears. I have read some fairly tedious books for the sole reason that they have been banned at some point in history. Despite its nasty edges, I am on the side of freedom of speech, even to the extreme ends, because I want to have the right to hear or read the things which may infuriate, disgust or offend me, and in turn have the right to speak back.