Another Author in Court

From the BBC: "French author in dock over Rwanda." The author is a noted French investigative journalist who wrote a book about the Rwandan genocide. The formal charge: inciting racial hatred. I'm not familiar with the details, but this appears to be just another case of interest groups trying to suppress speech they disagree with. Controlling speech is a hallmark of totalitarian regimes; free speech is one of the key civil rights that characterize free societies. So it seems obvious that governments and courts in the West — even in places like France and Canada — should not allow themselves to be hijacked into controlling speech under false political pretenses. Yet it continues.

Comments

[bloggernacleburner]

Dude, please. Your country had jackboots on the streets of Minneapolis during the RNC. Your police freaked over hippies and minimized a credible threat on the Democratic candidates life. If anything, the EPA debacle shows that the Bushies are as allergic to free speech as any tinpot socialist euro-commies.

How about you let the rest of the world deal with our free speech issues (trust me, it's an issue in Canada, France and the rest of the Western world) and focus on some more pressing issues at home?

[Dave]

Interesting site you run, burner. You're obviously unhappy about the world in general, but I'm not quite sure what your beef is with the LDS blogging community. Maybe you're upset that we don't post enough cat pictures.

[TrevorM]

oh snap!

[Jettboy]

There is a huge difference between protecting people from possible riot (and there was violence and damage to property), minimizing a threat that seemed to not have ever happened (so the minimizing ended up realistic), and this kind of free speech suppression. This person can go to jail for writing and publishing a book. In the U.S. there is a different way to deal with issues like this; don't read it or criticize it with perhaps another book or article.

The U.S. free speech issues you highlighted (I question if they really are issues) are considered troublesome by many. However, to be in legal danger because of words in a book or words from your mouth is considered crossing the line from questionable to the destruction of the U.S. Constitution. The freedom to talk or write is the most straight forward of rights. I think that danger has been problematic in the U.S., but not for the reasons you would agree with. However, I think the dangers to free speech that were becoming a problem have been minimized by the Internet where control is almost non-existant.

[Norbert]

I don't wish to defend the actions of the French court because I'm not very familiar with the point in question, but some context here does matter. Germany and (to a lesser but still significant degree) France blamed the anti-Semitic fervor which made the Holocaust possible on antisemitic writers before the war -- Julius Streicher being found guilty and hung at Nuremberg is a case in point. So it's one thing for Americans to look askance at this type of limitation of freedom of the press and quite another for those who consider racist publications to be partially responsible for a nation's collective guilt. Again, I don't know how that plays out in this case, but as a general principle Americans are working with another set of rules here.

And before any of us get too high and mighty here, American history is chock full of censorship, but usually from the right, not the left. Look at what happened to Socialist publishers in the 1910s and communists in the 1950s.