There are professionals who spin for a living. Here in God's country we have home-grown amateurs, such as a derivative thinker who parrots other peoples ideas. Then there are the haters who spew hate, bile and conspiracy nonsense.
SPIN DOCTORS, HATERS AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT
The point and purpose of this article is not to refute the odious, anti-semitic screeds, or the crude and obnoxious rants by various letter writers to this paper. My focus is on the bigger question of freedom of speech and its limits. The use of direct quotes from the various letter writers is simply for illus-tration. And while I could have taken similar passages from other haters around the country I choose to use home-grown invectives these because it takes away the thought that this kind of stuff hap-pens only some where else.
There are professionals who spin for a living. Here in God's country we have home-grown amateurs, such as a derivative thinker who parrots other peoples ideas. Then there are the haters who spew hate, bile and conspir-acy nonsense.
One letter writer denies the holocaust and revives the Czarist hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This notorious work of anti-Semitism purports to tell of a Jewish cabal which aims to take over the world. The historian Norman Cohn suggested that Hitler used the Protocols as his primary justifica-tion for initiating the Holocaust—in effect his "warrant for genocide".
The writer artfully combines anti-semitic hate speech with fear mongering and a re-writing of history that is breath taking. A few excerpts from his letter to the Mt. Demo-crat:
“The Germans who have been blead dry by the claim that six million died at Hitler’s hand. A claim that is a lie.”… The Jews (and one Negro) funded the communist takeover of Russia…overthrew the Czar, set-up a to-talitarian state and killed 60 million Rus-sians.”…”It was the Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Bushes who engineered 9/11 not Mus-lims”.
If you are shocked and appalled by this, you should be on, at least, two levels. First, the hate speech itself. And then, that a respon-sible newspaper would publish it, thereby lending credibility.
A veritable flood of letters and online com-ments followed the letter, all, without excep-tion, castigating him. Chris Daley my alter-ego liberal columnist wrote on the furor that erupted.
However, Mr. Daley has gotten it wrong on many levels. He is dismissive of the many reader comments to the paper, conflates ig-norant and controversal speech with the let-ter writer's racist rant, and minimizes the impact and consequences of, what he refus-es to label as, hate speech. Doing so he in effect trivializes it.
Chris correctly points to the difference be-tween printed and spoken speech, written speech having a longer shelf life and a much wider reach than the spoken word. As such it is in a different catagory when considering restrictions.
But Chris is also absolutely wrong on the fact that an incitement to violence is allowa-ble under the First Amendment.
There is no right to speak fighting words, words without social value, directed to a specific individual or group, that is intended to, or would provoke a reasonable member of that group to react violently. The opera-tive concept is proximity. Would the words directly, or indirectly, lead to violence? In the Black case, there has been no violence as a result. However, it is hard to argue the benign nature of the letter writer's vitriol given the rise of anti-semitism around the world including murders.
Regulation of hate speech can be divided in-to two types: those that are designed for public order and those that are designed to protect human dignity. And there is a com-pelling case to be made that hate speech is a mechanism of subordination and subjuca-tion, and thus should be restricted on those criteria alone.
And it is very important to distinguish be-tween obnoxious, purile speech, and hate speech. There are readers who chortle back and forth like middle school kids: “Altshuler’s columns provide a service that few others can produce. They provide a benchmark at the lower end of the human thought process thus assuring the rest of us will stay well above it.” To which another re-plied, “Look on the bright side...When Mr. Altshuler is busy bashing Christianity, Re-publicans & our Founding Fathers, he's not kicking his dog..."
That letter writer followed this with “Jew hating Christians defined as Altshuler (the opposite of an anti semite)”.
What both of these letter writers wrote is childish and borders on the anti-semitic, however, I fully defend their right to say it. And I firmly believe that others have the right to express their views, no matter how perverted. What irks me is that the Mt. Democrat printed this rant given the im-portant distinction between the spoken and printed word.
Further, it seems that the paper has violated its own policy, which states “Letters deemed to be in poor taste or potentially libelous will be rejected”. A recent version of this policy included the word “appropriate”. By publish-ing this screed the paper is saying that it does not consider the letter to be in poor taste or inappropriate.
When someone puts themselves in public view they make themselves vulnerable to vi-cious and obscene criticism and I accept that. It is as if you have a sign on your back saying “Kick Me!”
David Brooks, columnist for the NY Times, wrote: “Everybody who is on the internet is subject to insult, trolling, hate and cruel-ty.” These assaults, he points out, are dom-inance plays. They are attempts by the in-sulter to assert their superior status through displays of gratuitous cruelty.
Lastly, it is important to distinguish the haters and spin doctors from those who dis-agree on principle. I was pleased to see that many of those who have leveled criticism at me in the past - the sane and moderate, the thoughtful and considerate - condemed the anti-semitic letter in the strongest possible terms.