One of my fellow Britons, Mark Meechan, has just been convicted of a hate crime by teaching his dog to perform a Nazi salute when he said “Sieg Heil” or “gas the Jews.” Not that training the dog was illegal, it was filming it and uploading it to YouTube which constituted the real crime. The public flaunting of such actions was the crime, which, of course, it shouldn’t be.
Free speech means free speech, and if this had happened in the U.S., that would have been the end of it. Do recall — although most of us know about it from the movie “The Blues Brothers” rather than court reporting — that the Illinois Nazi Party gained the right to march and express their hatreds. Because that’s what free speech means, being able to express your love, hate, delight, or vileness. Sure, we do place limits upon it: libel, slander, and the immediate incitement to violence being the most obvious. But banning speech because other people don’t like it vitiates the very concept of free speech itself — yes, however fashionable it is these days to insist that no one should be allowed to offend another.
The point of freedom is that ability to offend one another, quite the reason why the Supreme Court keeps insisting that it’s legal to burn the flag, even as it’s also entirely legal to scream imprecations at someone doing so.
The breed of dog adds some comedy, because it’s amazing how far the “pug life” meme has spread from Cheezburger. The action itself was “Mark Meechan, 30, recorded his girlfriend’s pug, Buddha, responding to statements such as ‘gas the Jews’ and ‘Sieg Heil’ by raising its paw.” The sheriff (in Scotland, a form of judge rather than policeman) said, “The accused knew that the material was offensive and knew why it was offensive. He would have known it was grossly offensive to many Jewish people.”
And that’s a problem when we consider the law. To be offensive shouldn’t be a crime. To incite or, in terms of public order offenses, to actually cause violence or disorder, should indeed be something you can be jailed for. For it isn’t the offense itself which is the offense, it’s the following violence or disorder. This is where we’ve gone wrong in our modern jurisprudence. We’ve sacrificed that freedom of speech for the wrong reason.
Apologies in advance for crudity, but we’ve reached a point where if I stand in front of a crowd of actual fascists and scream “Fucking fascists,” thereby causing a riot, I’ve not committed a hate crime, nor a crime of offending people. Shout something about Jews and not cause a riot and I have committed a crime, supposedly. But it’s the riot that’s a real crime problem, not my being an idiot or offensive.
The Sheriff also said, “This court has taken the freedom of expression into consideration. But the right to freedom of expression also comes with responsibility.” Indeed it does, that responsibility being not to cause a riot. And nothing else. People who merely cause offense, however gross, should be allowed to get on with it and the rest of us both can and should treat them as the fools and idiots they are as a result.
No, I don’t support teaching dogs to heil Hitler, nor the filming of it, partially because both my grandfathers earned their medals fighting the real thing. But I, as they would and did, insist that free speech and a free society mean that people should be allowed to say or do that without punishment from the law. The correct response is whatever we decide to do in terms of social exclusion, not jail time. Or as Voltaire didn’t say — it was a character in a play — I don’t agree but I’ll defend to the death the right to say it.
Don’t forget, there was a time in the lives of those still living in a civilized European country when saying, “actually, Jews are normal human people and we should be treating them as such” was punished as being offensive to public order. Free speech is important, no?
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
