This is one of the saddest exchanges I’ve experienced as it is clear to me you have been so menticided that you are not only willing but eager to relinquish your most precious inalienable right—freedom of expression—in exchange for the illusion of safety.
The propagandists have made you so terrified of the monsters under the bed that you jump at the opportunity to proffer your liberty to the tyrants—and then champion the tyrants’ power to strip that right from others.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivers this urgent missive:
“We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more—we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!”
Étienne de La Boétie captured this spirit of surrender in his 1553 work The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude:
“It is incredible how as soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.”
But you might be more inclined to agree with the following quote:
“When I recognize a concept as correct, I not only have the duty to convey this to my fellow citizens, but moreover the duty to eliminate contrary interpretations.”
This aligns with your belief that speech you feel is incorrect, malicious, or even evil should be silenced while speech you feel is good should be permitted. Funnily enough, that’s exactly how Hitler felt. In fact, he’s the one who said that.
You asked for “an update[d] example of a genocide that occurred BECAUSE of the banning of hate speech of the Mein Kampf kind.” You seem to miss that when you empower a government or other authority to silence speech they define as “hateful,” “wrong,” or “dangerous,” totalitarian governments will censor the speech of dissidents attempting to expose their crimes under the guise of it being “hate speech.” The propagandists vilify dissenters as enemies of the State, and they are later targeted for elimination when it comes time to roll out the genocide.
I can give you a concrete example of how censorship incited genocide. To quote my first article (margaretannaalice.subst…):
“Everyone wonders how Hutus could have suddenly started axing their Tutsi neighbors to death after being inundated with waves of anti-Tutsi propaganda from Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines. Read Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda.”
In the Rwandan genocide, all opposing media outlets were banned, and only one radio station was permitted to broadcast its literal incitement to genocide, even to the point of naming specific targets for community members to machete.
This is how totalitarian regimes operate: They ban opposition media, make certain forms of speech illegal, and cause people to self-censor out of fear of persecution, as Heinrich Hildebrandt describes in They Thought They Were Free:
“‘Everything was not regulated specifically, ever. It was not like that at all. Choices were left to the teacher’s discretion, within the ‘German spirit.’ That was all that was necessary; the teacher had only to be discreet. If he himself wondered at all whether anyone would object to a given book, he would be wise not to use it. This was a much more powerful form of intimidation, you see, than any fixed list of acceptable or unacceptable writings. The way it was done was, from the point of view of the regime, remarkably clever and effective. The teacher had to make the choices and risk the consequences; this made him all the more cautious.’”
This is why people who have come face to face with the brutality of tyranny throughout history understood they must guard our freedoms with every breath of their being.
Benjamin Franklin stated that “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety,” and Thomas Jefferson said, “There is no justification for taking away individuals’ freedom in the guise of public safety.”
They enshrined freedom of speech in the First Amendment for this very reason:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Your example of incitement to violence/genocide is a rare exclusion to First Amendment protections (ncac.org/news/when-can-…), so it is not germane to this discussion as it is already illegal.
John F. Kennedy honored the Founders’ fervent commitment to freedom in these words:
“The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.”
Tyrants, on the other hand, know very well that censorship is their primary tool for controlling the populace. As Stalin says:
“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”
You wrote, “That does not prove that absolute free speech is something to die for.”
Honestly, that is one of the most bloodcurdling statements I’ve ever read when you consider how many millions of people have sacrificed their lives to preserve that very right.
Before White Rose leader Hans Scholl laid his head in the guillotine after being sentenced for exercising free speech that exposed the crimes of the State, he cried out, “Long live freedom!”
His sister, Sophie Scholl, was also beheaded for this crime that same dark date of February 22, 1943. In her cell, the indictment sheet was found with a single word scribbled on the back: “Freedom!”
The Scholls and their fellow White Rose dissidents wrote in one of the leaflets (white-rose-studies.org/…) they gave their lives to distribute:
“If the German nation is so corrupt and decadent in its innermost being that it is willing to surrender the greatest possession a man can own, a possession that elevates mankind above all other creatures, namely free will—if it is willing to surrender this without so much as raising a hand, rashly trusting a questionable lawful order of history; if it surrenders the freedom of mankind to intrude upon the wheel of history and subjugate it to his own rational decision; if Germans are so devoid of individuality that they have become an unthinking and cowardly mob—then, yes then they deserve their destruction.”
If you wish to learn more about why the White Rose and the most courageous individuals throughout history have chosen to defend our sacred right to free speech, you can read more in this piece:
The choice is simple: Cower in terror as the State manipulates you into believing individual freedom of speech is an expendable, abridgable right, or courageously resist the totalitarianists’ attempts to wrench that freedom from you.
I choose courage.
