The world had to fight a horrible war, drop atomic bombs, to win against such evil. The present tragic situation demands some serious thinking in our global perceptions of the realities in which we live and some of which we’ve created. Freedom of speech is both contingent on and complicit in every citizen’s rights, writes Professor Satendra Nandan.
OPINION: Now that the march of millions is over and the invisible dust has settled on the streets of Paris like life itself, we can begin to seriously scrutinise what is really meant by that magical phrase : Freedom of Speech.
The horror of the killings in that city of a score of people-- Christians, Jews and Muslims-- sends tremors of terror and horror in the hearts and minds of ordinary citizens including millions of visitors to a city that is immortalized in three words of the bloody and very violent revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
Europe is commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Second World War; 100th anniversary of the First. The Second was born out of the womb of the first. All together the two wars killed 70 million human beings, soldiers , civilians, and children. This is a conservative estimate.
This year also happens to be the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the horrors of which you see in faded pictures on your TV screens that break your heart into bits. And to think this was done so systematically by the most philosophically and technologically advanced nation on the European continent is to begin to understand the depths to which rational intellectuals can descend in support of an ideology or racial-religious nationalism of ancient hatred. It needed one maniac, democratically elected, to destroy civilizations. And he was a vegetarian, too, presumably because he hated plants before he hated people.
More than the deaths of millions, Hitler’s horrors produced monsters like Stalin, Mao and Franco. They had their opportunity to kill another seventy million through gulags and famine and the firing squad.
Favourite critics
George Steiner, one of my two favourite critics, the other is Edward Said, in his book, Language and Silence, wrote:
‘I realise that historians are right when they say that barbarism and political savagery are endemic in human affairs, that no age has been innocent of disaster. I know that the colonial massacres of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the cynical destruction of natural and animal resources which accompany them(the extermination of fauna being perhaps the logical and symbolic epilogue to that of native population) are realities of profound evil. But I think there is hypocrisy in the imagination that would claim universal immediacy, that would seek impartial appropriation throughout the provocations of all history and all places. My own consciousness is possessed by the eruption of barbarism in modern Europe…The blackness of it did not spring from the Gobi desert or the rain forests of the Amazon. It rose from within, and from the core of European civilization. The cry of the murdered sounded in earshot of the universities; the sadism went on a street away from the theatres and museums….’
In fact, on the streets that we saw millions marching, hand in hand with not a few murderous leaders in the tow and flow, the Jews were rounded up and sent to the Nazi concentration camps after the fall of France in the German blitzkrieg.
Then Winston Churchill became the new prime minister of the British Empire. A young BBC journalist went to interview him about his plan to resist Hitler’s tyranny sweeping across Europe like a bonfire of vanities. Churchill said to the young reporter: I’ve nothing to fight with.
The British were so unprepared at home while defending their indefensible empire across the globe, keeping people under brutal subjection though guns and laws. India was the most brutalized victim of it.
The stuff of history
The young journalist said to the recently installed PM: Sir, you do have something.
What’s that? inquired Churchill.
Sir, WORDS.
And Churchill’s words became the very stuff of history. The journalist Anthony Burgess became a Soviet spy in London.
The reason for remembering this to understand the potential power of words as weapons for GOOD and EVIL. Hitler, too, was an orator.
There is, therefore, no absolute freedom of speech. The good Pope Francis has recently reinforced this, while refusing to see the Dalai Lama for fear of Chinese repercussions.
And as I’m writing this, President Barack Obama has cut short his visit to India to attend the ‘wake’ for the late ruler of Saudi Arabia. Even the Governor-General of Australia was not in Australia on Australia Day. Doubtless they were paying tribute to the oil-rich kingdom’s wretched regime.
Dared to criticise
Recently the Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi was given a punishment of 1000 lashes and 10 years in jail, $260 ,000 in fine for ‘insulting Islam’. His lawyer was sentenced to 15 years in prison last year because he dared to criticise human rights abuses in the oily kingdom, where dissent is an anathema .
While young Badawi was given a public flogging of the first 50 lashes, the mob shouted “Allahu Akbar !”. The fact that the Great God Himself would be insulted by this punishment didn’t deter anyone.Badawi was handcuffed and shackled and tortured.
Saudi Arabia is a strategic ally of the West with its oils and markets for goods. The western powers supply it with the most modern weaponry. It is also a partner in the Coalition fighting Isis. While Obama, the Chief Guest at the 66th Republic Day parade in New Delhi, lectured to Indians on gender equality, and religious tolerance, he cut short his visit to attend the dead King’s funeral in Ryiadh.
One wonders if he saw a single woman driver on the most modern highways. And we’re all happy as long as the petrol prices are going down by a few cents.
Most religions insult other religions through defining their exclusivity of Truth: the Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants, Sunnis and Shias, Believers and Kafirs, Hindus and the Untouchables, and even the brutalities of Buddhism in Myanmar and Sri Lanka.
Words like ‘druidism’, ‘pagan’, ‘heathen’, ‘primitive’, ‘uncivilized’, among numerous others,divided the human race into damaging categories and deformed our deeper humanity.
The newly elected President of Indonesia, the largest Muslin state in the world, is bent on showing how powerful he is by sending two Australian citizens, who by all accounts have been rehabilitated after ten years in jail, to the firing squad. And this from a country that killed a quarter of million East Timorese in which not a few‘civilized nations’ were complicit.
US, China top executioners
But we cannot protest too much: our two friends, the US and China , execute more people every year than the rest of the world combined.
So what’s really the freedom of speech that we keep repeating like a sacred mantra? Is it sacred? I doubt it. Where national security is involved and the liberty of citizens, how sacred is this freedom? We all know the circumstances under which this freedom is curtailed and curbed—the First Amendment in the US constitution has been amended several times to protect citizens from racial and other abuses. The Terror Acts are severe in the US, India, Australia and Europe, among other free countries.
As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it: does ‘freedom of speech’ give a person the right to shout FIRE! in a crowded theatre, thus causing pandemonium and stampede which could kill many? There are limits and these are defined by laws germane to the Bill of Rights in any written constitution. Fiji has it.
The only thing that is sacred is life itself. Freedom of speech implies a listener and if my speech act transgresses the boundaries of human decency and humane conduct, then that is not liberty but licence sometimes degenerating into licentiousness. The fear of terrorism has terrified the consciousness of us all—from Sydney to Bali to Mumbai in our part of the world. Civil liberties are always compromised in a crisis.
Few countries have suffered more from terrorist activities than the largest democracy, India.Yet, the media in India is largely and responsibly free: what we do with that freedom is of course the moot point. Here the laws of a democratic nation, as defined in the Bill of Rights, becomes vitally important. And eternal vigilance becomes both imperative and the price we pay for a precious freedom.
We continue to define these jihadists as Islamic. Islam is not a monolithic identity or a single ethnicity. It’s as diverse as any other religious order. More Muslims are killed by these mad men than of any other religion. According to one report, 98 percent of the people killed by ‘Islamist Terrorists’, beheaded, bombed in mosques, belong to the Muslim community.
Thoughtless stigmatising
These jihadists-fundamentalists do not represent the vast majority of the Muslim population of over 1.5 billion. To stigmatise and demonise all Muslims, as thoughtless commentators often do, is to condemn Christianity because of the Klu Klux Klan or those who for decades practiced apartheid. Or the Nazis who claimed to be Christians liquidating the European Jewry. Or extreme elements on the Indian continent. Religious ugliness is endemic .
The world had to fight a horrible war, drop atomic bombs, to win against such evil. The present tragic situation demands some serious thinking in our global perceptions of the realities in which we live and some of which we’ve created. Freedom of speech is both contingent on and complicit in every citizen’s rights.
On a less sombre note, the only ray of light I could see in the enveloping darkness of killings, lashings, and ceaseless hypocrisy is Oz PM’s wonderful sense of humor in knighting Prince Philip. This is the revenge of the subtlest kind: the old colony’s best joke.
To think that Tony has achieved this single-handed makes me feel quite royal. Years ago in the Old Parliament House in Canberra, across which is the rather tattered Aboriginal Embassy, we’d a debate: Australia should have an Australian Head of State? At the moment it’s Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom.
The leader of the affirmative was Malcolm Turnbull, now a minister in Abbott’s cabinet. I ,too, participated on the affirmative side. Abbott was opposing the motion.
Treasonable coup
I was of course aware how the Colonel had converted Fiji into a republic through a treasonable coup, and given a 21-gun salute in the Federal Parliament in Canberra.My one incontestable argument was that this could lead, for the first time, to an Aboriginal Head of State in this ancient continent. I did get an ovation that night: our team won on votes.
Subsequently Malcolm, the banker, joined the Libs and became its leader only to be displaced by a single vote by Tony Abbott.
What’s the moral of the story? That there’s no moral!
And as I’m writing this on a Saturday night, it seemed the LNP was in for a real drubbing at the polls in Queensland state elections. Labor won by a landslide. This is a catastrophic electoral defeat for a Party that came to power with an overwhelming majority three years ago; its dramatic effects are likely to be nation-wide, especially in Federal politics. The mayor of Brisbane, who became the premier, has become the knightmare.
Once again, Malcolm Turnbull could eventually become the leader of the Libs. One hopes he’ll support making Australia a Republic. But before that he should give a knighthood to Tony.
So we can say, Good Knight, Sir Tony.
And sleep a dreamless sleep, waking up from a knightmare!
Satendra Nandan is Professor Emeritus in English and Commonwealth Studies at Canberra University. His new book, Brief Encounters: Literature and Beyond, will be published on May 15 and launched at a literary conference in Europe on July 27.
Pacific Media Centre
