Sometimes you just have to let your biases go. I think Winston Peters is a fool, a troll, and a blot on the political establishment. On the other hand, I think Susan Devoy was a darn good squash player and a darn good person. But when Susan tries to censor Winston, she’s wrong.
Last month Dame Susan declined to comment on Mr Peters’ “Super City of Sin” speech, in which he accused parts of the Chinese community in Auckland of importing corruption and being heavily involved in the sex industry and student cheating rings. Today Dame Susan said there was “a broader human rights issue” if Mr Peters continued “to stigmatise one population” to win votes.
“Winston has carried on this tirade for a long time and I don’t think that anything that I’m going to say is actually going to make a leopard change his spots, to be perfectly honest,” Dame Susan told Q+A.
Susan is wrong. The correct response to Trolls is mockery. Good speech drives out bad speech. And, as the good people of the Iron Drape point out….
But that aside, we classical liberals understand that free speech is the best defence against bigots and racists: such haters must not be silenced by the state, only by reason, as they are given the rope to hang themselves pursuant to the judgement of civilised, informed minds. Being offended is never a crime. Hate speech laws, are freedom hating laws. I don’t want Dame Susan using the power of state to censor, and it’s appalling her Race Relations primer for Dummies has led her up the garden path of doing so. That garden path merges always with the road to our serfdom. Without free speech, the West becomes the East, circa Cold War.
The Race Relations office must now be disbanded, though while Dame Susan waits in the antechamber, and given she has thrown herself into the childish sand pit of political partisanship, perhaps she could pen a missive to censor and censure both Labour and the Greens for their program of repugnant nationalism … that is, as far as the Chinese are concerned. Then please someone give Dame Susan a copy of Freedom for Dummies: or as I call it, my blog.
Because finally, the most important question to come from this, is what has happened that our theocrats in the Fortress of Legislation no longer understand that foundation stone of the free society: free speech? No, wait a minute, they’re theocrats, I’ve answered my own question.
Well, yeah. Winston is a pain. He continually denigrates the most productive minority in the country — the Chinese — the ethnicity of the woman I was married to for two decades (and she is, by my count, a third generation Kiwi). But I want freedom of speech. So I can look him in the face and tell him he is wrong — the gangsters in this society are generally not Asian, but Polynesian, particularly his ethnicity — for he is Maori.
But this kind of comment, this kind of discussion, may become illegal if the noxious censors within Internal affairs, working to the polite demands of the international elite such as GenderIT who conflate hard speech with violence.
They want to censor everything. They want to stop free discussion. They want appropriate discussion. What they consider safe, non violent, and what is effete.
The problem with banning speech is not that it does not stop hate. It stops truth. It stops people confronting those who speak rashly and unwisely. I want that right. I want to be able to be abrasive, to call Peters a blot on the landscape, to say that the Mana party has but one use in politics — they reliably guide us to what is right, for they are always on the side of error and evil.
I want rudeness. I want confrontation. And I want Gender IT, the EU Human Rights people, and the Race Relations Commissioner, to just resign their posts and let it happen. For our society is failing, and if we do not talk honestly about this, instead of muttering in some post modern manner about the words (ignoring the actions, ignoring the consequences, and failing to repair the damage done) as if the words were the solution.
We have a society to protect and a gospel to proclaim. Shut us up, and we will still get the message out: samidat can easily become samizdata. And in the end, the truth will drive out evil.
