France Arrests Comedian for Facebook "Joke" a Week After Charlie Attack

France Arrests Comedian for Facebook "Joke" a Week After Charlie Attack

Most people are not really getting this whole "free speech" thing. The American concept, as defined by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, means that the government may not punish you for the public airing of an opinion. The French don't get it at all. They say "Je suis Charlie" in support of comics who stated their opinions as cartoon jokes containing exiguous wit, while they simultaneously arrest another comic for stating the opposite opinions with Facebook jokes containing exiguous wit. We must assume from this apparent paradox that "Je suis Charlie" must therefore have nothing to do with free speech. It's just a statement of sympathy for the victims of terrorism.

Don't get me wrong. That's a good thing

But it's unrelated to free speech.

The French don't really believe in that whole free speech thingy. Animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot has been convicted and fined five times for speaking out against the slaughter of animals, as practiced in Islamic rituals. She has called it a barbaric practice that is destroying the country. Sorry, BB, no free speech for you. Even when you're right (if somewhat hyperbolic).

Let's be honest here. Whether you're French or American or anything else, you don't really support free speech unless you accept the right of people to express opinions with which you are in profound disagreement. As Rosa Luxemburg said, ""Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" ("Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently"). The guy arrested by the French is quite detestable. He's known to be anti-semitic and may even be pro-terrorist, but if you really believe in free speech, you have to believe that he has the right to express his despicable sentiments in public without fear of government interference. He would have that right in the USA. Oh, he would get his ass kicked a lot, because American society, too, has its defects. But he would not get arrested.

I have pointed out many times, to the annoyance of many people across the globe, that American exceptionalism does exist. The USA is the only country which has a provision like the First Amendment. In the United States, the government is explicitly forbidden from creating any law which abridges the freedom of speech, even though every other country in the world, even the great countries which developed the rights of man to begin with, allows its government's thought police to arrest people for "hate speech," or "subversive speech," or whatever other term they use for things they disagree with. "One would be hard-pressed to find anyone outside of the US who supports full US-style freedom of speech. The mere concept is simply unfathomable to them."

Americans think this makes their approach to free speech the best in the world, but many others think this makes the American system the worst. Others even go so far as to say that America's First Amendment is a violation of International Law! You may agree with those others. You may think it is good that the other governments prevent the airing of contemptible, hateful opinions. Perhaps it is, up to a point, but the problem with giving that power to your government is that once you do, the opinions you may express are then dependent on whom you vote for. It is now considered a hate crime in Germany to spread pro-Nazi propaganda, which sounds good until you realize that in the late 1930s you were not allowed to spread ANTI-Nazi propaganda.

That's the direct result of allowing your government to abridge your free speech.

By the way ...

The Weimar Republic had perfectly good laws against hate speech which often affected the Nazis before they took power. Even Goebbels was arrested. But those laws and those arrests didn't really do much to suppress the Nazis, did they? If anything, the arrests made those hateful wackos seems like a persecuted minority. The hate speech laws were not only anti-freedom, but they were also ineffective.

So - do sympathize with the satirists who died for exercising free speech in France, but don't assume the outpouring of sympathy means their country is actually defending free speech, because they just arrested some other satirist for expressing an opposite viewpoint. True free speech includes the right to say unpopular things. It includes the right to be an asshole. It even includes the right to make tasteless, offensive, unfunny jokes.