Början på ett mediakrig om mångkulturen?

Enligt Niklas Långström, psykiater och våldsforskare vid Karolinska institutet, visar internationell forskning att drivkrafterna vid denna typ av brott i bland kan liknas de som kan ses vid sexualbrott eller misshandel och rånarna vill hävda sig inför varandra. Man uttrycker överläge och makt och offret avhumaniseras och förnedras.

Even more troubling was Baron Cohen’s appeal to the crimes of Nazi Germany. The enemies of free speech see ‘Hitler’ as a kind of trump card against calls for unrestricted and unadulterated free speech. The implication is that the Nazis’ rise to power and the Holocaust could have been prevented if only the German state had been prepared to censor Nazi propaganda.

The historical truth is that the Nazis and their ideas were often censored in Weimar Germany. Anti-Semitic speech was prohibited by law. The offence of ‘insulting communities of faith’ carried a three-year prison sentence. As Flemming Rose points out in The Tyranny of Silence, leading Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for hate speech before they rose to power – and Streicher was imprisoned twice. The Nazi publication Der Stürmer was regularly confiscated and its editors were taken to court on at least 36 occasions.

Far from ‘free speech’ allowing Nazism to flourish, attempts to censor Nazi propaganda often backfired. Rather than tackling Nazi anti-Semitism, dragging leading Nazis through the courts allowed them to pose as martyrs. As Alan Bovoroy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, writes in When Freedoms Collide: ‘During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech… As subsequent history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.’

In fact, surely the Third Reich itself should give any right-thinking person pause for thought when calling for censorship and restrictions on speech. Books were burned, opposition parties were banned, and dissenters were thrown in jail or into concentration camps. The absence of free speech and open, critical debate is what has allowed authoritarians the world over to keep hold of power – to cover up atrocities and to propagate lies that go unchallenged. The Nazis should act as a grave warning of the perils of censorship, not as a spur for more censorship.