“We should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal”, Popper says. Maybe there’s something to that.
In March 2016, PEN America reported that the bounty for the Rushdie fatwa was raised by $600,000 (£430,000). Top Iranian media contributed this sum, adding to the existing $2.8 million already offered. In response, the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel prize for literature, denounced the death sentence and called it “a serious violation of free speech”.
When Rushdie was being persecuted, people rightfully recognized that the death decrees issued on him were not protected speech. So obviously there are speech acts that aren’t tolerated. But as soon as it’s Rasmus Paludan or Flemming Rose, it’s “just go ahead, boys, this is what a democracy is all about”. I’m not onboard with that.
They’re destroying democracy in the name of democracy.
Paludan is duplicitious since he makes a ton of racist threats and then he burns the book so he can say “See? See? They get mad just because I burn the book!”
That’s not it.
We get mad because of the context.
Two wrongs don’t make a right and I hope no-one gets hurt in the riots. (Even material damage, like burning cop cars, is bad because replacing them is ultimately gonna be at the expense of the Earth’s limited resources.)
But I’m not into all these politicians saying that Paludan’s hate tirades need to be protected speech, extolled with “This is democracy! This is democracy!”
It’s not. I know it’s a semantics argument here (“what is real definition of democracy, actually?”) but what these politicans are doing, extolling Paludan like this, is the open society killing itself.
The NSDAP declared itself the only legal party in Germany on July 14, 1933. That was a speech act. A speech act that destroyed the open society for decades. The death decrees on Rushdie were also speech.
It’s so obvious where the line goes yet these Paludan-hugging politicians don’t seem to get that. I’m pretty sure I know why.