Neil Gaiman -- Censorship

This afternoon on "An Evening with Neil Gaiman" at Jessamine County Public Library, the interviewer asked Neil about his view on the importance of freedom of speech and his ideas on censorship. My ears immediately perked up and my attention automatically sharpened. Obviously, having read all of Neil Gaiman's novels, I had presumed him to have a liberal and open view on the world.

The reason I became so interested in his perspective on the matter is that I truly respect Neil for his intelligence and expected him to have some interesting new insights into the idea of censorship. I was right to presume so.

I will attempt to sum up his take on the matter;. As I understood Gaiman, he pretty much made two main points:
a) It is impossible to define whose right is right. What I mean by this is that everyone has differing opinions, and therefore to censor some who might seem to have an extreme or even absurd take on a subject, is wrong. Freedom of expression realizes that everyone has different points of view, and ensures that no single person's ideas are scorned and that is purely positive.
b) As soon as you start to censor even the most extreme of ideas, you are on a slippery slope downwards, and will soon create a society with no freedom whatsoever.

Both of the above points are very valid and applicable. In fact the discussion with Neil reminded me of the book Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.


I'm not fully decided on my response to this, though. See, perhaps Neil Gaiman and Ray Bradbury are correct, however my mind always seems to revert back to the harm that hate speech can administer. See, despite the above two points and their validity, there is a third point that hasn't been addressed in the least.

To understand this point, I ask you to imagine taking a fully loaded gun, giving it to a kid to play with. While you might think that it's extreme for me to liken this situation to mere speech freedom, I don't. I'll give you an example. A couple of days ago I posted about the leader of the South African leading party's youth league, the ANCYL, Julius Malema.

Just over a week ago, Malema stood up and sung the song 'Kill the Boor', 'Boor' referring to the Afrikaans word for a farmer. Overnight, the statistics of farmer murders in South Africa increased from one every 48 hours to one every 18 hours. Why? Merely because he sang a very racist song.

See, hatespeech is like a weapon in the hands of a leader. Without Osama Bin Laden's speeches that won him public support amongst the Taliban, perhaps the World Trade Centers would still be standing. Without Hitler's dynamic speaking qualities, perhaps millions of Jews wouldn't have been murdered in the Holocaust.

Still, as soon as you start to censor, the line of what is acceptable is very difficult to draw. If you merely condemn all hatespeech, it is impossible to respond to world dictators and murderers. If you condemn nothing, you only give them support.

I'm not entirely sure of what the solution is, but I think it is perhaps fairly good to condemn hatespeech without basis. Any negativity must be supported by fact. This isn't a foolproof system, but it seems to me to be better than leaving everything without parameters.

The other option is to ensure that there are enough people with enough leadership and office in every community to respond to destructive voices in the media and and even within community.

That's it for now!

Edit: PS. Please feel free to comment and express your own opinions below.