Re: Protest Yahoo Sponsorship of Racist/FascistGroups

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> "Nathan Newman" <nathan.newman@xxxxxxxx> 02/20/00 08:43AM
Charles dismisses free speech, citing McCarthyism, but while a number of
Communists were jailed, the Supreme Court did eventually declare most of the
attempted deportations (cases centered on Harry Bridges) and convictions
void on First Amendment grounds.

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CB: This is a gross defamation, most people who argue with me on this allow themselves. I don't dismiss free speech. I dismiss the claim that supporting fascist free speech protects leftwing and communist free speech.

Secondly, most leftists who argue against what I say, express concern about trusting the bourgeois state to enforce the law against fascists. Yet, these same people fail to see that their argument relies completely on trusting the very same bourgeois state to make the following link: "Since we are protecting fascist speech based on the First Amendment, we must be logically consistent and protect communist speech based on the First Amendment. It is extremely naive to trust the bourgeois state to discipline itself to this logical chain of argument.

It is especially naive given the entire history of Supreme Court jurisprudence of the First Amendment, most of which involved the SC NOT protecting communist and left speech. The fact that they finally sort of got it right in some of the cases Nathan mentions ( The Smith Act is still on the books and was not struck down, rather it was lesser technicality that got the CP members out of jail after serving up to 8 years) does not at all make me trust the bourgeois state that they will not reverse themselves and find that Communists are prosecutable, and not protected by the First Amendment. They will come up with a new version of "clear and present danger" or "agents of a foreign power" to get around the First Amendment protection, when the revolution gets going again.

Bottom line, you are foolish to rely on the bourgeois state , which most people profess not to trust,  to protect leftists based on leftist arguing that rightwingers and fascists have freedom of speech.


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 They had serious failings in the early 50s
(which critically allowed the left unionists to get devastated) but the core
case law that emerged out of the period ended up being quite favorable to
dissent.

Those core rights have extended to lefties as well, from rights to
demonstrate to the right of a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party to
burn the American flag - hell just their name would have gotten them jailed
before the first amendment law was extended in the late 50s and 60s.

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CB: This is true. But the Warren Court of the late fifties is caput. A Rehnquist Court has reversed all the other Civil Rights and Civil Liberties gains of the Warren Court. They are diabolically clever enough to find a way to reverse the Warren Court protection of Communists.

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And there is no inconsistency in promoting tolerance of intolerance.  There
is without question a tension, but I do not think that fascist authoritarian
views are suppressed by mirror-image authoritarian measures - they just go
underground and spring up again.  But broad aggressive tolerance that speaks
the truth without suppression, even tolerance that seems to risk its own
survival, disinfects hate and lies.  The very survival and revival of
facsist ideologies in the former Eastern Bloc, where suppression of fascist
ideology was supposed to be complete, just shows how fascist views can breed
underground and come out even stronger because of the lack of free speech to
combat them.

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CB: This is an abstract argument. If you look at the actual history of the U.S. First Amendment and tolerance, what you describe has not been the case. See my discussion above.

There would be MORE fascism in the former Eastern Bloc if it had not been outlawed under socialism. That is the response to your second argument.

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But let me emphasize the "agressive tolerance" part of what I said.  This
means that the price of tolerance and free speech is active memory of the
victims of the Middle Passage, of the Holocaust, of genocides all over the
world.  It is aggressive documentation of the racism that still pervades the
US and the world.  It is mass mobilization when Nazis or racists gather to
show that more people preach tolerance than hate, so that no one is
attracted to hate groups in order to be "with the crowd."   It is active
consumer boycotts and other grassroots protests against corporate sponsors
of hate to avoid ever letting such views be considered "normal" or
acceptable, even if we don't trust the state with the power to completely
suppress such hateful views.

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CB: The ACLU organizes none of this. Those who advocate an ACLU view have the number one responsibility to organize what you say, but they don't do any of it. The "tolerance" crowd always says what you say. but then you look at their practice and it all involves only the free speech stuff.

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And one problem with giving the state the power to suppress such groups is
not just that the state will inevitably misuse that power.  It's that it
will induce laziness in progressive groups in actively combatting the hate
lingering beneath the surface.

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CB: You have no empirical proof of such laziness. Those of us progressives who advocate outlawing the fascists are the least lazy in combatting hate. The National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression was for outlawing the Nazis and KKK AND did much more work than the ACLU against hate and racism besides this specific demand.


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Austria is a good example, where fascists
like Haider and company choose their words (more or less) carefully, but the
racist hate survives.  Some have argued that Haider is little different from
conservative racists in the US, but that's the point.  Anti-Nazi laws made
little difference in Austria in rooting out the hate, even if the symbols
are suppressed.

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CB: I can argue that fascism would have returned much sooner without the anti-Nazi laws. The fall of European socialism is also a factor in the rise of fascism in Europe today.  The Communist Parties were a main bulwark against the post WWII fascists.

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CB:

What will make a difference is active, positive promotion of tolerance, of
the mass rallies in solidarity with "foreigners" and education to confront
the ignorance and hate.  That's what it took in the South to end formal Jim
Crow; that's what it took in California in the 1990s to confront and
overcome anti-immigrant racism.

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CB: Jim Crow was a set of laws and customs. The Civil Rights movement specifically trusted the bourgeois state to abolish Jim Crow laws and to pass and enforce new anti-racist LAWS. This directly contradicts those who claim we should not work to pass anti-fascist laws because in doing so we are trusting the bourgeois state. Before that the 13th , 14th and 15th Amendments are bourgeois laws. In fact, the First Amendment is a bourgeois law.

The opponents of my position are highly inconsistent on this issue. They trust the bourgeois state to enforce the First Amendment for general "tolerance",  but when we propose fighting for anti-fascist laws, suddenly they don't trust the bourgeois state.

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Relying on the state for such confrontation is not just dangerous, but it's
ineffective and is a poor substitute for the active anti-hate campaigning
and education that is the real key to changing peoples hearts and minds.

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CB: Nobody said to the Civil Rights movement, it is dangerous, ineffective and a poor substitute for active anti-hate campaigns to trust the bourgeois state to confront and change Jim Crow laws into pro-Civil Rights laws.

Nobody says it is dangerous to trust the bourgeois state to protect Left First Amendment rights when the system goes into crisis again, and leftists' speech is generating real threats to the capitalist system as in 1918 and 1949. Or 1970, for that matter, when the Black militants had their speech crushed by summary police conspiratorial methods, rather than courts. The Black Panthers and MLK had their freedom of speech "protected" in court and annihilated by the FBI and local cops. The bourgeois is quite flexible and pragmatic.

CB