Can Words Hurt Us?

The Question Is: Can the Nuremburg Tribunal’s willingness to execute the notorious Nazi antisemite, Julius Streicher, for publishing hate speech serve as a moral rationale for giving the claim that “words breed deeds” the strongest possible legal expression in New Zealand?

JULIUS STREICHER was convicted and executed at Nuremburg in 1946 for what would today be called “hate speech”. For many years Streicher had been the editor of Der Stürmer, the virulently antisemitic newspaper notorious for whipping-up hatred against Germany’s – and Europe’s – Jewish population. The judges at Nuremburg had drawn a direct causal link between the words and images printed in Der Stürmer and what we now call “The Holocaust” – the state-sanctioned and organised genocide of European Jewry. Words breed deeds, the judges said, and Streicher’s hateful words had contributed to the death of millions.

Such reasoning is, of course, made much easier when it is the deeds of the Nazis caught in the moral spotlight. When the effects of extremism are so unequivocally horrendous, a degree of carelessness in identifying its causes is all-too-easily overlooked and/or excused. With the images of the Nazi death camps seared into the consciousness of the Nuremburg judges, Streicher’s squalid provocations encountered a pronounced deficit of historical understanding. Between 1933 and 1945, the editor of Der Stürmer had indisputably got what he wanted. Surely, on the scaffold at Nuremburg, he got what he deserved?

Just Deserts? The body of Julius Streicher, notorious Nazi editor of the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer, hanged at Nuremburg for his unremitting media hate campaign against the Jews.

The Nuremburg Trials have presented the world with such a clear moral template that they have become the go-to source for generations in search of a clear ethical steer on the conduct of those wielding state power. In the 1960s and 70s, opponents of the Vietnam War warned the conscript soldiers of the United States that when it came to war crimes and crimes against humanity the judgement of Nuremburg was very clear. The excuse, “I was just following orders” is unacceptable. There are some orders that no human-being worthy of the name should follow. Military discipline does not trump the fundamental moral precepts of a civilised society.

That the anti-vaccination occupiers of Parliament Grounds in February-March 2022 also reached for the moral absolutism of Nuremburg – not least its willingness to execute the guilty – should give us all pause. Certainly it should remind us that all human judgement is bounded by the historical events and prejudices within which it is exercised. Even the high-minded pronouncements of the Nuremburg Tribunal are capable of being twisted to ignoble – even evil – ends.

The question, therefore, becomes: Can the Nuremburg Tribunal’s willingness to execute Streicher for publishing hate speech serve as a moral rationale for giving the claim that “words breed deeds” the strongest possible legal expression in New Zealand? Perhaps fortunately, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has handed over this complex legal and ethical argument to the Law Commission. Even so, the consequences of a wrong call on the strength of the causal links between words and deeds is fraught with political risk.

Where should one start? In Streicher’s case, the antisemitic prejudices which fuelled his newspaper sales predated Der Stürmer by several centuries. Crediting Streicher alone with whipping-up hatred of the Jews in Germany is an historical absurdity. One might as readily put the Catholic Church in the dock for instigating the medieval “blood libel” against the Jews. The Nazis did not invent German antisemitism: but, by giving anti-Jewish prejudice the force of law, they made it compulsory. Without Adolf Hitler’s genocidal hatred of the Jews, Der Stürmer would never have amounted to anything more than a loathsome antisemitic rag. One among many.

Those seeking to make hate speech illegal are relying, increasingly, on the concept of “stochastic terrorism” to justify their plans for extensive political censorship. Stochastic, in this context, is best explained as the problem of identifying precisely which one of the ten thousand antisemitic readers of an incendiary online posting is going to borrow his brother’s rifle and walk into the nearest synagogue.

The promoters of hate speech laws argue that it is enough to know that those contributing to the creation of a climate of hatred and prejudice will, eventually, succeed in provoking a deadly political reaction. Although it is virtually impossible for the authorities to identify exactly which one of these ten thousand potential terrorists will pick up a gun, the statistical certainly remains that someday, someone will.

Better, therefore, to legally prohibit extremists from building-up the sort of highly-charged political atmosphere that can only be earthed by a bolt of terrorist lightning. No antisemitic literature, no antisemitic movies, no antisemitic blogs and – Hey Presto! – no antisemitism!

Quite apart from the immense cultural wounds such an approach would inflict – no Merchant of Venice – it is far from certain that such extensive censorship would be effective. The perpetrator of the Christchurch Mosque Massacre, for example, was inspired, in part, by the deeds of the Norwegian terrorist, Anders Breivik. Does this mean that all news of such deadly attacks should be suppressed? Brenton Tarrant was also inspired by the medieval military struggle between Christendom and Islam in the Holy Land and Eastern Europe. Do those promoting hate speech laws also propose placing a ban on the reading of history?

The hate speech legislation packed off to the Law Commission by Prime Minister Hipkins proposed to limit the extended protection of our human rights legislation to religious communities alone. This offered considerably less protection for “vulnerable groups” than had been promised in earlier recommendations, and yet, even when limited to religious belief, the potential for conflict remains high. The Bible and the Koran both contain passages that are, at least on their face, antisemitic. Should both holy books join Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in the sin-bin?

The moral certainties reflected in the judgements of Nuremburg can still evoke a nostalgic response from those old enough to have grown up in their shadow. The Second World War was perceived (at least by its victors) as a Manichean struggle in which the Forces of Light had not only defeated the Forces of Darkness, but also, in the course of prosecuting those minions of evil who’d survived the War, spelled out with crystalline clarity the moral limits of political and military power. After the global exertions of the most destructive war in human history, the installation of a new moral order – the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the judgements of Nuremburg themselves – did not strike them as hubris, but as the very least that should be done to honour the millions who had fallen.

And yet, even as Julius Streicher was twisting at the end of a rope, his fellow defendant, Albert Speer, was being escorted to a comfortable prison cell, from which he would emerge 20 years later to burnish his growing reputation as the only “Good Nazi”. In the end, the thousands of Jewish and Russian slave labourers who died manufacturing the weapons which, as Hitler’s Armaments Minister, Speer had promised his Fuhrer, caused the Nuremburg judges less grief than Streicher’s hate-filled prose.

Truth is a hard goddess to like – and even more difficult to serve – but among all the other gods she stands alone for keeping her promise to humanity. “I cannot shield you from the pain that comes with me,” she told us, “but I am your only sure protection against those who would have you believe that happiness is ignorant, and that lies can set you free.”

This essay was originally posted on Interest.co.nz of Monday, 13 February 2023.

Is The Government’s Proposed “Cure” For Hate Speech Worse Than The Complaint?

For Our Own Good? Police officers knocking on New Zealanders’ doors on account of what they might think, or what they have said, is more likely to make the rest of us think we are living in Nazi Germany – not drawing lessons from it. The disharmony such heavy-handed state intrusion is bound to create will exceed by a wide margin the disharmony it is attempting to prevent.

IF ANY NATION UNDERSTANDS the relationship between “Hate Speech” and “Hate Crime” it is the German nation. Not only is Germany the nation which gave birth to Nazism, but it is also the nation which gave birth to the constitutional protections which allowed Nazism to destroy Germany’s fledgling democracy.

The constitution of the Weimar Republic – fragile successor to the defeated German Empire of Kaiser Wilhelm II – was the most progressive of its time. It conferred upon the German people civil and political rights as new as they were exhilarating. Foremost among these was that capstone of democracy, Freedom of Expression. Without this crucial freedom, all of Democracy’s other rights and freedoms are swiftly rendered illusory.

But, as the excellent German documentary series The Abyss: Rise and Fall of the Nazis, makes clear, the Weimar constitution’s unconditional guarantee of Freedom of Expression allowed the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper, Der Stürmer, to go on pumping its poison into the German body-politic. Tellingly, at the post-war Nuremberg Trials the editor of Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher, was charged with being an accessory to the mass murder of European Jewry. For his relentless incitement of hatred against the Jews, Streicher was found guilty of aiding and abetting the Holocaust and condemned to death. He was hanged on 16 October 1946.

The judgement of the international jurists at Nuremberg was clear: hate speech leads to hate crimes. To incite hatred is to invite violence – and worse. The constitution of the German Federal Republic (modern-day Germany) reflects the lessons learned from the tragic fate of Weimar. Germany’s “basic law” makes it clear that democratic rights and freedoms do not include the right to turn democracy against itself.

The question which New Zealanders must now answer is whether or not they confront a situation which in any serious respect resembles that of the doomed Weimar Republic? Is there a political force at work in New Zealand society remotely similar to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party? And, if such a force does exist, is it reasonable to characterise its protagonists as an existential threat to this country’s democratic institutions?

The answer to all of those questions is an unequivocal “No.” Nevertheless, the Labour Government is getting ready to pass legislation which will more define more clearly – and punish more harshly – “hate speech”. It is doing so at the behest of the Royal Commission of Inquiry in to the Christchurch Attacks of 15 March 2019. In the name of strengthening “social cohesion” – and thereby lessening the likelihood of future attacks – the Commissioners concluded that some revision of our current legal protections against hate speech was in order.

Before examining the Government’s proposed changes, it is important to determine whether the “Lone Wolf” Australian-born terrorist who carried out the Christchurch attacks did so as a consequence of absorbing hate speech uttered and/or published by New Zealanders on New Zealand soil. Or, more bluntly, was Brenton Tarrant incited to murder 51 people by a New Zealand variant of Der Stürmer? Once again, the answer is unequivocal: “No, he was not.”

Tarrant’s inspiration came from much further afield. He was a disciple of the Norwegian Lone Wolf terrorist Anders Breivik. He spent years visiting battlefields in southern and central Europe where Christian and Ottoman armies clashed more than 500 years ago. He participated in chat-rooms on the notorious US-based “4-Chan” social media platform. His political focus was upon events unfolding in the Northern – not the Southern Hemisphere.

Indeed, Tarrant chose New Zealand as the location for his attack on Islam precisely because it was so blessedly free of the unbridled hate speech that so inflamed the political discourse in other jurisdictions – along with the protections erected to preserve their citizens from its consequences. Prior to Tarrant’s deadly attack, New Zealand had not experienced a fatal terrorist incident since the death of Ernie Abbott in the Wellington Trades Hall bombing of 1984, and the loss of Fernando Pereira a year later in the state terrorist bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by the French government. Tarrant felt able to hide in plain sight in this country, confident that until he acted, he would not be detected. He wasn’t wrong.

All of which is not to suggest that New Zealand is entirely free of racial and religious prejudice and hatred. Verbal and physical assaults on people of colour and adherents of non-Christian religions are, sadly, all-too-common here. The point remains, however, that the level of this verbal and physical harassment was low enough for Tarrant’s attack to fall upon New Zealand like a bolt from the blue. No one anticipated anything like the horror and mayhem of the 15 March 2019 mosque shootings.

Why, then, did the Royal Commission feel moved to recommend a strengthening of our hate speech legislation? Did they not consider our democratic institutions robust enough to meet the outpouring of hatemongers head-on? Did they not regard the power of our news media to name and shame extremists of all kinds as a sufficient bulwark against the rise of a New Zealand Nazi Party and/or the publication of a down-under Der Stürmer? After all, when Far-Right and White Supremacist groups have shown themselves on the streets, the only impression they have left is one of profound weakness.

Although not yet “official”, the following wording would appear to be the Government’s preferred alternative to the existing legal prohibition against inciting racial hatred, it reads:

the incitement of disharmony, based on an intent to stir up, maintain or normalise hatred, through threatening, abusive or insulting communications.

It is further reported that legislative protection will be extended to target hate speech directed at religious belief and gender identification. Those found guilty of hate speech will be liable for a prison sentence not exceeding three years.

What sort of speech will it take to convince a jury of ordinary New Zealanders to send a fellow citizen to jail? One suspects that hatred of the sort perfected by Julius Streicher in Der Sturmer will be required to secure a conviction. Speech falling short of that measure will almost certainly result in acquittal. In the process of sorting out where the cut-off point lies (which is unlikely to be very far from where it is currently) real damage could end up being done to New Zealand democracy.

The framers of the Weimar constitution weren’t wrong to hold up Freedom of Expression as the capstone of democracy. They could not have foreseen the intensity of the hatred that fuelled the rise of the Nazis – hatred which the victors of World War I did so much to feed. Nor should we condemn the framers of Germany’s present constitution for attempting to learn the lessons of their country’s awful history. The problem our government faces, however, is that New Zealand is not Germany. Our political history contains nothing even remotely resembling the Nazi Party – or Der Stürmer.

And that’s the rub – isn’t it? Police officers knocking on New Zealanders’ doors on account of what they might think, or what they have said, is more likely to make the rest of us think we are living in Nazi Germany – not drawing lessons from it. The disharmony such heavy-handed state intrusion is bound to create will exceed by a wide margin the disharmony it is attempting to prevent.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 19 April 2021.