It is a truism that distasteful, unpleasant or highly controversial speech is usually the only kind of speech that really needs defending. But in the wake of the deadly Paris terrorist attacks against Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and Jews, and the efforts to test speech limits that followed, it is a truism worth repeating. 

It’s not the nice, respectful commentary that riles up the censors. It’s the offensive stuff, the stuff that makes you cringe, wince or shake your head in disgust, the stuff that surely everyone with a bit of sense would reject. The question is whether we’re better off letting those with a bit of sense voluntarily dismiss the nasty commentary on their own or if we should have government step in and formally silence the nasty commentators.

The former strikes me as a far better course of action than the latter, and I’m joined in this view by no less eminent a thinker than John Stuart Mill.

Among Mill’s reasons for valuing freedom of expression so highly was that even in cases where the received wisdom of the majority happens to be wholly true, that opinion still benefits from being earnestly debated and contested from time to time. If it’s not, it will devolve into nothing more than dogma that people are told they must believe  without remembering or knowing why.

ANOTHER VIEW: Hatred is not blasphemy

The recent example of the Halifax hotdog vendor who sought to test the limits of free expression by tweeting Holocaust jokes is a good example of Mill’s point.

In a nutshell, Jerry Reddick, a Muslim who sells hotdogs near the Dalhousie campus, and who is better known as “the Dawgfather,” was testing us. His inflammatory tweets about Jews were accompanied by the hashtag #freespeechworksbothways, and he was seeking to make the point that if speech mocking sacred Muslim subjects –  speech like the Charlie Hebdo cartoons which mocked the prophet Muhammad – is legal, then so, too, should be speech mocking subjects sacred to other religions.

I found his tweets, joking about Jews and ovens, disgusting. But I think his point about speech is right. The malicious and horrible nature of the Holocaust is exactly the sort of received wisdom that is too important for us to allow to become simply a prejudice that is held without meaning or conviction. Yet if questioning the Holocaust, or making light of it in offensive ways, becomes a crime – words that simply may not be spoken – then the truth of the Holocaust’s horror is no longer something that must be thought about actively and defended passionately.

Yes, that’s right: as Mill put it, freedom of thought for falsehoods helps keep truth alive.

Here, in Mill’s words, is what happens when a true belief isn’t tested: “When it has come to be an hereditary creed, and to be received passively, not actively—when the mind is no longer compelled, in the same degree as at first, to exercise its vital powers on the questions which its belief presents to it, there is a progressive tendency to forget all of the belief except the formularies, or to give it a dull and torpid assent, as if accepting it on trust dispensed with the necessity of realizing it in consciousness, or testing it by personal experience; until it almost ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life of the human being.”

People reacted in different ways to Reddick’s tweets. Several Dalhousie students fought the offensive expression with expression of their own. One launched a Facebook campaign urging students to boycott the Dawgfather’s stand, and others gave out free kosher hotdogs with the option for takers to donate to a Holocaust education charity. These actions have generated healthy debate and discussion. Another person reacted by complaining to the police, who are now investigating Reddick for hate crimes. That action has the potential not only to shut down debate and create a martyr out of Reddick, but also to enfeeble the power of the Holocaust to make people think and evoke real heartfelt conviction.

We have a similar situation in France, where comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala was arrested and prosecuted for being an “apologist for terror” because he posted on Facebook after the Paris Unity March that he felt “like Charlie Coulibaly,” a reference to one of the Paris gunmen.

Logic tells us that Dieudonné’s prosecution is likely to give extremists far more inspiration than his initial post. Given that the French public will now apparently be completely shielded from Dieudonné’s brand of anti-Semitic opinion, they will have lost a chance to cultivate the understanding behind the religious tolerance on which the censorship is based. As will we all. 

Marni Soupcoff is executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation (theccf.ca).