Hi everyone,
Can someone please have a read of my oral (English 1/2).
Thanks
A youtuber named Mark Meechan uploaded a clip featuring his girlfriends pug trained to give Nazi salutes when the youtuber shouted commands at his dog. For that, the youtuber was convicted, found guilty of hate crime and awaits sentencing this month. Famous Jewish comedians Ricky Gervais and David Badiel have spoken in his defense. And it’s relevant that both of these comedians indeed openly identify as Jewish comedians. This is where many wonder where the line is between free speech and hate speech. I think that this case is a gross affront to freedom of speech. Let me tell you why. I want to make a number of points that I think are incredibly important because they are points of principal. And when these principals are broken by our judges it worries me because precedence are set. The first thing I’ll say in the case of mark Meechan is that it’s not isolated. Just a week before, the British border agency decided to hold somebody under schedule seven of the terrorism act 2000, to hold a white, non Muslim, Canadian, right wing, populist, activist, named Lauren southern. A schedule under which the rights of silence is a criminal offence, that’s how serious this act is. That’s the counterstatement that’s going on here. She was held for distributing leaflets that bluntly discriminated Allah. In other words, for blasphemy. And now here we have a judge deciding if Mark Meechan and his Youtube video, an unfunny one in my personal subjective opinion, was guilty of hate speech and was criminally liable for it. Well here’s the problem I have with it. The importance of free speech is something that I believe is the corner stone of our democracy. Because without free speech political parties and campaigners do not have the right to campaign to recruit you to join their various perspectives. Without free speech you don’t have the right to then propagate the perspective of these various parties. Without free speech it becomes impossible to hold politicians to account for their views on anything, from climate change all the way to the justice system. Without free speech you don’t even have the right to practice your own religion. Free speech is probably the most important element of a secular democracy. It’s free speech that opens up debate and inquiry. And without free speech you cannot have free inquiry. And without free inquiry you cannot have freedom of thought. To limit free speech means “thought control” because as I said, without free speech you cannot have freedom of thought. That’s how important this is. It was Galileo and his free speech that allowed him to do what he did when he questioned the unscientific orthodoxy of his day. It was free speech that allowed darwin to do what he did when he questioned the religious and unscientific orthodoxy of his day. And as a result of their free speech, in other words their heresy, we are civilized nations that we’re meant to be in this day and age. And so Mark Meechan’s youtube video was heretical unsavory and perhaps even offensive. BUT guess what! Free speech and defending it doesn’t mean anything at all if you only defend it for things that you like. That’s not free speech. That’s actually defending your own opinion and your right to say your own opinion. Free speech is granting others the right to say things that you may not want to hear. Defending free speech only becomes relevant when your defending it against things that people find offensive. Otherwise it’s irrelevant to even have a conversation. And that’s why I often say that in a free society you have every right to be offended. But you have zero rights to insist that I do not offend you. Because that’s what it means to understand free speech. To argue that free speech only applies when saying what you want to hear isn’t an argument for free speech. Its an argument for bigotry. And this moves me to another point. Do you think the Nazis themselves would have tolerated their cherish salute being mocked by a dog? How do you think the Nazis would have reacted to this joke? Well surprise surprise. They would have did what this judge in free Britain would have done and sentenced the unfunny comedian to a criminal sentence. It’s the Nazis that would say this joke is not allowed. So why on earth is a secular democratic judge condemning this joke? And he said it by the way resting on the prosecutions case that argued the context of the joke is irrelevant. Of course context in comedy is always relevant. And to say that context in comedy is not relevant is to misunderstand comedy. FULL STOP. Because if context is irrelevant then I can pull up any number of given clips of the Nazi inspired TV series ‘Allo Allo’ and if I were to strip them all off context then I can find all those actors guilty for glorifying Nazis and spreading hate speech. Whether you found this joke by Mark Meechan funny or not which I personally did not find funny but guess what? Comedy is subjective. And what people find humorless or humorful is subjective. If you also did not find the joke funny then the easiest thing to do and in fact the only fitting punishment for this attempt at comedy by Mark Meechan is …. To simply not laugh at it.
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