Hatred and Silence

Kandel is a small German town near the French border, some 70 kilometers from Strasbourg. My family and I like to go there on day trips, as the town of nine thousand inhabitants offers plenty of opportunities for recreation. On Sundays, a local accordion orchestra plays by the town pond, and the kiosk serves spritzers made with the local Pinot Gris and warm pretzels. In this idyllic little town in the Palatinate, on December 27 last year, fifteen-year-old Mia Valentin was murdered outside the local drugstore. The perpetrator was her ex-boyfriend, Abdul D., a refugee from Afghanistan who had come to Germany two years earlier. In August this year, he was sentenced in Karlsruhe to eight years in prison.

The horrific murder understandably caused great outrage in Germany, but many of the reactions were very quickly removed from social networks. Germany’s new law, known as NetzDG, requires internet platforms to remove hate speech themselves. As Harvard professor Yascha Mounk, author of The People vs. Democracy, mentioned during a recent lecture in Strasbourg, the posts removed from Facebook included several statements that the murdered girl’s mother had addressed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Faced with extremely high potential fines of up to 50 million euros, Facebook simply did not want to take the risk of analyzing in detail whether this really was hate speech, nor did it take into account the context that these were the words of a grieving mother who had lost her child in horrific circumstances. The far right’s propaganda army, of course, did not let such a gift slip through its fingers.

On March 11, 2004, 193 people died in a bomb attack on Madrid’s Atocha station. The Islamist terrorist organization Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility. It was not Spain’s first experience of terrorism. Over the past 50 years, attacks by the Basque terrorist organization ETA killed hundreds of people. In this context, it is understandable that Article 578 of the Spanish Criminal Code prohibits “glorifying terrorism” and “humiliating the victims of terrorism.” The problem is that in recent years the number of convictions has soared; in the last two years alone there have been more than seventy. Among them are quite a few artists and creators. Last week, a court in Ghent rejected a request to extradite Valtònyc, a 24-year-old rapper from Majorca who fled to Belgium in May after Spain’s High Court upheld a sentence of three and a half years in prison for lyrics that, in the judges’ opinion, glorified terrorism.

A few days ago, a French court ordered a psychiatric assessment of Marine Le Pen. The leader of France’s far-right party is on trial for spreading images of the horrific crimes of the Islamic State. If the court finds her guilty, she faces up to three years in prison. On hearing this news, many in Slovenia grumbled about why we can’t have trials like this too. But it is worth pointing out that this is not Le Pen’s first such experience. Years ago, she was convicted over statements about the “Islamic occupation of France,” only to be acquitted on appeal. Her supporters enthusiastically celebrated the victory of a martyr fighting for truth in the name of the nation against censorship by corrupt elites.

These three cases differ from one another, but each in its own way illustrates the risk that ill-considered and overly deep intrusions into freedom of expression bring to the fight against hate speech. This does not mean, of course, that we must not or cannot limit that freedom, but we must be careful not to do more harm than good. That is why the European Court sets the threshold for legal prohibition, and especially for criminal prosecution, very high, and also defines as lawful speech that shocks, disturbs or offends.

In Slovenia, we undoubtedly have an extremely serious problem with the spread of hate speech and intolerance, but in my view it cannot be solved by prosecutors alone. Although there have recently been quite a few cases involving direct threats of violence, where questions about the prosecution’s decisions are certainly justified, for a significant part of the speech we might consider hateful we cannot categorically claim in advance that it reaches the high threshold set by the Strasbourg court for the most serious restrictions on freedom of expression.

This does not mean, of course, that such speech does not need and demand firm condemnation. On the contrary, the Strasbourg court not only permits such political and social reactions but expects them in a democratic society. That is a message for those who justify their silence by respect for democratic values. What is most lacking in the response to the growing spread of hatred in Slovenia is above all a firm and clear social reaction from politicians, as well as from other personalities and institutions that enjoy respect or influence in society. We need a democracy whose survival does not depend on prosecutors alone but which can also defend itself.

In a civilized, modern democratic society, the hatred, racism and vulgar lies spread in our public space by certain public figures and media should mean a one-way, non-refundable ticket out of public life and influence. Here, it is often exactly the opposite. The biggest problem with the tweets of the Ljubljana lawyer is not that the police did not handcuff her after she posted them and take her away to prison, but that her party, a member of the European People’s Party, put her up as a candidate for parliament without hesitation and without consequences, despite her regular outbursts of vulgar hatred.

The biggest concern about Demokracija’s recent front pages is not that the police did not raid the newsroom and confiscate every copy from the newsstands, but that the President of the Republic believes, or wants to believe, that he must not respond to cases of obvious hate speech, racism and intolerance in the media. The most worrying thing about the clearly hateful and racist statements by our security expert is not that his intolerance was not censored, but that, despite it, the gentleman became a state secretary.

Our weakness in responding to the growing spread of hatred is not only that we prosecute too little, but that we are too quiet and not ashamed enough. Silence gives hatred cover and legitimizes it. If we want to defeat hate speech, which is not only an ethical imperative but also a security one, we need politics that clearly and firmly defends constitutionally protected democratic values. Politics that stands up for those who are hated, instead of keeping silent about, excusing, nominating or even employing those who hate.