5 Feet of Fury

Jim Goad: Free speech or hate speech? I’ll take both, thanks

Jim Goad writes:

“The states where criticism of totalitarian ideology was prohibited were the ones that internationalized hate-speech laws,” writes Jacob Mchangama in a fascinating overview called “The Sordid Origin of Hate-Speech Laws” (…)

The essay tracks the Soviet Union’s repeated attempts to attach hate-speech exceptions to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and how the historical push has expanded slowly from banning speech that directly incites violence…to speech that somehow only incites “hatred”…to speech that authorities merely tag as hateful. And the Soviet Union’s definition of “hate speech” was so broad that it deemed any speech that spoke favorably of capitalism as “fascist” and therefore ban-worthy.