sticks and stones and machetes and nukes
Sep. 20th, 2004 02:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistThis is awesome
Also. Let's talk about hate speech. I was telling a friend about a paper I was writing, and I argued that the Michael Savage-type rhetoric, calling for a nuclear attack on Baghdad on US airways is, in fact, hate speech, as it creates a racialized enemy and essentially advocates genocide. Both proliferate and amplify racism, xemophobia and systematically construct a dehumanized enemy "other" that is locked outside of the cultural discourse of morals and ethics.
Hate speech is a murky category that is indicative of American confused puritan/libertarian moral compass, and is not criminalized in the US. It is, however, a crime under international law, although if I remember correctly it has only been prosecuted as a war crime twice, during the Nuremberg trials and at the "media trials" before the International Crimianl Tribunal for Rwanda. My friend's response was that Radio Machete was government-sponsored, which created the leap between words and policy. My argument is that our government is corporation-sponsored, not as some gloomy tinfoil-hat metaphor, but in very real, boring terms of dollars and cents and stocks and bonds, and that the Clear Channel is as much a reflection of the government policy as "Hate Radio" was of the Hutu leaders.
In a way this kind of reasoning relates to a larger problem...or, not exactly a problem, but an incongruency, a lag. Allow me to use The Economist as an illustration. I like The Economist. I often don't agree with its political platform, but it has excellent news analysis and international coverage. It's solidly libertarian, and very British. It is very polite and reasonable. And that is its downfall at this juncture in history. The Economist is stuck in a world of the past, when everyone was reasonable, when corruption could only be entertained as a phenomenon within certain reasonable parameters, when conspiracy theory was some kind of paranoid tomfoolery. It's like King Arthur at the Yankee Court. The Economist Does Not Comrephend in the way that your grandma Does Not Comprehend the nature of your dating imbroglios (or at least mine does not). How does a journal too sensible to engage with anything that deviates from the "rational choice model" and furthermore indulges in the colonial nostalgia of the Benevolent Western Influence fare in a world where the PNAC blueprint for actual Global Domination is laid out, in open text (well, open hypertext), making some pretty explicit wishes to the Neoimperialism Fairy for "another Pearl Harbor"?
Texts and people are overimpressed with reified historical categories, but they are the new Potemkin Villages; the government and the financial sector are about as separate as the other famous mythological binary, church and state. They are all about as separate as the well-kept lawn and the insects beneath it in David Lynch's suburbia. Making a distinction between government-owned Radio Machete and "privately owned" Clear Channel outlets is like falsely polarizing implicit and explicit, de jure and de facto, creating a binary opposition for flimsy, cold comfort in place of what is at best a spectrum and at worst semantics and sophistry.
Also. Let's talk about hate speech. I was telling a friend about a paper I was writing, and I argued that the Michael Savage-type rhetoric, calling for a nuclear attack on Baghdad on US airways is, in fact, hate speech, as it creates a racialized enemy and essentially advocates genocide. Both proliferate and amplify racism, xemophobia and systematically construct a dehumanized enemy "other" that is locked outside of the cultural discourse of morals and ethics.
Hate speech is a murky category that is indicative of American confused puritan/libertarian moral compass, and is not criminalized in the US. It is, however, a crime under international law, although if I remember correctly it has only been prosecuted as a war crime twice, during the Nuremberg trials and at the "media trials" before the International Crimianl Tribunal for Rwanda. My friend's response was that Radio Machete was government-sponsored, which created the leap between words and policy. My argument is that our government is corporation-sponsored, not as some gloomy tinfoil-hat metaphor, but in very real, boring terms of dollars and cents and stocks and bonds, and that the Clear Channel is as much a reflection of the government policy as "Hate Radio" was of the Hutu leaders.
In a way this kind of reasoning relates to a larger problem...or, not exactly a problem, but an incongruency, a lag. Allow me to use The Economist as an illustration. I like The Economist. I often don't agree with its political platform, but it has excellent news analysis and international coverage. It's solidly libertarian, and very British. It is very polite and reasonable. And that is its downfall at this juncture in history. The Economist is stuck in a world of the past, when everyone was reasonable, when corruption could only be entertained as a phenomenon within certain reasonable parameters, when conspiracy theory was some kind of paranoid tomfoolery. It's like King Arthur at the Yankee Court. The Economist Does Not Comrephend in the way that your grandma Does Not Comprehend the nature of your dating imbroglios (or at least mine does not). How does a journal too sensible to engage with anything that deviates from the "rational choice model" and furthermore indulges in the colonial nostalgia of the Benevolent Western Influence fare in a world where the PNAC blueprint for actual Global Domination is laid out, in open text (well, open hypertext), making some pretty explicit wishes to the Neoimperialism Fairy for "another Pearl Harbor"?
Texts and people are overimpressed with reified historical categories, but they are the new Potemkin Villages; the government and the financial sector are about as separate as the other famous mythological binary, church and state. They are all about as separate as the well-kept lawn and the insects beneath it in David Lynch's suburbia. Making a distinction between government-owned Radio Machete and "privately owned" Clear Channel outlets is like falsely polarizing implicit and explicit, de jure and de facto, creating a binary opposition for flimsy, cold comfort in place of what is at best a spectrum and at worst semantics and sophistry.
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 11:55 pm (UTC)I like the Economist too, for the same reasons you seem to, and with the same wariness. But I part of its appeal, for me, is its reasonableness: even if I disagree with the political platform being promoted, I feel secure that its journalists are at least provisional experts in what they address. So apart from any upward mobility on my part as a reader (reading the Economist makes me feel like I share something in common with imaginary rich adults in other countries), it's like this soothing voice of clarity.
They are all about as separate as the well-kept lawn and the insects beneath it in David Lynch's suburbia.
I see you've read the A-Z of Blue Velvet!
no subject
Date: 2004-09-20 08:58 pm (UTC)But that's exactly what I mean! It's soothing not because it knows better but because it references/invokes the time when things weren't as bad as they are right now. Its affect and tone indexes things that are no longer there, it's like the robotic house going about its daily routine after the nuclear war in Bradbury's story "There Will Come Soft Rains" (sorry for the macabre analogy).
I see you've read the A-Z of Blue Velvet!
No, I haven't, what's that?
no subject
Date: 2004-09-20 09:12 pm (UTC)No, I haven't, what's that?
It's a book by Charles Drazin. The argument is composed around the bugs/lawn analogy. It actually discusses much more than just Blue Velvet--it looks at Lynch's oeuvre as a whole, his personality, and Drazin's reaction to Lynch's vision of Americana (as an English observer). Definitely fun to read.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-20 09:13 pm (UTC)You post an entry like this, it's... it's.. like DARING me to reply!
Date: 2004-09-20 01:55 am (UTC)You might have a different standard that the Supreme Court. Ehh, if ya want, lissen' to Erwin explain about "hate speech" (keeping in mind the facts of Michael Savage's rhetoric while you read about the SC's categories)
http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/commentary/20030417_chemerinsky.html
(I once saw Erwin speak for over 2&1/2 hours without referring to notes once - the man must wear a size 9 hat to have brains that big!)
That's the state of Hate Speech regulation, although the facts from your case are quite different. But see also Beauharnais - the facts are more similar to Savage's speech, and although it's been weakened by subsequent cases, it's, uhh, I dunno, seminal (or, uh, ovulular, ok, it's "plantagenet") in 1st amendment cases where speech to be restricted advocates violence. BEAUHARNAIS v. ILLINOIS, 343 U.S. 250 (1952)
---------
That's "Hate Speech", but speech likely to incite violence, (here, genocide), is scrutinized differently.... see Brandenburg v Ohio, where "speech that incites the immediate commission of crime under circumstances where commission of the crime is likely to occur is unprotected, and may be prohibited by the government." - but HOLD ON, it's not like Michael Savage listeners (regardless of Savage's intent to incite such action) are either capable, or likely, to immediately launch warheads towards the middle east.* I'd see any laws restricting speech such as Savage's as either a prior restraint on free speech, or void for vagueness, or overly broad, or unnecessary to further a compelling governmental interest. Maybe it's not hate speech, maybe it's defamation (so see NY Times v Sullivan)
SO, HOW WOULD YOU PHRASE THE LAW WHICH RESTRICTS SAVAGE'S SPEECH?
Regardless, Findlaw is a great resource, as I bet you are aware. Good luck with the paper, and I bet all of your LJ friends would enjoy reading it.
* To dig deeper, read the famous "Clear and Present Danger" cases from Justice Holmes in Schenk v US, and then Frohwerk v US, Debs v US, Abrams v US, and then Judge Learned Hand (best judge name EVAR)'s evolution of the standard in Masses Publishing Co., v Patten, Gitlow v US, Whitney v California, Dennis v US, and Yates v US. At which point you will want to watch cartoons and drink beer.
Re: You post an entry like this, it's... it's.. like DARING me to reply!
Date: 2004-09-20 08:59 pm (UTC)Re: You post an entry like this, it's... it's.. like DARING me to reply!
Date: 2004-09-22 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-20 04:03 pm (UTC)Yes. You are not, in fact, paranoid if they are indeed out to get you. "Corporation-sponsored" government -- not to mention massive voter fraud or direct attempts at mass control -- no longer are the domain of Philip K Dick and the schizophrenic ward, if they ever were.
I may end up quoting some piece of this elsewhere. Thanks for this.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-20 08:20 pm (UTC)I keep struggling with what conspiracy theory even means these days, when it's all out in the open, it seems there is only conspiracy practice.