The right to freedom of expression cannot be interpreted as a right to incite crime or violence.
Given all the words spoken about free speech in the last week or so, it would be easy to leave the matter behind and move onto something new like our quarantine system. But as the son of a World War II veteran who fought fascism and spent the rest of the war in a prisoner of war camp, it would dishonour him to let some of the absurd and dangerous arguments go unchallenged.
Pre-war Nazi Germany taught us that fascism does not spring up overnight. It gathers momentum over time as good people feel too intimidated to speak up or decide that to do so would give fascists the notoriety they crave.
Neither prime minister Morrison nor acting prime minister McCormack was willing to criticise an American president for inciting violence by white supremacists who broke into the Capitol, ransacked offices of members of Congress and killed a policeman – though they did condemn the insurgents.
Harsh utterances of an American President in an American political contest are not ordinarily an Australian leader’s business, but a world leader inciting violence certainly is. Our leaders wouldn’t hesitate to condemn an ayatollah for inciting violence against westerners. Nor should they.
When ethical matters like this arise, I usually ask myself: “What would Bob Hawke have done?” We have a ready-made answer. When China’s leaders ordered violent repression of students at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Hawke, in tears, condemned them utterly and announced, with no reference to Cabinet, that the 40,000 Chinese students in Australia could stay permanently.
Despite no Australian lives being threatened, Hawke did not take the view that the behaviour of the Chinese leadership was none of his business.
Lest there be any doubt about whether the US President actually incited violence, the Member for Wentworth, Dave Sharma, pointed out https://www.smh.com.au/national/twitter-s-decision-to-ban-donald-trump-is-chilling-if-you-care-about-free-speech-20210112-p56thk.html that Trump had urged his supporters to “fight much harder”, warning them that “you’ll never take back our country with weakness ... you have to show strength”, and telling them “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Trump used Twitter to lie repeatedly that the election had been rigged by supporters of the Democrats. The white supremacists didn’t need any further encouragement in storming the Capitol, killing a policeman and ransacking the place.
One insurgent wore a sweater emblazoned with “Camp Auschwitz” and another with "6MWE"—a Neo-Nazi term meaning "6 million wasn't enough."
Joining President-elect Biden in condemning Trump were the leaders of Britain, Germany, France, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland and Sweden – but not of Australia.
In my father’s war diary, written at Stalag VIIIC, not too far from Auschwitz, he wrote of the Jews who had been transferred to Germany from the same Italian prisoner of war camp as the Australians following Italy’s capitulation: “We often wonder what became of the Jews from P.G. 57, who were on a different train to us.” He added of the Germans: “The hatred for the Jews cannot be imagined so it is impossible to describe it.”
Yet despite the unspeakable treatment of Jewish people during the Holocaust, sections of the political right in Australia have expressed outrage that media outlets have declined to give Trump and his ilk further opportunities to sow hatred and incite violence.
Dave Sharma acknowledged that Twitter had a strong case for banning Trump, but quickly claimed anyone with a commitment to free speech “should find the whole episode chilling.” He then lamented that Trump had been “stripped of his political voice, silenced, without reference to any law, and without the involvement of any court.”
Inciting violence is a crime. Twitter had been captioning Trump’s numerous tweets falsely claiming the election had been stolen with warnings that these tweets were not necessarily true. What was Twitter to do following Trump’s inciting of violence? Enable a crime to be committed again and again in the name of free speech? And by so enabling, run the gauntlet of a court case alleging that Twitter had been complicit in criminal behaviour?
Trump had not been silenced. As President of the United States, he could have called as many media conferences as he liked. Media outlets are not obliged by the principle of free speech to report his every utterance whether true or false.
Sharma was not a lone voice. Executive Director of the Institute of Public Affairs, John Roskam https://www.afr.com/politics/beware-the-anti-trump-tyrants-20210113-p56tvx acknowledged that Twitter and YouTube were free to ban Trump from their platforms, but added their decision was wrong but they were allowed “to exercise that freedom to be partisan hypocrites.”
We don’t accept as an expression of free speech the dissemination of images of child sexual exploitation. It is a crime. What a bizarre situation we would have if we accepted that using a social media platform to enable crimes was justified in the name of liberty and free speech.
In Australia, the extreme right-wing threat is real and it is growing. In suburbs around Australia, small cells regularly meet to salute Nazi flags, inspect weapons, train in combat and share their hateful ideology. If that sounds alarmist, consider this: it is verbatim from the Director-General of ASIO’s annual threat assessment https://www.asio.gov.au/publications/speeches-and-statements/director-general-annual-threat-assessment-0.html
According to ASIO’s most recent annual report, extreme right-wing individuals comprised around one-third of all ASIO counter-terrorism investigative subjects. And ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess warned just last month that extremists such as neo-Nazis are more organised, sophisticated and ideologically driven than before.
Rather than worrying about Donald Trump’s civil liberties to incite violence we should be concerned about the rise of right-wing extremism, just as we continue to be concerned by Islamic extremism.
In 2018, in the memory of my father, his war-time comrades and the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, I quit as a Sky TV commentator https://www.afr.com/opinion/why-craig-emerson-quit-sky-news-over-the-balir-cottrell-neonazi-interview-20180806-h13m3t when it decided to do a puff-piece interview of a neo-Nazi. Last week, Australian right-wing politicians and commentators should have condemned Trump’s actions to demonstrate that they take the threat of violent fascism seriously.
Craig Emerson is a distinguished fellow at the ANU, director of the Australian APEC Study Centre at RMIT and adjunct professor at Victoria University’s College of Business.