Freedom of Speech, Yet Again: Apropos of the Recent Verdict in Uppsala District Court, Sweden

I have discussed the idea of Freedom of Speech in here before, and it would seem that it is high time to do so yet again (although for a different reason this time). On June 30 this year in Uppsala District Court, Sweden, a man was found guilty of possessing child pornography. The man in question is a Japanese translator, and the images for which he was prosecuted and sentenced were manga, that is, Japanese comics. A combination of things that well and truly brings a lot of Freedom of Speech issues to the fore, no doubt; yet interestingly enough, it took more than a while for the Swedish media to react, and even when they finally did (and there have been many interesting defences of Freedom of Speech from those quarters since), the blogosphere has been surprisingly quiet – a blogosphere which was in a furious uproar earlier this year during the Lars Vilks debacle. It is obviously much easier to shout oneself hoarse for the right to offend some people on religious basis than to enter a discussion on the subject of child pornography. At least if the discussion is not altogether a condemnation of the phenomenon, and even something in any way related to the phenomenon.

The two preceding sentences can easily be read as a critique of some people that did not want a balanced discussion in the previous case, but while it is indeed in part intended as such, it is also honestly meant, in a nigh despairing fashion. For I would be a hypocrite not to note that the sentence was pronounced on June 30 and that it is now August 16, that is, some one and a half month later.

The reason for my own procrastination is quite simple: I spent a few years in my youth in Swedish Save the Children, actively propagating the Children’s Convention and working against child pornography. I am a huge fan of author, lawyer and children’s activist Andrew Vachss, and in particular of his brilliant little book Another Chance to Get It Right: A Children's Book for Adults, which has helped shaped a lot of the ideas on the importance of children’s rights in my mind. In short, I too cannot help to question the “need” for pornographic illustration of children to be made in the first place. And nevertheless...

I am certainly not naive enough to think Freedom of Speech absolute in any practical sense. Most judicial systems, even (dare I say it) the American, where Freedom of Speech is pretty high on the agenda, have (and quite rightly so) laws against libel and threatening people. But there is certainly something to be said for a Freedom of Speech that is much freer than it is shackled.

Do not get me wrong. Child pornography is wrong; it is vile; and it constitutes a crime. But exactly what is that crime? Many a year ago now, I read an article by Vachss (translated into Swedish, albeit specifically written for that occasion), where the sound argument was made that child pornography is photographic, or filmic, evidence of the sexual abuse of a child. As such, this evidence is an extension of that abuse, in fact, constituting a continued abuse of that specific child, in some sense. Similarly, I would argue that nude pictures of children (obviously not necessitating the same levels of abuse to exist) still falls within these parameters as they exploit these children’s nudity, and granted that the children themselves in the eyes of the law can hardly be deemed fit to make a decision about “willingly” being part of such pictures, nor necessarily agree with such pictures’ existence when they are old enough to understand that better.

(It is, I feel, at this point worth noting that the Swedish law has been very carefully formulated not to criminalise A) teenage couples photographing themselves and sharing those pictures with _each other_ (as long as the age difference is not substantial or the photographs taken against either party’s will), or B) people owning nude or sexual photographs (or films, I assume) of themselves (alone) even when adults. Basically this states that the presumed injured party cannot be found guilty of such possession. Although spreading such photos would obviously fall within the rules of distributing illegal material, and it would equally obviously be illegal for other parties to view them. Still, the detailed thinking vis-a-vis these questions are well worth noting, especially when we head into the topic at hand.)

In all cases I have brought up, the issue is not only that the images or films are offensive. The point is that they document and extend sexual abuse, that watching them makes any viewer guilty of furthering that abuse. And against this, hard laws are required. But, can a drawn image truly be said to do this? Can it be included in this argument? What I have just outlined above clearly does not apply. A drawn image does not require an act of abuse to exist in the real world. Nor does it depict a specific nude (or even fictionally abused) child. We might find these images offensive. We may well argue against such things being produced. But it is almost frightening how many times I have read comments on on-line articles where the commenters are arguing against child pornography itself on the basis that it is offensive. To me, this seems like pulling the teeth out of the proper definitions of child pornography, that is, as something a hundred times worse than merely being found offensive, simply by the fact that it is both a document and form of abuse.

If drawn images do not constitute such abuse, and granting that we do not easily legislate in matters of taste (and let us be honest, matters of offense are clearly linked to matters of taste), why should drawn images of nude children, or even children in sexually explicit acts, be deemed illegal? Now, here the reason cited is that such images may well incite paedophiles to commit sexual acts, or even (if we are to believe some assumptions) cause people to become paedophiles themselves. Surely, it is better to be overly cautious in such circumstances? Surely it is, as the saying goes, better to be safe than sorry? Or is it?

Now bear with me and please remember that I am by no means arguing in favour of such images, but as Neil Gaiman has pointed out, defending Freedom of Speech, also means defending such speech with which one does not necessarily agree oneself. I would in connection with this also like to bring up Peter Jones’s point that "[w]e may even fight shy of curtailing our conception of the non-legal rights of authors; we can criticise the use that people make of their rights without implying that they have no right to do what we criticise" (in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie 321), which I have already drawn upon before. Following Jones’ judicial reasoning, we must be allowed to debate the usages of Freedom of Speech, to make moral and even aesthetic judgements about any and all utterances, without impeding the Freedom of Speech itself.

My main objection to the current Swedish law on the issue of these types of drawn images (and to laws formulated along those lines in other countries), is that is an arbitrary law. If we fear that such images may incite paedophiles to commit sexual acts (or even, though I honestly find this less likely, generate more paedophiles), why do we stop at images? If it is better to be safe than sorry, why should fictional texts be any different than drawn images? Surely they too must entail the same possibilities of incitement, must they not? And if explicit images (or texts) can do so much damage, surely the seeds of our destruction must also reside in any and all texts or images that even implicitly deal with paedophiles or children in sexual situations (without openly condemning these things three times over and every time they are mentioned, lest someone only reads selected passages). Along these lines, ought not Nabokov’s Lolita, where the narrator Humbert Humbert is trying to seduce the reader into sympathising with his own paedophiliac desires, also be deemed illegal? And before someone suddenly twists my words into being pro-censorship extraordinary: my point here is, of course, where do we stop? Where do we draw the lines in such an arbitrary quagmire?

The problem with this arbitrariness is that it allows us to feel good about ourselves, to feel vindicated for a moment or two. We have found something offensive and that which was found offensive has been punished accordingly. While I will certainly hold on to my right to vocally oppose things I find offensive, I also find this judicial arbitrariness unsettling, and cannot help but remember that old adage, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” For there are many levels to this quagmire. If we are truly worried about the sexualisation of children, why do we not attack (vocally if not legally) cultural phenomena like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, who in their wake have children dressing in an explicitly “sexy” fashion and dancing around in manners it would only be ludicrous to argue do not evoke sexual acts (whether or not the children themselves are aware of it)? These things are situated right in the pop cultural mainstream. Yet in a time, when we are so afraid of the possibility that drawn images might incite a paedophile to commit a crime, we do not even have a large on-going mainstream debate on this problem. Because if these things are not ways of sexualising children, and if such sexualisation is not a way of allowing children to be viewed as sexual objects, then in all honesty, I have no clue what would be.

In this sense, we need to legislate less against fictions and worry more about continually debating that which we find deplorable (we do have that option). Because at the end of the day, fictions do not constitute abuse, but that which could incite such abuse certainly does not, nor will it ever, be confined within the arbitrariness of our laws.

Why Censorship Does Not Work

I have written previously in here about the idea that freedom of speech also inherently entails responsibility for speech, but also (referring to Philip Pullman) that we do not have a given right never to be offended. For some, these two ideas might almost seem contradictory, yet I would argue that they are not. There are differences between setting out to offend and to accidentally offend, to challenge powers that be and to attack (mercilessly) those in a lesser position. There is not necessarily an easy line between these categories, of course; while clear cut cases exist in abundance, there are most likely even more things that are hard to position as either-or, and sometimes perhaps even more easily both-and.

The responsibility for speech that I favour is an on-going discussion of what we can say, not in terms of freedom of speech, but in terms of a moral relationship with the Other. However, and this brings us to today's main topic, censorship can never be a solution in this equation. On that level, freedom of speech must be absolute (or at the very least more or less; it is naive to think that it is ever absolute in any literal or pragmatic sense. Most countries have libel laws if nothing else). Because there is a problem with discussing something you have not read or seen, not to mention being offended by it.

In an interview taped on 27 January 1989 by Bandung File (and ironically aired on 14 February on British Channel 4 that year), Salman Rushdie said, "If you don't want to read a book, you don't have to read it. It's very hard to be offended by The Satanic Verses, it requires a long period of intense reading. It's a quarter of a million words" (in The Rushdie File 26). Rushdie's comment was a response to a number of rather vicious critics of the novel, who rather brazenly admitted that they had not read it, in fact had no intention of doing so. For instance, one of the politicians behind the banning of the book in India, Syed Shahabuddin, wrote the following in The Times of India on 13 October 1988:

You are aggrieved that some of us have condemned you without a hearing and asked for the ban without reading your book. Yes, I have not read it, nor do I intend to. I do not have to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is. My first inadvertent step would tell me what I have stepped into. (in The Rushdie File 47)

Now, on one level (and bear with me, please), there is a certain level of logic in Shahabuddin's argument, and one which I think most of us apply to varying degrees and in different manners. As human beings, we continuously judge things unseen (or partly unseen) or unheard (or partly unheard) all the time; especially in terms of art in its various forms. This in itself is a natural form of selection for us, because, quite literally, there is too much out there for us to read, view, watch, listen to it all. And thus we make our choices, mostly based on what we think will be to our liking, or have some sort of artistic quality to it, or... Regardless of what criteria we apply, apply them we do; and like Shahabuddin (albeit, with hopefully a more modest and less aggressive tone) we deem some of the material less worthy of our attention, perhaps even to be filth we do not want to step into; and we are in our full rights not to.

However, while we do have the right not to read something, why would we have the right to stop others from reading it? And why would we blindly accept somebody else's interpretation of the work without wanting or even worse being able to make up our own minds by looking at the actual work with our own eyes? And this, to me, is at the very heart of why censorship does not work, in fact cannot ever work – because how can we judge art (or any type of utterance) properly without reading/viewing/watching/listening to the work in question? How can we debate a thing without knowing the thing itself, without having the reference? Simply put, it is one thing not to read/view/watch/listen to something and a completely different one to offer an unenlightened strong opinion on the matter.

A review of something where the reviewer has not taken in whatever he/she reviews is not worth a moment's time to read, because it is about nothing more than an uninformed opinion. Similarly, I do not think it is difficult to grasp the inherent problem in banning something without even taking the time to seriously take the work in question in; and even then, why should your opinion be the decisive one, the one to block this work from current and future generations (as if that one even ever truly works)? And if it is not your opinion, why should you trust it so inherently, without questioning it? Offence can be taken, and given, but offence taken at surface level echoes uninformed offence (i.e. the offended party does not even properly know what has offended it, there is merely the statement that it has been so).

Admittedly not all works of art are "a quarter of a million words." An image (e.g. a cartoon) can be so direct as to not allow us the option to avoid it in all contexts before it has managed to offend in a deeper sense (although, I would still say that offence taken without that exposition aligns itself with my discussion in the preceding paragraph). Naturally, this does not give us the option of forbidding the existence of this visual "utterance" any more than we can forbid the existence of a novel or a film. Once more, in this sense, freedom of speech, of expression, must be absolute (or as absolute as "absolute" gets). However, we do have a right to argue against this expression, to raise our voices and tell our own side of the story, to explain why it may be offensive, why it might be inappropriate – but, importantly, in order to do so, we must also see the thing we criticise, we must ourselves have access to it in order to criticise the thing and not a chimera, a phantom image of the thing.

In his article "The Satanic Verses and the Politics of Identity," Peter Jones writes that "[w]e may even fight shy of curtailing our conception of the non-legal rights of authors; we can criticise the use that people make of their rights without implying that they have no right to do what we criticise" (in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie 321). Jones' approach is one that is in total accord with my own. Because if the freedom of speech cannot be used to criticise abuses of that very freedom, without necessarily prescribing a censorship (which by defaults robs the debate of its centre), then how free is that speech? How strong? I would argue that the freedom of speech is not only strong enough to include such a debate, but that it is a necessary condition that it includes this idea by default. If nothing else, because the freedom of speech is our best way to dissent and disagree, and to protect that right, we must also be allowed to vocally dissent against utterances made by others, against verbal or visual offences. Not in order to imply that these others did not have the right to do it (to echo Jones), but in order to question whether it was right to do it. There is a difference and it may seem subtle, but it is essential to discuss that. And censorship can never contribute to that discussion


Works cited:

Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland, ed. The Rushdie File. London: Fourth Estate, 1989.

M. D. Fletcher, ed. Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994.

Philip Pullman on Freedom of Speech

Apropos of my post, "Freedom of Speech and Responsibility for Speech", I recently came across this video clip of Philip Pullman speaking about his new novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ:



Pullman's approach echoes my own thoughts in that he takes responsibility for his "utterance". While he knows that it can be considered offensive to call Jesus Christ a scoundrel (most things can be considered offensive if read from just the right angle, really), he places this unorthodox title within a context – the context of the published book – and welcomes a critical debate on the subject. All of which, to me, signals a healthy attitude towards the freedom of speech and the responsibility for it.


For a transcript of Pullman's speech, visit boingboing.

Freedom of Speech and Responsibility for Speech

Apropos of the death threats against Swedish artist Lars Vilks and his controversial Roundabout Dog, the debate on the Freedom of Speech is once more at the front and centre. As well it should be, I hasten to add. Clearly Freedom of Speech must be absolute in the sense that neither violence nor death can be seen as appropriate responses to any form of utterance, no matter if it is offensive to some parties. After all, there is no way to ever insure that nobody will ever take offence or feel violated by something.

However, all that having been said, I find the current debate troublesome and am reminded of a few years ago, when the Gothenburg Book Fair had Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Print as a general theme. I attended a few of the theme related panel debates and seminars that year and was quite appalled by the level of the discussion; simply because it lacked any kind of nuance. Moderators more or less consistently pushed the debate into a monochromatic perspective, a simple for or against. Some panel members (like religious scholar Mattias Gardell) admittedly tried (heroically) to bring some depth to the debate, but were metaphorically shot down quite swiftly by the moderators. For or against, in absolute terms, was all that was of interest.

Those debates made me wonder why debates were needed at all. After all, I dare say that nobody, and I do mean nobody (neither on the panels nor in the audience), thought that any kind of utterance (artistic or otherwise) warrants a death threat or any other form of violent response. Nor do I think there were any strong voices in favour of censorship present.

As a brief aside, I might add that I find censorship problematic at best, since it removes the option for people to respond to an actual utterance and leaves them condemning something in the second degree, based only on someone else's analysis and opinion.

However, the main problem with the black and white, absolute approach is that it denies the possibility of an ongoing debate on how we use the freedom of speech. As stated already, I do not favour censorship, but I also strongly oppose the notion that we must do something just because we have a right or freedom to do it. I find it strange that so many of the advocates of Freedom of Speech (and I would actually count myself as an advocate of it, in all honesty) seem unwilling to grant the same freedom and rights to their opponents. I find it weird because while violence is not an appropriate response, this by no means signals that any kind of critical verbal (or visual, musical, etc) response should be stricken down as if an act of violence, or even as if condoning such an act. The Freedom of Speech does not merely apply to being offensive (as it were), but also to verbally question and critique acts that are found offensive. In fact, I would argue that such an ongoing debate is both needed and healthy.

Furthermore, as civilisation has evolved, mankind has given itself various rights and freedoms. Most of these, however, do come with responsibility. This notion responsibility (legal, moral or otherwise) often seems to be forgotten or conveniently glossed over by the use of a black and white debate in absolute terms.

Nobel Prize Laureate Orhan Pamuk participated on one of the panel debates and voiced an opinion, which quite frankly scared me. Granted that Pamuk comes from a local history filled with oppression, power abuse and censorship, where the official "truth" often covers up actual truths (one needs only consider the genocide of the Armenians), but when asked whether authors should participate in the debate on what one should be allowable to say, he quickly said no and very naïvely added that the role of the Author is to find the Truth and say it.

Once more, I blame it on the Romantics (cf. a previous post of mine). Pamuk's view of the Author (with a capital A) corresponds well with the Romantics' view of the Author/Poet/Artist, from which we have admittedly not yet made ourselves free. This conception of the Author is ideological, to some degrees metaphysical and most certainly Romantic. By in some sense giving the Author reign over the dominion of Truth (also, notably, with capital letter), by privileging his/her point of view and voice over others, however, another problem is created.

Pamuk's view of the Author simply does not function pragmatically. And we know it. We are aware that there are several writers and authors out there who use their voices and their medium like good little demagogues, denying the Truth and inventing new ones as it suits their agenda. The simple capitalisation of the letter A (in turning author to Author) is not enough to avoid the issue. If anything, it problematises the issue further, because if there are authors and writers who act in opposition to the Pamuk's notion of the Author's quest, would it not be in the interest of the Author and that ideal to debate those very issues? If the Author's utterance does not, in and of itself, signify Truth, and if that is an ideal to which you yourself hold, would not the abuse of that ideal, the privileged position and the utterance itself, not to mention Truth, instil righteous fury in you? Would that not make you want to be a part of the debate?

At the end of the day, it is not about Freedom of Speech being absolute or not (it should be, in fact must be); it is not even about never offending anyone or violating someone's beliefs. At the end of the day, it is about responsibility. We need an ongoing debate which acknowledges that we are responsible for our utterances (legally, morally, etc) and that having the right to do something does not necessarily mean that doing it is right.