Wrestling with free speech

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

"We ignore hate propaganda at our peril. It is virtually unparallelled as an early warning sign of what is to come, and we no longer have any excuse for tolerating it."

This is the conclusion of the 30-minute documentary Hate Propaganda, by Prof. Frank Chalk, professor of history and director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, Concordia University. Chalk screened the film, which contrasts the use of hate propaganda in Nazi Germany, Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia and Rwanda, at the Nov. 13 public forum Speech: The Freedom to Hate, presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies (FSW) at the Norman Rothstein Theatre. He was one of four speakers on a panel that included Nina Krieger, education director of the VHEC; Leo Adler, director of national affairs of the FSW; and Kirk Lapointe, managing editor of the Vancouver Sun. The discussion was moderated by Barbara Buchanan of the Law Society of British Columbia and introduced by Frieda Miller, VHEC executive director.

In the documentary, Chalk says, "Hate propaganda focuses on a real or imagined injury in the past, a collective trauma inflicted on an entire people. It seeks to mobilize resentment, anger and hatred. It claims that the real people, our people, are noble and pure, the people who refuse to suffer further humiliation. It demonizes the other people as the source of the real people's misery and unhappiness, claiming that the other is responsible for all suffering.... No fate is too horrible for these criminal others who would destroy the lives of the most innocent among us, our women and children. Therefore, consequences must follow. Society must be cleansed and the other must be eliminated to create a perfect future. Revenge and purification are the essential goals of the hate propagandist who incites genocide.

"Hate propaganda is not inevitably victorious," continues Chalk in the film. "It can be fought, but, when the state apparatus is already controlled by those who are [its] architects and disseminators, it is a powerful influence on the actions of the populations subjected to its lethal messages."

In Hate Propaganda, Chalk says that the effective use of such material to promote genocide cries out for the counter-measures and principles of the Responsibility to Protect report, which was signed in 2005 at a United Nations World Summit meeting by world leaders. They agreed that states have a primary responsibility to protect their own populations and that the international community has a responsibility to act when these governments fail to protect the most vulnerable. (For more information, visit www.responsibilitytoprotect.org.) Chalk's film also points out that, in 2007, the European Union criminalized the use of the media to incite racism and xenophobia, with penalties ranging from one to three years for those who incite violence or hatred against "a group of persons, or the members of a group, defined by reference to race, color, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin."

Chalk believes that hate propaganda must be criminalized and its perpetrators punished. In his documentary, he uses as one example the work of Julius Streicher, publisher of the extremely anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer. In 1946, Streicher was convicted of "crimes against humanity" for his role in inciting the persecution and murder of Jews in the Holocaust and his case formed the basis of a recent VHEC educational initiative, Nuremberg: A Student Mock Trial.

Krieger briefly described this program, explaining how the trial was reconstructed and quickly going through some of the evidence that was presented by the prosecution and the defence.

"The question at the heart of the trial – whether hate propaganda can incite genocide – is no easy one, and I think the value of this question lies in its complexity," explained Krieger, "and so we tried to develop a program that would facilitate student engagement with this complexity within the framework of a 90-minute visit to the VHEC."

There was a mix of outcomes, said Krieger, with most groups finding Streicher guilty, but some acquitting him and some hung juries.

Krieger noted that, at the beginning of the program, there were people anxious about the possibility of an acquittal. "We had to reassure them though that critical, rather than prescriptive, thinking was the goal of the mock trial; that the challenge was for students to wrestle with these ideas, not to arrive at a comfortable, unambiguous solution," she said.

And wrestle they did, according to Krieger, with numerous issues surrounding freedom of expression and its limits, including on the Net.

"I don't think a single student left the mock trial without an awareness of the dangers of dehumanization, of painting an entire group with one stroke," she said. "And, of course, the strategies of dehumanization and propagation of hate that contributed to the Holocaust did not end with Streicher's conviction at Nuremberg.... What must change and what the VHEC hopes to change ... is the capacity for audiences to think critically about the messages and images they encounter and to be vigilant about the diverse forms and dire consequences of hate."

In the postwar period, knowledge of what access to the media could do led, in effect, to the boycott of those who wanted to promote hate, said Adler in his comments, noting that a white supremacist group would not be able to buy an ad in a mainstream newspaper, for example. However, 15 years ago, there were two crucial events that occurred, he said. The first was Timothy McVeigh, who went on the Internet and read the book Turner Diaries, which inspired him to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more, with explosives that he learned how to make from the Internet. The second was the establishment of the white supremacist website Stormfront, created by Don Black, who saw the Internet as a relatively cheap and unregulated place to reach out.

"The [Internet] market today is estimated to be over 1.3 billion people," said Adler, before showing the audience at the Norman Rothstein Theatre examples of several hate sites targeting a variety of ethnic groups, homosexuals, pro-choice doctors and others, in various ways: games, clips showing people being executed, videos of suicide bombers preparing, music, poems, etc.

In the question-and-answer session, Lapointe admonished parents who allow their children to have a computer in their room without any supervision. He said that parents must get involved and monitor what their children are doing. He acknowledged that there is a lot of horrible material out there, which at least the Vancouver Sun does not print, but he said that the paper is "fighting a losing battle": "There are more and more and more assaults on our desire to be decent. It's becoming a harder and harder game to stay out of and there are more and more things dragging us into it."

In his talk, Lapointe said, "The simplest principle to explain in journalism is often the hardest to enforce," referring to the principle of "minimizing harm," which "means assessing gathered information with a view to reducing the damage it would cause." It means restraining one's ability to tell a story if there is merely salacious or harmful content, he explained, and demonstrating compassion to those who might be adversely by a story, to children and to those grieving, as well as respecting other cultures and traditions, apprehending the potential motives of interviewees and respecting privacy. "In other words," he said, "it means not publishing everything you know; restraining yourself if there's not an abiding public interest to know."

But the "public interest" is hard to define and it has a more intuitive, subjective quality than most would like, he admitted. Objectivity is "an illusion" and fairness might be a better way to describe what journalists are seeking in their coverage, he said: "Let's be clear, journalism is not about publishing the truth, but about pursuing it."

Journalists have good intentions, assured Lapointe, but they make mistakes. There are thousands of decisions to be made for every paper that's published and these decisions are being made by human beings. "We should be surprised that more doesn't go wrong," he said, adding that what material is presented to an audience is "more of an art than a science."

Under the rubric of "minimizing harm," journalists must ask themselves such questions as whether repeating the content of a hate crime re-victimizes people, said Lapointe. "I'd argue that the ethical dilemmas are countless in today's newsrooms and they are magnified and accelerated by the arrival of an all-day, all-night news cycle that requires fast and fastidious handling of complex and often uncomfortable information."

Given this, there are a few tenets that the profession should follow in deciding what to publish, he explained. First, journalists should ask themselves who benefits more from a story: the audience or the person/group/service seeking publicity? Second, how little information is needed to tell the story? The role of the journalist is increasingly to curate, to authenticate, to separate the good from the bad information, said Lapointe. Finally, journalists should think like their audience, respect their values, recognize their moods and tastes and not push them around on these: "Remember, we live among people."

One in two stories printed contains a factual error, said Lapointe. "Despite our responsibilities, we're never perfect," he said of journalists, but "we are contrite when we misstep and we seek forgiveness for our human frailty."

^TOP