The definition of freedom normally given is “the right to do anything that does not abridge the rights of others.”
According to this definition, there was not a single slave in the United States in 1850. Black slaves were free to do anything that did not abridge the rights of their masters.
Using that definition, free speech only allows you to say anything that doesn’t offend anybody.
The Soviet Constitution of 1936, issued by history’s greatest lover of freedom, Joseph Stalin, contained an absolute right to freedom of speech.
Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago about his nightmare years in Soviet Death Camps. He was sent to the Gulag for writing private letters that were critical of Stalin. It was one of tens of millions of cases where Soviet Freedom of Speech had an exception.
Those letters expressed Solzhenitsyn’s hatred of Stalin.
And, in the USSR then as in the US now, “Hate is not free speech.”
In America, one example of this Hate would be for a white man to say he wouldn’t want his daughter to marry a black man. Solzhenitsyn’s letters to a friend about Stalin made it pretty clear that the Soviet Leader would not be his ideal husband for any daughter he had.
During the 1960s Mommy Professors’ boys running around in hippie uniforms wanted to have something to call a Free Speech Movement. Their problem was finding something to say that anyone world dare object to. Not only was everything they said ALLOWED in the media and on campus, it was the ONLY thing allowed in the media and on campus.
So they started fearlessly yelling obscenities to each other on campus and calling themselves champions of free speech.
No one objected, but the media announced that their shouting obscenities was courageous and daring, like everything else they did.
The purpose of freedom of speech was never the right to scream obscenities. Since the 1700s, the purpose of free speech in America was to EXPRESS AN OPINION.
In fact, freedom of speech DOES allow you to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
But only if, your honest opinion is that there IS a fire in a crowded theater.
In Britain, where Soviet Free Speech rules, “The Truth is no defense” for heresy.
Way back in 1734 America established that telling the truth as you see it IS the ultimate legal defense for free speech.
John Peter Zenger was a German American printer in New York City.
In late 1733, Zenger began printing The New York Weekly Journal to voice opinions critical of the colonial governor, William Cosby.
In November 1734, Zenger was arrested for libel by the sheriff on the orders of Cosby.
Zenger was acquitted in a landmark case where the jury ruled that the truth is an absolute defense against libel.
Two generations later “The truth IS a defense” was overwhelmingly reasserted in the 1798 congressional election. That election destroyed George Washington’s Federalist Party forever largely because that Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.
The Alien and Sedition Acts reasserted the British and Stalinist assertions that “truth is not a defense.”
What Zenger said was true but Governor Cosby didn’t like it. The American jury said that was just too bad.
Soviet and now British “free speech” outlaw honest opinions and factual statements with slogans like “Hate is not Free Speech” and “Heresy is not free speech.”
That way lies enslavement.
Free speech means the right to state the facts and ANY honest opinion.
-By Bob Whitaker
If not for free speech then we would all still be watching fake news. Free speech is what enabled the truth tellers to break people out of the mass media’s death grip of the narritive. They were spit upon and called conspiracy theorists, tim foil hat morons and ridiculed in every way. Because they would not be deterred and persevered we now have a chance of not being in gulags, albeit a small chance. Free speech enabled the brave amongst us to say “the emperor has no clothes”. Without us defending the tin foil kinghts, as I refer to them, then we would still be thinking like boomers, who sadly had no internet and relied on what we now know to be fake news. Free speech is what broke us out of the narritive of lies, without it we would have been in chains long ago. One last thing, in reguards to the line of you cant yell fire in a theater. That line has oozed out of the lips of every man who has tried to strip us of our freedom of speech. Its the crack they try and pound a wedge into the God given right to speak your mind. Be careful with that line and that mentality. It would be better if we were not prone to panic than to forsake our right of free speech. It would be better that rarely someone did die in a panic from some fool yelling fire than for us to relinquish the right to speak. We would become less prone to panic, we would be stronger in the end. Beware people using the line, “you cant yell fire in a theater”, while it may seem sound doctrine thats the very deception that makes it so effetive. Beware those people, they are almost always the same people that would see you lead to the gulag in slience. Great article, and very important in this day and age.