Freedom of Expression
Hi, there, this is Steve Kaufmann and welcome to Steve's Café. This is where I want to have discussions about history, about politics, about things of that nature because I like getting together with people and discussing. Now, many of you know me from Lingo Steve where I talk about language learning, which is another great passion, but here I want to have exchanges with people. I don't write out my talks beforehand so they're a little bit rambling and sometimes disjointed, but today I want to talk about freedom of expression and I want Steve's Café to be a place where people are free to express their views. I would hope that people express their views in a polite, sensible, reasonable way and, of course, that immediately introduces the sort of what are the limits to freedom of expression.
Undoubtedly, there are some. I think if people are lying, if people are inciting people to hate, to violence, then those kinds of views should be discouraged. How, to what extent? I think we have to have some laws. There are laws on liable if you falsely accuse someone of something. You can't shout fire in a crowded cinema. So there are reasonable limits, but I think we have reached a point now where freedom of expression is under threat from a number of quarters.
We have seen this in the presidential primaries, for example, in the United States, which I have been following. On the one hand you've got Donald Trump, who has basically denied access to some of his rallies to certain members of the press. I think this is unacceptable for someone who aspires to be President of the United States. He dismissed the press as disgusting when they criticize him. He says he's going to change the liable laws so he can sue people who have negative comments about him. He won't appear on certain television programs because he doesn't like the moderator. To me, this is essentially an attempt to bully and limit the freedom of expression of people who don't agree with him.
By the same token, we have these organized demonstrators at Donald Trump's rallies and their whole purpose is to shut down Donald Trump and I disagree with that. In fact, if anything, I feel the behavior of those demonstrators is worse than the behavior of Donald Trump. The difference being, however, that Donald Trump aspires to become President of the United States, whereas the demonstrators are just looking to cause trouble.
We've seen this limit to freedom of speech in our universities where there are certain views and you're not allowed to defend that position. I happen to be, I would say, moderately liberal on abortion. The issue of same sex marriage for me is a done deal, it's finished. Ten years ago I might have felt this was a strange concept, at this point I think it's normal. However, I think people who have different views should be allowed to express and defend those views. The whole idea that something has been decided forever and ever and therefore you're not allowed to express your opposition to it to me is against freedom of expression.
Similarly, in Canada I am not a fan of multiculturalism at all. I think that immigrants who come to Canada should assimilate to the mainstream culture, otherwise we won't have a country in Canada in another few generations and, of course, the majority of immigrants do regardless of where they come from. What can I use as an example? We have a Minister of Defense in Canada who is a Sikh and wears his turban. I am absolutely comfortable with that. He's a Canadian. He fought for Canada in Afghanistan. He's buying into the mainstream culture. If I go to watch a hockey game in Vancouver there are lots of people there who are of Indian origin, Chinese origin and they've bought into at least some aspects of the mainstream culture. This is a good thing.
Unfortunately, in Canada it has become sort of a symbol of your progressive thinking that you would encourage people to stay in their own cultural enclave or that the government should spend money promoting the culture of origin of these people and that the more diverse the culture is, the better. I don't believe that. However, those people are perfectly entitled to express their views.
I happen to believe that people will maintain their culture of origin quite comfortably on their own for one generation or two and it's not the role of government to deliberately foster that. Nor, in my view, should the government force people to assimilate; in other words, freedom of expression. Whatever you like to do go ahead and do it, but don't hold out this sort of diversity as being morally superior to assimilate. People do what they want to do. However, in Canada very often if you express that view you are labeled a racist, a bigot and stuff like that, so there's a tremendous effort to throttle the freedom of expression of certain views.
Similarly, with the immigration we have in Canada. We have 300,000 annual immigrants and some people think it should be more and some people think it should be less. Three-hundred thousand is considered arbitrary, that's good. If you argue for more you're allowed to do that, but if you argue for fewer immigrants for a variety of reasons, for example, the fact that we have so many immigrants from a small number of countries that the opportunity for the immigrants to integrate is reduced so maybe we'd be better off to have 200,000 instead of 300,000. You can't express that view, you are considered a bigot.
That's only one example of how the expression of call it what's perceived as less progressive views in the minds of those who see themselves as progressive, unpopular views for some people. These should not be allowed to be spoken to those people and I think, to some extent, the rise of the Trump phenomenon is a reaction against the so-called political correctness of our society which says that these views are acceptable and these are not acceptable. My feeling is we should be free to express our views. Now, one has to be responsible.
I should say freedom of expression also includes the idea that there's a free market of ideas. So if you're in a country where the government controls 80-90% of the media, directly or indirectly like in Russia, then while a very small portion of the media can express whatever views they want, the 80-90% of the media controlled by the government is basically used to demonize those people who oppose the sort of mainstream line that's pounded into people through government-controlled media.
Now, the media in the West is not always right. Individual journalists may have their axe to grind, certain publications, radio or TV channels have their political perspective, but the idea is that you have a free market and the greater the variety of opinions, the greater the freedom to express these opinions, the greater the freedom of a means to express these without being cowed into saying you shouldn't say this, you shouldn't say that, the healthier for society. Ultimately, the way we defeat fascism and other totalitarian or intolerant ideologies is by making sure that we maintain this freedom of expression so that even unpopular ideas are free to be expressed.
I rambled on a bit longer, but I want to set the stage for Steve's Café and freedom of expression. As long as you're not being fowl-mouthed or personal invective, so forth and so forth, you're absolutely welcome. It's the best guarantee we have for a number of other freedoms. Thanks for listening, bye for now.