A Revolutionary Democrat
Pondering About Free Speech
Adal Isaw
April 18, 2010
What is free speech and what do we use it for? How are we to define such an elastic social, political and global concept in agreeable terms for those with disagreeable worldviews? Does free speech begs a philosophical inquiry to unravel the soul of its life and the contents of its character? What is free speech made of? What makes free speech free and why? Is free speech contradictory? In other words, isn’t what is free speech for one an on your face odious, deplorable and violent-inducing remark for another?
Adorned with showy philosophical attires, free speech has flesh and bones. It has eyes to see and a brain to think and often walks funnily in many places of the world. It is healthy sometimes and miserably bedridden more often. Its hypocrisy is laughable and its deceit profound. It has huge pockets for cash and equivocates more often than it water down facts; it hates, intimidates, vilifies and bullies neighbors residing afar on another continent—to quite that it doesn’t want to hear.
More often than you think, free speech has no ears. But rarely, there is the desirable kind with big ears that many speak of its essentialness and it comes with hard work. We Ethiopians are working hard to have bigger ears, to sift the free and the essential—the desirable kind of free speech, from the free and the non-essential—the undesirable kind of free speech.
Free speech is undesirable if the speech that’s conveyed freely creates a sector within a society that hates and votes against its own essential interest. A sector within a society that votes against its own interest is self-defeating and lives a delusional social, economic and political life. A delusional sector within a society has adamantine beliefs in something untrue that defy normal reasoning. As a result, it adulterates modern discourse into a messianic deliverance, to create a life-or-death political environment out of a non-essential wedge issue. It depicts the universe as black and white and divides society into believers and non-believers. And it often picks up an obliterated glass, to see the truth in a narrow prism—for which the window of light is shut off for eternity. Consider the following, to confirm the effects of free speech of the undesirable kind on one of the oldest democratic societies in our world.
A new book, Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America by John Avlon describes what this writer believes is a political environment that has been created by free speech of the undesirable kind. The book tells its readers about sizeable numbers of Americans who hold extreme views of President Obama. A Harris Poll of 2,320 adults, surveyed online between March 1 and 8, 2010 by Harris Interactive confirms that 40% of American adults believe that President Obama is a socialist. More than 30% think he wants to do away with the right to own guns and that he is a Muslim not a Christian as he declares. More than 25% Americans believe that President Obama wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a world government; that he has done numerous things that are unconstitutional, that he resents America's heritage, and that he does what Wall Street tells him to do. More than 20% believe that President Obama was not born in the United States, that he is "the domestic enemy the U.S. Constitution speaks of," that he is racist and anti-American, and that he "wants to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers." 20% of Americans think he is "doing many of the things that Hitler did," while 14% believe "he may be the anti-Christ" and 13% think "he wants the terrorists to win.[1]"
The reasons for these outlandish and idiotic claims may be many, but at least one reason is a known quantity. Free speech of the undesirable kind is the single most important reason that has shaped the political opinions of these sizeable numbers of American adults. No matter how lunatic their political opinions are, however, these said American adults are not peculiarly situated to express these types of backward and ill-informed political declarations. They can easily be coupled with their pound by pound closest ever lunatic counterpart within the Ethiopian Diaspora.
Reading Mathza’s marvelously organized entries about the ill-informed and idiotic claims of the few lunatic elements within the Ethiopian Diaspora, will ascertain unambiguously the existence of a profound Ethio-American parallel in political lunacy. Both lunatics call their respective leader “Hitler,” “racist,” “anti-Ethiopian,” “anti-American,” “un-Ethiopian,” “un-American,” “the domestic enemy of the U.S.,” “the enemy of Ethiopia,” and etc. Both are victims of false propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, falsehood, and water down facts. False propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, falsehood and water down facts constitute the characteristics of free speech of the undesirable kind, and, their inevitable finished product is a self-defeating delusional sector within a society.
To create a self-defeating sector within the Ethiopian Diaspora, arduous work need not lead the effort for the work of misinformation, vilification and hate-inducing false propaganda had been done thoroughly by Derg, Shaebia, EPRP/A, OLF and many other foreign elements of state and non-state actors. As it relates to the American experience, however, to create a delusional segment within an American society requires a great deal of financial and human inputs. Because, costly falsehood has to be preached in redundancy; outlets of free speech have to be monopolized; insightful women and men should stay off the podium—away from cameras, TVs and radios. In essence, a movement against liberal knowledge has to be waged; intellectual bashing has to prevail; precise mathematical proof has to be renamed “fuzzy math;” all these in the mist while hate of erudition gives birth to the well-known and adorable “Average Joe.”
Why one wants to populate a democratic society with “Average Joes” should hit the curious and the engaging in the gut. To this writer, the desire to politically reproduce “Average Joes” is partly caused by free speech of the undesirable kind that money can buy —the very impediment to building an above the average, far-sighted, and questioning but tolerant democratic society.
Who is to say there is freedom to free speech when money becomes the tongue and the tongue becomes speechless, ascertaining centuries old proverb that “Money talks”? In other words, how free is free speech for the very poor, when and if what is being spoken sings naked to the tunes of billions of dollars? How free is free speech when misinformation becomes not only free speech but a matter of fact? Who is to say there is freedom to free speech when those with money set the agenda time again without ears to others? Who is to say free speech is as free as the perceived notion of a liberal democratic worldview reveals?
To a liberal democrat, explicitly stated is the idea that free speech is the basis for strong democratic society. But inquiring minds should ask questions to prove whether such a claim is undoubtedly true in all liberal democratic societies. Inquiring minds would at least notice conflicting claims about free speech in our inter-related world, and these conflicting claims emanate from disparate understanding of what free speech is.
To a liberal democrat, particularly for a believer in the American brand, free speech incorporates in it many issues and more than what many other political societies have in mind. Free speech carries guns; it carries corporate interest as brazenly put by recent US Supreme Court’s precedent nullifying decision; it facilitates hate speech that demeans and denigrates colored people, to the extent of calling African-Americans monkeys over public airwaves—“entertaining” close to twenty million self-defeating and delusional sector of an American society. These are the few from the many undesirable free speeches that a revolutionary democrat finds very dangerous.
These aforementioned undesirable free speeches are backbreaking political acrobats that pit the backbone of one sector of a society against another. When two segments of a society are at odds with each other, a friendlier understanding between them is hard to come by and it is perpetually kept absent by continuous free speech of the undesirable kind. The reason: it makes it easier to rule a divided and asymmetrically empowered society than it is to rule an equally empowered self-governing one.
A revolutionary democrat may not put a lid on odious mouth, except to discourage the undesirable and destructive free speech from taking a very dangerous turn— that is, from calling Adal Isaw a “cancer to Ethiopia”, to labeling the entire people that Adal Isaw is a member of as “unwanted and disposable.” A revolutionary democrat hopes to curtail such a dangerous and detrimental free speech of the undesirable kind by educating and warning those who ask for the right to hate speech, to refrain from crossing the red line of denigrating an entire people. The future of a country of many nations and nationalities will not benefit from hate speech that demeans and denigrates an entire people.
A revolutionary democrat explicitly asserts that people should be free to think wisely and thoroughly—well beyond the scope of hate speech. He argues with passion that people should be free to come up with their own take, concept, paradigm and problem solving tools to determine their future as they see it proper. No one on earth should stand to impede this desirable, explicit and extraordinarily essential free speech of any people; a revolutionary democrat strongly argues.
Equally, a revolutionary democrat is aware of the fact, that those who speak a volume on behalf of the freedom to free speech of a single individual are eager to shut an entire people from speaking its mind whenever and wherever their political and economic interest is at stake. Such is the history that the asymmetric international political-economic relationship has written and continues to write about North-South relation. And the status quo will continue unabated if deprived people in many places of the world fail to assert the supremacy of their freedom to a collective free speech.
It is a must that we understand how far-reaching this elastic concept of free speech is. The positive precepts of free speech compel us to honor differences in opinions and thoughts of individuals so long as the opinions and thoughts are not detrimental to our democratic society. Beyond the realm of the individual and for a sovereign people, it should be underscored, the freedom to free speech is a matter of independent survival; it is the supreme freedom that allows a people to determine its own fate. For us Ethiopians, therefore, our collective freedom to free speech should be one of the pivotal guiding principles that we should adamantly protect, especially, when those who are persistent about the freedom to free speech of a single individual shamelessly work against this precise collective free speech of a sovereign people in the open.
Our speech may not praise classical capitalism. Our worldview may not be likeable to liberal democrats for pointing the detrimental nature of free speech of the undesirable kind. Nevertheless, it is our inalienable write not only to wisely speak our mind, but also to develop our country in ways we deem preferable. Seen from this angle, free speech of the desirable kind works to benefit a striving people create strong democratic political unit. It will also allow it to fight political lunacy, backward ideological discourse, violent-prone activities and creeping foreign hands of the many kinds it is facing.
Keep in mind that those foreign interests, who insist to accentuate the freedom to free speech of a single individual over the collective free speech of an entire people, are only interested to win a single Ethiopian tongue — one tongue at a time— till their foreign freedom to “free speech” prevails. This is what we Ethiopians should stand to reject unshakably; a revolutionary democrat reminds us, right after pondering about free speech of the undesirable kind.
[1] The
Harris Poll®#42, March 23, 2010
By Humphrey Taylor, Chairman, The Harris Poll, Harris Interactive