What they're really saying when they say "free speech"
"shameless speech" would be more apt
Matthew Syed is a nationally syndicated columnist. He recently published a column titled:
Here in Israel, amid the horror, I have found a miracle — truly free speech
It's odd for an author to say this in a week when two booksellers in Jerusalem were arrested, their books impounded. It’s a strange thing to say about a country that restricts press access to lands that it illegally occupies. A country that bombs and bans foreign news organisations while censoring domestic ones. It’s a particularly odd thing for Syed, supposedly a journalist himself, to say about the country that killed at least 85 of his colleagues last year, more than two-thirds of all journalists slain.
For his column, Syed wandered a public square in Tel Aviv, interviewing anybody who’d speak to him. A woman tells him:
We should have prioritised the hostage releases. Netanyahu isn’t interested because he wants to continue the war.
Somebody else counters with:
Sure, you could probably get all the hostages back if you released every single Palestinian terrorist from our jails, but they would go on to kill thousands of Israelis.
Nobody Syed speaks to opposes the “war”. Nobody advocates Palestinian liberation. When Syed’s interviewee rants about “Palestinian terrorists”, nobody interjects that most Palestinian detainees face no charges and that many are children.
Slack-jawed, Syed calls the limited views he sees “free speech on steroids”. It was at this point that I realised: when Syed says “free speech”, he doesn’t mean it in a way that you or I would recognise. What he’s praising would be better described as “shameless speech”.
He explains:
In the UK when I say I’m a journalist, a look of fear materialises in a striking number of my interlocutors. “What if I say something construed as racist?” “What if I’m cancelled?”
I’d suggest that the British fear of being questioned by a hack stems less from “PC Gone Mad”, and more from the public's understanding that our press make sport of being cruel and remorseless towards members of the public. Putting Britain aside for a moment, it’s worth noting what Syed is actually praising here. A society that isn't troubled by being seen as racist.
It’s not just chutzpah that Syed admires; it’s shameless supremacy. It’s not just their forthrightness. It’s that they have forceful opinions about what should be done with their inferiors. The “open, fearless, acerbic” speech that Syed admires in Tel Aviv is the same kind that you might hear in Jakarta in the 60s, or in Kigali and Belgrade in the 90s.
Syed isn’t alone here. Rebranding freedom from shame as freedom of speech is a common right-wing trope. For example, when students began a series of protests against the legacy of the British Empire, their professors proclaimed that “undergraduates must learn the true nature of free speech”. This discursive shift enables right-wingers to deny legitimacy to those opposed to their views. Positioning those opposed to them as against the incontrovertible Western Enlightenment good of ‘free speech’ itself.
The bookends of Syed’s article reinforce this:
Fundamentalists are terrified of Israel’s openness… We are now in a fight not just for Israel, America, Europe and the vestiges of Nato but for the soul of western civilisation itself.
Syed’s public persona is that he is very smart, but his sign off echoes the witless, bovine words of George W. Bush: “They hate our freedoms”. Remind me, how did Bush’s global war for the soul of western civilisation work out?
Further reading
The United Kingdom’s ‘free speech crisis’: From the fringes to a mainstream political project by Taylor A Hughson and Simina Dragoș painstakingly traces the mainstreaming of the idea that there is a ‘free speech crisis’ in the United Kingdom.
The “Reform UK, Nigel Farage, and Elon Musk” episode of the QAA podcast contains enlightening and entertaining discussion of “free speech” as a right-wing cop-out.