Keystone of freedom

Part I of an abridged version of an essay presented at the 4th International Conference on Communication and Mass Media in Athens, Greece, May 22, 2006.

The First Amendment is the most glorious thing about the United States. It is the cornerstone of liberty and freedom.
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, dissenting in a 1951 case, wrote: "I have always believed that the First Amendment is the keystone of our government, that the freedoms it guarantees provide the best insurance against destruction of all freedom.”
The First Amendment is a radical statement. Its command is absolute: no law. The amendment contains perhaps the finest 45 words ever strung together.
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut has written that the First Amendment "reads more like a dream than a law." He added: few countries have "been crazy enough to include such a dream among its legal documents."
Far more nations should be "crazy enough." It remains a shame that most countries do not have a First Amendment or its equivalent.
Take France, a nation which often has far better values than the United States. In 2004 a French court fined a magazine $375,000 for a review in which a wine critic called Beaujolais Nouveau vin de merde (shit wine). Wine is almost sacred to the French. That is why the judge in the case said the critic “seriously abused the freedom of speech.”
He ruled: "By debasing Beaujolais to the point of scatology, and likening it to excrement," the writer for the wine magazine had "seriously abused the freedom of speech."
The U.S. First Amendment protects such "abuse."
Other French cases seemingly clog the courts. A French comedian was fined $5,300 for “inciting racial hatred” when he gave an allegedly anti-Semitic interview that was published. Brigitte Bardot was convicted of inciting racial hatred for portraying Muslims as “cruel and barbaric” in her book, “A Cry in the Silence.” She was fined $6,050.
Take Austria. A court in Vienna recently sentenced a British historian, David Irving, to three years in prison for denying the Holocaust. Irving was terribly wrong. But three years in jail for being stupid? For being unhistorical?
Take Italy. An Italian judge ordered Oriana Fallaci to stand trial on charges that she defamed Islam in her 2004 book, “The Force of Reason.” She wrote that the Islamic faith “sows hatred in the place of love and slavery in the place of freedom.”
An Istanbul court sentenced a newspaperman to six months in jail for daring to criticize a penal code provision barring writers and scholars from “insulting Turkish identity.”
Another Turkish court tried five newspaper columnists for “insulting” the country’s courts. The “Istanbul Five” attacked court rulings trying to block an academic conference on the Armenian genocide, a verboten topic in Turkey. (The Ottoman Empire slaughtered thousands of Armenians in 1915, some estimates ranging up to one million.)
Singapore outrageously prosecuted the International Herald Tribune because it told the truth in an article on the flawed asiatic judiciary. It is ever thus in dictatorial regimes. The last thing the Chinese government wants is a First Amendment.
The United Kingdom could use a First Amendment. British libel laws are harsh, making it difficult for the media to criticize celebrities, powerful people and powerful institutions.
The press is far freer in America than it is in Britain which has an Official Secrets Act. The act forbids former intelligence officers from leaking to the press or publishing books about anything they did or about any event that took place while they were in government service.
Such a law would be unconstitutional in America. As one of the British law lords said about another official secrets case: "In a free society, there is a continuing public interest in seeing that the workings of government are open to scrutiny and criticism."
In America, critics are entitled to be abusive without being fined or jailed. What all too few Americans understand about the First Amendment is that it protects opprobrium, hatred, insult--and stupidity.
Justice William O. Douglas rightly said: the First Amendment is not designed to dispense tranquillizers. Or, in the words of novelist Salman Rushdie, himself the target of a fatwa death sentence for writing his truth about Islam: “The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.”
The United States is and has been a badly flawed nation. The widely accepted notion of American exceptionalism is absurd. But there is no gainsaying the wonderful First Amendment.