Photo Credit: Palácio do Planalto
By Mario Sabino
If there were a serious discussion about freedom of expression here, it would be inevitable to look at the book Free Speech: a History from Socrates to Social Media , by Danish lawyer Jacob Mchangama, the most notorious defender of freedom of expression on the international stage.
In the book, he destroys one of the arguments that, with an air of erudition, has been used in the Supreme Court to establish censorship in Brazil in order to safeguard our democracy: the ‘Weimar fallacy’.
Read what Jacob Mchangama wrote:
One of the most common and intuitively appealing arguments for limiting tolerance of intolerance—to paraphrase the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper—in modern democracies is the ‘Weimar fallacy.’ It argues that if the Weimar Republic had done more to prohibit totalitarian propaganda, Nazi Germany—and therefore the Holocaust—could have been avoided. Thus, modern democracies cannot afford to make the same mistake. This is a questionable conclusion for a number of reasons. Not least because there were constant attempts to silence both Hitler and the Nazi Party. But these attempts helped fuel interest in and sympathy for the Nazis, transforming monsters into martyrs. Perhaps most frighteningly, the Nazis used Weimar’s emergency laws to strangle the very democracy they were supposed to protect.
Regarding ‘hate speech’ or ‘hatred’, as Minister Cármen Lúcia claims, Jacob Mchangama clarifies its impure source:
After World War II, the imperative to ban Nazi propaganda was cynically exploited by another totalitarian regime. Stalin’s Soviet Union used the Weimar fallacy to successfully lobby for the introduction of hate speech restrictions into international human rights law. This not only helped legitimize the repression of dissent in the Soviet bloc, but also provided legal cover under international law for Muslim-majority states eager to adopt a global ban on blasphemy.
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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).