Ways of expressing freedom
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International facts -
Adria
"This is true liberty, when free-born men,
having to advise the public, may speak free."
"Who neither can nor will may hold his
peace. What can be more just in a State than this?".
Euripides (480–406 BC)
Freedom of expression could be
considered one of the most fundamental of all freedoms. While it is of dubious
value to rate one freedom over another, freedom of expression is a basic
foundation of democracy, it is a core freedom, without which democracy could
not exist. The term encompasses not only freedom of speech and media, but also
freedom of thought, culture, and intellectual inquiry. Freedom of expression
guarantees everyone's right to speak and write openly without state interference,
including the right to criticize injustices, illegal activities, and incompetencies. It guarantees the right to inform the
public and to offer opinions of any kind, to advocate change, to give the
minority the opportunity to be heard and become the majority, and to challenge
the rise of state tyranny by force of words.
The struggle for freedom of
expression and censorship
Until the 20th century, formal
censorship— not freedom of expression— was the common practice of most states.
Autocrats frequently imprisoned critics, shut down the presses, forced authors
into exile, or censored written and artistic works.
Still, in places lacking
independence or self-government, freedom of expression has generally been at
risk.
Free speech and freely
expressed thoughts and ideas may have posed problems to pre-Christian rulers,
but hardly more troublesome than to the guardians of Christianity, as orthodoxy
became established. Helpful measures to fend off a heretical threat to
Christian doctrine were introduced, such as the Nicene Creed, promulgated in AD
325. But as more books were written, copied and increasingly widely
disseminated, subversive and heretical ideas were spread beyond control.
Consequently, censorship became more rigid and punishment more severe. The problem
increased with the invention of the printing press in Europe in the middle of
the 15th Century. Although printing greatly aided the Catholic
church and its mission, it also aided the Protestant Reformation and
"heretics" such as Martin Luther, thus the printed book became an
arena for a religious battle. In western history, the very term censorship
takes on a whole new meaning with the introduction of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum - lists
of books banned for their heretical or ideologically dangerous content, issued
by the Roman Catholic Church, and with the Sacred Inquisition as the zealous
guardians, banning and burning books and sometimes also the authors. The most
famous of banned authors undoubtedly being Galileo in 1633. The most famous
victims of the Inquisitions trials being Joan of Arc (1431) and in similar way Thomas More
had been prosecuted by Anglicans in 1535.
The first Index of Prohibited Books was drawn up by order of Pope Paul IV in
1559. The lists were issued 20 times through the centuries by different popes,
the last issued as recently as in 1948, and finally suppressed in 1966.
The Catholic Church, controlling universities such as the Sorbonne, also
controlled all publications through its decree in 1543 that no book could be
printed or sold without permission of the church. Then in 1563, Charles IX of
France decreed that nothing could be printed without the special permission of
the king. Soon other secular rulers of Europe followed suit, and scientific and
artistic expressions, potentially threatening to the moral and political order
of society, were brought under control through systems of governmental licence to print and publish.
The dual system of censorship created through the close alliance between church
and state in Catholic countries, was also exported to the forcibly colonised countries in the Americas.
Oppressive and sinister as the censorship executed by the Inquisition no doubt
was to the peoples of the colonies of the Americas, hardly anything can compare
to the devastating effect of the destruction by the Spanish invaders of the
unique literature of the Maya people. The burning of the Maya Codex remains one
of the worst criminal acts committed against a people and their cultural
heritage, and no less a terrible loss to the world heritage of literature and
language.
The Enlightenment: A Primary Objective
Freedom
of expression became a primary objective for Enlightenment thinkers as a
measure of liberal progress. In Europe, Sweden was the first country to abolish
censorship in 1766, followed quickly by Denmark and Norway in 1770. Reflecting
the egalitarian spirit of its revolution, the French National Assembly's
Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 included not only the right to free
expression, but also the right to own a printing press. In the American colonies,
one of the colonists' main complaints was press censorship by the English king.
After the American Revolution, the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, adopted
in 1791, established one of the strongest standards for the guarantee of free
speech by any constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or
abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people
peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of
grievances."
But the full
importance of freedom of expression could perhaps be appreciated only with the
rise of totalitarian regimes, such as Adolf Hitler's Germany and Joseph
Stalin's Soviet Union, among others.
In such
regimes, the state not only exerted full control over expression, it also used
the media to direct citizens' thoughts and opinions through propaganda,
indoctrination, denunciation, and social conformity.
Totalitarianism: "Truth
Is the Mortal Enemy"
The rise of totalitarian
regimes in the 20th century had an opposite dynamic: eradicating all freedom.
Totalitarian regimes took complete control of the media, making it into an
instrument for conveying state ideology, and attempting to control thought and
conscience through propaganda and the intimidation of deviant or dissenting
views and opinions. Indeed, such regimes moved immediately to control
expression upon seizing power.
In the earliest days of the
Russian Revolution, for example, the Bolsheviks imposed censorship, using
tactics such as destroying the presses of political rivals and destroying
private ("bourgeois") libraries. The Bolsheviks' leader, Vladimir
Lenin (1870–1924), set the early direction of state propaganda in his famous
maxim "A lie told often enough becomes the truth." Stalin further
institutionalized censorship by establishing a state body to oversee censorship
(called Glavlit in Russian) and the Writers
Union (1932), which became the only legal union for writers. These actions by
Stalin were instruments for directing every aspect of public expression and for
establishing socialism as the only allowable ideology. In the terror under
Stalin's rule (the height of repression lasted from the late 1920s to the late
1930s), thousands of writers, journalists, and artists who refused this
straitjacket found themselves in prison camps and even graves.
Upon taking power in Germany,
Hitler appointed Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) as director of propaganda. One of
Goebbels's first acts was to incite anti-Semitism in the media. He also rallied
support for a massive book burning on May 10, 1933, in Berlin to destroy
"non-German" books. To note, the German poet Heinrich Heine argued in
the 19th century, "Where books are burned, human beings are destined to be
burned too." Goebbels's notion of the "big lie" defines the
essence of totalitarian propaganda:
If you tell a lie big enough
and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can
be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the
political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes
vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent,
for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth
is the greatest enemy of the State.
Totalitarianism vs. Free Thought
Within
totalitarian regimes, one finds not just unimaginable suffering, but also
remarkable profiles in courage of individuals who struggled to write freely and
reveal the truth for the world and for history. Such courageous individuals
include the Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas (1943–90),
the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel (1936–), the Russian author of the 1973 The
Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918–), and many, many others.
For these individuals, intellectual freedom could not be compromised because it
meant compromising truth itself. Those who were imprisoned found ways both to
write and to smuggle their works out of their countries, creating a distinct
new form of literature called prison writing. Their pursuit of truth and their
efforts to overcome censorship define the meaning of free expression.
Within
democracies, freedom of expression remains controversial: Should there be
restrictions on hate speech or obscenities, or on publishing sensitive national
security information? But, examining freedom of expression in light of the
history of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, past and present, helps place
many of these debates in greater perspective and provides greater understanding
of the struggle for freedom of expression.
by Liceo Classico “C. Bocchi”
- Adria
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