By Josemaría Moreno
On June 18 we celebrate the International Day for Countering Hate Speech, which was inaugurated by the United Nations in 2022. Undoubtedly, concern about this destructive phenomenon has increased since the advent of social networks and online communication, but it is not a new phenomenon. It would be pertinent to recall some devastating examples regarding the consequences of hate speech.
- The Holocaust in Germany and other racist states in which more than 6,000,000 Jews and at least half a million Roma and Sinti died, in addition to causing countless atrocities against people with disabilities, Germans of African descent, LGBTQI+ people, Poles, and prisoners of war.
- The 1994 genocide in Rwanda that claimed the lives of more than one million ethnic Tutsi citizens in less than three months and the rape of at least 250,000 women.
- The Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in which Serb forces murdered 8,000 Muslim men and boys of Bosnian origin in a matter of days and a catastrophe that is part of a larger conflict (1992-1995) that left more than 100,000 dead.
- The Rohingya refugee crisis in Myanmar (2012-2017), which created the most volatile refugee crisis in history, displacing more than 725,000 Rohingya who had to flee to Bangladesh for their lives, in addition to tens of thousands of cases of sexual abuse extensively documented.
As you can see, hate speech has real and devastating consequences. And while it is easy, almost intuitive, to define hate speech as any type of communication or behavior that discriminates against and offensively attacks a person or group based on who they are—that is based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, ancestry, gender, etc.—this type of harmful rhetoric is, unfortunately, not entirely easy to frame in a legal position within an international foundation. In fact, the concept itself continues to be the subject of constant controversy, especially because of its relationship with freedom of expression.
One of the most recognized and important liberties contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights today—which is also, paradoxically, one of the most important weapons we have against hate speech—is the freedom to express oneself without concern about the opinions expressed. The endless refrain of the staunch defenders of this freedom is: freedom of expression cannot be limited under any circumstances, regardless of whether your speech is aberrational, alienating, or dehumanizing, even if your speech incites hatred, segregation, or genocide.
The paradox is notable, but we can make some precisions that clarify the problem. One of the legacies of the Enlightenment and later of Romanticism is that the self does not have an essential definition that pre-exists the development of the human being; that is, the self is a construction: I no longer think, therefore I exist, but I do, therefore I am. In the same way, the set of individualities, society in general, is not some kind of immutable essence that can be defined in isolation from the concrete facts of an ethical nature that said society practices.
At the end of the 19th century, the anarchist and biologist Kropotkin—a renegade child of the Enlightenment—believed that justice, rights, and freedom were not the manifestation of a pre-existing human essence, but rather that these fundamental legal conquests are the result of an ongoing struggle and that the human species has had to fight to try to establish a form of sociability that sustains life and its development. The fragile social equilibrium in which we currently find ourselves, always perfectible, must be defended to the letter, since at any moment it can slide towards barbarism and alienation, as shown by the list of atrocities summarized at the beginning of this text.
Freedom of expression, following Kropotkin, is not a social foundation that has to be protected. It is rather a consequence that has to be justified if we want to live in a kind, open, and inclusive world—a world that we do not inhabit now nor have we ever, but the utopian promise of one day reaching this promised land is enough to continue our efforts as a collective and as a declining species to try to protect the underprivileged, the minorities, the persecuted, and refugees—everyone who runs the risk of being singled out and mistreated for the simple fact of existing, of being what you are. Hate, in whatever form it takes, will never be a value.
