This week’s column is the second part of some reflections on the proposed new legislation: the draft Prohibition of Hate Speech Bill.
It is hard to decide which part of the draft Bill is the most revealing of insidious government intentions. In some of its provisions the Bill is disturbingly similar to legislation in Zimbabwe and under which virtually all independent political and social comment has been obliterated by the Robert Mugabe government.
Judging by the lack of all but puff and promise by the South African administration, it is no longer possible to believe that the Zimbabwean debacle has prompted any other visible reaction from Thabo Mbeki and his Cabinet minions than a certain approval. Their support of the Mugabe tyranny has long since become overt.
Here again are the basic proposals of the draft Bill on hate speech.
Criminal liability will ensue for ‘any person who in public advocates hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion against any other person or group of persons that could reasonably be construed to demonstrate an intention to be hurtful, harmful or to incite harm, intimidate or threaten, promote or propagate racial, ethnic, gender or religious superiority, incite imminent violence, cause or perpetuate systemic disadvantage, undermine human dignity or adversely affect the equal enjoyment of any person’s or group of persons’ rights and freedoms in a serious manner”.
This takes naivety to an astonishing extreme. It would appear that our government, in all seriousness, believes that prejudice can be abolished by means of legislation.
Apart from its naked hostility to Constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression, there appear to be two primary objectives behind the above mish-mash.
The first is its intention to express in legislation the most stifling prescriptions of political correctness, the most venomous of such reverse bigotry. The second, and even more obvious, is that the Bill attempts to codify what has become known as the ‘race card”.
Penalties for disagreement are to be made criminal.
Where the draft Bill virtually duplicates the Zimbabwean model is in its proposal that exemption from prosecution will be granted to the media when there is what it describes as ‘fair and accurate reporting in the public interest”.
The Zimbabwean terminology is more direct. ‘Publishing falsehoods” has been the justification for Zimbabwean newspapers being closed down, their journalists imprisoned and tortured, their assets seized.
If the draft Bill becomes law, who or what body will be appointed to decide what is ‘fair and accurate reporting”? May we look forward to some new bureaucracy like the old Directorate of Publications staffed largely, as it was, by those sympathetic to their government’s ambitions? The preamble to the old Publications Act stated that one of its prime purposes was to uphold a ‘Christian view of life”. Will the preamble to our new Hate Speech Act state that its purpose is to uphold the ANC’s ideation of a socialist nirvana? However the Bill is formulated, the first law of bureaucracies states that if abuse is possible, it is inevitable. Think of flavour-of-the-ministerial- week, the overruling of the sacking of a sex-pest ambassador in Indonesia.
Certainly the introduction of this new legislation will see much hastening off to the courts, which gives some relief to concern.
Whether the government structures will obey judicial instruction that interrupts their political volitions is, of course, another matter. Ask the Minister of Health whether she feels bound by High Court injunctions.
Other ‘exemptions” are proposed in the draft Bill. These are for ‘artistic creativity”, ‘academic and scientific inquiry” and ‘publication of information in terms of the Constitution” — whatever the latter means.
Apart from the obvious — that such definitions are open to the widest of interpretations — who or what do they foresee as final arbiters of whether some play or novel or poem or painting or satire or dance sequence has artistic merit?
No artist of any conscience would dream of playing executioner to the works of other artists, so who would they get to decide that a new sketch by, say, someone like Mark Banks is undesirable in that, by ridiculing government lackeys, it may reasonably be construed that Banks demonstrates an intention to be hurtful, harmful, to promote or propagate racial, ethnic, gender or religious superiority, systemic disadvantage, etcetera, etcetera? Some government lackey?
The term ‘fascist” is nowadays applied loosely to any figure or body of authority, all the way from the tough schoolmaster to the fundamental dictatorship. In his book, The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton identifies as one of the ‘mobilising passions” of fascists, their perceived victimisation by internal and external enemies. So-called hate speech is of such perceiving.
In these lights the motives of the government in proposing this legislation give rise to serious misgivings. Why should the state interpose its will on something as vital as the communication of human beings? What will be next? Government approval of all our reading matter?
After all, like newspapers, books are things which make their statements in public. Will local authors have to comply, have their manuscripts vetted lest they infringe? Will singers have their lyrics submitted for artistic validation by some committee?
Whichever way you look at it, the proposed hate speech legislation is the first step in the setting up of Orwellian ‘Thought Police”. Big Comrade is indeed growling.