Hate Speech in Asia and Europe

Beyond Hate and Fear

Myungkoo Kang, Marie-Orange Rivé-Lasan, Wooja Kim, Philippa Hall, Myungkoo Kang, Marie-Orange Rivé-Lasan, Wooja Kim, Philippa Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429559037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This edited collection provides a timely review of the current state of hate speech research in Asia and Europe, through the comparative examples of Korea, Japan and France.

Extending the study of hate speech studies beyond the largely western emphasis on European and US contexts dominant in the field, this book's comparative framework aims to examine hate speech as a global phenomenon spanning Asian and European contexts. An innovative range of nuanced empirical case studies explore hate speech by analyzing gendered hate speech and nationality, French cartoon humour, official counter radicalization narratives and the use of international law to inform domestic legislation in the Philippines and Japan. A fresh perspective on Asian and European hate speech, this book's evaluation of current of hate speech research also identifies future directions for the development of theory and method.

Filling a critical gap in the literature, Hate Speech in Asia and Europe will appeal to students and scholars of law, politics, religion, history, social policy and social science more broadly, as well as Asian Studies.

1
Introduction

How would Asia and Europe go beyond the hate speech?

Myungkoo Kang

There is an East Asian proverb, “Just like mushrooms sprouting after the rain,” Just as the poisonous mushrooms sprouting in the forest shortly after the rain, populism and hate speech have been sprouting all over the world. For the last 30 years, populism has been a mechanism of discourse that has encouraged globalization and neoliberal capitalism at the worldwide level. Along with this, hate speech has provided fertile soil for those who have been marginalized and otherized by neoliberal capitalism to victimize others and instigate the hatred within and between different groups. If neoliberal capitalism and populism are the moist soil after rain, hate speech is a poisonous mushroom that feeds on the moisture in the forest

A poisonous mushroom does not mark itself as poisonous. To lure its prey, it boasts of more beautiful colours and forms than any other beneficial mushroom does. While many herbivores are aware of the dangers of the poisonous mushroom and avoid it, young animals and some hungry ones become fatally ill from eating it. Most animals get to know the danger of poisonous mushrooms through learning (from their parents) and experiences (of friends’ death and suffering). Perhaps it took several centuries for the animals to distinguish between poisonous and beneficial mushrooms.

Likewise, hate speech does not always reveal itself in the form of obvious hatred. In fact, hate is considered an important mechanism that protects one’s identity or realm from the other. Hate has served as a significant mechanism to counter threats that disturb the system of identity and violate its boundaries, thereby contributing to sustain the community. However, it leads to alienation of the other, destruction of humanity and demoralization of the society (Kristeva, 1982; Nussbaum, 2004). In a global networked era where boundaries become indistinct and social uncertainty increases, hate is quite easily and negatively mobilized under the pretext that the conventional system should be protected. And hate speech manifests itself as beneficial mushrooms by conciliating people, resorting to conservative values systems, creating fake news and monsterizing the other.

With the recognition of the substantial growth of hate speech in Asia and Europe and its growing devastating effects, this volume collects various cases on different subjects who produce hate speech and those who are victimized and suffered from it. In particular, since there were not many reflections nor empirical data on to what extent and in what forms the poisonous mushrooms of hate speech are grown, we have attempted to look into concrete cases on hate speech in each country, the policy approach to regulate and incapacitate it and cultural resistance against it. In the case of Europe, many pieces of research have been accumulated on the hate speech phenomenon and its regulation debate in various countries, but there have been few opportunities to gather those researches in one place. Furthermore, there has been no attempt on a comparative approach to Asia and Europe.

As can be seen from each chapter in this volume, a significant trend in hate speech studies is towards case studies on specific hate speech incidents, its progress and effects. Both in Asia and Europe, hate speech concerning race, religion, gender, ethnicity and sexuality is becoming a social problem. The second trend is the analysis of different institutional, political, legal, ethical and philosophical perspectives on how to regulate hate speech in various countries. There have been abundant researches that explicate and compare the philosophy and judicial precedents regarding hate speech regulation in North America and Europe. This volume aims to provide a comparative point of view on Asian and European cases, if not to make an accurate comparison between them. Thirdly, what is noticeable in the researches included in this volume is that online hate speech and its regulation is an important issue that calls for scholarly attention. It brings up the longstanding debate on regulation and freedom of speech and places in the online context.

In Asia, research on hate speech is now at the beginning stage while European researches turn their attention to newly developing phenomenon such as online hate speech and hate speech based on ethnicities or religions that are manifested from terrorism and refugees. With the publication of this volume, we would like to share various hate speech cases in different Asian and European countries and elucidate the historical, cultural and socio-psychological soil on which hate speech grows just as poisonous mushrooms sprouting after rain.

Our contributors delve into each countries’ hate speech cases and question the mechanisms of these destructive behaviours and speeches. Japanese society, with the rising of ultra-nationalist groups, is witnessing the hate speech against Zainichi Koreans, and Korean society is suffering from hate speech targeting women, migrants and sexual minorities. European societies are facing extreme Islamophobic attitudes after a series of terrorism and refugee issues. The academic approach to interpret these phenomena is rooted in the critical anger regarding the current state.

Along with the critical anger, the chapters provide rational assessments on each hate speech incident and claim that to prevent hate speech, it is never enough to merely criticize certain individuals or groups that utter it. Each chapter clearly presents or alludes to its own answer on how to counter hate speech. Through the different cases in Asia and Europe, each chapter questions why such destructive behaviours are expressed and why hate speech perpetrators manifest their hatred against others without any sense of guilt and without any reflection on the destructive effect triggered by their speech. All the questions and discussions in each chapter show the future direction of hate speech studies.

And we will find out that the future direction for hate speech studies does not necessarily mean support for freedom of speech or strict regulation on hate speech. It’s when we give more critical attention to other important values such as human rights and dignity, care, tolerance, respect and recognition and discuss these keywords in terms of their philosophical and institutional base – which will be explored in our next forthcoming volume – that we can shake off the fetters of hate speech. These keywords lead us to the accumulated philosophical discussion on ethical and moral attitude to recognize and respect the difference of skin colour, religious belief and sexuality. These keywords can work as attitudes or dispositions on the individual level, as normative principles on the ethical level and as collective practices and institutional regime on the societal level, just as human rights have progressed. These keywords always need to be well considered when criticizing hate speech and discussing regulation tactics.

This volume consists of two sections. The first half aims to examine the current state of hate speech in Korea, Japan and France. Myungkoo Kang, Jaejin Lee and Sojeong Park provide us the contour of hate speech studies in South Korea. Their meta-analytical view shows that Korean hate speech studies is recently growing both in quantity and thematic diversity. Other chapters explore through the case studies how hate speech is produced in particular social contexts. Hyojin Jeong and Younghan Cho examine the construction of misogynistic discourse in South Korea. What is notable in their perspective is that they aim to illuminate “routine, prosaic, dull and unremarkable” aspects of hate speech against women, which they refer to as “banal misogyny,” The chapter provides critical insight on how the habitual representation of media victimizes the women. On the other hand, in Jackie Kim-Wachutka’s chapter, women are not merely positioned as the victims of hate speech. She gives much attention to the Japanese women who openly perform hate speech against social minorities in the name of love of country and how these women gain legitimate empowerment through their performance. With the intersectional approach, the chapter clarifies the intricate connection of gender, race and nation in the realm of hate speech.

Laura Ascone and Tino Bruno delve into French cases. In recognition of the increasing threat of terrorism, Laura Ascone investigates the rhetorical strategies used by the Islamic State. The linguistic analysis carried out with the use of the software Tropes reveals the double effect of hate speech which threatens the enemy and persuades the jihadist sympathizers. By examining how the different threats can be expressed in different ways, Laura Ascone calls for the necessity to consider the social context in which hate speech is formulated. And this necessity is well addressed in Tino Bruno’s chapter. He attempts to explicate how a joke in certain society can be considered as hate speech in another sociohistorical context, through the case of French caricature on the atomic disaster in Japan. This study leads us to reflect on the frontier between humour and hate speech, and also on the formulation of hate speech in the international setting.

The focus of the second half is how hate speech can be countered by the interaction of social movements and international law. Philippa Hall, Gemmo Bautista Fernandez, Naoto Higuchi and Ayako Hatano each engage with different national context, but they all give attention to different actors involved in policy making or legislation process and consider international law as a crucial legal resource that can assist social movements on the national level to counter hate speech. In particular, Hall underscores the intensification of neoliberal globalization and dwindling of the public sphere as the remarkable context of hate speech in Korea, Japan and France. Under such circumstance, the debate between hate speech regulation and freedom of speech, which is affected by not only regional specificities but also international law, becomes more prominent in each society. The debate between regulation and freedom of speech is an essential issue in Fernandez’s reflection on the Philippine case as well. While the legal approach to Philippine online hate speech assumes the US model which is in favour of the freedom of right, Fernandez supports the application of the ECtHR and UNHRC for a more balanced consideration of two rights.

Higuchi and Hatano give insights on legislation process anti-hate-speech law based on their analysis of the recent enactment of the Anti-Hate Speech Act in Japan. Higuchi, finding an answer to how the Anti-Hate Speech Act could be enacted so quickly and tracing the legislation process phase by phase, observes that “different actors related a baton from civil society to the core of ruling coalition,” Meanwhile, Hatano’s chapter interprets the same legislation process as a case that successfully vernacularizes the universal human rights ideology into the local context. In the Kyoto Korean School case which led to the enactment of first anti-hate speech law in Japan, international human rights conventions played a key role to transform the individual or local issue into universal social justice movement.

There is no royal road to extirpating hate speech. Just as hate speech is produced in certain a sociohistorical context, the contextual approach should be discussed. In this sense, various observations and perspectives on different cases in different countries can provide insights into how to counter hate speech. This volume is generated out of the international workshop titled “Beyond Hate & Fear: How Do Asia and Europe Deal with Hate Speech?” held at Kyoto in 2018. It is time for us to go beyond hate and fear, and we hope this volume can contribute as a substantial academic attempt.

References

• Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
• Nussbaum, M. C. (2004). Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Section 1
Current state of hate speech

2
Meta-analysis on hate speech studies in South Korea

Myungkoo Kang, Jaejin Lee and Sojeong Park

Introduction

From the 2000s, hate and discrimination against groups such as foreigners, refugees, immigrants and sexual minorities have been spread through the internet all over the world. In the case of Europe, the increase in discrimination against refugees, immigrants and Muslim minorities and the consequent rise of hate speech has brought about problems of social unity and human rights.

The term “hate speech” has been used by scholars in existing research, but there is not yet a general consensus on what exactly it refers to. Nonetheless, Anne Weber from Council of Europe states in her Manual of Hate Speech that “hate speech” refers to the following: 1) the act of inciting racial hate or hate speech to an individual or group on the basis of their race, 2) the act of inciting hate based on religion (which can be considered to be equivalent to the incitement of hate based on the discrimination of believers and non-believers) and 3) the use of expressions that incite other forms of hate that are founded on intolerance that is “expressed by aggressive nationalism and ethnocentrism” (Weber, 2009).

Hate speech has emerged in almost all nations as a social problem with the development of the internet and of social media. The hate speech of a nation reflects its social and historical context. For instance, racial discrimination in the US stems from its history of slavery and its unique character as a country composed of immigrants. On the other hand, the main target of hate speech in Japan is Korean immigrants, which indicates that at the root of this problem is the international relations of East Asian countries and the issue of history, more specifically the Japanese colonial rule of Korea and the post-liberation relationship of the two countries.

Likewise, hate speech in Korea is different in its character from that of other nations. In Korea, the main instances of hate speech are hate between social classes, flaming against “Jongbuk (Pro-North Korean forces),” and hate speech directed towards women and sexual minorities, recently made more visible by what is called the “Ilbe phenomenon.” The severity of the problem of hate speech in Korea is apparent in the “Research on Hate-speech in Korea and Measures for Regulation” project presented by the National Human Rights Commission of the Republic of Korea on February 19, 2016. This research, through a survey on online and offline hate speech, shows that minority groups that experience stigmatization and prejudice through hate speech experience psychological pain such as stress and depression to such a significant degree that it affects their everyday lives. That more than 50% of sexual minorities, physically disabled individuals, immigrants and women answered that they experience anxiety in their daily lives due to hate speech clearly indicates that hate speech is not a problem to be taken lightly.

Moreover, hate speech is becoming a more prominent phenomenon of negative communication not only on the level of individuals or certain minority groups, but in general society. Hate speech includes not only instances that are directly harmful to socially marginalized individuals but also the incitement to hatred in third-party individuals, and the incitement to hatred is likely to develop into group hate crime.

Based on such a recognition of the severity of this problem, this research approaches the past 20 years of research on hate speech in Korea from a meta-analytical perspective and analyzes their tendencies and characteristics so as to navigate th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: how would Asia and Europe go beyond the hate speech?
• SECTION 1 Current state of hate speech
• SECTION 2 Countering and reforming hate speech
• Index