No Free Speech for Fascists

Exploring 'No Platform' in History, Law and Politics

David Renton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000400014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

No Free Speech for Fascists explores the choice of anti-fascist protesters to demand that the opportunities for fascists to speak in public places are rescinded, as a question of history, law, and politics. It explains how the demand to no platform fascists emerged in 1970s Britain, as a limited exception to a left-wing tradition of support for free speech.

The book shows how no platform was intended to be applied narrowly, only to a right-wing politics that threatened everyone else. It contrasts the rival idea of opposition to hate speech that also emerged at the same time and is now embodied in European and British anti-discrimination laws. Both no platform and hate speech reject the American First Amendment tradition of free speech, but the ways in which they reject it are different. Behind no platform is not merely a limited range of political targets but a much greater scepticism about the role of the state. The book argues for an idea of no platform which takes on the electronic channels on which so much speech now takes place. It shows where a fascist element can be recognised within the much wider category of far-right speech.

This book will be of interest to activists and to those studying and researching political history, law, free speech, the far right, and anti-fascism. It sets out a philosophy of anti-fascism for a social media age.

1
Introduction

The purpose of this book is to help readers decide whether fascists should be allowed to speak.¹ The scenario it envisages is as follows. The leaders of a political party share with interwar fascism a taste for violence, an insistence that the nation is under threat and that their country can only be restored to greatness if democracy is limited and the party’s many critics silenced. One of those leaders has been offered a platform: a chance to give a televised talk, or an election meeting, or a lecture at a university. Anti-fascists insist that if the fascist is permitted to speak the rights of everyone else will be diminished. They call on the organisers to rescind the fascist’s invitation to speak. Are the anti-fascists correct to demand that the fascist meeting is cancelled?

There are other books which also address this question. Most of their authors say that restricting free speech in this way is always and unequivocally wrong (i.e. that free speech must take precedence),² or that it is usually wrong (i.e. that free speech is an absolute priority until the point at which a speaker advocates violence against their opponents or physically intimidates them, in which case a prohibition is justified).³ You can characterise these both as free speech positions, albeit that one is absolute while the other is conditional.

The theme of this book is whether speech can legitimately be restricted even in circumstances where violence is only a latent rather than an immediate threat. Fifty years ago, parts of the British left worked out a sophisticated answer to this question: no platform. Since then, the phrase “no platform” has become common across the English-speaking world, as has the related but different idea of “deplatforming.”⁴ The way these terms have been used is less specific than in the 1970s and includes actions (for example, the restriction of access to social media sites) which were inconceivable 50 years ago. The original idea of no platform was to deny opportunities to speak to fascists because they were fascists. The tradition of Mussolini and Hitler believed in silencing Communists, conservatives, liberals, feminists, indeed everyone except for themselves. Refusing to let their speech go unanswered was not about reducing the number of people speaking; rather, it was a means of protecting the number of people who could be heard.

The distinctiveness of no platform lay not only in answer to the question of who should be refused a platform (i.e. fascists, and fascists only). The theory also had an idea as to who should decide whether a speech was curtailed. The subject of no platform was a mass movement, whether of radical trade unionists, rebellious students, or advocates of black power or of women’s liberation. The supporters of no platform were not asking for the state to side with them. Rather, they assumed that an insurgent people needed to take back power both from the authoritarian wing of the state and from its allies, among whom the fascists could be counted.

Often, advocates of free speech warn of what they call the “taboo ratchet.”⁵ It is impossible, they argue, to limit one category of unwanted speech without causing others to say that they too have unwanted opponents whose chances to speak should be limited. If you would oppose fascists, they ask, who else would you ban?⁶ In response, no platform gives a simple answer. Fascism is qualitatively different from all other forms of politics, including right-wing or even far-right politics. Unlike them, it seeks to create a dictatorship and one in which all rival forms of speech would be curtailed. It is a politics of unlimited censorship.⁷ Its threat enables anti-fascists to refuse speaking rights to fascists only. The right-wing landscape of the 1970s was no less complex than our own, with each of the following prominent in public discussions – economic monetarists, anti-abortion campaigners, supporters of the death penalty – and many other kinds of right-wing politics beside them. Advocates of no platform criticised each of these trends, might have attended their meetings and heckled them, but held back from stopping their speech altogether.

Alongside that approach, there were ideas about the role of fascism in relation to other right-wing movements. Anti-abortion or anti-immigration protesters might ally, during an election, in support for a Conservative or Republican candidate. But fascism was not just a single-issue politics. It was a total theory of life. It saw itself as the “Spearhead” for the advance of inegalitarian ideas.⁸ Fascism was capable of breaking through in moments of crisis, and when it did it taught its supporters to absorb reactionary answers to every social question.

The uniqueness of fascism lies not merely in its dictatorial ambitions, nor in the way it offers its supporters a total theory of reactionary politics. The other way in which fascism is distinctive is that it has employed violence against a wide range of opponents at every stage of its development: the model of fascism which contemporary far-right parties seek to emulate is not merely that of Hitler’s racial dictatorship, but also the Mussolini of 1921–1922, who encouraged his supporters to attack and burn socialist buildings and kill their occupants. There is no rupture in the history of fascism; no moment of innocence after which a healthy political development was driven off course. Rather it has used violence against its racial and political opponents continuously: as a minority within a wider milieu of disgruntled ex-soldiers, then as a political party, as one large enough to contest for power, as a faction governing in coalition with others, and as a dictatorship. In all these different stages of its history, fascism’s violence was extensive.

As well as the part they played in the murder of six million Jews, Hitler and Mussolini were also supporters of genocide against the Roma and Sinti, advocates of a sped-up and ultra-aggressive form of colonial racism, of the subordination of women, of the destructions of unions and the murder of Communists. Each of these plans reinforced one another. This totalising dynamic made fascism a uniquely destructive enemy.

Fifty years ago, the collective memory of the 1920s and 1930s was clearer than it is today. The interwar years were seen as a time of economic crisis, in which fascists had been able to grow quickly. Both in Italy and Germany, they had begun as factions of a large anti-political milieu with barely a few dozen supporters. From there, the fascists acquired members to the point where they were hegemonic on the right and non-fascists were required to bend to them. Anti-fascists in the late 1970s did not expect that they were facing the same immediate danger, but if there was any possibility that fascism might enjoy a similar dynamic of explosive growth, the prudent approach was to organise against fascists when their supporters were few.

No platform as a range of behaviours

So far, no platform has been described as if it was a single thing: a group of campaigners co-operating to do all they can to have a fascist’s invitation rescinded. This is however a simplification. No platform has been a spectrum of tactics. At its most moderate, no platform takes in (for example) the Labour candidates, who in the 1990s sought to curb the rise of the British National Party by refusing to share a platform with members of that party. In so doing, they helped to isolate the BNP and deny it the legitimacy it craved.

At the other end of the scale, no platform included militant anti-fascists who attempted to disrupt far-right meetings. So, to take another example from Britain, in the 1940s anti-fascists would try to occupy public speaking places which otherwise would be taken by supporters of Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement. Such activity could be time-consuming, even exhausting. When supporters of the Union Movement saw what anti-fascists were doing, they responded by coming earlier to the same sites until both groups were having to sleep overnight in order to hold the best “pitches.” Those who occupied these spaces bore every risk of physical attack, in the dark, or when they were asleep. Often enough, anti-fascists would not try to occupy a space pre-emptively but capture ground which was being held by fascists. Anti-fascists’ memories of this period include being attacked by fascists armed with knives, knuckledusters, and razorblades.

Between these two extremes, there were all sorts of behaviours. Near the minimal end of commitment, no platform might involve researching a venue where a talk was due to take place and phoning the owner and inviting them to reconsider the booking; or organising a petition to the managers of a meeting-space to demand that a talk was cancelled.

Closer to the militant end, anti-fascists took part in intelligence gathering, posing as members of far-right groups, collecting lists of names – and this was never an activity which could be done without a physical risk to those who volunteered for it.⁹

For the purposes of this book, “no platform” is treated as a shared frame of reference, but no one should imagine that beneath this slogan there has ever been a consensus as to how exactly fascism should be stopped. Even amongst those who have agreed in seeing fascism as a uniquely threatening enemy, and even among those who emphasised self-activity over petitioning the state, the debates have continued as to which speakers to target and how best to defeat them.

No platform and hate speech

Although the term “no platform” was used repeatedly by different left-wing activists in the 1970s, it emerged alongside other approaches for answering racism or fascism and its ideas must be disentangled from theirs. Since the 1970s, no platform has given way to a similar seeming but in fact different argument that freedom of expression should be rescinded when a speaker is likely to offend a significant part of his or her audience. Its approach to the scenario with which this book opened is on the surface the same no platform: if a speaker would treat a group of people as less than human, if the speaker would offend and humiliate them, it is right to rescind the speaker’s invitation. This position is often assumed to be identical to no platform, but the rationale for rejecting hate speech is radically different. A hate speech approach insists that speech must be limited whenever it would be hateful to those who would be humiliated by it.

Although a hate speech politics can co-operate with no platform, the former has a different underlying philosophy and leads to different conclusions. It gives a different answer to the question: who else would you condemn, other than fascists? In the early 1970s, its supporters answered: only other racists. But soon other justice campaigns demanded – and plausibly – that they too required protection. There never has been a convincing argument for saying that racism is a unique evil and should be condemned, while sexist or homophobic speech can be tolerated.

A further distinction between the strategies of no platform and hate speech is that the advocates of the latter rarely distinguish between strategies to stop fascism from above or below. Their priority is to stop demeaning language and only unusually do those involved consider whether hate speech should be stopped (as it was in the 1970s) by pickets and demonstrations, or (more often these days) by complaints to social media companies, university administrators, or the police. While there has been a range of opinion within no platform, and indeed within those who sought to prevent hate speech, in general, no platform has given much more care to the question of who is doing the banning, and how fascists are to be stopped (Table 1.1).

TABLE 1.1 Hate speech v no platform

	Hate speech	No platform
Who can be banned	Fascists, the far right, racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, anyone who uses discriminatory language in any form	Fascists
Wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• PART I History
• PART II Law
• PART III Politics
• Index