Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello, welcome at this new vlog of Belicons.
Nice that you are watching.
This week my blog and vlog are about the freedom of speech.
At the end of my blog I wondered how it is possible that it is so unclear to us what
freedom of speech really means.
We tend to think that it means that we can say just about anything.
That there are no limits to it.
Because of this, many people were very indignant when Geert Wilders was convicted for saying
that he wanted fewer Moroccans in The Netherlands.
That was his opinion so he should be free to say what he thinks.
But this isn’t what the freedom of speech is about.
Actually, no kind of freedom is.
We are only free if we can do whatever we want within some limits.
Take for example education.
In The Netherlands everyone is free to start a school, but if it doesn’t meet certain
demands, it will be closed very soon.
And that is important of course.
Suppose the people who inspect schools would approve of anything, then education would deteriorate.
So we are free to start a school, but we first need to prove that we have a good concept
and subsequently we need to prove that that concept really works in practice.
So on the one hand we are free, but on the other Dutch children are protected against bad education.
The same that goes for freedom of speech.
If we would be fully free to say about anything and we would choose to threaten each other
very often, that wouldn’t create a very pleasant society.
So we are free to say what we think, but if it hurts another person, and a threat does
hurt another person, then we could be convicted by a judge.
No one can prevent that we threaten another person, but since we know we could be persecuted
because of this, we will probably choose not to do that.
Last week there was a new discussion on the freedom of speech.
A journalist was critical about all the sexism and racism on a certain website.
This website responded by posting a picture of this journalist on their website and asking
their visitors to respond in a sexist way.
Subsequently, the visitors responded with all kinds of fantasies to *** this journalist.
Of course many people were disgust by this.
But still the discussion in our society that resulted out of this, showed that the limits
of freedom of speech aren’t clear to us at all.
For when a large group of women started to protest against this, not by suing the people
of the website or by calling them to take these sexist posts off the website, but just
by asking the advertisers to rethink whether they really want to finance this website by
placing their advertisements on it.
Instead, that other people were happy that some people protested against this, these
women were criticized because they wouldn’t respect the freedom of speech of this website.
What do they mean that they wouldn’t respect the freedom of speech of this website?
They didn’t try to prevent these posts from being placed on the website in the first place,
they don’t ask all the comments to be deleted, they just ask companies to be aware of where
they place there advertisements.
And I think that some more awareness is very good in this matter.
We all want to live in a nice society, right?
Well, in that case it is important that we treat each other respectfully.
And of course no one can prevent that some people are unkind towards each other.
But precisely then it becomes important to have clear limits.
We are free to say what we think, that is the freedom of speech, but as soon as we harm
another person with our words then someone should stop us.
That is the limitation that makes our freedom sustainable.
But time and again we see protests against certain statements and that shows that this
isn’t clear to the protesters.
Because freedom of speech is one of the most important things in our society, we need to
understand exactly what it means.
And therefore we should have good lessons about this in primary and secondary school.
Because then young pupils can already learn how important limitations are in order to have real freedom.
Moreover, then they can learn to think how to deal with the freedom of speech in a society that is changing.
Many statements that were unacceptable about 20 years ago, seem to be very normal right now.
For example, 20 years ago we could only talk positively about the multicultural society
otherwise people would have hated us.
But now we all see that the multicultural society has downsides too and as a result
we switch to the other extreme and people cannot say any more that they do believe in
the multicultural society.
People are often talking so negatively about people with a migrant background that these
people are perceived negatively, even though they might do so many good things in our society.
So society is changing and what we think are acceptable statements is changing too.
And freedom of speech has limitations.
If we want to guarantee all our freedoms then all of this needs to be very clear to us.
And for that reason young children already need to learn to think about this so that
they can cope with it in a good way when they turn adults.
These are my ideas.
Let me know what you think, on Belicons or on YouTube.
And don't forget to mention your arguments of course.
I'm really curious and I will see you next week.
Bye!