Why New Zealand shouldn’t ban the shooter’s manifesto

Are we really so frightened not just of a terrorist’s weapons, but of his words?

The New Zealand government’s ‘chief censor’ has outlawed the alleged Christchurch mosque murderer’s manifesto as officially ‘objectionable’ under New Zealand law. Possessing a printed copy of the document, or having it on your computer, could earn you a 10-year prison sentence. Sending it to somebody else via the internet could get you up to 14 years in jail.

Understandably, this ban has not attracted as much criticism as other acts of state censorship, since few want to start a campaign demanding free speech for self-confessed ‘eco-fascist’ terrorists accused of mass murder.

But the ban is still a bad thing. In trying to prevent people from reading the alleged gunman’s ‘message’, the authorities have sent out a worrying message of their own. Their message is that we should be frightened, not only of the terrorist’s deadly weapons, but also of his words; that Western society is now so enfeebled and lacking in self-belief that it cannot take on and defeat the rambling rhetoric of a mad gunman.

The underlying message of the ban is also that the authorities do not trust the New Zealand people, and that those people should not trust one another. After all, what does it say about your neighbours if the government believes they could be turned into racist terrorists by a glimpse of a ranting webpage?

New Zealand’s Bill of Rights Act (1990) declares that, ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form’. However, as the New York Times’ report of the ban observed, ‘the parameters are more restrictive than the First Amendment guarantees in the US’. In other words, the New Zealand authorities have more scope to override that apparent legal right and restrict free speech. As in this case, they can even impose a pre-emptive ban. And it is up to the state’s ‘chief censor’ to decide what is allowed.

David Shanks, the current incumbent of that century-old post, took the extraordinary step of outlawing the manifesto using the definition of ‘objectionable’ under the Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act (1993). This can cover any publication which the censor decides ‘deals with matters such as sex, horror, crime, cruelty or violence in such a manner that the availability of the publication is likely to be injurious to the public good.’

That ‘objectionable’ law seems a remarkably sweeping power for a modern state apparently committed to ‘freedom of expression’, and gives the official censor plenty of scope to wield the blue pencil.

Banning the alleged mosque shooter’s manifesto and warning New Zealanders to ‘destroy any copies’ and report any sightings, Shanks observed that it ‘promotes, encourages and justifies acts of murder and terrorist violence against identified groups of people’, identifies targets for other attacks and potential ways of carrying them out. This brought him to the crux of his case.

‘There is an important distinction to be made’, said Shanks, ‘between “hate speech”, which may be rejected by many right-thinking people but which is legal to express, and this type of publication, which is deliberately constructed to inspire further murder and terrorism. It crosses the line.’

Any debate about free speech today tends to focus on exactly where ‘the line’ should be, and which types of speech cross it. The fashion across Western societies is to make that line easier to cross and seek to outlaw more and more types of ‘hate speech’ or ‘offensive’ words. Shanks makes the welcome concession that ‘hate speech’, while objectionable, is not illegal. Nor should it be. However, he then shifts the line again in order to justify his ban.

The NZ state’s argument is that the alleged shooter’s manifesto should not be protected by free-speech law because it seeks ‘to inspire further murder and terrorism’. In other words, it is an incitement to racist violence.

‘Incitement’ is arguably the most oft-used and abused method of restricting free speech. We should be clear what we mean by it. There ought to be a line between words that are an expression of an opinion, however hateful, and words that become part of the execution of an illegal action. But that line should be drawn very firmly to define incitement narrowly and broadly to favour freedom of speech. Instead the tendency today is to broaden the definition of incitement to include any ‘inflammatory’ words. The New Zealand ban is a case in point.

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