Margaret Atwood and Free Speech

IEP EXERCISE n°2: “If we don’t defend free speech, we live in tyranny”, Margaret Atwood 

1. COMPREHENSION

1. Artistic free speech matter in a democracy because it shows that the ruler accepts the possibility of being criticized and disliked for his politics and choices. If artistic free speech is not accepted, then it means that the ruler is condemning every opinion different than his and therefore free speech cannot exist.  

1. Writing a book is often a great way for authors to voice their opinions very openly and critically. Those books can be shared very quickly and with a lot of people: in authoritarian regimes, rulers do not want to be criticized; somebody questioning their way of ruling is a threat to their authority. Writers are also very easy to blame, perhaps because they are the only ones capable of expressing their ideas against the regime, they describe the truth about the violence in those regimes.

1. Margaret Atwood does not support unlimited freedom of expression. She thinks freedom of expression should be supported until the point where it is at the expense of somebody else:” the right to freedom of expression does not include the right to defame, to lie maliciously and damagingly about provable facts, to issue death threats, or to advocate murder”. She even thinks that unlimited freedom of speech should be judged and punished in a court of law.

1. This quote means that most authors write about their opinions and opinions cannot be universally accepted. If an author is universally liked, it must mean that he only expressed what most people wanted to hear and not what he really thought. A lot of authors use their books to criticize things, thus again this cannot be accepted by everyone.

1. “Used as a pawn” can mean that Salman Rushdie was used as an example, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a Fatah against him to show that anyone who would want to rebel against him, or his authority would finish the same way as him.

1. ESSAY

“Does free speech include the right to offend other people?” 

Free speech is first seen as a necessary democratic right. Amnesty International, a global movement that campaigns to end abuses of human rights reminds us on its website that free speech is the 19th article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet, sometimes free speech is used as a tool to be offensive towards people and can be lawfully reprimanded.

Some may say that it is complicated to delimit. Indeed, press and freedom of speech were granted in the United States in 1791. Before that, many people such as Nicolaus Copernicus lived during a time when the Catholic Church controlled the people and their opinions. The major concept held by the catholic Church was the geocentric theory which Copernicus was against with his heliocentric theory. Copernicus’ theory was not accepted and was considered very offensive. Yet now, free speech is crucial for scientific discoveries and debates. Something considered offensive decades ago is now considered crucial in a lot of domains.

Though it may seem difficult to delimit free speech, not delimiting it seems highly dangerous. If we begin to justify or accept free speech by saying that it evolves with society, it means we let everyone say hurtful or unacceptable things. For example, 30 states in the United States have cyberbullying laws: in those cases, if we don’t make laws about the limits of free speech, millions of people can be bullied and bullies will not have any repercussions.

In conclusion, while free speech seems like a necessary tool and hard to delimit, it is fundamental to prohibit it from hurting others.

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