Defending My Enemy: American Nazis, the Skokie Case, and the Risks of Freedom

"This is a most incredible story. Aryeh Neier is himself a Holocaust survivor. His family, who were Jewish, got out of Germany pretty much at the last minute. In the late 1970s he was running the ACLU— the American Civil Liberties Union—and decided to defend the right of a bunch of neo-Nazis to march through a town called Skokie, where a very large number of Holocaust survivors lived. You can imagine this was massively controversial. He got hate mail, many people resigned from the ACLU. This book tells the story of that. What I find particularly moving is the first chapter, when he explains why he does it, and he says—I paraphrase—‘It’s not in spite of being Jewish, it’s precisely because I’m a Jewish Holocaust survivor that I know that free speech and the law is the defence of the weak against the strong. And if I ask that for myself, I have to ask it also for others, and so that’s why I’m defending my enemy.’ “How would I have behaved if I’d been an East German? Would I have been a dissident or a collaborator?” So it’s not just a very coherent and powerful argument, it’s a very moving argument coming from the guy who’s writing it—and he went on, by the way, to be a terrific international human rights activist. He headed George Soros’s Open Society Foundation for many, many years. He has practised what he preached. But this is such a defining moment, and I remember my friend Christopher Hitchens saying to me that the Skokie case was one of the things that made him want to move to the United States. Those were the days when the United States really stood as a beacon for free speech and civil liberties. You have to take the question in two parts. Part number one is the kind of question I asked myself when I was writing about my Stasi file which is how would I have behaved if I’d been an East German? Would I have been a dissident or a collaborator? I don’t know the answer to that question, how I would have behaved. Part two is, in principle, do I think he was right? Absolutely I think he was right. A perfectly legitimate choice. You disagree with this profoundly, that’s fine. This is Milton, it’s Mill, it’s Aryeh Neier. In the famous formula, we must defend the thought we hate, not just the thoughts we like. I mean, in contemporary terms, I remember Theresa May, when she was Home Secretary, once saying, ‘The internet platforms must ban this Islamist stuff, because these people have disgusting views.’ Well, free speech is not about banning disgusting views. It’s about going after them when they’re really dangerous. It’s about arguing with them. But the idea that just because they seem ‘disgusting’ to Theresa May is sufficient reason for them to be taken down by the internet platforms suggests she really hasn’t got the basic idea of free speech. And I hope she will soon have the leisure to do so. It very much has. One characteristic of this connected world is that we now have a global public sphere provided by a few private companies. There’s the notion of ‘POPS’—Privately Owned Public Spaces. Increasingly we’re getting our news from Facebook, not just exchanging family photos. So they have to face up to the fact that they have some public responsibilities. Then the question is, so how should they do that? What should be the rules of the game? One has to acknowledge that women and people from minorities do get massively harassed and bullied on Facebook and on Twitter and that’s a serious problem. They do have to provide us with the tools to defend ourselves. “Free speech is not about banning disgusting views. It’s about going after them when they’re really dangerous” That’s how I would put it, that I should be able to decide the level of privacy I want. You see, free speech is the right of both the speaker and the listener. I should be free to say what I want or not. The listener should be free to hear what he or she wants or not. So I should be able to block people on Twitter. Now the problem arises—when I was talking to a human rights activist just a couple of days ago in Montreal, she was saying she got 16,000 tweets in a couple of days attacking her on one issue. Well, she can’t spend the day blocking 10,000 accounts. So there are problems of scale, but the principle is very simple. I should be able to decide. Education is incredibly important here. Going back to the navigation metaphor, we really are like people who are steering paddle boats around the lake and suddenly we’re on the high seas. That involves knowing about how you protect your privacy online, how you report really bad stuff, how to keep it away, how to find the good stuff, how to distinguish fake news from true news, but also how you engage with people. I quote in the book a technique, which I love, called ‘constructive controversy.’ I saw this in action in an academy school in east Oxford. Let’s take a controversial subject, the burka say. What’s your position on this? Ahmed argues for this position, and Joe argues for that position. That’s fine. Then you say, ‘Okay, now you have to swap and you have to make the opposite case.’ When that happens, you almost see a sort of light bulb going on in their eyes as they see, ‘Yes, I can imagine what it would be like to see it from their point of view.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The question of effective counter-speech on the internet is something I’m working on now. How do you do it? How do you actually make it work? Anonymity is a big problem. I call it Janus Anonymous. On the one hand the death threats and the hate speech is coming from anonymous. On the other hand, if you’re a dissident in Iran, or in an oppressive religious community, anonymity is a lifeline for you."