Okay, then. Fire!

It’s not that crowded a theatre, but “fire!” again.

You see, if you remember the appalling judgement actually rendered by Mr Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in that case, he was comparing the action that I’ve just imitated, parodied, to the action of a group of Yiddish-speaking socialists who gave out a leaflet in Yiddish only opposing Mr Wilson’s war and actually calling attention, as they were, to a major conflagration raging in Europe in which they did not think the United States should become involved.

Be very, very, very careful when people give you arguments from authority or tradition that suggest that free speech can be limited by higher authorities like the sainted Holmes because that’s what you’ll get.

The end of it is a group of Yiddish-speaking radicals told they can’t hand out a leaflet in Yiddish on a major question of the day.

That’s always how it will end, no matter how high-mindedly or creepily or sinisterly it’s presented to you.

My favourite crowded theatre story is actually about the terrible Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank.

Some people may remember it’s in the 60s. It was a production famous for its longueur.

In the third act, as the German soldiers came pounding on the door and stamping into the parlour, someone in the front row shouted, “She’s in the attic!”

Call me old-fashioned if you will, ladies and gentlemen, but as you will see, I don’t think a joke is really a joke unless it’s at somebody’s expense.

Now, if you’re thick-skinned and broad-backed enough to take that, I might have a bit more for you.

The real question, utterly, utterly dodged by David in his shady remarks, is this.

Who’s going to decide?

We’ve already found that Oliver Wendell Holmes isn’t competent on the point. Who will you appoint?

Who will be the one who says, “I know exactly where the limit should be. I know how far you can go, and I know when you’ve gone too far, and I’ll decide that.”

Who do you think, who do you know? Who have you heard of?

Who have you read about in history who would give that job?

I would say, just for this evening, I wouldn’t give it to anyone who’s spoken so far on the other side.

Now, actually, I do know a bit about Milton and quite a lot about Thomas Paine as well, and Mr.

Paine actually updated and, I think, improved John Milton’s Areopagitica, which is the classic case for free expression.

And those of you who know Areopagitica and Paine’s commentary on it will know that it recommends free speech in this way, not for you, but for the people you are listening to and the people whose comments you hope to hear in return for your own education, for your own enlightenment, and for your own elucidation.

As Mr. Paine says, commenting on Milton, one of the vices of those who would repress the opinions of others is they make themselves prisoners of their own opinions because they deny themselves the right and the means of changing them.

Should this not be as plain as could be, the free interplay of ideas is not something that those of us who wish to speak or unload our opinions insist upon for that sake.

It’s because we want to hear what is said in response, however unwelcome it may be to us.

Thus, the defense of any one opinion or form of expression is a defense of all of them.

The classic statement in modern times of this, in my view, would be Aryeh Nair’s book, Defending My Enemy, where he describes the decision of the American Civil Liberties Union, which I’m a supporter, to take the case of the American Nazi Party and its right to parade swastikas through the town of Skokie, Illinois, a favorite retirement community for those who’d survived the final solution.

ACLU lost a lot of members on that proposition, but we did the right thing by the First Amendment.

In the book, he has a wonderful extract from Robert Bolt’s play Man for All Seasons, which some of you will have seen at least in celluloid form, where if you recall, Sir Thomas

Moore is talking to one of the witch hunters and prosecutors and says, “So you’d cut a roadthrough the laws, would you, to get after the devil?” And the witch hunter and prosecutor says, “I’d cut down every law in England to do that.”

And Thomas Moore said, “That’s worth knowing. And when the devil turned around to meet you and had you at bay, where would you look for shelter, Mr. Prosecutor? The laws all being flat and cut down. Where would you turn then?”

It’s impossible ever to think of infringing the right of anyone else to free speech

without arranging, in a sense, calling in advance for this to happen to you, too.

It’s quite different, obviously different, from any question of information.

Information may be classified, information may be copyrighted.

Every word said on that score by the first speaker on the other side was a complete waste of her breath, because it’s not what we’re meant to talk about.

We’re meant to talk about the expression of opinion and conviction, not breach of copyright or leaking of classified information.

If we’d wanted to talk about that, we would have phrased the motion differently.

There have been some bad signs lately, a lot of slippage in what I would have thought were the pedantic obviousness of the points I’ve just made.

The imprisonment of David Irving in Austria for a thought crime, for the possibility that he might, while in Austria, have given a speech saying that he doubts some of the verdicts of history, as I consider them to be, about the final solution.

There’s no victim to this crime.

The Austrian consul called me up, weeping with self-pity when I pointed this out in the Wall Street Journal, and said, “But we thought finally Austria would be popular.

We had done something that you would all like.

So Gemütlich, the land that survives on the myth that Hitler was German and Beethoven was Viennese, the land that had Waldheim as its chancellor and has Jörg Haider as a member of its government, can revenge itself on a defenseless British academic and jailer.

This is a standing disgrace.

And there are attempts to extend similar thought crime laws to other topics of historical importance.

The most depressing of which recently is the decision provisionally at any rate by the French Parliament to criminalize discussion of the Armenian massacres, considered by me and most others to have been a planned genocide in the early part of the 20th century.

Now you can’t take the contrary view.

You couldn’t, for example, argue, as you can, that actually in the provinces of Turkey where Russian forces were not engaged, Armenians were not massacred.

In other words, it could be that it’s partly an act of war as well as an act of ethnocide.

Provinces of this kind would now be at your own peril.

The law on which it’s modeled, the loi Gaisot, which criminalizes in France discussion of the Holocaust as well, is named for the French Stalinist, Monsieur Gaisot, who sponsored it and whose spirit and the spirit of whose hero is present in all of these and other such discussions.

One, eh?

Okay.

I stipulate that all of these things, when they happen, offend me very much.

I’m offended by them, I want you to understand.

It goes to the core of what I do and what I am. First Amendment doesn’t just provide me with a living.

The First Amendment is my life. When it’s infringed, I am offended. I have claimed the right to be offended.

Do not claim the right to go burn down someone else’s place of worship, to threaten their relative with violent reprisal, to picket their home, to publish their name in threatening terms on the internet.

I won’t do any of that.

It doesn’t mean I can’t be offended, but it does mean that I’m even more offended by those who claim the right not just to be offended, but to seek violent reprisal, as is so vividly and currently being done by the votaries of the Prophet Muhammad.

In recent cases, which I only have no time at all to inform you, but about which you already know and to which I hope I will be asked to return.

Thanks very much.

[Applause]