"Ha-HA!"
In October 2009, Nick Griffin, the then-
leader of Britain's foremost
far-right political party (the British National Party),
Appeared on the nation's flagship current affairs program 'Question Time'.
8 million people watched. At the
time, there was a lot of debate over whether it was
appropriate to give a platform to the extreme right. He was roundly
mocked by people on the show as well as the mainstream media,
and he complained - with little apparent understanding of the
irony of his language - that he had faced "a lynch mob".
It was an early example
of this debate that's now become ubiquitous: if you really
want to drive fascism and other hate-fuelled ideologies out of public life,
is it better to debate them?
And presumably, WIN that debate... Or, should you ignore them,
not offer them a platform, and hope they go away?
I'm not talking about just "censoring views you
disagree with" in this video; I'm assuming a LITTLE bit of shared
ground with you in thinking that Naziism, or fascism, are
genuinely abhorrent and that
the world would be better off if nobody believed in white supremacy.
That is, THIS is a debate among friends, about
means, rather than ends. We can all agree
(hopefully, though it *is* 2018 so who really knows anymore)
that neo-nazis should end up discredited and disbelieved.
Instead, there's a genuine question
about how we can best achieve that goal. So the question
we want to address, then, is: can we debate the
nazis to death. Or, is sunlight
really a good disinfectant?
The first argument you might make, if you wanted to argue that
'argument is the best route to victory', would be that
the views of nazis and fascists are generally abhorrent and
if you invite them on-stage in front of a public audience
then you get the opportunity to talk to THEIR audience and show them
how wrong and silly their leaders are.
I think that's pretty well-intentioned, and
I can see the appeal of it. I actually thought the same thing for quite
a while, but a few years back I used to be involved in a
debating society called the Cambridge Union, and we would
occasionally host people with some pretty objectionable views. A
really good example was Marine Le Pen, who came in 2013.
I was in support of her coming at the time; I
thought that we would get the opportunity to give her a really good grilling,
and demonstrate to the watching world (however many of them there were)
that she and the 'Front National' were fundamentally wrong.
Maybe we could do some good.
I left the event disillusioned.
She got to speak for nearly an hour before anyone
could ask questions. And then a student would get to ask
a 30-second question, to which she would give a 5-minute response which
often engaged with it really only obliquely.
And you might say, "sure, Tim, but that's just a
problem of structure. If you made sure she didn't overrun,
and maybe gave students the right to reply to her after the
question was answered, then she would have been really held to account."
And I... thought the same.
And I actually got the opportunity to test that idea out
when I ran the society myself
and we hosted the Israeli ambassador. I was
really careful: I timed his answers
to questions so I could cut him off if he overran and I
made sure that students could respond to his answers. But very
few of them did, and I would imagine he left the event feeling he'd
pretty comfortably "won" the encounter.
And to me, this demonstrates a few problems with the argument that
debating can disarm our opponents.
First, there's this issue of power.
Usually, but not always, giving somebody a
platform to speak requires that you treat them as a guest.
Sometimes that means that you give them the floor for a significant period of
time to speak uninterrupted, which
nobody would necessarily get the opportunity to respond to.
Even if you CAN respond, it takes an incredibly
accomplished debater to be able to collect together all the
arguments they made and respond to them in a compelling way.
But even if they don't get to speak for that long, there are these weird
norms
which are often referred to by academics as a form of "epistemic
injustice". That is, some people are
believed more readily than others, because of the status
that we've given them. And no matter how much we might dislike it,
we give a guest status by inviting them
on to be debated. That status is hard to undermine
(although I think it CAN be, if you're
INCREDIBLY careful with how you treat and engage them).
So perhaps, under limited circumstances,
the power problem can be dealt with.
The second, and I think more um, problematic
problem (?), is that arguments aren't made in a
vaccuum.
Arguments aren't just things that you place in front of people to assess
in an objective and detached manner. Their appeal is a
product of WHO is making them, what they look like,
whether they're pushing your buttons, whether they "sound
reasonable", and whether they're being made by somebody you like.
And that's the reason that some people think that those pieces in the New York Times
which humanise Nazis are so damaging. Their
arguments gain currency when they're being made by someone
you could empathise with, rather than
by people you perceive as borderline monsters.
The whole performance by prominent alt-right
figures is to appeal to your grievances with the world
and give you what seems like an easy solution.
They want you to like them.
And your belief in their worldview, or something adjacent to it,
comes afterwards. And that's why Richard Spencer
looks so polished all the time, and he called his
nazi think tank "The National Policy Institute"
rather than "Ricky's Blog". It's different strokes
for different folks, some of them get dressed up while others pretend to be your friend,
but the point is you can't just break them on the
wheel of logic. And the final issue
I have here is that they're very good
at arguing their points. For some of them, their
literal entire career is based on making this
one argument
and making it in a way that appeals to a very specific
demographic. There's a few people in the British
press whose sad fate is to wheel out the same banal
reactionary arguments
every single week for the rest of time, and you can bet that they're
incredibly good making those arguments land, no matter how crap they are.
And even if you 'defeat them
with logic and facts', they still gain
currency with some people for whom what they were saying made a whole lot of
sense.
But let's leave all that aside for now, because I recognise that it's a really
tricky issue, and I'm not sure that people who passionately believe in the power
of open debate to change minds and who perhaps aren't as
jaded by years of competitive debate and chronic Twitter use as me
will have their minds changed on that so easily. Which is,
uh, I guess, funny and ironic.
There's a second prong to the argument of giving fascists a platform:
it'll probably be recorded,
and afterwards there'll be lots of people who take the recording apart,
explain what they were doing, why their arguments were flawed,
and do things like this:
[Main Speaker] And with me here in London, the leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin,
[comedically edited clip] recently named the most powerful Muslim woman in Britain,
we're talking about racists in the British National Party.
You start off. [Nick Griffin, in comedically edited clips]: I am thoroughly unpleasant and
really creepy. Um, I'm against black people kissing in public,
uh, I believe that the Holocaust was an
enormous party where the Nazis just done what they really had to do, so,
what's the problem? Finally, Adolf Hitler.
I'm pretty partial to this argument; the very fact that I'm sitting here
writing a script for a video about rhetoric and debate and
'the fash' probably indicates
that I'm the sort of person who might watch a video of someone
dissecting a member of the alt-right and chuckle smugly to himself.
[hbomberguy video "Nice Try, Paul" plays]
[Tim laughs] [smugly, of course]
But much like my '2 cans of Monster a day' energy drink habit,
this is something I very much enjoy that I know is probably
incredibly bad for me and may well have mysterious effects upon my liver. And,
much as I enjoy having a steady supply of takedown videos to watch, I'm not sure
that the consequences of giving them the airtime are necessarily worth that
particular joy in my life.
The first issue is that giving them a platform grants them a new
audience. Let's just say you're a TV
host and you have a prominent neo-nazi on your program just to
challenge them.
They come over pretty badly;
even then, a minority of your viewers are inclined to check out some more of their stuff. They see that
in the absence of the """lynch mob""" pressing them really hard, they
actually 'say some really reasonable things' and they 'come over pretty well'.
So that even if you're able to challenge them in one forum,
they always have another place where they can give their side of the story
unimpeded.
It's an issue outlined pretty well in a report by the research institute
'Data and Society' called "The Oxygen of
Amplification", which showcased how journalism attempting to give
"""even""" or """fair""" coverage can be hijacked
by people with no interest in fairness. It's why a lot of people are
fighting quite hard to try to deplatform nazis and
and fascists. To prevent them from gaining access to
new audiences who might be vulnerable to the kinds of
manipulations they engage in. But there's another issue here
which is that that same platform we just talked about
gives them legitimacy.
And that comes in 2 forms, one more insidious than the other.
When the Cambridge and Oxford Unions both hosted Marine Le Pen,
she put the videos up on her website and she did press releases about it.
Prestigious institutions had validated her,
showing that even if she was being maligned in the French press, there was intellectual
'appeal' and 'importance' to her ideas - she
'had' to be taken seriously.
But the second way it gives legitimacy is far more important
and far worse.
Let's say that you host a fascist on your TV show and it goes really badly for them.
They get absolutely crucified, maybe they get punched and everyone cheers.
They can't even wear it as a badge of honour that they were on your show because
it looks SO bad for them.
Instead, they flip the argument.
They went on your show, and were ENTIRELY reasonable, and look how
POORLY you treated them!
That allows them to gain this kind of 'counter-cultural cachet':
They were "civil", and YOU were "intolerant". Their ideas are "too
subversive for you to engage with", and the Mainstream
Media can't STAND them... and these are used
as ways to connect with an audience who are already disaffected
and are looking for a new authority figure. And this is so much worse
than just using you to gain a line on their CV;
because in using you THIS way,
they undermine the legitimacy of you as a critic
and your show as a genuine forum for discussion,
and everyone that can be grouped under the term 'mainstream media'
as a good source of information. In giving a platform to the
fascist, you've contributed to your own decline.
I think we're all on the same side here - that is, the side that
wants the nazis and the fascists to get back in the history books
where they belong.
I think I'm just worried that
the most intuitive argument - the one that says
the best way to do that is to engage with them and debate them,
and show the emperor has no clothes -
might actually be the most damaging argument of all.
