Free Speech for the Klan is a Fraud, not a Right
Davis, Rod
Free Speech for the Klan Is a Fraud. Not a Right EDITOR'S NOTE: The Progressive's editors have an absolute commitment to freedom of speech—especially for those whose views we find obnoxious or...
...A society that hates racism would not permit it to flourish and would, in particular, not allow a vanguard racist group to operate with official sanction and police protection...
...Yet the media in Austin lamented the "violence," and the police and a local grand jury wound up persecuting the anti-Kim demonstrators—especially the brown-skinned ones—instead of the Klan...
...One vigorous dissenter is Rod Davis, an occasional contributor, and several months ago we invited him to state his position...
...Is there any reason for society, and especially for the Left, not to oppose the Klan and the racism of which it is merely the ugly symbol with a ferocity equal to that mustered against the Vietnam war, segregation, the draft, child abuse, and sexism...
...Action against the Klan is a statement, long overdue, about the depth of our perception about race—a perception which must not be diluted by rational-sounding, legalistic discourse...
...Constitutional "free speech," in the daily, concrete world, consists of what the Government decides it to be...
...A society creates itself—its tools, its language, its ideas...
...Klan strategist David Duke drew on the liberal infatuation with the intellectual sanctity of All Learned Concepts to advance Klan doctrine a few paces beyond The Protocols of Rod Davis, the former editor of The Texas Observer, teaches English at the University of Texas...
...At the same time, we asked Nat Hentoff, our regular writer on First Amendment issues, to respond to Davis...
...We are already under attack...
...FBI guidelines implemented in March go so far as to equate political activism (including union membership) with organized crime as a proper focus for Federal scrutiny...
...In Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Michigan, Maryland, the Klan is a reality—an active malignant presence with an impact that reaches far beyond the firelight circle of white-robed racists and black-uniformed storm troopers...
...Even Woody Allen, nobody's casual thug, observed that the only way to deal with the Nazis and the Klan is with baseball bats...
...no tiny group should co-opt the obligation of society to resolve what is our greatest historical social disease...
...In some cases— for example, in Greensboro, North Carolina—the Klan has infested the law enforcement and judicial systems that are supposed to control it...
...If, on the other hand, you believe that "freedom" and "speech" are products of social interaction, not black-robed writ, and that a society which produces racist and fascist sects cannot possibly mean anything when it boasts "free speech," then you will have no more compunction about shutting out the Klan than a doctor would about injecting against smallpox...
...This statement should not be left to fringe crazies...
...We must not be concerned with protecting the Klan from the abstract encroachments of governmental censorship, but with protecting the people— including all nonwhites and non-Protestants in this instance—from the real, document-able, historical violence of the Klan and its allies...
...It is a fantasy to insist that in protecting our enemies we protect ourselves...
...Especially the early, wooden ones...
...Government caprice regarding free speech is notorious...
...Is there any reason not to celebrate the turnout of several thousand persons in Austin, Texas, last February to heckle and pelt with stones a march by the Texas Klan at the state capitol...
...The need actively to oppose the Klan, denying it any vestige of protection, is paramount...
...This is absurd, it is insulting, and, insofar as it places the rituals of an arbitrary government above the real need for protection of the non-WASP citizenry, it is racist...
...Now it is organizing in the West as well: Marin County, California, has an active Klan which harasses the few black residents, and in Oregon the Klan has found a hate-wedge by recruiting against hippies and Orientals...
...What rhetorical catchphrase is in greater need of deconstruction...
...The point is to get the proper power installed, and expect nothing from improper ones, including those in whose obeisance Justice Hugo Black so often bleated...
...Whether or not the Government certifies such action through various facades of "legality" is irrelevant, just as official approval of mass action has been irrelevant from Mahatma Gandhi's India to Martin Luther King's America...
...That our society does afford sanction is but a statement that we will employ anything, even the phantom fetish of the First Amendment, to let racism persist...
...Free speech...
...We welcome reactions from readers...
...Even if "free speech" is limited for the moment to its embodiment in that great illusion, the First Amendment, it is readily seen to be so violated as to be nonexistent...
...Were Japanese-Americans accorded free speech in their internment camps...
...Hentoff volunteered to let Davis have the last word...
...And you will not subscribe to the secondary liberal position that demonstrating against the Klan means "stooping to the Klan's level...
...Are we supposed to wait for the Government to grant or withdraw permission to discuss social change...
...An abstraction that has not been put into practice certainly can have no meaning...
...Incredibly, there is a proffered reason...
...Just as some white-dominated city councils were giving the Klan "free speech" permits to rally last spring, another governmental body, the State Department, denied an entry visa to Salvador Allende's widow because her scheduled speech to church groups in California was deemed "prejudicial to U.S...
...Surely it is progress, not "stooping," when public stones are no longer cast at civil rights marchers but at Klans-men...
...Last November, a coalition of activists routed the Klan in Washington, D.C...
...Is there any reason for the Left, too, not to celebrate that it was the Klan's mystique, not a few municipal ordinances, broken on that day...
...That is, the Government tagged her as a communist...
...In the 1970s, the Klan (whose nationwide membership in 1924 was estimated at four million but later declined sharply) began to regroup and present itself more openly...
...As for "free speech" outside relations to the Government—who would claim there is free speech on the shop floor, in church, at school, or in the media...
...the Elders of Zion and into the realm of seeming rationality...
...The issue before the Left is clear, but our line of vision must not wander...
...BY ROD DAVIS hat should be done to prevent the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States...
...What is this phantom...
...Defending the Klan's "right" to appear publicly defends nothing more than the Klan, in the same way that pursuing peace with honor meant nothing more than pursuing war...
...interests...
...In my state, Texas, the Klan has run a media blitz this year with city council-approved rallies in three major cities, and in rural east Texas there is a virtual epidemic of Klan support...
...The white establishment media interpreted it as a riot, focusing on store lootings instead of on the issue celebrated in the black press: that the Klan had been clobbered by black Americans...
...For more than 120 years, the Klan has murdered and organized, first in the South and later in the volatile racist North and East...
...As we have learned on more than one occasion, that commitment is not shared by all readers of this magazine...
...Not a Right EDITOR'S NOTE: The Progressive's editors have an absolute commitment to freedom of speech—especially for those whose views we find obnoxious or threatening...
...Did the Southern civil rights movement wait on the mighty shield of the First Amendment or just sit in those buses and at those lunch counters, and die in bullet-riddled cars...
...Stop the Klan, for it is not the grotes-queries of the Klan mentality which are being opposed but the acceptability of the Klan within its white host...
...Free speech," unlike racial terror, is an abstraction, and abstractions are maintained by governments to fetishize concepts routinely abrogated in practice...
...Play us no Nero violins of "free speech" while the Left is being systematically burned...
...His reply is on Page 24, and a brief counterrebuttal by Davis appears on Page 26...
...It is suggested that instead of opposing the Klan and racism, we ought to defend the Klan and the larger issue of "free speech...
...the millions who fought and died in the war against Hitler so testify...
...The revival encompasses violent attacks, paramilitary camps, bookstores, frequent public and media appearances, and renewed perception of Klan strength at the community level...
...If you waver behind the mirage of "free speech," you must consider the possibility of complicity...
...It is the responsibility of society to produce that which will reflect its values...
...Did the Smith Act, the Dred Scott decision, the recent CIA regulations provide unfettered dialogue for their respective targets...
...If you feel that the defeat of racism is a greater priority to society than is continued worship of the legal fiction of "free speech," then you see the issue clearly...
...Klan chapters found a new aura of respectability in some quarters, and though estimates of current membership vary—the number is probably around 20,000, based on projections from a 1981 New York Times report—it is fair to guess that the Klan renaissance is significant...
...If free speech means anything, it can only refer to the expression of a hazy range of interpretations within the ideological parameters of an enforcing power...
...Everything possible, by broadbased, organized, enthusiastic popular opposition...
...One does not stoop to the level of an enemy by opposing it...
...The "free speech" of the dominant class will never be the free speech of the oppressed and exploited, and saying so in the face of historical experience is dissembling...
Vol. 47 • July 1977 • No. 7
