The Befuddling Orwellian Slogan of “Hate Speech”

The notion of so-called “hate speech” is totalitarian newspeak at its finest. Everyone has an inalienable right to hate whomever he pleases and be vocal about it. On the other hand, no one has a right to threaten others with physical aggression. However, it is perfectly possible to do the former without doing the latter – even extreme and extremely conspicuous emotional dislike does not logically imply issuing threats of aggression against the object of hatred. The Orwellian project at work here is to blur the crucial distinction between the two and to make the term “hate speech” sufficiently ambiguous to mean one or the other, depending on political expediency.

Thus, accusations of “hate speech” should be ignored by default, and punitive actions based on them should be condemned by default. This appears to me to be the best way to ridicule this term into oblivion, thereby neutralizing its obfuscatory and propagandistic influence. Otherwise we might find out that politically-mandated corporate censorship can do as well as old-fashioned political censorship, and that the more capacious the Orwellian bag of “hate speech” grows, the more brazenly arbitrary this new “soft” censorship will become.