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School of Law

Professor Eric Heinze pens 'The left’s version of hate speech: guilt by association' for Free Speech Debate

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Professor Eric Heinze, Professor of Law and Humanities at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), writes for Free Speech Debate about Leftists who argue for hate speech bans but ignore the far left’s own version: “A hallmark of racism and other more customary hatreds is guilt by inclusion, an identity or characteristic attributed solely through belonging to some reviled group.  The hallmark of leftist hate speech, by contrast, is guilt by association. The pristine theoretical tract may well portray the moneyed elite as a contained group, but leftist histories have looked vastly different. From Lenin, to Stalin, to Mao, to Pol Pot, to Castro, to Chavez, countless voices venturing doubt about official doctrine have becomeinstant ‘class enemies’ or ‘foreign agents’, with tens of millions of corpses to prove it. Yet today guilt by association is applied inconsistently.”

 

 

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