The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 79, No. 19, Ed. 1 Friday, February 7, 1992 Page: 3 of 24
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OPINION
THE RICE THRESHER FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1992 3
'There's no such thing as free speech and it's a good thing, too'
Mark David Schoenhals
Many people have heard this
phrase: "There's no such
thing as free speech and
ifs a good thing, too." Most react
viscerally to it It rubs us wrong, es-
pecially in America. It shocks ova-
fundamental common sensibilities.
After all, we had to fight awfully hard
for the First Amendment
The phrase is the title of a work-
ing paper by Stanley Fish, a Duke
English professor. The formulation
of his title is sensational. This is no
accident for the attention-grubbing
Fish. He does not actually mean that
"free speech" does not exist, but that
it has no essential worth. "Free
speech" has no intrinsic value. As he
says, "Speech...is never and could
not be an independent value, but is
always asserted against a background
of some assumed conception of the
good to which it must yield in the
event of conflict"
After arguing that the Canadian
charter is less nalVe than the U.S.
Constitution because it acknowl-
edges this absence of intrinsic value
explicitly, he continues to elaborate
his idea that "free speech" is not a
value in itself "Free expression could
only be a primary value if what you
arevahiingisthe right to make noise;
but if you are engaged in some pur-
posive activity...you will come to a
point when you decide that some
forms of speech do not further but
endanger that purpose."
Fish uses Congressman Henry
Hyde's proposed amendment to the
civil rights act as evidence that we
even have this understanding of free
speech in the states. The goal of this
legislation to protect "the free speech
rights of college students" at private
and public institutions. An exception
is made for religiously affiliated col-
leges, which are free to control speech
in a way "consistent with the reli-
gious tenets of such organizations."
Hyde knows, then, that at the
"heart" of each college and univer-
sity is a "set of beliefs." We do not
value "free speech" greater than the
sacred values of these institutions—
at least if they are religiously affili-
ated. But Fish states rightly that "no
institution is "just there' independent
of any purpose" and that these pur-
poses determine the value and ex-
tent of "free speech" within the insti-
tution.
From his brilliant and persuasive
argument about the nature of prin-
ciples like "free speech," Fish quickly
draws concrete conclusions. For the
university, this means undesirable
speech must be "extirpated." (He
borrows this word from Milton, who
wanted to "extirpate" Catholics.) This
scares me. I dont mind being in the
same tank as Fish .Just notice that we
deal with predators differently.
Barbara Hernstein Smith, one of
Fish's colleagues at Duke, contends
that a text (the Constitution is a text)
may or may not have an inherent
meaning. For her, what is important
is how the text is interpreted and
Nothing has
intrinsic value,
not even 'free
speech.'
evaluated. We continue, always, to
make these judgements about his-
torical texts. Our understanding and
value of a text is highly contingent
upon our context in the world.
Montaigne noticed this flux many
years ago: "Never did two men judge
alike about the same thing, and it is
impossible to find two opinions ex-
actly alike, not only in different men,
but in the same man at different
times." It has been handed down
since Heraclitus in various forms.
As a result of this problem of con-
tingency, the important question to
ask becomes: what does the First
Amendment mean in our commu-
nity? What is the purpose of "free
speech" at Rice? Why do we value it?
Fish attempts a "noncon-
troversial...stipulation" of the pur-
pose of the university as "the investi-
gation and study of matters of fact
and interpretation." We can take this
as a beginning. For students, a uni-
versity should be an educational en-
vironment for learning how to do
these things—study and investigate.
And it's about "folding yourself,"
which involves confronting funda-
mental challenges to your values
head-on.
Fish doesnt seem to acknowledge
this. He is "too focused on short-term
outcomes," a charge he raises against
himself specifically to refute it He
does not defend himself well against
it I argue that we are always better
off when we listen to and refute of-
fensive claims.
Fish disagrees with this, dis-
missing the argument "that harmful
speech should be answered not by
regulation but by more speech." He
ridicules it before he dismisses it,
however. He wonders facetiously if
the "effects of such speech could be
canceled out by additional
speech...by saying something like
*So's your old man." This is absurd.
The bases of harmful speech can be
attacked and its legitimacy under-
mined. Fish then accuses those who
make this argument of assuming that
"everything is...weightless verbal
exchange." Again, he ridicules this
argument, by comparing it with
"Sticks and stones will break my
bones, but...."
These practical evaluations that
Fish forces us to make are, in fact,
unavoidable. I think his practical
judgment is wrong, however.
It is ironic that Fish says that his
argument will make our conception
of "free speech" more thought-about
Indeed it wilL We will not be able to
mindlessly invoke the First Amend-
ment to defend "scoundrels," as Fish
says we now do. This, he says, will
prevent us from "walking away from
a problem" and using the First
Amendment as an excuse.
One thing is certain: around this
office, I did not hear anyone attempt-
ing to use the First Amendment—in
letter or "in spirit" (traditional mean-
ing)—as an excuse to print the Ho-
locaust Revisionist advertisement
What I heard, and the arguments I
have made, are practical ones.
Adead tradition is useless. This is
Fish's strongest point We should
not accept the First Amendment on
the authority of the Constitution in
history. The Constitution is alive in
the sense that we are always making
sense of it again for ourselves.
The Holocaust
Revisionists can-
not meet the stan-
dards of telling
history stories.
Fish wants "truth" to be chal-
lenged and determined locally and
politically. This opens a space for the
Holocaust Revisionists. This is not
reason to reject Fish, but it should
prompt us to put up our defenses.
We should realize that the stories
of history are alive and subject to
local reinterpretion in the same way
that the Constitution is. It is a living
tradition, not just something in our
textbooks to be blindly accepted.
When it is challenged, we must come
to its defense. The Holocaust Revi-
sionists attack the living tradition—
not to kill it but to distort it
This actually has parallels with
Fish's argument To the degree that
the "Holocaust story" is now under-
stood by Holocaust Revisionists as
contaiy to their interests, they have a
stake in changing it It is a story like
the constitution which we should re-
interpret to suit our own agenda. In
thiscase, it would seem that the agenda
is to save face for Germany and to take
a significant step in undermining the
legitimacy of the Zionist state.
Holocaust Revisionism is the kind
of craziness that is possible when we
open everything up to infinite inter-
pretation and contingency—when we
acknowledge that nothing has intrin-
sic value but everything exists only to
serve other ends. By crazy I don't
mean insane These people are in-
deed sane and maliciously clever. We
have standards in history about what
kinds of evidence are acceptable in
telling our history stories. Because
history stories are subject to these
rules, we rely on history in ways that
we dont rely on fictional stories. The
Holocaust Revisionists cannot meet
the standards of telling hi story stories.
(See article below.)
Both the Constitution and history
in general, including the Holocaust,
are up for grabs in the age when
everything is a story. But we can
benefit from maintaining a careful
distinction between them. Story-tell-
ing follows different rules in each
case, as it serves different purposes.
We have the sense to see what kind
of story telling is appropriate and
what kind is fundamentally unac-
ceptable in each area.
Fish acknowledges the danger of
opening up every story for explicit
reinterpretation: "Nothing...can in-
sulate us from those risks." In the end
it is based on "judgment" for which
we can "offer reasons but no guaran-
tees." For many reasons, we can judge
the Holocaust Revisionists to be
wrong. In the same way, we can judge
Fish to be wrong to the degree that he
might attempt to suppress them.
Fish provides a valuable frame-
work for examining this decision to
print or not to print It's about taking
a risk in assessing the advantages
and disadvantages of each, and in
making an argument in support of
the decision. In my view, suppres-
sion is inneffective.
I make an extended practical ar-
gument in the article below. Coinci-
dentally, lfollowaquotefrom Milton's
Aeropagitica,justas Fish does. Milton
is quoting Francis Bacon: "The pun-
ishing of wits enhances their author-
ity, and a forbidden writing is thought
to be a certain spark truth, that flies
up in the feces of them who seek to
tread it out" Not printing the ad is
worse than printing it h would be
best of course, if it didnt exist at all.
Rupp's remarks at Rosenblatt's
Presidential Lecture in the Fall provide
us a sense of his notion of our univer-
I don't mind
being in the same
tank as Fish. Just
notice that we
deal with preda-
tors differently.
sity. Seemingly based on practical con-
siderations, he suggested that we err
on the side of speech that is painful an d
offensive, rather than run the risks as-
sociated with suppressing it
Rupp's comments lead me to be-
lieve that the decisions of the Thresher
editors-in-chief not to print the adver-
tisement was a bad one for our com-
munity. Better to print it and address
it demonstrating its danger, espe-
cially when so many of the ad's
charges are based on the idea that
Holocaust Revisionist opinions are
being oppressed by university
"Thought Police." Why should we
give him ammunition for his gun when
we could shoot him, metaphorically?
Despite the stress that it has
caused around the office, I am grate-
ful to the Holocaust Revisionist for
submitting the ad, because it had
exactly the effect of making the issue
of what should and shouldn't be ex-
pressed publicly a local and political
one, which is what it must be.
Mark David Schoenhals, opinion edi-
tor, is a senior at Lovett College.
Print Holocaust Revisionism for practical reasons
Mark David Schoenhals
Using the framework for con-
sidering "free speech" which
I present above, I want to con-
sider the practical issue at hand:
should we have printed the Holo-
caust Revisionst's ad? IH argue that
we should have printed the ad for
practical reasons. First, let me tell
you briefly what the ad says, and
what other people have said about
it—since you cant read it
The Ad
Because the ad was rejected by
the Daily Texan, the Houston
Chronicle has covered it but in an
extremely brief and somewhat mis-
leading way. In the interest of fair-
ness (because I believe that we can
play fair and win), let me give Brad-
ley Smith—the author of the ad—
every benefit of the doubt The
Chronicle report, for example, calls
Smith's organization, the Committee
for the Open Debate of the Holo-
caust "a group claiming the Holo-
caust story was fabricated to 'drum
up support for Jewish causes.™ This
generalization quotes the ad out of
context in a way that misses impor-
tant subtleties in his argument He
advances interesting but specious
conspiracy theories, but does not
chum that Jews were involved—at
least originally.
In the ad, Smith claims that "Al-
lied governments" continued their
wartime propaganda about German
atrocities in the postwar period in
order to "justify" their own "great
sacrifices" in the war and to "divert
attention" from the atrocities com-
mitted by Allied forces against inno-
cent people in German and Japanese
cities. The most important reason for
continuing this propaganda, accord-
ing to Smith, was to justify "postwar
rearrangments" like the "annexation
of large parts of Germany into Po-
land." The "Zionist organizations,"
according to Smith's ad, did not ini-
tiate this, but did become "deeply
involved" to advance their own inter-
ests. In our phone conversations,
Smith claimed that the Holocaust
story continues to be exploited—
most recently by George Bush dur-
ing Desert Storm.
The only other claim from Smith's
ad cited in the Chronicle story follows:
The figure of 6 million Jewish deaths
is an irresponsible exaggeration. No
execution gas chambers existed in
Europe which was under German
control." (Poland doesn't seem to
count) Unlike the other quote, this
(me is representative of the kind of
claims made by Holocaust Revision-
ists. Parts of the ad deny the Holo-
caust as it is defined by the Simon
We should get
his wickedly
calculated
falsehoods out in
the open and
kill them.
Wiesenthal Center: "the deliberate
attempt to exterminate Europe'sjews."
In another phone conversation,
Bradley Smith defended this claim
only by taking a more extreme posi-
tion. He asserted that "no documents
indicate an order, a plan, a budget, a
weapon, or a victim" in what we call
the Holocaust In other words, no
documented gas chambers and no
documented dead Jews. This quote
is a representative example of the
kind of bogus claims that Holocaust
Revisionists make.
Aware of some of the ad's calcu-
lated attempts to mislead, I con-
fronted author Smith himself with
them—motivated by curiosity
mainly. The Simon Wiesenthal Cen-
ter and the Holocaust Education
Center were extremely helpfuL They
assembled and delivered documents
to me which refuted Smith's specific
claims about the Holocaust I exam-
ined lengthy excerpts from the Jae-
ger Report, a transcript of the
Wannsee Conference, Adolf
Eichmann's testimony, Henrich
Himmler's testimony, Rudolph
Hoess's autobiographical writings,
the Kremer Wartime Diary, and other
documents.
I can make my point without reliv-
ing the details of Smith's claims and
the way that these documents refute
them. After all, as Smith told me on
the phone, "You're not an expert on
this. I'm not either." By using this
strategy, he can preclude debate. In
response to any direct charge he will
answer "I dont even know if [that
document] is authentic or not" or
"You dont have any knowledge of
that document." He also noted
insightfully that I was "drowning in
all sorts of information"—and misin-
formation, I will add. He explained
on the phone that he merely intended
to provide enough evidence in the ad
to indicate that the Holocaust should
still be open for debate. Toward this
end, he revises various parts of the
"Holocaust story" in sections of the
ad titled "The Photographs," "Docu-
ments," and "Auschwitz."
His most audacious maneuver is
in a section titled "Eyewitness Testi-
mony," where he compares those
who claim to have witnessed the Ho-
locaust to those who claim to have
seen "flying saucers." He maintains
that much of the "eyewitness testi-
mony" has been determined to be
"false" by Jewish organizations. Other
testimony he calls "uncorroborated"
and' therefore inadmissible. This is
ridiculous.
Smith is very slick, slippery slick,
and very clever. Still, even after talk-
ing to him at length, it is easy for me
to say that he is wrong in his specific
claims about the Holocaust The
problem is that he always evaded my
challenges to the concrete evidence
by emphasizing the other point he
makes in his ad: "On American
campuses today there is a wide range
of ideas and viewpoints that are for-
bidden to be discussed openly."
Whenever I tried to refute one of
his specific claims, he shifted cleverly
to this issue, saying things like "1
want to provide access to revisionist
scholarship to the people of Rice."
He maintained that this was the pri-
mary point "My job isn't to prove
that the Holocaust never happened.
My job is to ask for free inquiry and
open debate on the issue." By refus-
ing to print the ad, the Thresher bol-
stered the legitimacy of this claim
Of course, without printing the
ad, there's only so much that can be
done to denounce its claims. Yet this
is the ideal environment in which
students can confront a controversial
issue and have access to resources to
learn to make a sound decision. My
decision is that Holocaust Revision-
ism is misleading and based on bad
scholarship. Unfortunately, you must
trust this decision solely on my au-
thority since you are prevented from
judging the ail for yourself.
The Derision
The people who really benefited
from this experience were those of
us at the Thresher who were able to
deal with this controversy, however
stressful it may have been. (I have
been popping my knuckles all week.)
The effect, certainly undesired al-
though understood, of the editors-in-
chiefs decision not to print the ad-
vertisement is that students are un-
able to see its absurdity directly and
confront these issues personally. 1
SEE HOLOCAUST, PAGE 5
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Zitterkopf, Ann & Howe, Harlan. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 79, No. 19, Ed. 1 Friday, February 7, 1992, newspaper, February 7, 1992; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245804/m1/3/: accessed May 1, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.