On 16 March, I was invited to give a lecture on the German censorship of Mein Kampf and the importance of freedom of speech at the European Students for Liberty conference at Humboldt University in Berlin. My speech is published below.

Many people think that freedom of speech is all about the freedom of the speaker.

They think that freedom of speech is all about the rights of the person who wants to make a speech, or publish a pamphlet, or write a book, or in some other way express his views.

And it’s understandable that we think this way about freedom of speech. After all, the very name of this freedom - freedom of speech - suggests that it is wholly concerned with the right to speak, the right to say something, the right to raise your voice.

But I think the freedom to speak is only one aspect of freedom of speech. There is another aspect that tends to be overlooked.

And that is the freedom to hear - the right of everyone in society to hear or read or watch your speech and to make a moral judgement as to whether your ideas have any worth.

When we say we value freedom of speech, yes we are saying that every individual or group should be at liberty to express their views, however shocking or disturbing those views might appear. That is very important.

But we are also saying that we trust the public to be able to hear those views without going mad, without being instantly corrupted, without suffering some form of irreparable moral pollution.

We are saying that we trust ordinary people to listen to and see all kinds of ideas and imagery, and to make an independent moral decision about the value of those ideas and imagery.

Freedom of speech is only partly about your freedom to speak - it is also, just as importantly, about my right to hear you and to pass judgement on you.

And I think the main reason freedom of speech is in a bad state these days, the reason it doesn’t enjoy the supreme cultural validation that it should, is because society has lost faith in that second component of freedom of speech - in the audience and its right to hear.

The corrosion of freedom of speech really speaks to a corrosion of faith in the masses, who are now looked upon, by both the left and the right, and even by many libertarians, as politically ignorant, as fickle, as easily led astray by the mass media or evil ideas, and thus they cannot be allowed to hear and see certain things.

The undermining of freedom of speech today is fuelled more by a distrust of the audience than it is by a disgust for the speaker. Without a faith in moral autonomy and political capacity, you cannot mount an effective defence of freedom of speech.

Let’s consider Mein Kampf.

Why is this book effectively banned in Germany? It is because the German people are viewed by the authorities as intellectually untrustworthy, even as corruptible, and apparently they must be protected from this book for their own good. They must have their eyes shielded from this book in case it stirs up their inner Nazi and gives rise to another fit of far-right extremism in Germany.

The effective ban on Mein Kampf is not an attack on Hitler’s rights - it is an attack on German citizens’ rights, primarily their right to hear and to make independent political judgements.

The way Mein Kampf is censored is very interesting.

There isn’t an actual law forbidding ownership or even sale of Mein Kampf. You can buy it in certain antique bookshops.

But it is in essence forbidden to publish a new copy of Mein Kampf and to sell this new copy in mass, mainstream bookshops.

When he died, Hitler’s official place of residence was Munich. This meant that his entire state, including the copyright for Mein Kampf, passed to the government of Bavaria.

And in the 70 years since his death, the government of Bavaria, with the agreement of the federal government of Germany, has refused to grant anyone permission to publish a new version of Mein Kampf, on the basis that the book is poisonous and dangerous.

Officialdom has gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent German citizens from publishing or sharing Mein Kampf.

A few years ago, the German justice minister asked the American store Barnes & Noble to stop selling copies of the book via its website to residents of Germany.

Likewise, following an investigation by the Simon Weisenthal Center, Amazon agreed to stop distributing Mein Kampf to people with German addresses.

In 2000, the German authorities threatened legal action against the website Yahoo after it said it would auction copies of Mein Kampf and it became clear that German citizens could enter the auction.

In 2012, the British publisher Peter McGee planned to publish and distribute in Germany 100,000 copies of a pamphlet called “The Unreadable Book”, which would have consisted of various sections of text from Mein Kampf. But a court in Munich ruled that even publishing citations from Hitler’s book violated Bavarian copyright, and so McGee backed down.

The New York Times aptly described the prevention of McGee’s plans as the German authorities’ “most recent victory in a continuing battle to prevent circulation of Hitler’s seminal work”.

This is blatant censorship.

When German citizens are blocked from ordering books online, when publishers are prevented from quoting Hitler in pamphlets, there is clearly something deeply political and censorious at work. The German authorities are attempting to deprive their citizens of access to a particular literary work. That is censorship.

The justification offered for this censorship, even though it’s never called that, is that if Mein Kampf were freely available it would offend those who suffered under the Nazi regime and more importantly it might stoke and inflame neo-Nazi and far-right sentiment.

From this perspective, the restrictions on Mein Kampf should be seen as an assault on the autonomy of currently alive German citizens rather than on the freedom of the long-dead Hitler.

For the ban on Mein Kampf is justified on the basis that its content might generate instability by warping and twisting German people’s minds, reigniting the racist outlook. In short, German people cannot be trusted to have free access to this book. Their minds are so malleable, and their souls so corruptible, that they apparently require the authorities to protect them from an old mad, ranting text.

How patronising. How insulting. In keeping with all modern-day acts of censorship, the real target of the restrictions on Mein Kampf isn’t the author himself; it’s the public, who have been judged too morally immature to be able to cope with seeing this book.

Their right to read, to think, to argue, to make an independent judgment call as to whether this book has any moral worth, has been denied.

There is a terrible irony to Germany’s censorship of Mein Kampf - it is presented as an anti-Hitler measure, but it actually rehabilitates one of Hitler’s most foul ideas: namely that some books are so morally and politically corrupting that they must be banned / burned.

Censorship is always, at root, an attack on the public.

This was recognised by the great 18th-century radical Thomas Paine, who said censorship of published material is more of a “sentence on the public [than] the author”, because it effectively tells the public “they shall not think, they shall not read”.

That sentencing of the public, that assault on the public’s rights, has come to the fore even more starkly in cases of censorship in recent years.

Today, censorship is primarily justified on the basis that the public is fragile or stupid and therefore it cannot be trusted with certain printed or broadcast material.

Today, the question of *who* might have access to the published material under consideration, the question of the audience’s presumed levels of intelligence, is always at the forefront in attempts to impose censorship and in successful impositions of censorship.

Consider the current feminist campaign in Britain to rid The Sun of Page 3 - that famous page in Britain’s best-known tabloid which every day features a half-naked lady.

It isn’t nakedness per se, or women’s breasts, that these feminist censors want banned. They accept the exposure of breasts in movies, and some of them are the very same people who campaigned for the right of women to publish photos of themselves breastfeeding on a Facebook. No, it’s the *audience* for Page 3 that makes them uncomfortable and censorious - an audience that is largely working class, male, blue collar.

When anti-Page 3 campaigners say Page 3 increases misogyny, and even leads to violence and rape, what they are really saying is that the audience for this imagery is animalistic; this audience is like attack dogs who hear a word or see an image and thoughtlessly respond to it.

It’s not the content that offends these censorious campaigners; they accept the right of people to expose and depict breasts; it’s the audience that offends them.

Or consider, on the other side of the political spectrum, those European right-wingers, including some people who hilariously describe themselves as libertarians, who suggest we should ban the Koran on the basis that it’s a corrupting, immoral book.

Again, it isn’t the content that offends them. After all, the Christian Bible also contains its fair share of strange claims and ideas that are ill-suited to the 21st century. No, it’s the audience for the Koran that drives these right-wingers to embrace arguments for censorship. Muslim immigrants with apparently febrile, shaky minds, easily led into violence - it is fear of these people rather than fear of the Koran per se that motors the desire for anti-Koranic censorship.

Censorship is demanded not because the content is uniquely terrible, but because the audience for it is presumed to be a lower form of intellectual life than us, than the educated, the erudite, the right-thinking,

All the main forms of censorship today are informed by a view of the public as dumb and dangerous.

So campaigners calling for the outlawing of hate speech that offends women or minorities do so on the basis that it can create a climate of poisonous hatred, even violence, and can cause real-world violence and mayhem. That is, the public will hear these words and be corrupted by them, made automatically violent,

Or consider the expansion of the definition of incitement. Once, the word “incitement” was used to refer specifically to one person directly inciting another to commit a criminal act, usually an imminent criminal act.

Now, even criticism of Islam can be referred to as “incitement to hatred”. The offensive chanting of football fans is talked about as “incitement to violence”.

The broadening of the definition of incitement, and the corresponding clampdown on allegedly inciting speech, sums up the key problem with censorship today: it is driven by a view of an instant, will-free relationship between words and actions; between what is written and how people behave. It calls into question people’s ability to think, exercise free will, and determine whether and how to respond to particular ideas. The claim that words incite is as much a demonisation of the public and its mental capacities as it is a criminalisation of certain words and ideas.

Your position on freedom of speech and whether it is a good thing really reveals a lot about how you view humanity and whether you think humanity is a good thing. This has always been the case.

So it is not a coincidence that the true demand for freedom of speech emerged as the modern democratic sensibility took shape, in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

A growing trust in man’s ability to run his own life, select his own leaders and determine his nation’s fate naturally went hand in hand with a growing trust in man’s ability to discuss, debate, to hear all sorts of good, bad, weird and outrageous things and to *decide* if they are right or wrong.

So John Milton, in the 17th century, said we should let truth and falsehood grapple in the public arena, and truth, he said, will win out. In short, the public sphere is more than capable of working out right from wrong, good from bad.

Thomas Paine, in the 18th century, said the following: “When opinions are free, in either matters of religion or politics, truth will finally and powerfully prevail.” That is, the freer discussion is, the more the public has access to claims and ideas, the more likely enlightenment becomes.

In the 19th century, the great liberal John Stuart Mill said “complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth…”. That is, it is only by submitting your ideas or beliefs to the rigours of public discussion and public ridicule that you can be sure they are correct, true, right. Public deliberation - that is, the public - will decide if you are right.

Past liberals and democrats had such faith in humankind that, unlike the rulers who came before them, and the ones who dominate today, they were willing to let it be the referee of the great battles of meaning and ideology.

Today, the opposite is the case. Today, it is the collapse of trust in mankind that leads to the undermining of free speech, which leads to demands for the audience to be protected from foul words and destabilising ideas.

Misanthropy, not politics, is the key driver of censorship in the 21st century,

On both the left and the right, thinkers and campaigners now doubt the capacities of the public. Some on the left campaign to ban hate speech, far-right propaganda, sexist language, and so on, because they believe such things might warp us. And some on the right want to clamp down on Islamist preachers, “sympathy for terrorism”, and other ideas and arguments that they think will warp fragile sections of society.

Even among libertarians, an outward defence of freedom of speech constantly rubs up against an inward disdain for the moral autonomy and mental capacities of the public.

At this very conference, I have attended sessions and heard discussions on the problem of public ignorance, on wether we need expert cliques to run aspects of public life that the public doesn’t understand, about the problem of the mass media and its harmful impact on people’s minds and belief systems.

So even libertarians who challenge censorship also help to fuel the *logic* of modern censorship - which is that the public is ill-equipped for full and frank free debate.

They claim to be libertarian in one breath, but in the next they implicitly call into question the very foundation of liberty - namely the conviction that human beings are capable of autonomy, of thought, of moral consideration and action, and they do not require experts or priests to tell them what is right and what is wrong.

To defend freedom of speech today, we must, of course, stand up for every individual or group facing censorship. But we must go further than that - we must also recover and resuscitate faith in mankind’s moral capacities. We must challenge misanthropy, because freedom of speech is impossible in a society that fears humanity itself.

So yes, let us unban Mein Kampf, not because we like Hitler or his ideas, but because we trust that people can think for themselves and are capable of knowing and understanding what is good and what is wicked.

This is the text of a lecture I gave at the European Students for Liberty conference at Humboldt University in Berlin on 16 March 2014.