Week 8 Blog Post - by Giulia Weiss
Does limiting Pro-dictatorship expression strengthen democracy?
In 2022 the Spanish Government passed a Bill that bans expression of support for Spain's Infamous former Dictator, Francisco Franco.
Francisco Franco, Spain's 20th-century dictator, was installed in a coup after the Spanish Civil War in which more than 500,000 people died. Francisco Franco is responsible for persecution on religious, political and sexual grounds and other atrocities. The new law aims to bring “justice, and reparation to victims of Spain's civil war and the subsequent dictatorship.
While I believe that freedom of expression is sometimes necessary to protect the vulnerable, my question is whether a law limiting freedom of speech can be seen as a step towards “strengthening our Democracy” as Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez claims.
As we have seen in this course Censorship is a tool that is often used by non-democratic forms of government to limit the flow of information in favour of the government. Censoring the support for a previous regime may look undemocratic. Shouldn’t people be able to come to their own conclusions based on all available information in a perfect democracy? Or is it different when the expression supports a non-democratic regime?
I take no issue with the new law, but I am unsure if I am entirely convinced that it indeed “strengthens democracy” as the Prime minister claims. Whether limiting pro-dictator expression is undemocratic is a philosophical puzzle that makes my head spin.
I think the whole notion of freedom of speech is very interesting, because while superficially we, as you explain, associate censorship with non-democratic regimes and dictatorial leadership, in democratic regimes it often takes a different form. Here, the phrase 'freedom of speech' is often used to justify hate-speech. But then the question arises as to who is justified in drawing these lines of what constitutes hate speech and what constitutes freedom of expression? I think in this instance, the censorship is less the dictatorial type that tries to control the flow of information, and more about trying to prevent that type of language itself controlling the flow of information. So in that way, I think that it is democratic, as long as there is acknowledgement of the past, and an effort to learn from it rather than an attempt to forget it.
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