How should we respond to hate-mongers? Especially in this day of the Internet, when vile trolls spewing crackpot conspiracy theories of every toxic variety can easily reach hundreds of thousands of people, how, if at all, should we regulate hate speech?
One of Canada’s most infamous hate-mongers, the Alberta teacher and politician Jim Keegstra, died two weeks ago at the age of 80.
If you didn’t live through the Keegstra era, it might be hard to understand how his smug, leering face haunted political discourse and public imagination.
In 1981, Susan Maddox, an Eckville, Alta., mother, became concerned about what her son Paul was learning in his social studies class. Keegstra, Paul’s teacher and the town mayor, was teaching students the Holocaust was a hoax, faked as part of a giant international Jewish conspiracy to control the world, that Jews were child-killers who controlled the economy. He also taught students that Catholics were morally corrupt and morally inferior to Protestants.
Maddox complained. It wasn’t the first time someone had raised concerns. In 1978, Keegstra had been asked to limit his anti-Catholic rhetoric. But he kept his job.
This time, the school district warned him to stop teaching his students about Jewish conspiracies. Almost a year passed, with Keegstra still in the classroom, still teaching his hate. Finally, in December of 1982, the board fired him.
The Alberta Teachers’ Association immediately pledged its support for Keegstra and vowed to appeal his firing. His students started a petition of support for their teacher. The Maddox family was bombarded by hate mail.
The public reaction was as disturbing as Keegstra’s teachings. How was an unapologetic hate-monger allowed to poison the minds of children, year after year, without anyone speaking out? How could his colleagues, students and neighbours could go on giving interviews about what a great guy he was? It was hard to know what to blame on moral cowardice, what to blame on ignorance and what to blame on racism.
As the months and years went on, the Keegstra affair became a legal circus. He appealed his dismissal, but in 1984, his teaching certificate was finally revoked.
That same year, he was charged with the wilful promotion of hatred, and was represented in court by Victoria lawyer Doug Christie. That case, fought all the way to the Supreme Court and back again, finally concluded in 1996, with a conviction and a sentence of 200 hours of community service.
The landmark legal precedent established the constitutionality of Canada’s hate-speech legislation. Yet far from silencing Keegstra, 12 years of appeals and retrials gave him a platform to posture as a free-speech martyr and defender of civil liberties. He basked in national notoriety. In 1987, he even served, albeit briefly, as the leader of the federal Social Credit party.
It was a frightening time in Alberta. Fuelled, perhaps, by post-National Energy Program economic frustration, violent anti-Semitism seemed to flourish.
In 1988, police in Calgary foiled a Ku Klux Klan plot to blow up the Calgary Jewish Centre and murder Jewish businessman Harold Milavsky.
In 1990, Terry Long’s Aryan Nation held an “Aryan Fest” at Provost, Alta., which featured a huge swastika flag and a cross-burning, accompanied by chants of “Death to the Jews.”
Did the extended prosecution of Keegstra make such hateful viciousness worse? It’s not easy to judge.
The Keegstra affair did lead Alberta to establish a Committee on Tolerance and Understanding. It did force the province to confront its demons, to have a gut-wrenching public debate about racism and about the duty of citizens to stand up to hatred, as Susan Maddox bravely did.
Today, it’s unlikely a teacher could get away with preaching unvarnished hatred for as long as Keegstra did.
But Keegstra’s spiritual kin — the Truthers, the Birthers, the False Flaggers, the homophobes, the conspiracy theorists of all strains — flourish in today’s social-media ecosystem, cross-pollinating their lies and paranoia, feeding on fear, loathing and misinformation. And we still haven’t found a way to balance freedom of speech with the rights of the vulnerable to be protected from the provocations of bigotry.
Here’s what I learned from Keegstra. Courts and cops can’t stop hate. We must fight lies with truth, ignorance with knowledge. Since we cannot silence all the evil, noxious speech in the world, we must instead teach our children and ourselves to think critically and debate freely.
Let that, please, be Keegstra’s last lesson.
