Freedom of speech: Are Danes taking it too far?

This is one of the topics I have touched on a couple of times but I have never dedicated a blog post to it. It is also one of the things Danes take great pride in, freedom of speech. I think that a number of Danes would say that Denmark is all about the freedom of speech. The thing is that Danes do not take great pride with a lot of things but they do with this one and with H. C. Andersen, even though they didn't like him that much while he was alive.

Freedom of speech, the thing that made Denmark infamous in the world when the "Mohammed" cartoons were published by the Jyllands Posten back in 2005. They weren't much better at the beginning of this year when the same news media published an article about corona with the Chinese flag that had the particles of Corona virus on it. A day later Chines embassy contacted Jyllands Posten and demanded an apology and that their modified flag be removed. Neither happened, on the contrary, Danish government sided with Jyllands Posten saying that the freedom of speech is everybody's inalienable right and that everyone can exercise it as one sees fit. So the Chinese didn't get their apology. Are they taking the freedom of speech a tad bit to far? The other day I saw a status by one of my ex-colleagues, where she inquired, how is it freedom when you are insulting religious feelings of a certain group and in consequence potentially causing harm? Shouldn't other people have the freedom of not being the receivers of harm? How is it appropriate to mock the biggest pandemic the world has seen since The Spanish Flu? Nobody considers it funny anymore, including Denmark, but they will say it was still a good joke at the time. 

Well, no matter these considerations, this is how their society works. Everyone has the right to say whatever they want, nobody will prevent them, but if they break any other laws while doing it, they will be adequately punished. 

There was one bizarre example during their last parliamentary elections. One extreme right wing candidate that was running for parliament, Rasmus Palludan, as a part of his campaign, went to the neighborhood with a majority of people with Islamic religious background and he started spewing all sorts of vile insults he could find on them. Couple of police officers protected him, he had no supporters present around him and later he ended up in jail for his little performance because he went across the boundary of hate speech. The point is that no matter how extreme his political views are and no matter that by doing it he was breaching other laws, his right for free speech was respected. 

Are Danes going a bit too far with it? I have a pragmatic take on it. If we would limit the free speech with taking into consideration that nobody gets offended, we could barely say anything and sometimes I get the feeling that this is the direction where the world is heading. 

I will give one benign example. I have one opinion that I know stands out from the majority. I dislike Christmas. That holiday never resonated with me well. To have a part of the year where everyone just goes on an spending frenzy and suddenly becoming do-gooders, which they are not for the rest of the year. I just find the whole holiday a bit fake and forced. But I will stop here because this is not the point of this blog post. 

The point is that, if we would limit the freedom of speech by saying that one is free to say what one wants as long as it doesn't hurt anyone's feelings, or that it doesn't offend anyone, we would become unable to voice our opinion about things as benign as the one I just offered. I am sure that there are people out there who love Christmas and who could be potentially hurt by my take on Christmas. Should that be enough to prevent me from expressing it? I think not, that would be too extreme. 

And then there is the case of people like Rasmus Palludan. Should his freedom of expression be limited because of what he has to say? I don't think so either, because people with extreme political views are present everywhere and repressing their freedom to express their opinion would not accomplish that these opinions would go away, it would just suppress them in the underground but they would still be there. The difference would be that not a lot of people would know about it and how strong they are but with freedom of speech, public is informed about them. We know who are they, where they are and how many of them there is. And knowing is always better than not knowing. So, no I don't think that Danes are taking it to far. There is an unexpected twist to their freedom of speech but I will cover that next time.