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Have been thinking about the scheduling of this event in the US—inviting Apartheid president de Klerk—to the ABA in relation to the recently-concluded Niall Ferguson debacle in Pakistan. Some thoughts: https://twitter.com/TshepoMadlingo1/status/1274053543050305538
It is not a coincidence that the issues surrounding the platforming of right-wing, racist individuals reappears in almost exactly the same form in Pakistan as it did in the US. There is a direct link.
In the US, the “controversy,” involving the offering-up of free speech arguments to shut down opposition to platforming decisions arose in the instances of Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannapolous, Donald Trump Jr, etc. being invited to colleges.
In those instances, too, free speech arguments grounded on law and especially US constitutional protections were invoked to support these men being given attention.
Now, there, in a moment of racial reckoning, we find de Clerk being invited to speak at the ABA. With the same spiral of justification and opposition and explanation and exhaustion wearing itself out.
But back to the point, tracing the link between ways of looking at things there—in the center of knowledge production, America—and here, in the dependent knowledge economy, Pakistan.
The vaporization of the “constitutional right to free speech” does not appear out of thin air. It is a historical and legal construction that then is shared, disseminated and replicated through knowledge-systems.
In our case, by lawyers—then law students—who study in the US academy, most of all at elite law schools, the most prominent of which is Harvard, which boasts a strong institutional focus on constitutionalism.
And also comparative constitutionalism. Which is particularly attractive to Pakistani students. Why?
Because, as Prof. Fazal Karim has narrated, whole sections of the US constitution were copied almost verbatim into the 1973 Constitution of Pakistan at the time of its drafting.
A copy-paste, if you will. A wretched plagiarism.
So the Comparative Constitutionalism program at Harvard becomes particularly relevant to Pakistani scholars, who can see obvious similarities between their own and the US legal context. And seek to compare and contrast and borrow and learn from “there.”
As more and more Pakistani lawyers are trained in the US legal academy, the liberal conception of legal rights is constantly imported back to the dependent context.
These lawyers are drawn to the enlightened concept of liberal rights as a paragon of structuring civilization partly because they look to their own society and see only encroachments into the dignity and rights of others.
This is the situation Aimé Césaire writes of in his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land: returning from the colony to find your own people in a violent mess, your own land ravaged by viciousness.
The solution seems to be in front of you. It is in your enlightened training, the books you have studied and the notion of superiority that your foreign sojourn has provided you, your success in the greatest halls of knowledge known to man.
The answer is in the enforcement and keeping-up of liberal rights: the freedom of speech being one of the foundations of this system.
Freedom of speech must always be protected. Must always be defended. For this and only this can save society from a descent into its inherent savageness.
Cue: Hobbes and all the successive philosophers whose justifications for the liberal order of law provide the legs for the Western legal order.
Interestingly, an education in the vaunted legal academies of the US never—only very very very very rarely—involve an introduction to the opposing voices to the greatly-enlightened liberal way of law.
By this I mean: never a look at Derrick Bell, for instance, who speaks of the Voices in the Bottom of the Well, objecting to the liberal legal order.
From where? The position of the slave, the black being that the liberal legal order never recognized as a being.
Why is this relevant? Because the liberal order has had its day. The law is being questioned daily, frequently, and in this moment, fundamentally by those it never afforded its protection, its love, its maternal embrace.
The center cannot hold. Rights cannot be discussed without a discussion of their unequal distribution. Law cannot be discussed without speaking to its failure. To marginalization. To the violence enacted in its name.
De Clerk, invited by the tone-deaf American Bar Association, may be a Nobel winner—if only by association to the great Madiba—but he presided over a vicious machinery of racial prejudice and killing power.
This is not a free speech argument. This is an argument of the dignity of people who survive and live the consequences of Apartheid.
Stop fetishizing free speech, constitutional protections, rights as the primary form of security for people, and the liberal order of things. You are in a new world.
