Following the Norway massacre, three dominant arguments have emerged on the Left. The first is that Anders Breivik’s actions occurred in the context of a decade of hysterical hate speech on the Right, in which the West was described as facing imminent destruction from Muslim hordes, the handmaidens of such being progressive parties, activists, writers, etc.

The second was that those who were name-checked in Breivik’s long manifesto could be specifically blamed for his actions, or culpable by his very mention. The third was the proposal that there should be additional limits on speech should a strong link between violent actions and such hate-mongering be proven.

In reaction to this, many of those who argue — for varying reasons — that there is no political content to Breivik’s actions, are eager to conflate the three. It would be important to distinguish these arguments in any case; but given the Right’s attempt to depoliticise the event, that task becomes imperative.

It seems to me that holding proposition one does not entail agreeing with proposition two or three. To deal with the last first: unless someone is actually issuing instructions to kill, there should be very few limits on free speech. Most of us on the Left want to retain the right to urge non-legal forms of resistance and revolt, and that freedom has to extend to the Right as well.

Those of us who are from the materialist Left, for want of a better term, are no fans of religious and racial vilification laws, even if others on the Left are. So one can thoroughly agree with my good friend Brendan O’Neill when he says that people such as Mark Steyn and Melanie Phillips should be allowed to say what they like.

The trouble is, as per his article yesterday, Brendan can find almost no one who disagrees with this (save for some vague comments by Matthew Carr in the UK),and so he is obliged to argue for a kind of “second-order” censorship.

Thus by talking back to people such as Steyn, by assailing them for arguing that they are systematically building an atmosphere of hatred and crisis based on fantasy, and a barely concealed racialism, we are guilty of using “moral blackmail to pressure people into keeping their thoughts to themselves”.

Sorry to say this, but this has to be one of the most nonsensical depictions of public debate that I have encountered. By that logic, any form of debate by which one launches vigorous moral criticism of others, any hypothesising about the creation of an atmosphere of fear and hate is some form of censorship — i.e. argument and dialogue is inherently censorious.

This absurd conclusion is reached only if you turn every social issue into one of free speech, where no threat to it is present — a version of the “worst-case” scenario that Brendan rightly decries as a guiding principle.

Thus the argument is that one should switch off one’s intellect, make no attempt to reason about social movements, political processes, links between speech and action. The proposition ultimately is that there is no link between speech and action — indeed there is no debate or dialogue. It’s a model of society in which we all simply speak into a void, without debate, reply, critique or any appeal to common human values. The very act of speaking morally becomes meaningless. The model of public debate then mirrors the atomisation of social life, (which Brendan, and other Spiked writers, and myself, see at the root of the contemporary crisis of politics) rather than speaking back to it. This is a position of sorts, but so is a corner you’ve painted yourself into.

Such a politics of fear — that every criticism of anyone else on moral grounds is an attack on free speech — is a favoured motif of the Right. That’s evidenced by the CIS’s mini-conference at which Brendan is speaking, thunderously coming out against “political correctness” — a title that initially suggested it might be a ’90s retro event.

The theme is the same — that being called to account, having your ideas challenged, having to defend your position, is a form of censorship. There was little surprise that it would be applied in the case of the Norway massacre.

Those of us who aren’t governed by worst-case scenarios feel ourselves quite capable of arguing against vicious and hateful social arguments — and then defending their right to speak should the state come around to bring the hammer down.

Nevertheless, the “criticism equals censorship” argument has been given succour by the second proposition — that anyone name-checked in Breivik’s writings has questions to answer. That is not the same as turning the focus on those who foster an atmosphere of hate, and it’s an error to propose it.

Thus I have to disagree with commentators such as Graham Redfearn here yesterday, and Aron Paul in New Matilda who look for appearances by George Pell, etc, etc, to establish some sort of culpability. It’s a gotcha game played by both sides, and pointless. Especially in the online era, one’s writings appear everywhere.

Say something tentative about anti-Semitism in Europe and your words appear in some settler’s website under the heading “It’s Ramallah or Auschwitz”. Say something mildly critical of Israel, and you end up juxtaposed with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. No one, per se, is responsible for who they are quoted by.

The Right has squawked at such guilt by association — notably Keith Windschuttle in The Australian. Fair enough, but it’s a pattern that was established by the Right after 9/11, when it embarked on a massive false syllogism – 1) the left criticises Western imperialism, 2) al-Qaeda criticises Western imperialism, 3) therefore the Left supports al-Qaeda.

“Were the same to happen to Osama bin Laden, Chomsky’s moral rationalisations in his most recent book — ‘almost any crime, a crime in the street, a war, whatever it may be, there’s usually something behind it that has elements of legitimacy’ — could be used to plead for a lighter sentence” someone said in June 2003. Bloke named Windschuttle. Ah well.

Such a gotcha game is all the more counter-productive because it obscures the principle argument — that a core of writers have produced such a relentless and hysterical picture of European “decline”, based on false statistics, absurd rhetoric and racialist hatred of Arab Muslims, that they fostered an atmosphere in which such attacks are likely to take place. But the crucial issue is not that such hate and fear has been fostered per se — but that it has been done so through demonstrable lies and propaganda. Violence might be fostered by true analysis, but it should not be held accountable for that. Discussing the deep structural poverty and oppression of Latin America led to many things, and one of them was the ultra-violent Shining Path movement — but that outcome does not invalidate the accuracy of the assessment.

Mark Steyn, Melanie Phillips, Bruce Bawer and others need to be relentlessly brought to account because their diagnosis is false — perhaps wilfully so — their whole framework implicitly abhorrently racialist, and their rhetoric vicious.

They are not being called to account for the actions of Breivik — they are being called to account, as they have previously, because of their ideas, and on the basis that their disregard for truth, and values most of us hold in common, have contributed to an atmosphere in which people can move from obsessive grievance to violence.

We are not asking the state to discipline them. We are asking them to reflect on their rhetoric and actions in a genuinely moral fashion. Most importantly, we are calling on those reasonable members of the Right to have the courage to talk back to the vicious talk that comes from the lower depths of their tradition, and affirm a liberalism/conservatism that is not based on hate and fear — rather than huddling together in pathetic groupthink gabfests about “political correctness” with invited speakers who talk about “Jewish genes” and “Turkish genes”. We live in hope.