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Freedom is always the freedom of the dissident, Rosa Luxembourg exclaimed in a critique of Lenin. Die Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des andersdenkenden. Of course this is a simplification, but it contains a large grain of truth. We need not unduly worry about the freedom to agree with the powers that be or the freedom to pursue the accepted way of living. What really has to be defended is the freedom to disagree with authority, dissent from conventional wisdom, express unpopular opinions. It is this freedom which is now increasingly being threatened. There is, especially and surprisingly amongst intellectuals, in the media and at universities, a growing tendency to try and obliterate certain views instead of seeking to refute them. A telling example was when many of the New York Times staff vehemently protested in July 2020 against the invitation to Senator Tom Cotton to write an article on the opinion page where he suggested that the military should be deployed if riots and looting would continue in American cities. The editors apologised to the staff at a long and tense meeting, and the editorial page director, James Bennet, was forced to resign. Note that Senator Cotton was not encouraging violence; on the contrary, he was calling for a measure to end violence. Note also that as a newspaper the New York Times would have been expected to be on the side of the senator’s free speech, not censorship.
Grundtvig’s Maxim
The real test of freedom is indeed when others are doing something that we find provocative, unpleasant, despicable, even abhorrent. This was well said in 1832 by Danish poet Nikolaj F. S. Grundtvig in a well-known poem on the Nordic cultural heritage:
Freedom our watchword must be in the North!
Freedom for Loki as well as for Thor.
Loki and Thor were both among the old Nordic heathen gods, the Aesir. The difference was that Loki was a rogue, sly and malevont, whereas Thor was a real hero, a strongman, associated with thunder and lightning, protecting humankind with his hammer, but perhaps not the most cunning of the gods. (Thursday in English is named after him.) Grundtvig was making the same point as John Stuart Mill in his celebrated Essay on Liberty twenty-seven years later that freedom includes the freedom to make mistakes and hold erroneous and even outrageous opinions, as we see it, and that what we believe to be the truth will only be strengthened if challenges to it are allowed. Loki should not be silenced.
The Danish ‘Democracy Debate’
It is now timely to recall a famous debate in Denmark after the Second World War, the ‘Democracy Debate’, demokratidebatten. During the War, Denmark had been occupied by Hitler’s Nazis, and although they had not been as brutal as in many other countries, the occupation had left deep scars on the Danish national consciousness (perhaps because it had indeed been relatively mild). Shortly after Denmark’s liberation in May 1945, some Danish communists published articles asserting that freedom of expression should not include freedom to spread anti-democratic ideas, such as national socialism. It was also essential, they added, that government institutions such as the police, the military and the public administration in general should be purged of anti-democrats. Grundtvig’s maxim, ‘Freedom for Loki as well as for Thor,’ had been used as an argument against a ban on Nazi activities, as one of the communists observed, Mogens Fog, Professor of Medicine and for a while a government minister. Fog commented: ‘Those inspired by this maxim were involved in endangering our democratic rights, because they allowed their enemies to grow strong. This weakness should not occur again.’
Andersen’s Article
A Grundtvigian, Poul Andersen, Professor of Public Administration at the University of Copenhagen, protested in the newspaper Politiken on 5 September 1945. I could not resist translating from Danish his short article:
Recently, government minister Mogens Fog expressed his support for the following statement by Professor Jørgen Jørgensen: ‘Democratic freedom is not freedom to do whatever one wants, but only to to do what is compatible with the maintenance of democratic values, including the freedom thus restricted.’ The demand for the defence of freedom is, it says, here ‘concisely expressed’.
Admittedly, Jørgen Jørgensen’s statement is concisely expressed. When democratic freedom is discussed it should however of course be understood as that which the author thinks it is. But the content is so indeterminate that it only suggests a tendency against which, for the sake of democracy, a warning has to be issued.
For, what does it mean that there should only be freedom to do what is compatible with the maintenance of democratic values? The meaning must be that if a political project is for example deemed to be dangerous for economic democracy, it should be forbidden, unless the evaluation of the issue in question and the freedom ideal gives more weight to freedom. But is this anything but words? This rule provides in fact a licence to act against any statement which the authorities do not like. There is by no means a general consensus about what democratic values mean, or for that matter about the means by which they can be introduced and maintained. By the way: How is is possible to compare the ideal of freedom and material democratic goods?
This line of thought, that the goal of political projects should determine whether they are permissible, leads to the suppression of any opposition. Thus there is more to be had from the old maxim ‘Freedom for Loki as well as for Thor’. Any political opinion should be allowed, even if it would imply the rejection of democracy, yes, even if it would be a demand for a constitutional change in an anti-democratic direction. Limitations should only be about the means used. Violence and terror should be excluded.
Would this weaken democracy? In England and America, where this conception of freedom is accepted, democracy is quite strong. The same can also be said about democracy in Denmark. And in Germany, how was there any help in laws in the 1920s which were supposed to protect the republic?
I was moved to submit this piece because I saw a serious danger in the tendencies which are in accordance with the ideas of Jørgen Jørgensen and Mogens Fog. Jørgensen speaks about purging of anti-democratic and notoriously unreliable elements and about dismissing civil servants who reveal anti-democratic positions, and so on. Such political censorship of people’s—and especially civil servants’—beliefs is far from what has hitherto been understood as democracy.
At the moment, the law on the civil service is being revised, so there is an opportunity to present proposals in this direction. It should not be too difficult to formulate them because the German 1937 Civil Service Act provides an excellent blueprint. In Paragraph 26 it says that a person can only be a civil servant ‘if it is clear that he would on any occasion and unconditionally defend the National Socialist state’. One only has to replace the last words by ‘the democratic state’.
Professor Jørgensen subsequently replied to Andersen that Grundtvig’s maxim lost all sense if ‘freedom for Loki’ was taken to mean freedom for the enemies of democracy. He wrote: ‘Grundtvig’s dangerous maxim: “Freedom for Loki as well as for Thor” cannot in my view be a motto for a democratic society, only at most for an anarchistic one.’
Freedom for Communists and Not for Nazis?
Poul Andersen’s position, that in a true democracy there should be as much freedom of expression as possible, while violence and terror should be outlawed, seems in retrospect the most coherent and plausible contribution to the ‘Democracy Debate’. But the debate had some ironical aspects, little-noted at the time. First, there had not really been a significant threat to Danish democracy from local Nazis. They enjoyed negligible support. Moreover, there had not been any heroic struggle in which Danish democrats had defeated both the Nazis and their collaborators. Denmark was not liberated from within. The German military simply surrendered because Germany had lost the war against the Allies, not against Denmark.
In the second place, after the War it was mainly the communists who sought to ban any advocacy of anti-democratic ideas and to purge the administration of alleged anti-democrats. But such measures—if thought through—should have hit the Danish communists themselves first of all. They were clearly anti-democratic. After all, the historical rift between communists and social democrats had in Denmark, as elsewhere, been about whether non-democratic means to gain power should be allowed, as the communists held, or whether such means should be totally excluded, as the social democrats insisted. The Danish communists slavishly supported Stalin in the 1930s and 1940s. When Stalin denounced social democrats as ‘social-fascists’ in the early 1930s, the Danish communists concurred. When Stalin changed his position in the mid-1930s and encouraged a broad alliance against fascism, the Danish communists did the same. When Stalin made a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in 1939, the Danish communists, with few exceptions, became more hostile to the Allied forces, the United Kingdom and France, than to the Axis powers, Germany and Italy. When Stalin was attacked by Hitler in 1941, the Danish communists changed overnight into fierce enemies of Nazi Germany, becoming the most militant members in the resistance movement. In the light of Stalin’s purges, defended by the Danish communists, it was hard to take seriously their call for purges in the public administration.
Andersen Excluded
It is rather odd that in the section on the ‘Democracy Debate’ on a website about Denmark’s History, maintained by Aarhus University, the articles by the two communists, Jørgensen and Fog, are reproduced, including Jørgensen’s reply to Andersen, but not the article by Andersen himself which I have here quoted! When I wrote to the editors and asked about this, I received a polite reply by Dr. Anne Sørensen, pointing out that Andersen’s article originally had been published in Politiken and that it could not be reproduced without a large fee. This seems somewhat facetious since many of the other articles reproduced on the website had also been published in Politiken, including the one by Fog on which Andersen was commenting and Jørgensen’s subsequent reply to Andersen.
It is quite true that free speech does not entail a duty of others to listen. I may tolerate your opinion without having to publish it. But of course, Andersen’s article should have been included on the Aarhus University website. It was a crucial contribution to the ‘Democracy Debate’. The folks at Aarhus University seem to believe that there should not be the same freedom for Poul Andersen as for the two Danish communists, just like the staff at New York Times wanted to deny the same freedom to Senator Tom Cotton as they routinely extend to left-wing advocates of violence such as Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis, not to mention the Taliban leader Sirajuddin Haqqani (who was once invited to publish an article on the editorial page). What is worrying is that in the universities and the media of the West the would-be censors seem now to be in control while the opinions they refuse to publish are held by a large segment of the population. It is by no means certain today who belongs to each of the two parties, of Loki and of Thor. Not least because of that, Grundtvig’s old maxim about ‘Freedom for Loki as well as for Thor’ is still relevant.