This Post is Illegal

Go on, let's have a riot. I'll be at Queen Street Mall tomorrow with a piece of 2x4 and some nihilistic rage; I'd like you to join me in establishing a new world order.

So probably I'm not much of a demagogue, but you get the idea. I could - technically - go to jail for writing this post. And obviously I will not. What's the difference between me and these louts?

As Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill puts it, "...it is highly questionable whether [convicted inciters] Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan could be held morally responsible for their behaviour." O'Neill argues that in the UK the previous common-law iterations of incitement laws (now enshrined in the Serious Crimes Act 2007 Section 44) made a distinction between views 'circulated in the press' and encouragement uttered in the 'heat of the moment' to an audience teetering on the edge of a frenzy of violence.
Similarly, the Australian Criminal Code Act 1995 Section 2.4 Div 11 makes incitement an offence, going so far as to make incitement prosecutable "...even if committing the offence incited is impossible."

These laws are not legislative backwaters, with most the amendments made in the post-9/11 era. And in the UK at least, the public prosecutor and courts are apparently quite okay with sentencing two youths to four years in actual shiv-in-your-kidneys, ruled-by-gangs-and-rapists jail. For making a Facebook page about a riot. That nobody went to.

Whether or not we have at the moment the political will to get away with such a daring feat of inalienable-rights abusing, the fact is that we have the same laws in this country. And a few more that may worry you, if you get all antsy about your human rights. Is this sane? I could quite legally go to jail for inciting nobody to go steal something that does not exist.

What is missing from this equation is an understanding of individual culpability. If I post signs around Brisbane asking like-minded citizens to murder David Cameron with sharpened sticks, that is technically incitement. But it should not be the offence incitement. There should be an expectation that incitement is only a crime if the offender is capable of swaying a number of people in the heat of the moment to actually commit am offence. O'Neill's conclusion is quite apt:

"Both the powers-that-be and many in the radical intelligentsia see "the little people" as totally different to themselves - as incapable of processing ideas in a reasonable fashion and thus given to outbursts of newspaper-inspired hysteria. Effectively, they see everyday folk as the moral equivalent of attack dogs, who hear an order and act on it. Where we, the decent, educated people, have free will and the ability to make moral choices about how to behave, they, the ignorant horde, apparently do not."
My condolences to the Facebook warriors. You might be berks, but you certainly do not deserve what you got.