HATE SPEECH IN THE CONTEXT OF MACEDONIAN SOCIETY

Abstract

The multicultural historical experience of the Republic of Macedonia has always
enabled some social tolerance and a relatively small number of incidents, as
examples of hate speech and hate crimes. But Macedonia failed to revive the
tolerance or this inherited sensibility from "value in itself" to "value for itself."
Even the political ruling elites stopped understanding it as a value. Often they will
come to a view that the restriction of hate speech is weakness imposed by the
political correctness of our multicultural living. And my intention is to analyze the
consequences of the current political usurpation of this legal concept.
In this regard the paper will focus primarily on the infused confusion about the
very concept of hate speech, and the limited understanding that prevails in view of
its harmful consequences or damage which this speech imposes on its targets -
stigmatizing them, reducing them to uniform samples of the stigmatized group
and denying them the capacity to live as responsible members of society, in short,
refusing to accept them as equal members of the society.