There was a recent case where someone was arrested for wearing an anti-Swastika badge. Apparently there was also an earlier case from Yugoslavia where someone was arrested for wearing a Dead Kennedys t-shirt from the album “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” – because it has crossed over Swastika.
And of course such speech crime laws have a tendency to grow into other areas. France has been talking about prohibiting denial of the Armenian holocaust (to Turkey’s great dissatisfaction) and I believe the Rwanda killings, some countries have prohibited denying communist atrocities, Ukraine has talked about prohibited denying that Stalin planned the hunger in the 30s and Germany is constantly finding new symbols to prohibit. Last I read it was the Celtic cross. And Germany has been trying to make it a EU-wide law.
When you look at that list Rune and then start to consider the other genocidal massacres, such as Cambodia, China, Srebrenica, The Rape of Nanking, (and if you want there are plenty more to consider) then you have to start thinking that maybe we should concentrate much more on these and punishing those who seek to minimise of justify such events.
Perhaps the knowledge of a long lasting odious reputation and the certainty that someone would be seeking to arrest and imprison such persons would at least be of some comfort to the victims, I somehow doubt that such despots ever believe they would be held accountable - seems to be particularly true in Africa these days.
puppygod, your response is appreciated. However, you don’t seem to know too much about the US.
Many, you euro guys have some strange fantasies. In the US, you can wear any kind of t-shirt you want, including one that says “Obama is a nigger.” I saw a guy once at the flea market wearing a t-shirt that said “Brown and black may be beautiful, but white is the big boss man.” Turned my stomach, but it’s his right. It’s this weird concept we have called “freedom of speech”, you ought to try it sometimes.
puppygod, you and everyone else have been running like crazy to avoid answering my question above about which statements I made above are illegal. Clearly, some of them are. By your laws, I can’t discuss those ideas in public. Ergo, you are banning public discussion of those ideas … heck, it’s worse than that. You are not only banning them, you are avoiding discussing them on this very board. I listed about twenty statements and asked [twice] which were illegal. You euro-folks don’t even want to touch that.
I apologize that my writing is unclear. Teenage boys are the ones who are most likely to adopt the neo-nazi ideology, you know, those young guys you seem to have so many of over there, the ones with the bald heads? That’s who you need to convince that nazism is wrong, that’s your target audience … and given how many of them you’ve got there, banning certain ideas doesn’t seem to be very effective in stopping them from becoming neo-nazis.
On the other hand, if you don’t understand the concept of “forbidden fruit” and why it is sweet, I can’t help you. But you might want to start with the Wikipedia article on the subject.
Funny, but in the US, “pretty clear, most of the time” is not generally considered sufficiently detailed for a law.
Second, I have googled the laws, thanks, and I have cited and referred to and discussed and even quoted the laws in this very thread. You’re not paying attention.
Third, I notice that you have not responded to my direct request to you to say which statements I made above are legal and which are illegal. You talk a good fight, but when I ask which are illegal and which are not, you are struck Euro-dumb … what’s up with that?
puppygod, this appears to be the truest thing you have said so far. Me, I’m different from you. I’m against totalitarianism in any form, including yours. As you just pointed out, you are for it. Not in any form, though. Just in the forms you approve of …:rolleyes:
Do you have kids? Do you forbid them from doing something like say reading pornography, or saying certain swear words?
Whenever you do that, you send a message that says “Pornography is important. Certain words are important. They must be, or Dad wouldn’t make rules about them.”
Clear now?
Look, my friend. Whenever there are ideas one cannot state in public, discussion of those ideas is restricted. You’ve been wearing your chains for so long you mistake them for freedom. Whenever and wherever ideas are banned, discussion of those ideas is restricted. You think that the very existence of discussion proves something, you say “there is discussion of Nazism in Europe” as if that meant there was a free and open discussion, where any idea is welcome. It doesn’t. Not all discussions are free and open.
Come back when you are willing to tell me which of the statements I made above were illegal. You’ve dodged the question enough to make it very plain why you think discussion of nazism isn’t restricted in Europe … because you guys have gotten so good at dancing around the issue that these days you don’t even notice you’re wearing ballet tights 24/7 …
Heck, to make it easy for you, here’s my statements again, so you don’t have to go find them. They are to be read in the context of an existing law criminalizing “Anyone who has contested, minimised, justified or denied the existence of war crimes or crimes against humanity …”
Here’s different statements about the Holocaust. Consider them in the light of a law making it illegal to contest, minimize, or justify the Holocaust:
*I think ten million Jewish people were exterminated by the Nazis.
I think millions were exterminated, but the records are too fragmentary to say exactly how many. Somewhere between one and four million would be my best guess.
I think the real records were captured by the Russians during the war and hidden away, just like they captured and took away the records, photos, and bones of He Who Must Not Be Godwinized (HWMNBG), and didn’t release them for a half century. I think we’ll never know how many were killed, but I figure it’s more than we actually know about from actual records. Say three million.
I think Jews did die, perhaps millions, but I think it’s been blown out of proportion. Millions die in any war.
I think the numbers of victims given are close, but they’re probably inflated somewhat. It’s human nature.
I think no more than three million people were exterminated by the nazis, maybe four million tops. Of those, maybe half were Jews.
I think Genghis Khan killed so many people he made HWMNBG look like a pansy. Nothing HWMNBG did was important on that scale. Genghis raped and pillaged around the planet. He was way cool.
I think we don’t know, might be as low as hundreds of thousands, might be millions. I think the records were mostly destroyed.
I think it happened, but HWMNBG didn’t know about it because he had Alzheimers. Much like Reagan in his latter years of Presidency. Alzheimers plus all the drugs that Dr. Feelgood kept giving him. That’s why he lost the war. I think other people did the Holocaust without him ever knowing. How many millions I don’t know.
I think the war was an insane and tragic occurrence, in which the killing of Jews must take its place as one small part of all the horrors and barbarity and killings that have occurred during every war in history. WWII was no different.
I think no less than fifteen million people were executed by the Nazis. I think after the war none of the authorities wanted people to know how many French and British and Americans had been executed, so they gave out low numbers and destroyed some records.
I think no more than a million Jews died, maybe two at the most, because I think the people keeping the records have added in every unsolved disappearance during the war onto the lists.
I think only half a million Jews died in death camps. Another five and a half million were simply worked to death. Of course they had no food, no one had food then.
I don’t think that there were many Gypsies killed in the Holocaust. Of course the Gypsies disappeared. They disappear whenever there’s trouble … wouldn’t you? Shows they’re smart. Sure, some died in death camps, but most resurfaced in another country with another name. How would you ever know? So they put hundreds of thousands in the lists as “lost in the Holocaust”.
I think that twenty million patriotic and heroic Russian men and women died fighting with all their strength to stop HWMNBG, some in German concentration camps, along with millions of French and Americans and British and all the allies, and millions of Jews. I think we need to look at all those who lost lives, and at who lost the most lives. We should not just focus on one group who lost lives.
I think the Russians took the documents, then inflated the numbers to make their arch-enemy Germany look bad. I don’t think we can trust the numbers. I think it happened, but why should we believe the numbers the Russians give us? I say divide all their numbers by ten.*
I think we’d be better served to try to prevent future massacres rather than comfort the long dead victims of previous massacres. And as you said, there are plenty other massacres we could try to prohibit discussion of. Many which would probably be considered controversial. How about the Muslim slave trade of Europeans to Africa? How about Sweden’s massacres of Danes in what is now southern Sweden. How about Polish massacres of German civilians after WW-II or Red Army rapes of German women. Should communist symbols be outlawed? The hammer and sickle? The Internationale? Mao t-shirts? Lenin avatars on Internet forums? Che Guevara mugs? … there’ll be no end once we start down this route.
But basically I think it is an insult to the intelligence of the common man to assume he can’t handle to have his beliefs challenged and a lack of confidence in own arguments that one have to resort to threaten to throw people in jail rather than argue with them. I don’t fear arguing with holocaust deniers. In fact I have done so many times. Most of the times they are just stupid and the arguments on par with 9/11 truuthers or moon-landing hoax, which in no way deserve to be raised to such fearful a pedestal as be worthy of laws and imprisonment.
Fundamentally, Germany is a different country than the U.S. with a vastly different history. Is anyone really surprised that it would have different laws?
M view is not that these things should ot be discussed, but rather that to deny proven facts is the crime, if any.
Its the motivation of denying these facts that is one part of the problem, why deny historical evidence which is not in genuine dispute?
I cannot think of a good reason to deny these things, now if someone then wants to take those facts and justify them, thats something else, history is always subject to interpretation and discussion, but denial is not something that should happen.
So if some neo-nazi type says something along the lines of “Yeah all those millions that were killed by the nazis was justified” - its an odious view but it is not seeking to deny what took place. All that remains is to argue aginst the position taken by the speaker.
If the same speaker says these things did not happen, this is argument from a position of blatent falsehood, but for a sinister purpose .
casdave, you are right about denial. However, it’s not just denying the killings that’s illegal in the EU (and Israel). The laws differ, but in a number of the states it’s illegal to “minimize” or “trivialize” or “justify” or “diminish the proportions of” or “put in doubt” the killings. So be cautious, because the statement you just made could buy you two years in jail, better hope nobody reads this in Liechtenstein.
How goofy is that? Two years in jail for saying what you said?
The UK and the US are among the holdouts against that kind of law.
Me, I’m still waiting for someone who believes in these laws, who thinks they are right and correct, to tell me which of my statements above I should be thrown in jail for if I made them in all seriousness in public. Like say on the internet, which is the main marketplace for ideas these days. Or in some public park in your country. One by one, look at them and tell me in your opinion, as lawyer or laity, where and how and why you think each (or should be) is a legal or illegal statement about the Holocaust.
For me, it’s easy. They all should be legal. But most of the statements I posited above dispute and minimize and justify and diminish the Holocaust. And that is illegal in a number of countries under the various thought police laws popular in some countries. Oh, you can think those things, all right, but it’s the crime that cannot be named, you can’t “disseminate them by electronic media”.
If a thought dies in the forest of censorship … does anybody read it?
Curiously, Germany among the EU countries has laws kinda like US/UK laws. Makes sense, I guess, given they were the occupiers. The issues are handled under the section dealing with “Public Incitement”, which seems to be what I’d call “Incitement to Riot Acts.” They only come in to play if the speaker is whipping up a crowd, or as the Germans put it, “in a manner capable of disturbing the public peace”.
That makes sense to me. They’ve also commendably made genocide a crime under German Law, which I don’t think is true in the US, although there are “hate crime” laws in the US. (However, the crime is not the hatred. The crime is the crime. If it’s done out of racial hatred, the punishment goes up. But I digress …)
On the other hand, there appears to be (quoted on Wiki) a German law unheard of in the US, saying they can throw my ass in jail if I say “your dead grandpa was a horse thief, my daddy saw him steal them”, viz:
Ah, well. I suppose it’s good that I can’t say that Joseph Mengele was an inhuman monster, we wouldn’t want to disparage his memory. Weird. But I’m not a lawyer, perhaps someone could explain it.
In the UK and the US, it’s the other way around, as far as my non-legal brain understands it. You can’t libel the dead. A British legal expert explained it to the BBC:
I note that Mr. Lamont says the law harms the prospects of analysing history … an effect of the laws on denial that we discussed earlier in the thread. Coincidence? You be the judge.
Quite. To conflate a law against holocaust denial with ‘no discussion of the holocaust’ is practically willful in its ignorance. It can be discussed til the cows come home. But it cannot be denied.
No he doesn’t. I’d like you to demonstrate how permitting inflammatory, fascist-agenda driven lies to be propagated enhances the study of history. Without that is, resorting to the ignorant confabulation of a law against holocaust denial with a law against discussing the holocaust.
I wasn’t talking about the law about holocaust denial, I guess my writing is abysmal. I said that, and quoted Mr. Lamont, in the context of the German law regarding being mean to dead people, viz:
Unless that law is somehow used in the holocaust denial issue. In which case I am confused. Didn’t I quote that law just before bringing up Mr. Lamont, and talk about libel laws and their effect on analysing history in exactly that context? Hang on … yeah, I did.
Tagos, you, like the others, seem to miss the point. It’s not just “inflammatory, fascist-agenda driven lies” that are forbidden. I’ve given about a dozen or more provocative statements above. They minimize, justify, and otherwise diminish the holocaust, all of which are illegal in various countries under the denier laws. Nobody seems to want to face that fact. I invite you, as I have invited everyone else, to tell me which statements you think are (or should be) legal or illegal under the law given, and why. No response to date … which isn’t too surprising.
Few if any of those statements come within the scope of the law and quite frankly, they are a somewhat bizarre mish-mash. You persistently, to the point I can only assume it is deliberate, equate Holocaust Denial with debate over details.
holocaust Denial does nothing to enhance the study of history. Quite the opposite. I’m perfectly happy with laws that ban such inflammatory hate speak concerning genocide.
I think you also have a somewhat naive view of history. The Armenian Genocide is a point in fact. It is an indisputable fact but is being whitewashed through State Denial.
As centuries pass things fade and blur as historical revisionists build careers.
You can see it in the pathetic right-wing attempts to rewrite the Great Depression.
The origins of the First World War are still debated.
Hell - even now the Serbs (who in my opinion are a nation of unrepentant war criminals who should have the same level of collective guilt as the post-war Germans) deny their own genocide and that was only 15 years or so ago.
And Holocaust Deniers want to do they same thing. They are not debating the Holocaust. The law does not prevent that. They are fascists wanting to drag Europe back into that awful period.
Stalin is coming back into fashion.
And all your rhetoric about ‘freedom’ is just that. Rhetoric and histrionic rhetoric at that.
you also completely ignore the fact that laws have to applied through courts and so moderated by citizen common sense.
Serbia Turkey and Germany NEED laws that keeps their collective crimes stuffed in their face. Only one of those three acknowledge their guilt and that is the one concerning Holocaust Denial. I’d add Russia and China to that list. And Indonesia.
This is no more a free speech issue than the publication of child pornography.
The very fact that a piece of child pornography exists is evidence of a greater crime, committed by the creator. Prosecuting the possession of child pornography then has the same benefits as prosecuting the purchase of stolen goods: it removes the market for these goods that can only be obtained by committing crimes.
In comparison, all that a denial of the Holocaust proves is that you hold false, ignorant and unpopular opinions about Germany’s history. It might also suggest that someone else committed the same crime in convincing you that the Holocaust was not true, but as that’s a circular argument, it cannot be used to argue in favour of its criminalisation.
It can also prove, which is where the vast excluded middle of the legal system, juries and the weight of precedent comes in, is that you are inciting others to commit the same crimes. The thin end of an awful wedge.
A child porn picture does not say the person possessing it or publishing it has committed a crime (assuming there is no ‘free-speech’ chilling law against possession or publication). Just that someone may have, depending on the jurisdiction, at some time in the past.
A successfully prosecuted denial of the Holocaust pretty much demonstrates that you are a fascist with all the goals that implies. As does the possession or publication of child pornography. The Holocaust (general existence, scale and extent) isn’t a matter of factual debate. Both are incitements to crime.
ironically, you’ve just answered your own question, and showed why you are wrong.
Just like your example, the German laws are designed to “remove the market” for goods (i.e. ideologies), whose possesion leads to crimes much more dangerous than child porn.
And yes, like porn, the ideas will continue to exist and circulate underground. But, unlike child porn, there are millions of people alive today who publicly and proudly engaged in it. So laws to keep them underground are a legit way to prevent those ideas from every being seen in public again.
Rarely do countries learn from their history, and work so hard to avoid repeating it. Germany is doing the right thing.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
And who decides what ideologies are allowed and what ideologies are not?
That’s the point of freedom of speech: A definite belief that government should have NO ROLE in that what so ever.
How is this any different that China prohibiting it’s people from discussing Chinese government abuses? The substance of the two issues might be different, but the logic used in defending them is the same.
What if a majority atheist government decided that since religion is all crap anyway, those who promote it will be sent to jail. There’s no evidence of Jesus or YHWH or Krishna, etc, right?
So what would you say to such a government? How would you defend such a position? Or is curtailing freedom of speech only appropriate when you happen to disagree with the sentiment?
First they came for the neo-nazis, but I wasn’t one so I didn’t speak out.
then they came for the socialists, but I wasn’t one, so I didn’t speak out…
I decide. And you decide. And millions of other decent people, just like you and me.
In fact, it’s the same people who decided that child porn is illegal.
Remember, child porn isn’t illegal everywhere (there are no laws against it in India, and the wise men of ancient Greek didn’t object too much). But you and I both know that it is too disgusting to be allowed into the realm of public discussion, right?
so would you argree that "first they came for child porn collectors, but I wasnt one, so I didn’t speak out…
There are logical limits to everything.Society is held together by common decency.
Some ideas are simply beyond the realm of decency. And we know which ones, because the people who wielded those ideas built gas chambers with them.