- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
Censorship just hides it. Better would be to educate them. Make them meet with survivors, send them to the remaining concentration camps.
I don’t know if this is really censorship in that way. Like yeah don’t hide the genocide, hide the denial, because it doesn’t deserve a platform. Holocaust denial has no basis in reality, especially considering it’s one of the most well documented genocides of all time.
Don’t censor history, teach the children about all the bad shit humans have done.
Holocaust denialism is censorship. It’s an attempt to hide reality itself by controlling the narrative. If anything, outlawing holocaust denialism is anti-censorship, as it’s helping ensure that Nazis won’t be able to suppress the truth about what happened.
Someone claiming that outlawing holocaust denialism is censorship is trying to flip the script and overwrite reality (or just repeating someone else who is doing so, I guess). It’s like saying “Hey! Stop censoring my attempt to censor others! This is censorship!” It’s a mind game, an attempt at manipulation through deception. Look up the term DARVO: Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender. That’s what saying “Outlawing holocaust denialism is censorship!” is: Reversing the Victim and Offender.
Lies and misinformation and other attempts to deceive and suppress the truth are not a form of free speech. Quite the opposite, they’re what results when free speech remains unprotected.
Exactly
There aren’t that many survivors left, but you wouldn’t know judging by the noise some jewish.groups make while clamoring for reparation.
This is effective censorship – of a bad thing, but still censorship.
Education is the way, don’t let people forget history, remind them of all the horrors the nazi regime inflicted on gays, gypsies, political dissidents, criples, … Remind them genocides are still occurring: in Palestine and elsewhere.
I’m so used to bad news I read that as decriminalize
Will they punish communism glorification as well? I’m thinking anything nazi is shit but most of the people here are shitty tankies so Hitler bad Stalin good yet both were monsters… different types but monsters and no one criminalizes the glorification of Stalinism.
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Not placing reasonable limits on hate speech is what ends free speech (and other freedoms in general). It should always be done carefully, but one only needs to open a history book to see why not limiting hate speech out of a dogmatic view that all speech is equal is a terrible idea.
Imagine being this dense.
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You’re right, you win: can’t imagine being as stupid as you. I think it would require some brain damage, though who knows since maybe the universal healthcare we have would prevent it from getting that bad.
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You speak from experience?
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Spot the American! Dumbfuck over here doesn’t understand what free speech is!
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Free speech != Hate speech. Holocaust denial is hate speech. End of the story.
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Hate speech is how my country’s democracy fell in part. Hate was let go rampant, and people had to accept far-right propaganda, otherwise they were accused of discrediting the trauma of victims of crimes commited by minorities.
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Russia really loves hate speech from what I’ve heard.
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You American? Sounds like what’s happening there.
You make a persuasive case that free speech, by your definition, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Why would you want to be hateful?!
Because I hate Nazis
Stating you hate nazi is a thing. Creating a political party and actively stating you want to kill whoever you include in your nazi definition are two differents things.
This is why it is ultimately at the judge to determine if it fall under hate speech and promoting violence or is just a random anarchkiddo on the web saying ‘I wAnT tO kIlL nAZi’ from his mama home
I think hate can be self-destructive. If you’re going to punch a Nazi, do it from a place of love. But also, more power to your elbow.
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So you’re all for freedom of speech, but the moment someone exercises it you’d like them to up sticks to another country? Riiight. You sound unhinged.
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Oh look, the dumbass can’t even answer a single question.
You aren’t allowed to shout “Fire!” in a packed theatre. Is it censorship?
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“You are really dumbfuck”
Oh, the irony.
The amount of times you call other people stupid tells a lot about you. You know for the stupid, everybody else is stupid.
Honestly, yes. It’s justified censorship, but still censorship
I’msorry, but legally speaking that is not the case. In the US, which specifies freedom speech ‘as is’ (cited)
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
the Supreme court decided that hate speech is, in most cases protected (see Imminent Lawless Action test, Brandenburg V Ohio)
Of course, all nations aren’t the US and for instance my country, Czech rep, allows limiting free speech, but it outlines this specific reasoning in its Bill of Rights, specifically §17(4) of 2/1993 Coll. Said Article says that ‘For the reason of protecting democracy, the law can limit free speech…’ and I assume the Finnish Constitution has a similar clause.
But the plain expression ‘freedom of speech’ does protect hate speech. That being said, even the afformentioned US limits free speech as it allows individuals to sue for libel and defamation and allows the state to prosecute someone for meaningful threats.
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the Supreme court decided that hate speech is, in most cases protected (see Imminent Lawless Action test, Brandenburg V Ohio)
that court (in its present composition) is a bunch of fucked up privileged racist monsters.
Yeah, that’s true. Generally, I think the Constitution needs a lot of revision as it fails to properly protect the civil rights of its citizens so a bunch of corrupt assholes (looking at you Clarence Thomas) cannot just disappear them in a whim.
Also the decision was made in the 60s by the liberal Warren court (the one that, among others, ended institutionalized segregation in the public sphere (Brown V BoE))
Oh cool, too bad the US government has decided your laws don’t hold concrete merit and the constitution is worth as much as toilet paper.
That decision was made in the 60’s, not today. I was trying to write analysis as neutral as possible, not to say which side is morally correct. And while the political situation in the US is dire and the incumbent admin absolutely blatantly violated, among others, freedom of speech (Perkins Coie LLC V DOJ, a case under which hundred of amici signed in support of the Plaintiff) and it is true that Brandenburg, actual KKK leader, was a piece of shit on another level, the decision still stands.
Just like in Canada, you’re free to say as you please as long as it doesn’t harm or hinder someone else freedom of expression. Hate speech is (often) not an acceptable use.
Surely this won’t ever be abused to silence/punish Palestinian supporters or anyone critical of Isreal. That never happens.
If you’re not able to critizice Israël without deniying Holocaust happened I don’t really care you are silenced. There’s plenty of ppl capable of doing the first without the latter and these are the people I want to hear not some confusionist bullshit
That’s not at all what I’m saying. No holocaust denial is necessary if those in power abuse the law.
No holocaust denial is necessary. Period.
For sure!
you will apply this law with the same rigour to every genocide right? right?
Yeah they won’t use this to evil ends…
Fuck israel
Always trust Finland!
It should be illegal everywhere. Germany knows how to deal with Nazis (well, unless they’re part of a party)
Germany considers criticising Israel antisemitism.
all criticism?
Meaningful criticism.
lol, on all topics?
Others were the ones who dealt with Nazis not Germany.
Let’s not whitewash the forced compliance of Germany with what was imposed on them by the nations which had to fight them to stop them as some kind of achievement of Germany.
Germany kept most of the Nazis around - not the “upper management” but certainly the “middle management” and below - doing the jobs in the State appartus that they did before.
Probably explains both the rise of the AfD and how still now after Israel has been for over a year fully and unashamedly acting in a way painfully similar to Nazism - just with different ubermenschen and untermenschen (or as Israeli politicians say it, “chosen people” and “human animals”) - almost the entirety of the German political class continues to unwaveringly support them, overtly because of the dominant ethnicity of that nation, a purely Racist rationale.
Change from the inside changes mindsets, change imposed from the outside mainly changes the visible expressions of the mindsets rather than the mindsets themselves.
Probably explains both the rise of the AfD and how still now after Israel has been for over a year fully and unashamedly acting in a way painfully similar to Nazism
The far- right has been on the rise all over Europe, not just Germany.
Over a year? Are you fucking kidding me? They’ve been acting that way for decades.
I don’t think that what Israel did before was at the level of being “painfully similar to Nazism”.
Before the last year and a half they were acting as an Apartheid state, but they weren’t actually working hard at making a XXI century version of the Holocaust happen as they are right now.
Before it was bad, but now it has reached the level of Evil.
They’ve been systematically eradicating palestinians for a long time. It just wasn’t legally recognized as a genocide by many. Fun things they’ve been doing before that is stuff like forceful relocations, murder, and denying water and medicine to civilians
Fucking GOOD.
Hopefully we’ll also have laws against denying the holocaust israel is inflicting on palestine TOO.
That’s a conflict of interests.
Whoa. That sort of thinking requires nuance. We don’t do that here.
Maybe 50+ years after every palestinian is murdered.
All holocausts?
According to the bill, denial of the Holocaust or other serious international crimes, such as those defined under the statutes of the International Criminal Court, would be punishable by a fine or a prison sentence of up to two years.
Interested to see how this plays out.
Prohibiting Holocaust denial is relatively easy, because we have the benefit of it being history, and we have an ample historical record and a clear consensus among historians. Plus, no one can credibly claim that the legislatures were not thinking of the Holocaust when they wrote the law.
However, how are they planning on applying the law to contemporary international crimes? People make accusations of them all the time. And the other side always denied them. And the actual facts are generally obscured by a massive fog of war that can take years to see through, if ever.
There is also plenty of history where the answer is less clear. Do we really want courts involved in determining if the 15th century conquest of the Canary Islands counts as a genocide. Or if some unnamed mass grave an archeologists unearths was caused by an invading army killing all of a city’s adult males, or simply a burial site for fallen soldiers?
What about the book of Esther. Taken literally, it ends with what is arguably a genocide committed by the Jews against the Persians. However, outside of some Israeli hardliners reinterpreting that ending for contemporary political purposes, it is widely understood that that ending is a literary device, not a literal telling of events. Did my Hebrew school teachers violate this law when they told me we didn’t actually kill 75,000 Persians? [0].
What about the ongoing genocide against white Afrikaners going on in South Africa today? Am I violating the law when I say that genocide is not real, and just something the rightwing in the US invented for domestic political purposes. If the US has such a law, could Trump use it to jail his political opponents who criticized his recent stunt of accepting 60 Afrikaner refugees?
Do we defer to an international body like the ICC or ICJ? In that case, you have just outlawed disagreeing with those bodies.
The UN has repeatedly found it to be a massive human rights violation. Does disagreeing with those findings violate this new law?
[0] As an aside, secular historians generally consider all of Esther to be fiction.
Well the way German law works out that it comes down to established historical fact. As in, the professional consensus of historians, heard as expert witnesses. The wording of the law is (paraphrased) “Acts committed by the NS regime that fulfil the UN definition of genocide”, the historians decide what happened, who did it, judges decide whether it fits the definition. Invoking precedence, in German law, is like invoking someone’s doctoral thesis on a matter of law: It’s a piece of reasoning judges will have to take into account because it’s an argument before court but it’s by no means binding. As such having an ICJ judgement will be helpful, but it does need to be up to standards.
How many have there been? As far as I know it’s “The Holocaust”.
well - there’s an ongoing major genocide happening in Gaza that unfortunately no longer pales in comparison. It’s not up there yet, and let’s hope it never gets there, but I definitely see the point of the question of the previous comment.
I’m not sure they’re really comparable. The Holocaust was industrialized murder on racial grounds. Gaza and the West Bank are more like the genocide of the Native Americans. A sort of “Give us the land you’re sitting on, or die. I don’t care where you go” as opposed to “I’m going to kill you. No there’s nothing you can do. You are the wrong race and must die”
I don’t even think that’s as much of a distinction as you think.
In 1930s Germany, the Nazi platform was “We’re going to relocate these Jews. We’ll make some kind of settlement for them, or shift them to other nations, who knows.”
Maybe at the end of the war the Holocaust - their “final solution” for the relocation problem was made clear, but even then anyone could have raised questions about where there were going.
Political excuses like “Relocation” are extremely common for Genocide.
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The tail end of that sentence was “…was made clear.” Up until then, the narrative seen to the world and the German public was different.
I’m not even claiming that Germany had a perfect veil of secrecy over it; just that they would use propaganda to push just enough plausible excuses over the “missing people”, the smokestacks, that the world wasn’t convinced until the end of the war that systematic execution was really going on.
And yes, deportation was an early public part of Germany’s plans, in part because that’s more publically digestible. They canceled plans to move many Jews to France after colonizing it - referred to as the Madagascar Plan - because of a blockade.
Of course, one major aspect of deportation is that people become sight-unseen at many destinations. The gestapo can easily execute people with gunfire en masse once they’re in a place no one can access them. So, saying “They only wanted to deport them” is not a compliment to the “decency” of old Nazis. It’s a word of caution about the new ones.
The ‘relocation’ wasn’t based on anything the Jews had that the Nazis wanted though, not in terms of physical land anyway. Wealth, sure, but the Nazis weren’t going after Jews because they had money. The Slavs were gone after for land, definitely, because the Nazis wanted all the land to the east and were happy to just murder anyone and everyone living on it, but even that was based on genetics because the Nazis believed the Slavs to be an inferior species.
Again, what Israel is doing is definitely genocide, there’s no arguments there, but it’s not the same as the Holocaust. There’s a reason the Holocaust is seen as more evil than the Holodomor, and it’s because of the sheer industrial evil of it all. A systematic extermination of a people based purely on genetics has some extra weight to it.
Wealth, sure, but the Nazis weren’t going after Jews because they had money.
That’s not entirely matching what I learned from history books. The German Nazis absolutely commit robber/murders. They just extended their murder spree to those of the same ethnicity and other “out-groups” who didn’t own anything to steal.
Again, what Israel is doing is definitely genocide, there’s no arguments there, but it’s not the same as the Holocaust.
No argument there, note my original wording “it no longer pales in comparison”. The Gaza genocide already has millions of victims and tens of thousands of murdered palestinians. That’s unfortunately starting to become visible even on a scale that takes the Holocaust as reference.
That’s not entirely matching what I learned from history books. The German Nazis absolutely commit robber/murders. They just extended their murder spree to those of the same ethnicity and other “out-groups” who didn’t own anything to steal.
It wasn’t “Those people have money, therefore we shall rob them” though. It was “Those people are Jews, therefore they deserve to get robbed”. They were an acceptable target because they were Jewish, not because they had any money.
A sort of “Give us the land you’re sitting on, or die. I don’t care where you go” as opposed to “I’m going to kill you. No there’s nothing you can do. You are the wrong race and must die”
Imagine believing this is a reasonable distinction.
It’s a really important distinction if you’re not a moron. The Nazis rounded up undesireables and killed them. There was no ‘loyalty’, there was nothing those undesireables could have done that would have changed what, in the eyes of the Nazi regime, should have happened to them. They were rounded up, shipped off to camps and exterminated, based purely on their genetics or even perceived genetics.
What Israel is doing is genocide, but it’s not the same as The Holocaust. Israel has a Palestinian population inside its borders, they have voting rights, they have seats in their Parliament. The Nazi Regime would have never allowed ANY of their chosen undesireables to have any representation, because the entire purpose of the undesireables was to be killed.
Now, compare what Israel is doing to Palestinians to what the US Colonies did to the Native Americans, and suddenly it’s a lot more comparable. The Colonists showed up, took land, forced the Native Americans out, and if the Natives resisted in any way, they were murdered. Any attacks on Colonists by Natives were met with overwhelming force and wholesale massacres of Native populations. Sounds a bit similar to Gaza, doesn’t it? Americans just don’t like to make the comparison because then it suddenly puts them in the genocidal hot seat.
Nobody said it’s reasonable. It is a distinction, tho.
“Give us the land you’re sitting on, or die. I don’t care where you go”
If the Israelis truly didn’t care where the Palestinians went, they wouldn’t be confining them to a 25-mile long open air prison. Extermination is the goal.
You’re ignoring the West Bank. Palestine is not just Gaza.
What’s your point?
Palestinians in Gaza are not allowed to freely travel to the West Bank.
You’re making a lot of claims about what’s going on in Gaza and making huge, sweeping statements that attempt to correlate Palestinians’ experience with others in history. I recommend you read about what is actually going on in Gaza before continuing. You seem ignorant about some of their most basic and fundamental struggles.
My point is the genocide of the Palestinians is more than just Gaza. The bombing of Gazans is a war crime, yes, but that in and of itself is not genocide. The settlements in the West Bank and overall encroachment on Palestinian territory is genocide, and that’s been going on for decades. If Israel and Egypt suddenly allowed people to leave Gaza and go to the West Bank, it wouldn’t stop the genocide, nor would stopping the bombing or the killings in Gaza, because the fact that Israel is allowing their colonists to displace Palestinians at all is enough to say that their intent is genocidal in nature.
You’re so caught up in the emotive rhetoric about Gaza that you’re ignoring the actual issue at hand. It’s like if the bombings weren’t happening at all, you wouldn’t actually give a shit.
Yeah let’s ask Egypt if they would take them
Holocaust is the name of a particular genocide.
All thumbs are fingers but not all fingers are thumbs kind of situation.
Lots.
A holocaust is a religious animal sacrifice that is completely consumed by fire.
The Holocaust occurred in WW2.
Pretty sure they were talking about genocide in general, not just one genocide.
Genocide is a constant, ongoing foundation of capitalism, colonialism, etc. Sometimes it happens in Europe, sometimes in Palestine… Sometimes they genocide almost all of the inhabitants of USA, Australia, etc.
I don’t think you know what genocide is or have a grasp on reality.
They’re not wrong. The deaths of Indians from the Americas and the aborigines from Australia far surpass the technical definition of genocide. Throw in banana republics and other nation building and it is totally arguable that the US has been complicit in many other genocides, for instance.
Sorry, quick nitpick for non-Australians. It’s never “aborigines”, if you’re going to use the term it’s “Aboriginals” (and the capitalisation is important).
Aborigines is kinda like calling Asians Orientals.
I’m confused by this comment. Can you explain what you mean by “Genocide is a constant, ongoing foundation of capitalism, colonialism”?
I don’t understand what you mean, and my attempts to interpret it lead me to silly conclusions which I doubt are what you’re trying to communicate here.
From what I understand, “genocide” refers to the eradication of a people or culture. This includes things like killing all Jews/Palestinians (e.g. Nazis and Israelis), imprisoning and “re-educating” an entire ethnic group (like the Chinese are doing to the Uyghurs), and much more.
Colonialism very easily falls into that definition, but I struggle to see how captialism does.
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When your politics is nothing but shouting thought terminating cliches
Capitalism is just the modern label for the same systems that made colonialism tick. The same exploitation is still going on, people are still dying for the same reasons, and the same elite is sitting on top profiting from all of it.
The whole idea of a free and competitive market where good ideas thrive and people that work hard are rewarded is a sham. It’s the same BS idea the elite has always sold us.
There are no great men.
Ok, I see now that my silly conclusions were on point lol
“everything I don’t like is capitalism” is not a good philosophy to have if you want to be taken seriously.
I seriously believe that in an adult society you can set one or two historically damaging things aside from “freedom of speech.” I believe it was Trevor Noah who explained that when black people took back South Africa from its apartheid masters, they didn’t burn those people at the stake or prosecute them out of existence or even steal all their property. They just said you won’t be ruling this country like that anymore OH and that ONE WORD… you don’t get to say that ONE WORD ever again.
Good, now criminalise Genocide denial.
They did. This is unequivocally a good thing
This is a dumb law
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