Section 14

The German government is intending to use its presidency of the Council of the European Union to introduce a Europe-wide ban on holocaust denial and the display of the swastika. See the work programme, p19 (PDF).

The Presidency plans to resume the stalled negotiations on drafting a framework decision on combating racism and xenophobia and to drive the project forward. The goal must be to achieve a minimum level of harmonization in the penal provisions of the EU Member States, particularly with regard to criminal liability for disseminating racist and xenophobic ideas.

This mouthful of bureaucratese bullshit means that they intend to spread the holocaust-denial ban that operates in nine EU countries (and possibly the Germany-only Nazi insignia ban) across the rest of the Union. A similar ban was rejected two years ago.

The original ban ran into trouble on a number of fronts - from Eastern European nations saying that if the swastika was to be banned then so should the hammer-and-sickle insignia, others saying that the swastika is an ancient good luck symbol in Hindu and Buddhist tradition, and even from Britain and Italy noting that the ban would curtail freedom of speech.

As I’ve said before, the best way to deal with holocaust denial is to discuss it openly:

If bad ideas are going to be defeated it must be with better ideas. Imprisoning a person for the ideas they express does nothing to defeat the idea. It is by evidence and debate that we must come to the truth.

No doubt many Germans are ashamed of their country’s history but the way to atone for Germany’s past is not to become president of the whole continent and then pass laws telling people what they’re allowed to think and say.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 8:59 am and is filed under Hate Speech, Neo-nazis, Censorship, Europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.