Section 14

The German bid to spread its holocaust denial laws across the entire European union has gone a step further, although in a watered-down form. The new law will make it an offence to deny or trivialise the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, but only if the effect is to incite racial hatred or violence.

A Polish/Baltic attempt to have Stalin’s crimes covered was rejected as was, in a nod to candidate-hopeful Turkey, any mention of the Armenian genocide. Germany’s bid to ban Nazi iconography has also been dropped.

While it’s good that the law has been watered down, (my thoughts on the original proposal are here: German bid to spread fascism), it is still an entirely unwarranted limitation on freedom of speech. There are already laws against inciting violence and inciting hatred is nothing more than thoughtcrime.

On a related topic, Spiked has an essay (Turning society into Room 101) on the “pathologisation” of certain types of expression:

People are silenced because they are ‘in denial’ (of the Holocaust or climate change), or because they’re ‘phobic’ (whether Islamophobic or homophobic), or because they spread ‘hate speech’ (they’re consumed by irrational hatred). All of these new censorious categories – denial, phobia, hatefulness – speak to the pathologisation of certain ideas. Speech is increasingly depicted as a sickness, and censorship as the cure.

Hat tip: Kiwiblog.

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.

Holocaust denier David Irving has been released from prison in Austria. Irving was imprisoned in February this year and sentenced to three years for saying that the gas chambers at Auschwitz didn’t exist. (He later recanted.)

At the time, a number of people showed their true illiberal colours:

We must learn the lessons of the past to built a decent society for the future. Irving’s conviction, especially in Austria which was a former Nazi country, is important and appropriate. - Lord Janner, chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust

Today’s sentencing confirms David Irving as a bigot and an anti-Semite and also serves a direct challenge to the Iranian regime’s embrace of Holocaust denial. - Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center

However, others had a much better attitude:

“This is a silly law by silly people for silly people,” [Lothar Hobelt, associate professor of history at the University of Vienna] said.

“In fact, having a law that says you mustn’t question a particular historical instance, if anything, creates doubt about it, because if an argument has to be protected by the force of law, it means it’s a weak argument.”

Hobelt has it exactly right. 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. See for example chapters 12 to 14 of Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things, which deal with pseudo-history in general and holocaust denial in particular.

U.S. Supreme Court judge and American Zionist leader Louis “Sunshine is the best disinfectant” Brandeis would have agreed.

Hat tip: Foreign Policy.