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.

Iran yesterday opened a conference questioning the Holocaust. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has tried to claim that the conference makes Iran a champion of free speech, inviting speakers who have served jail time in Europe for expressing their opinion that the Holocaust did not occur or has been exaggerated.

As discussed at Not PC last week, the state sponsorship of a particular point of view at the expense of others can be just as damaging to free expression as state censorship. While France and Germany’s laws that punish holocaust denial are reprehensible, state-sponsored anti-Semitism in Iran is hardly the answer.

The real free speech lesson in Iran yesterday came from Ahmadinejad’s opponents.

Dozens of Iranian students burnt pictures of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and chanted “death to the dictator” as he gave a speech at a university inTehran.

The protest, during a speech at Amir Tabir University unrelated to the Holocaust meeting, will be embarrassing for Mr Ahmadinejad. He has portrayed Iran as a champion of free speech in hosting the two-day Holocaust conference, which has attracted revisionist historians who have served jail sentences in Europe, and American David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader.

But the conference has embarrassed many ordinary Iranians who are aware of the damage such events are inflicting on their country’s image. Some Iranians point out that they have much less freedom to debate pressing issues such as Iran’s nuclear program, which has brought the threat of international sanctions.

Despite being a total Islamic state Iran has an active reform movement, although its strength has waned since Ahmadinejad came to power with several opposition newspapers closed down, increased restrictions on Internet use, and continued arrests of journalists and bloggers. It’s very encouraging to see active opposition to the regime from inside the country.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday that Google is refusing to remove racist blogs from its Blogger site. (Hat Tip: David Farrar, who’s pictured on one of these sites, wearing a National Party shirt, labelled as a “red”. The days when the web was just for rocket scientists are long gone.)

Google, as a private organisation, has every right to set the terms on which they will host sites but they have chosen to do their bit to uphold freedom of speech and not censor anything.

“We allow our users to create blogs, but we don’t make any claims about the content of these pages. In cases where contact information for the author is listed on the page, we recommend working directly with this person to have this information removed or changed. We would only remove content from this blog if ordered to do so by a court order,” the [Google] spokesman said.

The ‘marketplace of ideas‘ theory of free speech, first given form by Oliver Wendell Holmes in Abrams v. United States, says “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Another Supreme Court judge, Louis Brandeis, put it “the best disinfectant is sunshine.”

John Locke cautioned against using force to quash unpleasant or incorrect ideas, saying “truth is not taught by laws, nor has she any need of force to procure her entrance into the minds of men. If truth makes not her way into the understanding by her own light, she will be the weaker for any borrowed force violence can add to her.”

Defending people like neo-nazis can leave a nasty taste in one’s mouth but it is worthwhile remembering the words of H.L. Mencken: “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”