From holocaust denial to race/gender equality denial

Lawyers and historians who testified in court in defense of holocaust deniers, are threatened with prosecution1. Such a blanket prohibition of speech, where truth is no valid defense2, can lead down the slippery slope to hate speech laws and repression of #TrueSpeech.  Denying that the Nazi holocaust killed 6 million Jews is a felony3 in many countries. “Scholars have pointed out that countries that specifically ban Holocaust denial generally have legal systems that limit speech in other ways, such as banning “hate speech“.”[Laws against Holocaust denial|Wikipedia]

Reposted from Sincerity.net

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Switzerland: Prison Term for ‘Holocaust Denial’

On April 10, 2000, a Swiss court sentenced 79-year-old publicist and retired teacher Gaston-Armand Amaudruz to one year in prison for “denying” the existence of homicidal gas chambers in World War II German concentration camps. […]

Amaudruz was found guilty of violating Switzerland’s five-year-old “anti-racism” law, which makes it a crime to “deny, grossly minimize or seek to justify genocide or other crimes against humanity.” He had broken the law, the court ruled, through his distribution of revisionist books, and for two articles in 1995 issues of his newsletter Courrier du Continent. In one of the offending items he had written: “For my part, I maintain my position: I don’t believe in the gas chambers. Let the exterminationists provide the proof and I will believe it. But as I’ve been waiting for this proof for decades, I don’t believe I will see it soon.”[…]
The three-day trial (April 3-5) was his first appearance before a court for anything he has written or published. For half a century, Amaudruz has been putting out his Courrier newsletter with no detectable harm to the country’s Jews, much less to Swiss society as a whole.[…]

An Unabashed Racist

While on the witness stand, Amaudruz was asked if he is a racist. “Yes,” was his forthright reply, “and on the basis of the Petit Larousse [a standard dictionary] of 1947, which defines Racism as ‘the theory of those who seek to defend the unity of the race of the nation’.” Today, he went on, “those who want to exploit or exterminate other races are called ‘racist’.” In that sense, he said, he is not a racist, because he doesn’t want to exploit or kill anyone.

When asked if his opposition to racial mixing is not discrimination, he replied: “Race-mixing destroys that which nature has created over eons of time. Racism protects the rights of all human societies.” Amaudruz reaffirmed his long-standing conviction that “the European peoples must remain white.” He also expressed opposition to abortion, and support for the right to life of all human beings. […]
Amaudruz is not the first person to be punished under the country’s Anti-Racism Law. In July 1998 a Swiss court punished two revisionists, Jürgen Graf and Gerhard Förster, with fines and prison terms for writing and publishing allegedly anti-Jewish books. (See “Swiss Court Punishes Two Revisionists,” July-August 1998 Journal, pp. 2-13, esp. p. 13.)
A dramatic high point of that trial was the testimony of Austrian engineer Wolfgang Fröhlich, who told the court that mass gassings with Zyklon at the German wartime camps, as alleged, are technically impossible. As he spoke, the public prosecutor threatened to bring “Holocaust denial” charges against Fröhlich for his sworn testimony. Even the defense attorneys in the case risked indictment for trying to show the court that their clients’ views are based on fact.

Laws against Holocaust denial|Quoted from Wikipedia

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Laws against Holocaust denial

Laws against Holocaust denial have been proposed in many nations including the United States and the United Kingdom. Such proposals for laws have received criticism and faced opposition, most significantly, from civil rights and human rights advocates who contend that the such laws would violate people’s established rights of freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Organizations representing Jews and other groups victimized during the Holocaust have generally been split, in opinion, about such laws.More at Wikipedia […]

Scholars have pointed out that countries that specifically ban Holocaust denial generally have legal systems that limit speech in other ways, such as banning “hate speech“. According to D. D. Guttenplan, this is a split between the “common law countries of the United States, Ireland and many British Commonwealth countries from the civil law countries of continental Europe and Scotland. In civil law countries the law is generally more proscriptive. Also, under the civil law regime, the judge acts more as an inquisitor, gathering and presenting evidence as well as interpreting it”.[1] Michael Whine argues that Holocaust denial can inspire violence against Jews; he states, “Jews’ experience in the post-World War II era suggests that their rights are best protected in open and tolerant democracies that actively prosecute all forms of racial and religious hatred”.[2]

János Kis[3] and in particular András Schiffer[4] feel the work of Holocaust deniers should be protected by a universal right to free speech. An identical argument was used[5] by the Hungarian Constitutional Court (Alkotmánybíróság) led by László Sólyom when it struck down a law against Holocaust denial in 1992. The argument that laws punishing Holocaust denial are incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have been rejected by institutions of the Council of Europe (the European Commission of Human Rights,[6] the European Court of Human Rights[7]) and also by the United Nations Human Rights Committee.[8]

Historians who oppose such laws include Raul Hilberg,[9] Richard J. Evans, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Timothy Garton Ash.[10] Other prominent opponents include Christopher Hitchens, Peter Singer,[11] and Noam Chomsky,[12] who wrote:

It seems to me something of a scandal that it is even necessary to debate these issues two centuries after Voltaire defended the right of free expression for views he detested. It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers.[13]

An uproar resulted when Serge Thion used one of Chomsky’s essays without explicit permission as a foreword to a book of Holocaust denial essays (see Faurisson affair).

In January 2019, in an interview in The New Yorker in connection with the publication of her book, Antisemitism: Here and Now, Holocaust historian Deborah E. Lipstadt expressed her opposition to laws against expressing Holocaust denial:

I still am a firm opponent of laws against Holocaust denial. First of all, I’m a pretty fierce advocate of the First Amendment. Having been sued for libel, and having had that in my life for about six years, I’m more than ever. Even though libel is not covered by the First Amendment, [David Irving] wouldn’t have been able to sue me in this country because he was a public figure.

But I also don’t think that these laws are efficacious. Forget the morality – I don’t think they work. I think they turn whatever is being outlawed into forbidden fruit. We saw it in Germany, when Mein Kampf was released from the embargo on it a few years ago. People bought it because suddenly it was something they could get ahold of. I just don’t think these laws work. And the third reason I’m opposed to them is I don’t want politicians making a decision on what can and cannot be said. That scares me enormously.[14]

These laws have also been criticized on the grounds that education is more effective than legislation at combating Holocaust denial and that the laws will make martyrs out of those imprisoned for their violation.[15]

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Contents

END Laws against Holocaust denial|Quoted from Wikipedia

  • List of countries where Holocaust denial is legal – RationalWiki If this logic is true, then conversely the statement “In most places, my opinion would not be censored — ergo, my opinion is false” would be true (and Holocaust denial would be false). This is a list of countries and territories where there are no laws against Holocaust denial.

  • Holocaust Denial: Key Dates | The Holocaust Encyclopedia 1984 In a landmark case, a Canadian court convicts public school teacher James Keegstra of “willfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group” for espousing Holocaust denial and other antisemitic views to his social studies students. 1986 On July 8, the Israeli parliament passes a law criminalizing denial of the Holocaust.

  • Why is holocaust denial a crime in some countries? – Quora I am a German historian and although the Holocaust has not been my central field of research I have spent quite some time in Amsterdam’s war archive to get a clearer picture of the Nazi efforts to seize Jewish property in the printing business aft…

  • Armenian Genocide denial – Wikipedia Armenian Genocide denial is the denial of the planned systematic genocide of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I, conducted by the Ottoman government.Turkey similarly denies the genocides perpetrated against indigenous Assyrians and Greeks during the same period.

  • On the Laws that Prohibit Holocaust Denial – Brown Political … Jun 25, 2018The United States, with a strong tradition of Common Law-a legal system in which principles are based primarily on judicial precedents-protects the public expression of Nazism under the First Amendment. Laws against Holocaust denial were first enacted in Europe to curb far-right extremism, with Germany leading the way.

  • Is Holocaust denial illegal in the United States? – Quora Holocaust denial is not technically illegal in the United States. You cannot be tried, convicted, or imprisoned for Holocaust denial, or for spreading/believing any other misinformation, crackpot conspiracy theories or willful lies.

Footnotes

  1. for themselves being in violation of holocaust denial laws: Switzerland: Prison Term for ‘Holocaust Denial’, more cases of lawyer and expert witness intimidation can be found and cited

  3. Prosecutions and convictions
  4. ProtonMail will only disclose the limited information on our users that we have if served with a valid Swiss court order. Please see the Data Disclosure section of our Privacy Policy: https://protonmail.com/privacy-policy “ We will only disclose the limited user data we possess if we are instructed to do so by a fully binding request coming from the competent Swiss authorities (legal obligation). While we may comply with electronically delivered notices (see exceptions below), the disclosed data can only be used in court after we have received an original copy of the court order by registered post or in person, and provide a formal response.”

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