Holocaust Denial vs. Freedom of Speech
This is disturbing on many levels. Apparently a Holocaust Denier has been sentenced to three years in jail (it seems in Austria, though the article does make that clear). On one level, this guy is a disgusting provocateur (Europe seems to have lots of those). On another though: what right does the government have to patrol the content of people's statements. It doesn't seem that denying the Holocaust directly harms anyone. On top of that, doesn't three years seems a bit excessive? What is this guy suppose to learn in those three years in jail? Or is the harshness of the penalty purely as a deterrent? Won't this chill speech?
All in all, I guess stuff like this makes me appreciate living in a country where there is no Islamaphobia and antiquated laws prohibiting anti-Semitism. Europe might be exotic, but it has some serious issues.
-Mr. Alec
posted by Alec Brandon @ 3:20 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
If you are to celebrate free speech, why is it to be assumed that there is no limit thereof? An argument may be made by defining free speech to the classification it is given in American laws (I use the American model to isolate a generality): a clause of the 1st Amendment. This would put free speech on the same basis as religion, assembly, and petition. Yet, as we see in cases of religion and assembly, certian conditions under which freedoms are practiced mitigate the defensibility of the act. Violation of curfews in a time of war or religious practices running contrary to statute are *less defensible* as, for lack of a better term, conditionally irritating. The same is theoretically true of a set of laws meant for the protection of individuals. The set of laws I refer to in the Austrian case are the de-Nazification laws passed throughout Europe; in America we find a whole history of examples in the Reconstruction, followed by the Jim Crow laws, and capped by Civil Rights legislation.
We won't make people martyrs of anything if we don't reduce our own position to an unalterable maxim in favor or against what is actually a well-tailored legal formula, and not a general reflection on societal values.
Jared,
While you do make the case for infringing freedom of speech in certain cases, I just don't see how this is one. No one is protected by sending this guy to jail.
On top of that, the situation is not one in which this man's words incited any Jewish lynchings. Jews in Europe today are nothing like blacks in America 50 years ago.
-Mr. Alec
You have to take into account a sense of "retention" in legal systems and in political sociology. Laws remain on the books because there has been no primary need to remove them, and, perhaps, they do no harm as the practice is itself outdated or irrelevant, which you seem to suggest. Yet, at the same time we have to take into account the posibility that the malignant nature of the practice is retained by the transgressor in equal or undue proportion to its legal counterpart. That is to say, the transgressor see his act as legaly aggrevating in relation to the relevancy of the law, or as a greater opposition, which would then legitimize the illegality of the act as it is assumed "greater opposition" implys the provacation is at a level equal to the crime the law was *originally* meant to reprimand, i.e. he really is a Nazi and potentially dangerous. In the less malignant case, that he saw his action as legally aggrevating in relation to the relevancy of the law, you cannot make the argument that you can deliberately break the law unless you are to hold that law as injust. Even so, a transgression of that sort cannot on its own be seen as threatening--taking up a neo-Nazi stance simply to challenge a law you see as violating free speech is not an ethically adequate challenge.
If I were to make an argument based solely on empirical fact and leave all the above aside, I might remind you of le Pen's near election in France, the right-wingers in Germany, and my own discussions with students from the region of Bavaria. I'd have to say that the conditions for neo-fascist activity are still existant. The blacks in America today are nothing like the Jews in Europe 50 some years ago--who happened to be worse of than American blacks--and which this man categorically denies.
Jared,
You are spot on in dealing with the superficiality of my response to you.
I think a much stronger response be to engage the argument you made about the limits of freedom of speech.
There is no debate, at least in the US, that freedom of speech is limitless. The question though is where should that limit be placed.
In times of war there is a justifiable state interest in keeping curfews. This rationale is the basis of campaign finance laws that restrict people's right to freely air their opinions.
But I think that such a state interest does not exist here. This Nazi sympathizer was propagating an opinion, nothing more. He was inciting no violence, in short, the interests of a civil government were not being challenged in anyway by his statements, thus I don't feel any civil government should have the right to imprison him.
-Mr. Alec
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