Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

After seeing /pol/ constantly derail threads about with this stuff it makes me wonder.

Now, like any sensible person, I think the Holocaust did happen. However, I question whether laws that disallow publicly denying that (which only exist in parts of europe and a few other countries) it happened are doing the best job of what they should be accomplishing, since said deniers often use laws as evidence for their imagined Jewish conspiracy. Is the benefit gained from laws allowing those people to publicly run their mouths worth breeding their resentment further? Or is it just not worth worrying about?

""Is the benefit gained from laws allowing those people to publicly run their mouths worth breeding their resentment further? Or is it just not worth worrying about?""

The great thing about Free Speech is the circulation of ideas and the data supporting it. So in a happy scenario where facts and evidence usually trump the topics born from superstition and propaganda, the sensible perspectives win out. But in a sad scenario of Free Speech where the opposite is true, we get Stormfront, where Free Speech is encouraged, but perspectives not shared by the collective are shunned.

Obviously there should only be very very very few reasons to ban speech. It should be education, not authoritarianism, that steers the population.

Obviously there should only be very very very few reasons to ban speech. It should be education, not authoritarianism, that steers the population.

Are the laws these European countries have valid, then?

I don't believe they are. Even if the topic is a very dark period in history, educating the masses provides more…..what's the word….help, than simply banning discussion of it "because we said so". It provides more common ground between two ideologies, if there even is a common ground between Holocaust Recognition and Holocaust Denial. I suppose this is true for less obvious topics of interest.

OP is a JIDF shill, do not listen to what he says. :^)

On a serious note, I find laws against free speech and freedom of opinion abhorrent, though I believe the concentration camps to have been real. I don't condone the hypocritical "anti-hate" laws that many European countries have. In answer to your main question, yes I believe that these sorts of laws cause resentment, and provide "evidence" to strengthen anti-semitic sentiments.

There is definitely several accounts of video evidence, though the viewing is not for the faint of heart. And this is me about to go into a field where you open a guy up and say "yep, arterial hemorrhage."

Sadly deniers tend to ignore any evidence presented from a source that has any ties to Jews or Judiasm, which they are very quick to invent even if it doesn't exist.

Also, I can't edit the OP of the thread for some reason. Shame I can't fix that typo.

All these laws are doing is encouraging people to do this in order to be "edgy", to be a "rebel" and show that they're not going to "be part of your system, man". Having something as simple as saying dumb things be outlawed makes people only to want to say dumb things more. As a fan of comedy, I can tell you flat out that all the 7 Dirty Words banning did, was encourage people to use those 7 dirty words.

If you made it legal, much of the support for these groups would most likely wither and die. They'd grow increasingly irrelevant with their main source of conflict evaporated. People would be able to look at them, and see that nobodies stopping them, and question how these people can claim to know some secret nobody else wants known, when nobody has come to stop them saying it. Stormfront was mentioned, but stormfront itself not only has no power or sway, but its also a very small group of people, if I'm not mistaken. And of those people, most are assholes who wouldn't do anything in real life, and only complain on the internet to make themselves feel important.

As for /pol/, I think many of them do this just to troll. Its a sensitive issue that rustles many people jimmies so they do it. If people didn't give them attention with this holocaust stuff, they'd move on to the next horrible thing to say in order to make people hate them and shower them with stuff to talk about.

Trying to relegate dumb things out of the world, especially by forcing people to do it, only has ever made them want to do that dumb thing more. You won't get more people jumping off a cliff, then if you put a sign up asking people not to jump off said cliff.

More than likely. Streisand effect

They surely make the deniers feel validated, but its overall effect is probably still in the other direction. Hate movements can reach a tipping point beyond which they spiral out of control, and those laws reduce the very real likelihood of that happening.

You can't "ban" an idea, you can only ban the expression of that idea. But the only way to ensure that certain expression isn't happening anywhere is for a government to become tyrannical to an Orwellian degree. And from my understanding of human nature, these people that exist in the shadows of society only more entrenched in their ideologies with the validation that they are being "oppressed". And when they spill out into the light (and they will eventually), I believe they will only be that much more motivated…

But even disregarding that, freedom of speech is something that transcends our desire to feel "safe". Keep in mind that one man's "hate movement" is another man's "liberty movement"- these laws represent governments tampering with the marketplace of ideas in a disturbingly fundamental way.

I would like to note, most of these countries are places that were at some point Nazi controlled, where governments were the main perpetrators of antisemitism. I think a lot of it is to do with dissociating themselves with that sort of behaviour. Do I think it's the best way to go about it? No.

But I feel like these people are stamping out free speech entirely and are all authoritarian. I think that these places need a little more time to get past the fact that racism and hatred exists.

Citation-wise, here's a good description of how nationalistic groups tend to form: http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/9849/SPS_2008_11.pdf?sequence=3

Here's a good interview with a sociologist and an SPLC researcher that covers the sociology of hate-based organization: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105291618

Beyond that, there is no historical shortage of nationalistic movements that ignited violently. Some led to totalitarian regimes, some lead to widespread violence. I don't see any reason to write up a laundry list.

The rational behind these laws is that the expression of the idea is inherently dangerous, as it normalizes the idea and gives it a chance to root itself in legitimacy. Nobody is going to argue that it is a perfect, absolute and unregrettable strategy, but they're rationalized with the idea that hate-based ideology abuse the marketplace of ideas in the came way that totalitarian leaders abused the democratic process. I'm personally not for censorship, but I don't blame European nations that implement such laws for fearing a revival of European nationalism, which has a very long and bad history.