Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion

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When free speech is hate speech, there is no level playing field. The aggressors misuse the power of free speech to victimise, intimidate and demean their targets. It's like the school yard bully - he or she uses free speech too, to demean someone less powerful or less able to display brute force.
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Sad to see that you have a neo nazi running for election unopposed now in the USA. Maybe it signifies something far more serious:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 95421.html

Entirely upside-down. Unless freedom of speech includes the freedom to offend, it's meaningless. "You have freedom of speech, unless some people disapprove of the things you say". How's that for a level playing-field?

it's like the devil's gotten into people, people here on WP who of all people ought to know better.

Think of it like this; who would you trust to tell you what you can or can't say?

if a person had the sense of decency for others that they would wish others to feel for them, they would know that just bringing up the subject of holocaust denial goes beyond the pale. a decent person doesn't need any law telling him or her to say or not say something. how anybody could even think of saying blatantly, to ones with the unique numeric tattoo on their arms, that they were just imagining it, is beyond me.

I don't know why you keep bringing up politeness, decency and good taste. These things are simply not relevant.

Aside from the question of scale, why is it worse to deny the holocaust than, say, the Armenian Genocide?

I spent my childhood in the shadow of the second world war. Our family doctor was a Polish jew. He had the tattoo, and bad burn scars on his hands from being forced to work in the lime pits bare handed. It was work that did not certainly make him free. He was liberated by the allies just in time.

My husband's stepfather was one of the first people to enter Belsen immediately after the war's end. He could never speak of it; it must have traumatised him for the rest of his life. We only found out at his funeral, when a man who had flown spitfires over Germany with him stood up and made a eulogy. His wife of many years had no idea of where he had been and what he had seen there. We didn't even know until his funeral that he could speak 7 languages. We did know before that that he was a highly decorated officer, and he always pretended these came from his earlier work in the evacuation of Malta.

There are consequences to the misuse of free speech coupled with the misuse of power, especially the power to oppress, and social media has enabled a lot of "free" hate speech that may have far reaching consequences in the future. There is little thought being given to those possible consequences, at least that's my impression from some of what I have read in this thread.

Thank God I am old. I don't want to see where this may lead.

Good find. He's a Holocaust Denier too.

http://www.whas11.com/news/local/holoca ... /514949821

Who said it was?

I certainly didn't. The Armenian Genocide is right there in my far-from-comprehensive-but-quite-sufficiently-depressing list, in fact. Which is on this very thread:

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=359872&p=7812649#p7812649

And - moving along to the presupposition tucked neatly inside that assertion - why does the failure to mention one atrocity make it unacceptable to deplore another? That reasoning is on a level with "your answers are wrong because the pencil you used isn't a Ticonderoga." Sorry; no.

Finally, let's address the use of the term "free speech" as a pretext for advocating hate speech. Yes, hate speech is protected under the First Amendment; that does not make it value neutral. The First Amendment does not speak to values on that level. It's up to us - "we the People" - to do so.

Which is precisely where the "politeness, decency, and good taste" come into it.

Stealth advocacy for hatred is simply not acceptable. None of the euphemisms and derailing tactics obscure the underlying intent. Words do not exist in a vacuum, and exhortatory speech most certainly does not.

Here's a short piece by a Constitutional lawyer on the subject. Free Speech and Hate Speech

Edit in: for future reference, a short article summarizing tactics used in verbal and psychological abuse, most of which focus on sabotaging the target's ability to think, oddly enough. Making said list quite relevant in any situation in which the use of reason is under assault. Following the intro, there's a fairly comprehensive list. (I was looking for something by Lundy Bancroft, but this will have to do.)

The Sabotage of Reason

My aunt has a number on her arm. She was a child who survived the camps. There are living, breathing survivors out there. Go speak to them, and see if afterwards, you are compelled to defend deniers. I have listened to the stories, straight from the mouths of survivors. All of whom have/had numbers on their arms. How does a denier explain away tangible proof? I recall, quite vividly, the first stories I would hear, of the fear of being lead to the shower building, thinking it was their time to be gassed, as they would hear the Nazis speaking and laughing about it. Holding on to their children in the showers, saying goodbye to them in their minds. Standing naked, being stared down, humiliated, dehumanized, in the freezing cold, their hearts racing, holding back tears to save their children from grief and sorrow in those moments. I choose to defend survivors and their truths. The sheer terror and hell they lived through. Not merely, in the camps, but for the rest of their days on this earth. They have experienced a lifetime of mental and physical illnesses, throughout their lives, while spreading good throughout the world. It is disheartening and disconcerting to read comments made by defenders of deniers. But, I am keeping my focus on all of the positive, good, loving, kind, charitable deeds that survivors of the holocaust have spread across all cultures, races, religions, political beliefs, and all of humanity, throughout the world.

Last edited by Britte on 06 Feb 2018, 1:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yep...I've known people with numbers, too.

I had a friend as a kid whose father was a concentration camp survivor.

No, I'm not putting the Jewish Holocaust (Shoah) over all the other genocides....not at all. Even amid the Shoah, there was a concurrent genocide of other ethnicities which killed at least any many non-Jewish people as Jewish people. I I

I would say the same things about people who deny the Rwandan Genocide, for example.

Have you noticed that many of the "Holocaust deniers" wear certain sorts of uniforms?

And those things are absolutely horrific. However, in light of these stories and many thousands like them, do you think it likely that a Holocaust denier is going to convince anyone outside of some fringe crackpots that it's all just smoke and mirrors cooked up by the Zionist overlords? Colour me doubtful.

That being said, even though he's a crackpot, I'm told David Irvings crazy-person zeal actually produced some snippets of better-than-before information. I can't tell, not one of my greater areas of interests. But if we assume that to be true, then we are better off with that better understanding than we are without it.






Auntblabby seemed to repeatedly move from the question about whether X is legal towards whether it's decent. Seems rather irrelevant when we're discussing laws against hate speech.


Do let's get one thing absolutely crystal clear; I do not advocate for what might be called "hate speech".It's not something I think people previously disinclined to do should consider as a new hobby. The only reason I defend it is because it's the necessary byproduct of a belief in free speech as a fundamental principle that needs to be applied universally. I'd rather have that unpopular opinion than be a demonstrable hypocrite.

Great, so you have that all figured out for America. How about the other 30 countries involved? The one's that don't fall under the U.S. constitution?


Also, your constitutional lawyer seems to agree with me:

"The Supreme Court’s answer to this particular question is that even hate speech contains political ideas, however horrible these ideas may be. When you regulate such speech, you are also regulating ideas. Think of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and forbidden words. The Supreme Court has also made clear that just because speech offends people, this is never a justification under the First Amendment for punishing it. Furthermore, we are justifiably suspicious of government when it attempts to regulate speech and ideas. After all, government may have its own political agenda in regulating hate speech—which groups would be protected against hate speech and which not?

Finally, and perhaps most important, think about how the marketplace of ideas functions: even if hateful ideas are communicated, the theory (hope?) is that counter-speech will emerge to rebut it and to fight it. In other words, more speech rather than less is the remedy."


The reason I asked about the Holocaust vs. the Armenian Genocide was that people get jailed for questioning the Holocaust, but a person questioning the Armenian Genocide hosts a popular news/commentary stream the Young Turks with rather significantly less controversy.




Is this supposed to be some sort of accusation? Because if so, I don't appreciate it.

I see it as a ban on dangerous propaganda.

As a member I am glad that the owner of Wrong Planet sets limits to what is acceptable to post here. I don't think defending the rights of holocaust deniers was ever what Alex had in mind when he set the website up, and personally I don't want to read it, so I am out.

The question of is hate speech free speech is legally settled for the foreseeable future in the United States. The question of should it be is not. There is an American expression "the price of freedom". The "price" was originally meant to describe solders being killed or badly wounded in wartime. So the "price" most certainly describes a lot more then being offended. The "price" of allowing Nazis free speech has been demonstrably horrific, a lot more then allowing shouting fire in a theater. So curtailing Nazis free speech rights seems a prime example of "but in this case we need to make an exception". But I reverse the question of where does this lead? What about a law curtailing the right to criticize Applied Behavioral Analysis or curing autism or describing such as hate speech? An argument has often been made that if those of us who feel that way get our way that people with autism and their carers will be subjected a life of misery and early death, that peer reviewed science agrees. Best to nip the dangerous concept of neurodiversity in the bud. I am diagnosed and Wrong Planet exists because people were allowed to express unpopular ideas considered dangerous.