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Comment by throwaway8879 | Hacker News Reader

Are you allowed to deny the Holocaust?

Are you allowed to slander in the US? Are you allowed to publish Child pronography? Are you allowed to publish Obscene materials (as judged by the average citizen)? Are you allowed to utter words that might incite someone to fight you? [1] Some of it depends on state law, but the 1st amendment does not protect any of those [1].

Bottom line: No country has absolute freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is one of the basic liberties, and it's balanced against others. Different countries come to different conclusions on the balance. Generally speaking Germany tends more towards Freedom than the US according to comprehensive surveys [2].

Specifically When it comes to denying history, citing the US Supreme Court: "[There is] no constitutional value in false statements of fact".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

[2] https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world-2018-table-cou...

If you can provide scientific proof that it didnt happen, yes. Otherwise no

You can't do that, it's impossible.

You'd have to go with something like "show that the massive decline in the Jewish population of Nazi Germany was by means other than genocide".

Which is also impossible, but due to truth instead of poor epistemology.

Ehhhh, you're "not even" allowed to investigate it, so this one doesn't really work

This is false. I personally know academics who study genocide who do serious research on the Holocaust in Europe.

It's just that these people are dingbats who have decided ahead of time to deny the Holocaust and desperately search for any shred of broken evidence for this claim.

No, most EU countries have laws in some form that prohibit Holocaust denial. But as with any country that has the rights to freedom of speech, these rights are inevitably balanced and restricted by other laws.

This is a good thing, because while freedom of speech is important, the general wellbeing of the population and preventing people getting hurt is important as well. It is my belief for example that allowing racist remark under the banner of free speech, hurts more than it helps. It leads to an overall negative impact in the wellbeing of the population. I think the same balance was considered when prohibiting holocaust denial.

Question: why use a throwaway account?

I'm aware of this. You may think it's a good thing, and I'm inclined to agree that for a peaceful and civilized society, this balance is definitely a necessity. However, there may be many amongst us who think it's not a good thing. I don't prefer one over another anyway, but just pointing out that absolute free speech isn't a thing anywhere. I suppose the US comes as close to it as possible. This is my regular HN account.

I disagree, the US has plenty of restrictions on free speech, and the constitutional guarantees are no stronger there than in other places.

It's an image of itself that the US likes to project though.

There's very little speech that's actually illegal in the US. You can't tell outright lies about someone with the intention of hurting them professionally (although it's still a civil matter, and when I say "lies", I mean specifics, e.g. you can't claim in an article that someone dropped out of college if they didn't) and you can't say anything that has a high probability of causing immediate physical harm (e.g. you can't order somebody to shoot someone). That's basically it. When you start talking about publishing photographs or recorded audio, things get a bit more complicated because of copyright laws, and obviously CP is illegal, but strictly in terms of speech, online or off, there are almost no restrictions here.

On the other side of the argument, I think many would ask where do you draw the line? And who draws that line? It seems like the majority of the people I know feel like it's better not to draw that line at all and instead focus on teaching people why these arguments are wrong. The failing of our education system is another (bad) problem entirely.

Ex: what if the government one day decides that criticizing the government is too offensive?

This is what I'm concerned about too. Where I'm from, offending those in power/religion/etc will get you into a whole lot of trouble. When I was young, maybe two decades ago, there was an inkling of hope that perhaps one day my people would follow the Western ideal(at least to an extent), when it comes to free of speech, human rights and so on.

Unfortunately, I don't see this happening anymore. I don't want to sound gloomy, but the web back in the day had a completely different feel to it. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I can feel it's vibrancy dying. Maybe it started a while ago.

Anyway, there's still hope with decentralization and such. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see.

> the general wellbeing of the population and preventing people getting hurt is important as well

I fail to see how speech does hurts anyone. Would you mind elaborating? Should it not be solely the responsibility of whoever hears said speech to decide on whether to act on it? Does censorship of any shape or form not actually hurt the ones that wanted to listen to said speech the most?

Sure. UK crackpot David Irving has been denying the holocaust since the 80s. There’s a drama on Netflix about him called Denial

Perhaps you forgot about this?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/20/austria.thefar...

Well I didn’t know. But now I do, so thanks.

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