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Comment by pmlnr | Hacker News Reader

> But watching the events of the past few years unfold I am no longer convinced that this would really make the world a better place.

One hard truth: it would have been enough to look at European laws made after WWII, and adopt them in the US as well in the first place.

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"In Europe, Speech Is an Alienable Right: [the European Court of Human Rights] upheld an Austrian woman’s conviction for disparaging the Prophet Muhammad."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...

Is this really what you want?

"She held “seminars” in which she presented her view that Muhammad was indeed a child molester. Dominant Islamic traditions hold that Muhammad’s third wife, Aisha, was 6 at the time of their marriage and 9 at its consummation. Muhammad was in his early 50s. The Austrian woman repeated these claims, and the Austrian court ruled that she had to pay 480 euros or spend 60 days in the slammer. The ECHR ruled that Austria had not violated her rights."

So it appears that she set out to attack Islam and then received a relative slap-on-the-wrist for it. Neither of those affect the principles, but still....

There should be nothing illegal about “attacking” a religion with words, all the moreso if those words are factually accurate.

Going out of your way to piss other people off is a poor idea.

You may feel that it should be legal (at least until it affects you). Other people may feel otherwise.

All of those things are true and are common knowledge among those with even a modicum of knowledge about the religion.

All religions are frankly horrific at one point or another. And all of the countries (that I'm aware of) that are officially atheist are rather unpleasant, I think you might agree. Everyone's family tree is not an acyclic graph, and contains some ugly people. All of this up, in detail, is true, and everyone knows it. Having "seminars" on it simply makes it a club to be used to beat on someone you don't like. (Doing that here will likely get Dang to rough me up, perhaps even before I have pissed you off. And rightfully so; see the guidelines.)

The bottom line is, the Moslems I've known have been better people than anyone I've met who believes rights and truth are the only limits on what they would say.

She said Muhammad was a pederast, which is correct, according to the Quran.

Out of curiosity, what do she plan to do with that information? Why did she say it?

According to the Bible God "came over" a 12 year old Mary, sneaking into her bedroom at night like some creepy uncle, to "pop her cherry" before her newly wed husband Joseph could.

The child of that came to be known as.. Jesus.

Which should be a stark reminder that all Abrahamic religions have their roots based in such absurd and ancient practices that none of them hold up much to scrutiny under modern standards except when framed solely around an entirely fictional "Good guy miracle making baby Jesus".

Here's the actual judgement from ECHR: [1]

It is an interesting reading - it gives a very different impression than the article.

According to the document, she claimed Muhammad was a pedophile in a series of seminars "Basics of Islam" that pretended to be objective courses but were organised by a far-right political party.

The judgement also mentions that saying something offensive or untrue on purpose and then claiming "it was just my opinion" doesn't protect you from repercussions, that you are allowed to criticise current practices of religion but not on bases of what someone allegedly done hundreds of years ago when societal standards were different, and that fine 480 Euro is on the low end of a range and not disproportionate.

So as I understand it, a far right person was deliberately shit-stirring in a propaganda seminar and got slap on the wrist (fine of ~ 15 % median wage) to be more careful next time.

[1]: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{"itemid":["002-12171"]}

EDIT: the link doesn't seem to work properly, you'll have to copy-paste it.

> but not on bases of what someone allegedly done hundreds of years ago when societal standards were different

Guess we can't legally criticize people for owning slaves now.

Oh I'm sure you can. The ruling doesn't say that.

The ruling says that when you do it in context of pretend-seminar that's far right propaganda, and you do it mostly to to anger and hurt people to divide society - then when you get fine of 480 EUR your human rights are not violated.

> The ruling doesn't say that.

Your post does however.

Interestingly, "typical European Free Speech laws" are both more and less restricting than you would see in the US - there's more limits on harmful ideologies and violence but less restrictions on sex and nudity, for example.

Of course it's not just constitutions and laws - movie ratings are not de iure laws but work that way de facto - and EU limits other things, like advertisement of pharmaceuticals.

Comparing the different approaches needs finesse and not just "free US vs non-free Europe".

> there's more limits on harmful ideologies and violence but less restrictions on sex and nudity, for example.

Also more mindful about privacy, in many EU countries one can't just doxx people, not even criminals.

A popular example is this story about a Swiss parliament secretary who got fired for posting nudes from her workplace.

EU outlets censored her face and left the nipple [0], US and AUS outlets showed her face but censored her nipple [1], while the British Mirror pixelated both [2].

[0] https://images05.xn--sterreich-z7a.at/sex_01.jpg/rl2015_arti...

[1] https://www.9news.com.au/world/swiss-secretary-posted-nude-s...

[2] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/secretary-working-s...

What about the lessons of Europe before WWII? The lessons of fascism and authoritarian communism arising in heavily censored states without the right to free expression? The lessons of fascists and communists enacting further censorship and surveillance as a means of enforcing their power? The lessons of fascism and communism corrupting well-meaning laws, laws initially curtailing civil liberties for the safety of society as a whole?

What do you mean by “European”? And what laws are you talking about?

Does this include the laws made in East Berlin or other communist countries? Do you think Le Pen didn’t get into power because of free speech laws? It seems to me like she just didn’t have quite enough support to get in.

What about the laws made in post-communist countries like Poland or Hungary or Belarus? (Or Lithuania or Latvia?)

Perhaps you mean countries like Sweden or Norway? It does at least seems to make the news there when some neo-nazi is punished for what American prosecutors would have to consider free speech.

I thought it's obvious from the context, but examples include denying the holocaust being a crime.

I don't see why a future collapse into tyranny of a country in Europe would have to involve a revival of the symbols of any particular defeated regime. If they needed symbols for propaganda purposes, they'd draw from legal symbol pools, like Roman culture. (It "worked" once...) More likely, they would draw from contemporary symbols that already had positive sentiment associated with them.

The point being, it's not clear whether German speech laws are frosting or cake. If the German people wanted to destroy Europe and themselves, that would be enough whether they did it with the symbols of a defeated dictator or not. People point to European speech laws as examples of reasonable protections, but I'm not sure if they're stopping anything. The real bar against the collapse of liberal democracy is the fact that the people living in those countries don't want it to happen, and understand why it would be bad for them.

> More likely, they would draw from contemporary symbols that already had positive sentiment associated with them.

Yes I think so. In fact, that's precisely what the nazis did with the swastika.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_use_of_the_swastika_in...

> I don't see why a future collapse into tyranny of a country in Europe would have to involve a revival of the symbols of any particular defeated regime.

In the US, at least, the current (seemingly unsuccessful) slouch towards tyranny definitely does involve the revival symbols of a particular defeated regime: the Confederacy (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/us/Kevin-Seefried-arreste...).

Though it might not really be a "revival," since the symbols were never really killed off in the first place. A lot of the flashpoints building up to this one involved removal of these symbols.

It might also be worth pointing out that those flashpoints were originally put into place deliberately, in a mostly failing attempt to bring the country back together, and then left in place until they went off.

Symbols retain power for a long time. That's why we're not seeing a swastika revival in interior design or anything like that, even in places where the Nazis did not exist. Another good example is the U.S. confederate flag, which only existed officially for a few years and was decided against by a bloody and brutal military loss. However, it's retained enough significance that someone just pranced through the U.S. Capitol with it. If it doesn't have power as a symbol, why not pick a new flag?

Obviously banning a symbol is not going to prevent future violent movements by itself, but it also seems wise to not leave still-hot embers of symbolic power lying around for the next would-be demagogue to fan back into a fire. People trying to pick up those old symbols are giving a very strong signal about their ideology.

I agree that the main bulwark of a society against falling into fascism is its people's memory of the past and willingness to prevent recurrence of such episodes though.

The best example is that right after the holocaust and "never that again", half of the western political spectrum turned a blind eye to the various genocides and crimes against humanity happening in the communist block. Clearly no lesson was learnt. The two great totalitarian ideologies of the XX century have a lot in common. These laws that target one but ignore the other are I think at best misguided if not cynical. The French equivalent of those laws was proposed by the French communist party...

> I don't see why a future collapse into tyranny of a country in Europe would have to involve a revival of the symbols of any particular defeated regime

It wouldn't have to. But having watched Hitler sell the idea that Germany was being unjustly punished for Jewish lies a generation earlier, they drew the conclusion that [West] Germany was quite likely to see would-be tyrants rallying around a Lost Cause narrative and that vulnerability to this was a bigger problem than a lack of diversity in holocaust historiography. Or more straightforwardly, they figured German democracy faced a more imminent threat from neo-Nazism than a slippery slope towards an Official State Version of History. A view which seems to have persisted even after reunification with the East which had considerable recent experience with the pervasive censorship involved in promoting its Official State Version of History.

That's an interesting fact that puts the issue into a light I hadn't considered. Fortunately, the literal "lost cause" language of the American Civil War has already run its course, caused its damage (up to and including a presidential assassination), and the country has survived. Would banning confederate symbols have prevented the assassination of Lincoln? Probably not, to be honest. I wonder if it would have prevented anything.

I don't see it preventing Lincoln's assassination, no. Jim Crow laws? Possibly not, and there were better ways of preventing them. But we wouldn't be seeing angry mobs fighting over statues today if they'd never been put up and we wouldn't have seen a mass membership second Klan if the first one hadn't been ruled constitutionally protected shortly after it had been forced to disband

The post Civil War US is an experiment in taking the precise opposite stance to postwar Germany: positively encouraging the losing side to romanticise their cause so long as their revisionist history downplays the slavery bit. Some northerner presidents even paid tribute to General Lee. I think it's difficult to argue reconciliation and race relations have been helped the resulting counter narrative that it was actually a pretty noble thing to defend their way of life against other states who only pretended to be concerned about negroes though.

I guess my question is really what the effect of such laws was? Obviously there has been general prosperity and peace between the Western European countries but this may have been due to other reasons.

There doesn’t seem to be much more resilience in the population to the kind rhetoric we’ve seen recently in America. Indeed, there seem to be many parallels. Maybe the laws helped but we see less difference now as Europe after the war started “further behind”?

It’s certainly true that holocaust denial is illegal in Germany. It isn’t, for example, illegal in the U.K. (there was a libel case lost by David Irving against someone who called him a Holocaust denier where he tried to prove he was a legitimate historian however), and there are surveys showing that some percentage of the population don’t really believe it (but maybe this is the fact that for even seemingly trivial survey questions, some proportion of people give the wrong answer). I suppose here I would just point out that Europe is a big place.

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