This was further shaped by the experience that the nazi rise to power was propelled by widespread popular support both in Germany and elsewhere, despite the millions that died in World War I just a couple of decades earlier.
In comparison, the limited harm done to people who have their speech restricted is seen as a relatively minor tradeoff.
The same goes for holocaust denial, those who deny the death of millions of people risk repeating history, thus making their 'opinion' dangerous for society at large.
As to the risk of repeating history: Anyone positing the holocaust didn't happen is competing in a marketplace of ideas where the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary. Not to mention fierce competition from the European equivalent to K-12 education.
It seems to me akin to criminalizing street vendors selling hot dogs made of ( sterilized, to minimize health counterarguments ) toe jam and ear wax. Very very few people are going to become customers. Except it's much worse, because you are criminalizing ideas.
Are you not? It would seem to pretty clearly defame everyone who have made claims to have witnessed holocaust and been in concentration camps. And in fact, holocaust denial is often explicitly framed in a way where defamation is a substantial part of the intent. So yes, you are harming living human beings even if we ignore the
> As to the risk of repeating history: Anyone positing the holocaust didn't happen is competing in a marketplace of ideas where the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary. Not to mention fierce competition from the European equivalent to K-12 education.
The rise of the nazis happened in a situation where it was competing in a marketplace of ideas where a substantial majority of the population o the countries involved had first hand experience with the effects of World War I, and despite that the nazi's still succeeded in getting enough support in elections to be able to form an elected government.
The nazi rise to power was a horrific demonstration of just how easy it is to ignore history even when the knowledge is widespread. I'm not even decided on whether or not these bans are necessary, but not out of any kind of fantasy belief that these kind of ideas can't gain support again.
There's more than enough surveys demonstrating scary numbers of people doubt facts that are disputed by far less dedicated crackpots than holocaust denials to the extent that it is hardly a defensible position to claim that current education systems are sufficient to prevent obviously wrong ideas from gaining substantial support.
> It seems to me akin to criminalizing street vendors selling hot dogs made of ( sterilized, to minimize health counterarguments ) toe jam and ear wax.
And that is, indeed, likely illegal pretty much everywhere and certainly in Europe. If your product does not prominently state that it is toe jam and ear wax, and in any way present it as hot dogs, you'd go down for misleading advertising and likely for fraud. And regardless of that, chances are high you'd be on the hook for health and safety violations. So that's not a very good example.
In that respect laws specifically targetting a very specific set of lies, that also happen to be defamation of a large group of people (and so potentially actionable based on other laws in many cases anyway, including in many cases in countries without laws against Holocaust denial) is one of the most targeted, limited such restrictions around.
The entire lesson of the Nazis is that awful things can happen when the State appoints itself as the unquestionable arbiter of truth and refuses to allow open discussion about its own dogma. Freedom of expression simply does not exist when governments have the power to rule facts into law by fiat and render them illegal to question or dispute.
You can't believe a country like Germany with one of the strongest cultural and scientific traditions could have accept genocide of such magnitude.
Maybe it should have a sunset provision for the sake of free speech, although I don't think you'll find many MPs signing up to sponsor that bill.
Questioning the existence of the Holodomor, for example, even though it conservatively resulted in the deaths of 7 million people in one single year, more than the whole "6 million jews in 6 years" thing, is not illegal.
In fact most people in Europe are blissfully unaware of the Holodomor at all. Or of Stalin's and Mao's murdered millions.
Strange, yes?
For those people acknowledging the holodomor and giving it the same status of the holocaust or even that of the armenian genocide means admitting they spent most of their youth defending mass murderers.
Also, it is illegal in France to deny the communist mass atrocities, just as it is illegal to deny the nazi ones.
What are you talking about?
And got a link to that? because all I could find was a petition from eastern european countries to the UE asking for penalties on deniers of the crimes of communism.
It has a law from 1990 which criminalises denying those crimes against humanity covered by the Nuremberg Charter, however that only dealt with trying the Axis powers, so doesn't cover the USSR.
There is then the law that got brought in in 2012 that makes it a crime to deny any genocide recognised as such as by the state. However that law got struck down by a court, and also they might count what happened in the USSR as a mass atrocity rather than a genocide, so it might not have covered it.
edit - if you are going to post on the subject of the legal positions on political denial of events, then it helps to do some research to check that you are not actually talking bollocks yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Holodo...
Or are you talking about something else?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial
France and Germany, for example, has laws that while containing bits and pieces that are specific to nazism, also targets genocide and crimes against humanity in general.
Switzerland and Portugal are examples of countries with laws that don't explicitly mention Holocaust denial but where many forms of Holocaust denial is covered by laws placing restrictions on denial of genocide in general.
It is a bit confusing as it looks wider until you consider the condition "such as they are defined by Article 6 of the statute of the international tribunal military annexed in the agreement of London of August 8, 1945". That tribunal explicitly was only able to rule on acts carried out by Axis countries, so this law only applies to those acts specifically.
Also, "I've looked it up real quick but I can't see" is hardly the way to approach this if you think you have even the slightest point.
Even dating back to Odysseus, did he actually meet the sirens and the cyclops and see his men turned into pigs? Probably not, but it's a damn good story. You'd have to prove malicious intent before anyone could entertain the idea of folk stories causing damage to anyone.