Holocaust deniers and laws against hate speech
Holocaust deniers, in their attempt to depict themselves as the victims of — rather than perpetrators of — ethnic hate, like to point to cases in which Holocaust deniers have been sent to prison. The way Holocaust deniers frame it, of course, is that the Jew propagandists have pummled the world into creating Jew laws to prevent brave and honest investigation into Jew lies, i.e. the Holocaust, and those who have gone to jail are brave and honest researchers, true and objective and golden intellects perfectly untainted by anti-Semitism and blah blah blah.
It is true that Holocaust deniers are, in some countries, being prosecuted and even jailed under hate speech laws for passing along wack-o-bird conspiracy theories. That’s a unique situation. Why aren't other wack-o-bird conspiracy theories, every bit as fact-free as Holocaust denial, considered illegal on these countries?
Well, think about it from the point of ethnic hate speech. If you claim that NASA faked the Apollo 11 moonlanding, what ethnic group have you defamed? None.
If you claim that 9/11 was an inside job, controlled demolition or space beam or baby H-bomb or whatever, what ethnic group have you defamed? None.
If you claim that the Sandy Hook shooting was a big governent false-flag operation to encourage tough new gun laws, what ethnic group have you defamed? None.
If you claim that Paul McCartney really died in 1966, and the Beatles replaced him with a lookalike, what ethnic group have you defamed? None.
But if you claim that the Holocaust was a Jewish fraud by which the dishonest, conniving Jews have flimflammed the world by pretending to have been the victims of a much, much larger crime than was actually committed against them, then, yes indeedy, you have defamed an ethnic group. And you have done it enough to fall afoul of some nations’ hate speech laws.
The history of Holocaust denial as a movement is the history of a hate group trying its damnedest to sell themselves — to the public, at least — as if they weren’t. And there are nations who, recognizing the direct and unbreakable ties between Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism, have explicitly made laws against these lies. Not to protect Jewish secrets, but because they decided racist lies of this sort are bad for their society.
The real issue about hate speech laws is not whether Holocaust denial is hate speech. It plainly is; this board overflows with examples. The real issue is whether or not laws against hate speech should exist. As a fan of the First Amendment, I personally don’t think they should; it turns the kind of moronic cranks you see here — who would otherwise would live out empty lives in pure wack-o-bird obscurity — into martyrs to free speech.
But I also recognize that each country has the right to set its own laws its own way. Most of the nations who have laws against Holocaust denial were either part of the Nazi Reich or occupied by the Nazi Reich, so I can understand that their sympathies might pull in the other direction than mine on these laws. Hitler started with nothing but hate speech, and ended up hauling their Jewish neighbors away to be murdered. So painting these laws with the standard denier boilerplate — "they are panicked efforts by The Jews to keep people from finding out The Truth” and blah blah — well, that’s just plainly in variance with the facts. Sorta like Holocaust denial itself.