By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Forums - General - Anyone else find it odd that Holocaust denial will land you in jail?

The Ghost of RubangB said:
A few years ago they even threw a guy in jail for teaching his dog to seig heil all the time. Then they couldn't get the dog to stop and it was hilarious.


Yeah, this shouldn't be illegal. It should be society shunning those idiots, not the government locking them up.

/thread

 



Around the Network

The holocaust was a terrible thing.

That said, I do recall a few years back the Oxford university debate society got a famous holocaust denier in as a guest speaker for a debate. The papers here went insane saying how he should not have been allowed to support his beliefs because they were wrong.

Now forgive me if I'm wrong but isn't the sole objective of a debate to have two opposing sides? If a load of people say one side does not deserve a voice then it is just going to be a load of people agreeing, which is not a fun debate.

Bottom line: They are glaringly wrong, but I support their rights to say it.



I remember reading some holocaust revisionist arguements.

They claim....
Auschwitz was basicaly a jewish hoax. The deaths were caused by disease, and the starvation by the allies bombing the supply routes late in the war. There was no gassing to death of Jews, the gas used was to kill lice. If it was poison gas, then the guards would have had to wear gas masks before going in to drag out the bodies, something that witnesses never claimed. The cremation ovens were too small and few in number to cremate more then a dozen or so bodies a day.



Yet, today, America's leaders are reenacting every folly that brought these great powers [Russia, Germany, and Japan] to ruin -- from arrogance and hubris, to assertions of global hegemony, to imperial overstretch, to trumpeting new 'crusades,' to handing out war guarantees to regions and countries where Americans have never fought before. We are piling up the kind of commitments that produced the greatest disasters of the twentieth century.
 — Pat Buchanan – A Republic, Not an Empire

How can you possibly deny the holocaust? Did 11 million people (6 million of them jews) just disappear from the Earth? How can they think disease did all this.



Yeah. It's odd... but it happens.

Free Speech in the US doesn't mean the same thing as Free Speech does in the rest of the world.

In the US.  It's say whatever you want unless it panics people to the point of where someone dies.

Just about everywhere else it's "Say whatever you want unless it's going to offend a lot of people."

Hate Speech laws are problematic.



Around the Network

It does bring up a good point...

Should you be allowed to tray and change history though speech?

For example, if Bill Gates thought it would be fun to use his money to try and change the fact that slaves ever existed in the US. He ran ads, made movies, published books... used all his resourced to try and change history.

Should that be legal?



The holocaust is singled out because of the heavy Jewish influence everywhere in the West. Even more so in Germany. They get to have these laws pushed forward that are ridiculous...
Of course, the Holocaust did happen, and it was terrible. The reason these crazy people are allowed to say this stuff is because there is a little evidence supporting that 6 million jews did not die. For example, the Red Cross was allowed to bring food to people in the camps throughout WWII. It was the only organization allowed to do so. The Red Cross took a census of the populations, and it came out to something like 2.7 million jews throughout WWII.
How true is this? I don't know. If you want just google holocaust hoax and im sure youll get tons of websites...



 

 

I think it is pretty stupid to deny it but I don't think it should land you in jail. What is next? People that think the Earth is flat or center for Solar System will be put in jail also?



TheRealMafoo said:
It does bring up a good point...

Should you be allowed to tray and change history though speech?

For example, if Bill Gates thought it would be fun to use his money to try and change the fact that slaves ever existed in the US. He ran ads, made movies, published books... used all his resourced to try and change history.

Should that be legal?

Why not?  Everyone does it already.  There are parts of history that are broadly skipped over... and other parts of history intentionally manipulated just to stop other problems.  (Like say Alexander the Great's Macedonia.)

That's always been the risk of saying something stupid.  Stupid people may believe you.  If Bill Gates tried all that a lot of people would well call him out on it and it would fail.



^Like in US history books that have about 2-4 sentences talking about the Vikings discovering America first then having 2-5 pages on Christopher Columbus.