Finland to criminalise Holocaust denial
Finland to criminalise Holocaust denial
yle.fi
Finland to criminalise Holocaust denial
Let's say better late than never.
116 comments
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Fucking GOOD.
Hopefully we'll also have laws against denying the holocaust israel is inflicting on palestine TOO.
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Whoa. That sort of thinking requires nuance. We don’t do that here.
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Maybe 50+ years after every palestinian is murdered.
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That's a conflict of interests.
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Good, but add Armenian and Gaza genocide denial to the list too. Or make it genocide denial in general.
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According to the bill, denial of the Holocaust or other serious international crimes, such as those defined under the statutes of the International Criminal Court, would be punishable by a fine or a prison sentence of up to two years.
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I fucking love Finland.
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I need people to pay attention to the popularity of denial of the mass killings by Nazis of transgender people. One of the doctors who performed the first vaginoplasty, on Dora Richter, did also go on to participate in brutal abuses in a concentration camp. Like a dung beetle, a group is rolling around this tiny kernel of truth, coalescing in a ball of shit that ends up like this.
There’s something so vile about this. It has to be deliberate.
DuckDuckGo and Google have always had at least one denialist result in every single Google search I have made about the Holocaust. Back in 2010 - in high school, I remember reading half of a book online which seemed to be the memoirs of an American World War 2 soldier, than abruptly realizing that he was starting to say some really strange things. Never anything quite wrong, but off. I did a little googling, a bit more research, and then started running into names like David Irving.
It’s just such a damn difficult problem to fix. They are insidious. Deniers know that the Holocaust happened. They know that trans people were brutalized and massacred by the Nazis, whether you feel like the “purpose” of the mass killings makes it a genocide or not.
They don’t care. They want stupid people to believe it, because then you can get the stupid people to look the other way. To laugh at people pointing out the patterns.
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One of the doctors who performed the first vaginoplasty, on Dora Richter, did also go on to participate in brutal abuses in a concentration camp.
TIL, design of the freezing experiments and he later wrote on them. Worked at the Charité at the time of doing the vaginaplasty, from what I can tell seems to have been a star surgeon. Surgery attracts psychopaths, he probably could not give less of a fuck about the ethics of anything but was interested in the technical aspects. Dora Richter's surgery was a joint effort with Ludwig Levy-Lenz, generally credited as the father of sex reassignment surgery and working at the Hirschfeld Institute itself. Not terribly surprising they collaborated with the Charité on a novel procedure, it was and is one of the very best hospitals in the world. Not indicted in the Doctor's trials, you probably do not want to read up on what those people did. I'm serious.
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JD Vance will be pissed.
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All holocausts?
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According to the bill, denial of the Holocaust or other serious international crimes, such as those defined under the statutes of the International Criminal Court, would be punishable by a fine or a prison sentence of up to two years.
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Interested to see how this plays out.
Prohibiting Holocaust denial is relatively easy, because we have the benefit of it being history, and we have an ample historical record and a clear consensus among historians. Plus, no one can credibly claim that the legislatures were not thinking of the Holocaust when they wrote the law.
However, how are they planning on applying the law to contemporary international crimes? People make accusations of them all the time. And the other side always denied them. And the actual facts are generally obscured by a massive fog of war that can take years to see through, if ever.
There is also plenty of history where the answer is less clear. Do we really want courts involved in determining if the 15th century conquest of the Canary Islands counts as a genocide. Or if some unnamed mass grave an archeologists unearths was caused by an invading army killing all of a city's adult males, or simply a burial site for fallen soldiers?
What about the book of Esther. Taken literally, it ends with what is arguably a genocide committed by the Jews against the Persians. However, outside of some Israeli hardliners reinterpreting that ending for contemporary political purposes, it is widely understood that that ending is a literary device, not a literal telling of events. Did my Hebrew school teachers violate this law when they told me we didn't actually kill 75,000 Persians? [0].
What about the ongoing genocide against white Afrikaners going on in South Africa today? Am I violating the law when I say that genocide is not real, and just something the rightwing in the US invented for domestic political purposes. If the US has such a law, could Trump use it to jail his political opponents who criticized his recent stunt of accepting 60 Afrikaner refugees?
Do we defer to an international body like the ICC or ICJ? In that case, you have just outlawed disagreeing with those bodies.
The UN has repeatedly found it to be a massive human rights violation. Does disagreeing with those findings violate this new law?
[0] As an aside, secular historians generally consider all of Esther to be fiction.
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How many have there been? As far as I know it's "The Holocaust".
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Pretty sure they were talking about genocide in general, not just one genocide.
Genocide is a constant, ongoing foundation of capitalism, colonialism, etc. Sometimes it happens in Europe, sometimes in Palestine... Sometimes they genocide almost all of the inhabitants of USA, Australia, etc.
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well - there's an ongoing major genocide happening in Gaza that unfortunately no longer pales in comparison. It's not up there yet, and let's hope it never gets there, but I definitely see the point of the question of the previous comment.
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Lots.
A holocaust is a religious animal sacrifice that is completely consumed by fire.
The Holocaust occurred in WW2.
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It should be illegal everywhere. Germany knows how to deal with Nazis (well, unless they're part of a party)
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Others were the ones who dealt with Nazis not Germany.
Let's not whitewash the forced compliance of Germany with what was imposed on them by the nations which had to fight them to stop them as some kind of achievement of Germany.
Germany kept most of the Nazis around - not the "upper management" but certainly the "middle management" and below - doing the jobs in the State appartus that they did before.
Probably explains both the rise of the AfD and how still now after Israel has been for over a year fully and unashamedly acting in a way painfully similar to Nazism - just with different ubermenschen and untermenschen (or as Israeli politicians say it, "chosen people" and "human animals") - almost the entirety of the German political class continues to unwaveringly support them, overtly because of the dominant ethnicity of that nation, a purely Racist rationale.
Change from the inside changes mindsets, change imposed from the outside mainly changes the visible expressions of the mindsets rather than the mindsets themselves.
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Probably explains both the rise of the AfD and how still now after Israel has been for over a year fully and unashamedly acting in a way painfully similar to Nazism
The far- right has been on the rise all over Europe, not just Germany.
Over a year? Are you fucking kidding me? They've been acting that way for decades.
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Good, now criminalise Genocide denial.
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They did. This is unequivocally a good thing
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you will apply this law with the same rigour to every genocide right? right?
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Based! Fuck Nazis
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Common nordic W
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It's not "late". They're doing this in support of the current genocide.
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Can you back this claim with evidence please?
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Free speech != Hate speech. Holocaust denial is hate speech. End of the story.
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Just like in Canada, you're free to say as you please as long as it doesn't harm or hinder someone else freedom of expression. Hate speech is (often) not an acceptable use.
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Surely this won't ever be abused to silence/punish Palestinian supporters or anyone critical of Isreal. That never happens.
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I'msorry, but legally speaking that is not the case. In the US, which specifies freedom speech 'as is' (cited)
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
the Supreme court decided that hate speech is, in most cases protected (see Imminent Lawless Action test, Brandenburg V Ohio)
Of course, all nations aren't the US and for instance my country, Czech rep, allows limiting free speech, but it outlines this specific reasoning in its Bill of Rights, specifically §17(4) of 2/1993 Coll. Said Article says that 'For the reason of protecting democracy, the law can limit free speech..' and I assume the Finnish Constitution has a similar clause.
But the plain expression 'freedom of speech' does protect hate speech. That being said, even the afformentioned US limits free speech as it allows individuals to sue for libel and defamation and allows the state to prosecute someone for meaningful threats.
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Spot the American! Dumbfuck over here doesn't understand what free speech is!
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Not placing reasonable limits on hate speech is what ends free speech (and other freedoms in general). It should always be done carefully, but one only needs to open a history book to see why not limiting hate speech out of a dogmatic view that all speech is equal is a terrible idea.
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Is this tacked on with a bunch of other laws related to criticism of Zionism also being against the law?
Tons of laws Israel is trying to get passed in western countries to associate anti Zionism with Antisemitism.
I doubt this is the only part of the law.
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No this law only outlaws denying recognized genocides by the international court and in a hateful way.
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Yeah they won't use this to evil ends....
Fuck israel
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W Finland
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They probably mean anti-genocide and pissrahell criticism with it.
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Every slope is a slip and slide when you're dealing with the "freeze peach" crowd.
Oh, except when they're suppressing speech they don't like...then suddenly the "freeze peach" absolutism just doesn't apply and we all living on a flat plane.
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Always trust Finland!
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This is coming from a currently far-right + hard capitalist government so I'm wary of how truthful this news is
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I seriously believe that in an adult society you can set one or two historically damaging things aside from “freedom of speech.” I believe it was Trevor Noah who explained that when black people took back South Africa from its apartheid masters, they didn’t burn those people at the stake or prosecute them out of existence or even steal all their property. They just said you won’t be ruling this country like that anymore OH and that ONE WORD… you don’t get to say that ONE WORD ever again.
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There are about 2,500 Sudanese immigrants in Finland. Why not have a law criminalizing the Darfur genocide too? Or better yet, how about a law against denying any genocide in the furtherance of hate speech?
Unfortunately, I think I know the answer to these questions. I suspect it's related to the fact that Finland does not recognize the Palestinian state, unlike their neighbors in Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. A law criminalizing the denial of any genocide in the furtherance of hate speech would end up legally including the genocide in Palestine as soon as a case lands in a Finnish court. At that point, it would be really hard to defend their one-sided support of Israel, and lack of Palestinian state recognition.
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I must be mistaken. I thought the EU had made it illegal. Finland is part of the EU last I checked.
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Will they punish communism glorification as well? I'm thinking anything nazi is shit but most of the people here are shitty tankies so Hitler bad Stalin good yet both were monsters... different types but monsters and no one criminalizes the glorification of Stalinism.
116 comments
I’m so used to bad news I read that as decriminalize