Finland to criminalise Holocaust denial
Finland to criminalise Holocaust denial
yle.fi
Finland to criminalise Holocaust denial
Let's say better late than never.
179 comments
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I’m so used to bad news I read that as decriminalize
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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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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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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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Armenian and Gaza is fully confirmed, but human rights violations of Xinjiang not so much, it's semantics at that much, like calling the modern Turkish state genocidal for destroying the culture of Kurds in northern Syria, when it was not explicitly to destroy the people itself
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JD Vance will be pissed.
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you will apply this law with the same rigour to every genocide right? right?
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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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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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I fucking love Finland.
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Based! Fuck Nazis
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Common nordic W
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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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Yeah they won't use this to evil ends....
Fuck israel
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W Finland
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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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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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Censorship just hides it. Better would be to educate them. Make them meet with survivors, send them to the remaining concentration camps.
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I don't know if this is really censorship in that way. Like yeah don't hide the genocide, hide the denial, because it doesn't deserve a platform. Holocaust denial has no basis in reality, especially considering it's one of the most well documented genocides of all time.
Don't censor history, teach the children about all the bad shit humans have done.
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Holocaust denialism is censorship. It's an attempt to hide reality itself by controlling the narrative. If anything, outlawing holocaust denialism is anti-censorship, as it's helping ensure that Nazis won't be able to suppress the truth about what happened.
Someone claiming that outlawing holocaust denialism is censorship is trying to flip the script and overwrite reality (or just repeating someone else who is doing so, I guess). It's like saying "Hey! Stop censoring my attempt to censor others! This is censorship!" It's a mind game, an attempt at manipulation through deception. Look up the term DARVO: Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender. That's what saying "Outlawing holocaust denialism is censorship!" is: Reversing the Victim and Offender.
Lies and misinformation and other attempts to deceive and suppress the truth are not a form of free speech. Quite the opposite, they're what results when free speech remains unprotected.
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There aren't that many survivors left, but you wouldn't know judging by the noise some jewish.groups make while clamoring for reparation.
This is effective censorship – of a bad thing, but still censorship.
Education is the way, don't let people forget history, remind them of all the horrors the nazi regime inflicted on gays, gypsies, political dissidents, criples, ... Remind them genocides are still occurring: in Palestine and elsewhere.
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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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Is Finland just as based as I think it is? They even got the homeless problem fixed. If only...
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Is Finland just as based as I think it i
No, we're not. There's a lot of good, and definitely very good in comparison to a lot of other, or even most other countries, but I daresay there are certain problems of our own.
While the systems are all great on paper, reality doesn't always conform.
I was abused by the police in a manner that I think actually would reach the bar of international crime, as they even cut off my water at one point. I was denied my prescription medication and went psychotic for days on end in a jail cell, while "under supervision for my safety". I was literally drawing on the walls with my own blood. I didn't eat. They didn't care. Now whatever the motivation, the conditions I was kept in and the treatment I got would, I argue, constitute an international crime.
I've yet to find a single Finn who doesn't immediately challenge me when I say that, and then I show proof, they deny it, and I have not gotten a single person to explain to me how on Earth it would be possible for me to self-harm so badly while "under supervision" and why I was not given my medications and fucking urgent medical assistance? I still have scars on my arms and fingers and that was several years ago. Even just according to the Finnish laws, permanent physical harm would constitute a grievous assault, when done on another person. And since I wouldn't have done that if I weren't being treated that way (in a cell without a single word to anyone, no knowledge of my rights, which I have a right to hold a physical copy all the time during detainment, lights on all the time, no mattress, no bed, no blanket). The guard even taunted me several times over the radio.
Finns will deny this, just like all the Finnish authorities did. And thus if I can manage to prove that it was actually internationally criminal, then anyone denying it would be a criminal under this law, which sounds kinda nice.
Anyway, the point is that we're not a utopian democracy, we're a somewhat socially secure bureaucracy. Like yeah we don't really have anyone living on the streets, people usually get enough to eat, so "can't complain", but that's just it. Having some things be well doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive to improve the things which aren't.
Personally, Finland is a great country, but all countries are flawed in one way or another. There's no utopia anywhere.
Also the thing about Finns being introverts is not even an exaggeration. It'd be a massive understatement to say we're emotionally reserved and generally avoidant.
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I've yet to find a single Finn who doesn't immediately challenge me when I say that
Here's one who doesn't challenge. The police do a lot of bastard shit here. At least this one whistleblower blog ended up in the news but nothing is being done to fix that system.
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I'm so sorry for everything you've gone through, this sounds horrendous. But thank you for enlightening me, I know mostly nothing about Finland personally. I hope you're doing better now though, and as someone who's been through abuse as well, it's tough, but in the end, we can get through this. I'm not really good at talks like this, sorry if it's bad, but just know that I'm rooting for you. It will get better. 🙂
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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.
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Always trust Finland!
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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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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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Based
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This is a dumb law
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They probably mean anti-genocide and pissrahell criticism with it.
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"Suggesting that the Holocaust did not happen will become a punishable offence"
Nothing here about literally anything other than "did this historical event happen?"
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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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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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I mean, the holocaust definitely happened, was horrific, and people who deny it either deny history happened at all of are conspiracy theorists, but I don't like the precedent set by the government specifying what opinions are allowed to have - it doesn't sound like something we should be celebrating, and anyway, banning opinions just drives them underground, if you want to regulate people's thoughts you have to legalise them.
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banning opinions just drives them underground
which means fewer people will find them and engage with them.
You're going to get more people turning to Nazis if it's just out and about in the open. If YouTube was running ads for nazisim, they'd get converts. If the only nazi stuff you see is scribbled on the bathroom walls, it has less legitimacy and thus fewer converts.
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hug
Sometimes I forget decent people with common sense still exist. Sometimes it doesn't feel that way...
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But it's not an opinion. It's a fact. It should be illegal for me to claim I'm disabled when I'm not or that bleach cures autism. Misinformation should be illegal.
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Disinformation is spreading misinformation on purpose, knowing that it is incorrect.
Spreading misinformation should (in my opinion) not be illegal in itself, people should in many cases be given the benefit of the doubt. It might be ignorance.
A judge/jury should decide if it is done knowingly.
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Wait....bleach doesn't cure autism? Should I stop drinking it?
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Not all opinions have to be around the table to debate. It's a false idea of democracy. Your freedom of opinion has limits and one fundamental is humanity. Denying a crime against humanity isn't an opinion.
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Agreed. People imagine the best case scenario for these kinds of bans, like calls to criminalize "misinformation" but what happens when the government is headed by Donald "Fake News" Trump and suddenly what you know to be fact is labelled "misinformation"? People were getting cancelled for speaking out against the invasion of Iraq, now imagine if it became a crime to deny that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
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You mean Fox News?
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Your argument only works if you assume that this sets some precedence for fascists to use. It doesn't, fascists like Trump will implement fake news laws anyway. In fact Holocaust denial is illegal in quite a lot of countries for quite a while now, most of them democracies (in number, not necessarily km²). Obviously you have to be reeeeally careful with any legislation that somehow restricts any freedom (like freedom of speech), but since every freedom requires boundaries to ensure other freedoms (like the freedom to live in peace and safety) and this is a historical, culture-defining fact and not some political agenda, we are absolutely fine.
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This has nothing to do with opinions and everything to do with facts.
Edit: I see someone made a similar reply at the same times as me. I didn't mean to spam reply the same thing as someone else.
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No no, I think it's good that you replied. In this case pushing back against misinformation is a great use for repitition.
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First off, I am a bit torn here, but will take the opposing side for arguments sake.
This is not an opinion. The holocaust happened, that makes it a fact.
I get your point, but should disinformation (as in deliberate misinformation) be allowed? How much harm should we accept from people spreading disinformation before we do something? The harm here being antisemitism.
Antisemitism is growing because people do not differentiate Israel and Jewish people. Many jews report that they do not feel safe in otherwise safe countries.
This is a hard question. Not sure what I think.. Might be side effects that are hard to foresee
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Antisemitism is growing because people do not differentiate Israel and Jewish people.
This is also why definitions of antisemitism that include anything about Israel are extremely damaging. The term "antisemitism" should only be applicable when talking about people and never about governments.
Broadening the definition doesn't help anyone, except for the state of Israel. But it does so at great expense to Jewish people.
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How TF can you have an opinion on a fact?
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I don't think that perspective is consistent with facts or evidence. Do you have anything tangible to back it up, or is it just your assumption?Suppressing things and pushing them out of the mainstream can be quite effective, and that's exactly why it's dangerous - if it wasn't effective, there's be no real reason to fear a ban.
Imo it's good so long as it's constrained to just the Holocaust. Slippery slopes can exist but not everything is one, and in this case it's likely that they intend to just stop there. There's overwhelming agreement among historians and everyone who's not a Nazi on this and this alone, there is nothing to be gained from debating or rehashing it and virtually everyone trying to is acting in bad faith. This isn't necessarily true of all claims of genocide, and there are always going to be edge cases where there's room for reasonable disagreement.
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179 comments