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.
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.
Well the way German law works out that it comes down to established historical fact. As in, the professional consensus of historians, heard as expert witnesses. The wording of the law is (paraphrased) “Acts committed by the NS regime that fulfil the UN definition of genocide”, the historians decide what happened, who did it, judges decide whether it fits the definition. Invoking precedence, in German law, is like invoking someone’s doctoral thesis on a matter of law: It’s a piece of reasoning judges will have to take into account because it’s an argument before court but it’s by no means binding. As such having an ICJ judgement will be helpful, but it does need to be up to standards.
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.
I’m not sure they’re really comparable. The Holocaust was industrialized murder on racial grounds. Gaza and the West Bank are more like the genocide of the Native Americans. A sort of “Give us the land you’re sitting on, or die. I don’t care where you go” as opposed to “I’m going to kill you. No there’s nothing you can do. You are the wrong race and must die”
I don’t even think that’s as much of a distinction as you think.
In 1930s Germany, the Nazi platform was “We’re going to relocate these Jews. We’ll make some kind of settlement for them, or shift them to other nations, who knows.”
Maybe at the end of the war the Holocaust - their “final solution” for the relocation problem was made clear, but even then anyone could have raised questions about where there were going.
Political excuses like “Relocation” are extremely common for Genocide.
The tail end of that sentence was “…was made clear.” Up until then, the narrative seen to the world and the German public was different.
I’m not even claiming that Germany had a perfect veil of secrecy over it; just that they would use propaganda to push just enough plausible excuses over the “missing people”, the smokestacks, that the world wasn’t convinced until the end of the war that systematic execution was really going on.
And yes, deportation was an early public part of Germany’s plans, in part because that’s more publically digestible. They canceled plans to move many Jews to France after colonizing it - referred to as the Madagascar Plan - because of a blockade.
Of course, one major aspect of deportation is that people become sight-unseen at many destinations. The gestapo can easily execute people with gunfire en masse once they’re in a place no one can access them. So, saying “They only wanted to deport them” is not a compliment to the “decency” of old Nazis. It’s a word of caution about the new ones.
The ‘relocation’ wasn’t based on anything the Jews had that the Nazis wanted though, not in terms of physical land anyway. Wealth, sure, but the Nazis weren’t going after Jews because they had money. The Slavs were gone after for land, definitely, because the Nazis wanted all the land to the east and were happy to just murder anyone and everyone living on it, but even that was based on genetics because the Nazis believed the Slavs to be an inferior species.
Again, what Israel is doing is definitely genocide, there’s no arguments there, but it’s not the same as the Holocaust. There’s a reason the Holocaust is seen as more evil than the Holodomor, and it’s because of the sheer industrial evil of it all. A systematic extermination of a people based purely on genetics has some extra weight to it.
Wealth, sure, but the Nazis weren’t going after Jews because they had money.
That’s not entirely matching what I learned from history books. The German Nazis absolutely commit robber/murders. They just extended their murder spree to those of the same ethnicity and other “out-groups” who didn’t own anything to steal.
Again, what Israel is doing is definitely genocide, there’s no arguments there, but it’s not the same as the Holocaust.
No argument there, note my original wording “it no longer pales in comparison”. The Gaza genocide already has millions of victims and tens of thousands of murdered palestinians.
That’s unfortunately starting to become visible even on a scale that takes the Holocaust as reference.
That’s not entirely matching what I learned from history books. The German Nazis absolutely commit robber/murders. They just extended their murder spree to those of the same ethnicity and other “out-groups” who didn’t own anything to steal.
It wasn’t “Those people have money, therefore we shall rob them” though. It was “Those people are Jews, therefore they deserve to get robbed”. They were an acceptable target because they were Jewish, not because they had any money.
Well. Partially it was exactly that though. One of the roots of European antisemitism is that christians were not allowed to take interest on money loans, and jews were not allowed to do many jobs, but by faith could take interest from non-jews.
It’s kind of convenient to find an excuse why people you owe money to are “sub-human” and should be murdered. And that was also a factor in Nazi-Germany.
“Give us the land you’re sitting on, or die. I don’t care where you go”
If the Israelis truly didn’t care where the Palestinians went, they wouldn’t be confining them to a 25-mile long open air prison. Extermination is the goal.
Palestinians in Gaza are not allowed to freely travel to the West Bank.
You’re making a lot of claims about what’s going on in Gaza and making huge, sweeping statements that attempt to correlate Palestinians’ experience with others in history. I recommend you read about what is actually going on in Gaza before continuing. You seem ignorant about some of their most basic and fundamental struggles.
My point is the genocide of the Palestinians is more than just Gaza. The bombing of Gazans is a war crime, yes, but that in and of itself is not genocide. The settlements in the West Bank and overall encroachment on Palestinian territory is genocide, and that’s been going on for decades. If Israel and Egypt suddenly allowed people to leave Gaza and go to the West Bank, it wouldn’t stop the genocide, nor would stopping the bombing or the killings in Gaza, because the fact that Israel is allowing their colonists to displace Palestinians at all is enough to say that their intent is genocidal in nature.
You’re so caught up in the emotive rhetoric about Gaza that you’re ignoring the actual issue at hand. It’s like if the bombings weren’t happening at all, you wouldn’t actually give a shit.
All holocausts?
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/26868-finland-moves-to-ban-holocaust-denial-under-new-criminal-law.html
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.
Well the way German law works out that it comes down to established historical fact. As in, the professional consensus of historians, heard as expert witnesses. The wording of the law is (paraphrased) “Acts committed by the NS regime that fulfil the UN definition of genocide”, the historians decide what happened, who did it, judges decide whether it fits the definition. Invoking precedence, in German law, is like invoking someone’s doctoral thesis on a matter of law: It’s a piece of reasoning judges will have to take into account because it’s an argument before court but it’s by no means binding. As such having an ICJ judgement will be helpful, but it does need to be up to standards.
How many have there been? As far as I know it’s “The Holocaust”.
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.
Holocaust is the name of a particular genocide.
All thumbs are fingers but not all fingers are thumbs kind of situation.
I’m not sure they’re really comparable. The Holocaust was industrialized murder on racial grounds. Gaza and the West Bank are more like the genocide of the Native Americans. A sort of “Give us the land you’re sitting on, or die. I don’t care where you go” as opposed to “I’m going to kill you. No there’s nothing you can do. You are the wrong race and must die”
I don’t even think that’s as much of a distinction as you think.
In 1930s Germany, the Nazi platform was “We’re going to relocate these Jews. We’ll make some kind of settlement for them, or shift them to other nations, who knows.”
Maybe at the end of the war the Holocaust - their “final solution” for the relocation problem was made clear, but even then anyone could have raised questions about where there were going.
Political excuses like “Relocation” are extremely common for Genocide.
deleted by creator
The tail end of that sentence was “…was made clear.” Up until then, the narrative seen to the world and the German public was different.
I’m not even claiming that Germany had a perfect veil of secrecy over it; just that they would use propaganda to push just enough plausible excuses over the “missing people”, the smokestacks, that the world wasn’t convinced until the end of the war that systematic execution was really going on.
And yes, deportation was an early public part of Germany’s plans, in part because that’s more publically digestible. They canceled plans to move many Jews to France after colonizing it - referred to as the Madagascar Plan - because of a blockade.
Of course, one major aspect of deportation is that people become sight-unseen at many destinations. The gestapo can easily execute people with gunfire en masse once they’re in a place no one can access them. So, saying “They only wanted to deport them” is not a compliment to the “decency” of old Nazis. It’s a word of caution about the new ones.
The ‘relocation’ wasn’t based on anything the Jews had that the Nazis wanted though, not in terms of physical land anyway. Wealth, sure, but the Nazis weren’t going after Jews because they had money. The Slavs were gone after for land, definitely, because the Nazis wanted all the land to the east and were happy to just murder anyone and everyone living on it, but even that was based on genetics because the Nazis believed the Slavs to be an inferior species.
Again, what Israel is doing is definitely genocide, there’s no arguments there, but it’s not the same as the Holocaust. There’s a reason the Holocaust is seen as more evil than the Holodomor, and it’s because of the sheer industrial evil of it all. A systematic extermination of a people based purely on genetics has some extra weight to it.
That’s not entirely matching what I learned from history books. The German Nazis absolutely commit robber/murders. They just extended their murder spree to those of the same ethnicity and other “out-groups” who didn’t own anything to steal.
No argument there, note my original wording “it no longer pales in comparison”. The Gaza genocide already has millions of victims and tens of thousands of murdered palestinians. That’s unfortunately starting to become visible even on a scale that takes the Holocaust as reference.
It wasn’t “Those people have money, therefore we shall rob them” though. It was “Those people are Jews, therefore they deserve to get robbed”. They were an acceptable target because they were Jewish, not because they had any money.
Well. Partially it was exactly that though. One of the roots of European antisemitism is that christians were not allowed to take interest on money loans, and jews were not allowed to do many jobs, but by faith could take interest from non-jews. It’s kind of convenient to find an excuse why people you owe money to are “sub-human” and should be murdered. And that was also a factor in Nazi-Germany.
If the Israelis truly didn’t care where the Palestinians went, they wouldn’t be confining them to a 25-mile long open air prison. Extermination is the goal.
You’re ignoring the West Bank. Palestine is not just Gaza.
What’s your point?
Palestinians in Gaza are not allowed to freely travel to the West Bank.
You’re making a lot of claims about what’s going on in Gaza and making huge, sweeping statements that attempt to correlate Palestinians’ experience with others in history. I recommend you read about what is actually going on in Gaza before continuing. You seem ignorant about some of their most basic and fundamental struggles.
My point is the genocide of the Palestinians is more than just Gaza. The bombing of Gazans is a war crime, yes, but that in and of itself is not genocide. The settlements in the West Bank and overall encroachment on Palestinian territory is genocide, and that’s been going on for decades. If Israel and Egypt suddenly allowed people to leave Gaza and go to the West Bank, it wouldn’t stop the genocide, nor would stopping the bombing or the killings in Gaza, because the fact that Israel is allowing their colonists to displace Palestinians at all is enough to say that their intent is genocidal in nature.
You’re so caught up in the emotive rhetoric about Gaza that you’re ignoring the actual issue at hand. It’s like if the bombings weren’t happening at all, you wouldn’t actually give a shit.
Yeah let’s ask Egypt if they would take them
Lots.
A holocaust is a religious animal sacrifice that is completely consumed by fire.
The Holocaust occurred in WW2.