AHC: Holocaust denial illegal in US.

[Saint_007]

Twilight of the Red Tsar TL. Have USSR gone mad and persecute another Holocaust

Except then you'd have people still denying the (Axis-caused) Holocaust, especially if they're anticommunists trying to use it for propaganda.

Oh, and you'd probably have some staunch defenders of Communism denying the Soviet Holocaust ever happened.

 

[ReconGuy02]

Except then you'd have people still denying the (Axis-caused) Holocaust, especially if they're anticommunists trying to use it for propaganda.

Oh, and you'd probably have some staunch defenders of Communism denying the Soviet Holocaust ever happened.

Nobody is going to defend USSR after that.

 

[Saint_007]

Why not? People still defend Hitler. Some people still want ISIS to rule them, as insane as it might sound. Or some people can be trolls.

 

[ReconGuy02]

Why not? People still defend Hitler. Some people still want ISIS to rule them, as insane as it might sound. Or some people can be trolls.

Their number would be greatly reduced, as Tankies in this TL = Neonazis

 

[Saint_007]

Okay true.

Though back to the argument of Holocaust denial being made illegal, the only way you can do that is classifying it as hate speech. Other than that, it's extremely dangerous to make an idea illegal, even if it were for the sake of common decency.

Imagine, if you will, Monsanto suddenly arguing it should be illegal to talk against GMOs because they're good for the environment and therefore talking against GMOs is harming the advance of human progress. Monsanto will then stand behind this law as it silences all critics, whether they talk about GMOs or not.

I understand the argument is about blocking any attempt to communicate Holocaust denial bullshit to others, stemming anti-Semitism and other vile similarly ideas. But my argument isn't that Holocaust denial isn't bullshit (it is), but rather an attempt to clamp down and shut down an idea by preventing it from being communicated in the US, which is the constitutional crux of the issue.

 

[Arkenfolm]

Good. Because they're all fucking stupid. The Moon Landing Hoax in particular, since that's just insulting and Un-American.

It's all fun and games until your ideology/beliefs of choice get censored. As mentioned with the Monsanto example, corporations would have a field day with the precedent this would set.

 

[woweed]

There's pretty much no chance of this happened. Post-1970s, The Supreme Court's position on Free Speech has basically been that, as long as it isn't, like, outright child porn, it's protected.

Pardon me, but why would you even consider it? It would just be a slippery slope to more and more authoritarian anti-speech laws, as the other posters stated, not to mention such a concept would be egg on the face of the Founders, the Consitution, and the basic principles of America.

Not to mention if you institute such laws, people will have their eyes on them, and curious as to why they cant deny it, so they might find information that allows them to find out why people might deny it, which in turns creates more deniers. See what I mean?

I mean, this isn't a hypothetical. Countries like France have these laws, and have yet to become dystopian hellholes

 

[Expat]

@Saint_007 cuts through and finds the leverage. Find a way to classify it as hate speech. There is, unfortunately, a pretty ready POD off the top of my head. A white supremacist entered the Holocaust Museum in 2009 with a gun. It was a tragic day, but I’m sure we can all imagine it being much worse. Have it be much, much worse. Perhaps a bomb is involved. Capture him alive. Base his defense entirely on “a desire to eradicate lies.” Give him copycats. See what happens.

 

[Saint_007]

It would just be seen as a terrorist attack, a man trying not to spread his word but to silence that of others. You don't silence them back, you fight with knowledge.

 

[FillyofDelphi]

Good. Because they're all fucking stupid. The Moon Landing Hoax in particular, since that's just insulting and Un-American.

People once thought Germ Theory, the Heliocentric Universe, and a model of history that contained subsahharan africans accomplishing anything of note or a view of society in which pre-Columbian North America was civilized were "stupid" and ran counter to the prevailing consensus at the time. That's not to say every disagreeing assertion is correct, but it does say allowing the questioning and arguement of the prevailing narrative is nessicery for evolution and greater accuracy of societal beliefs towards acctual reality to occur. If the idea is wrong, let it be aired and disproven rather than beaten into the shadows with a stick.

Can it be tiring that it won't die completely? Perhaps. But even if our idea is only 99% correct perhaps those who question it have corrected an error in that 1% we can gleen out, and even if not it's well worth the cost to avoid dogmatic stagnation.

 

[Barry Bull]

Pardon me, but why would you even consider it? It would just be a slippery slope to more and more authoritarian anti-speech laws, as the other posters stated, not to mention such a concept would be egg on the face of the Founders, the Consitution, and the basic principles of America.

Not to mention if you institute such laws, people will have their eyes on them, and curious as to why they cant deny it, so they might find information that allows them to find out why people might deny it, which in turns creates more deniers. See what I mean?

The danger is, if you ban certain ideas or arguments, what's to prevent it from going into things like opinions or dirty/politically incorrect jokes? The US is predicated on the concept of personal freedoms; taking away others, whether for good intent or otherwise, is going to set bad precedents. What if popular opinion swings a certain way, and people are ordered not to talk about climate change or the prison system.

Remember, the surest way to critique a law is; are you willing to have that law work against you as you are having it work for you?

The many democratic European countries that have anti holocaust denial law beg to differ to your attack against their democratic status.

I now invite our resident German lawyer to speak further on this.

@DerGreif

 

[Barry Bull]

People once thought Germ Theory, the Heliocentric Universe, and a model of history that contained subsahharan africans accomplishing anything of note or a view of society in which pre-Columbian North America was civilized were "stupid" and ran counter to the prevailing consensus at the time. That's not to say every disagreeing assertion is correct, but it does say allowing the questioning and arguement of the prevailing narrative is nessicery for evolution and greater accuracy of societal beliefs towards acctual reality to occur. If the idea is wrong, let it be aired and disproven rather than beaten into the shadows with a stick.

Can it be tiring that it won't die completely? Perhaps. But even if our idea is only 99% correct perhaps those who question it have corrected an error in that 1% we can gleen out, and even if not it's well worth the cost to avoid dogmatic stagnation.

Such view assume it could be disproven enough to convince a critical mass of lay person.

What's the point of allowing bad ideology to spread if it is more attractive cf. to liberal or accurate ideas?


The problem lies not with a ban, but the choice on what to be banned and who to make the choice.

@Fenwick

 

[Mark E.]

Think about the types of speech and expression that were, in fact, banned in the U.S. in previous generations. At the end of WW1, the sedition laws put many to jail over comments that seem innocuous today. In the fifties, even after McCarthy was gone, there were laws that required "communists" or sympathizers to register as such. Labor rights/civil rights activists like W.E.B. DuBois even registered just to be safe. Same for history teachers and college professors who taught twentieth century history that included Marx, Lenin, Stalin, etc. In the sixties, pornography and mild swearing were crimes; look up Lenny Bruce over his delivery in an age-restricted night club. Courts have ruled for free speech, but suppression might still be possible if restricted to certain times, places and contexts.

 

[Arcavia]

Is there any way to get an underground Nazi terrorist organization from what's left of the SS after the war that works via propaganda and attacks like you had Fascist terrorists in Italy after the war? They do something stupid like attack US military instillations in Germany and holocaust denial etc. is construed as "aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States", since it attempts to make these terrorists out to be less bad than they seem, making it illegal under Article 3, Section 3 as far as constitutionality is concerned? The Supreme Court at this time was heavily willing to abridge the free speech rights of the Left; if certain rightist groups can make themselves appear as anything like as hostile there might be a chance of this happening...

 

[Dr.Kafka]

In his famous Words that Wound, Richard Delgado makes an argument that American jurisprudence already accepts a de facto tort action against hate speech. It's rough around the edges and isn't always consistently applied, but the elements are still there (the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress, for example). If Holocaust denialism is classified as hate speech, then it would be within the reach of this tort. You just need a state to codify a tort action against hate speech.

Furthermore, the Supreme Court has historically been quite willing to restrict free speech in certain circumstances. It's not totally out of left field to think that a different Supreme Court might fashion something very similar to the Miller test for Holocaust denialism. For example, the Court could conceivably come up with an analogous standard that looked at the community standard for speech, examined whether the speech was patently offensive, and looked to a national standard of scientific or artistic merit. The issue with this proposal is that obscenity has long been regulated whereas conspiracy theories have not. Thus, I would argue that Delgado's proposed solution is the more elegant (and more likely) of the two. It doesn't even require Nazi terrorists.

 

[FillyofDelphi]

Such view assume it could be disproven enough to convince a critical mass of lay person.

What's the point of allowing bad ideology to spread if it is more attractive cf. to liberal or accurate ideas?


The problem lies not with a ban, but the choice on what to be banned and who to make the choice.

There's no way you can set up an objective determination of "bad" ideology even in principal, as bad is entirely subjective term. To use my three examples: Heliocentrism is obviously only catching on because it's more appealing to small minded materialists rather than those enlightened in God's infallible will, Germ Theorists is more appealing because it allows sinners to not admit they deserve the curses afflicted upon them, and of course the red and black man would want to fudge and inflate their pasts to try to get the pride and respect Western Civilization properly earned (Note: Devil's advocating all of this). Obviously, they are bad and running on ideological appeal, and so must be surpressed so the "good" ideology is allowed to flourish.

If we had an infaillable authority, that would be the only way a system could work in theory. But since a verifiably infaillable judge is impossible (given that by declaring something infaillable, you've removed any non-self referential way to judge the accuracy of that declaration) open social discussion is the only tools we have to try to move in that direction. Granted, we still have to assume that will sufficent access to information the average interested party will be able to determine a particular truth more often than not, but if that's not the case than we should admit frankly we're interested less in truth than ideological dominance and not ape at being impartial authorities.

This is a long standing piller of the Anglo-Saxon / Common Law and Jurisprudence legal tradition.

 

[Barry Bull]

There's no way you can set up an objective determination of "bad" ideology even in principal, as bad is entirely subjective term. To use my three examples: Heliocentrism is obviously only catching on because it's more appealing to small minded materialists rather than those enlightened in God's infallible will, Germ Theorists is more appealing because it allows sinners to not admit they deserve the curses afflicted upon them, and of course the red and black man would want to fudge and inflate their pasts to try to get the pride and respect Western Civilization properly earned (Note: Devil's advocating all of this). Obviously, they are bad and running on ideological appeal, and so must be surpressed so the "good" ideology is allowed to flourish.

If we had an infaillable authority, that would be the only way a system could work in theory. But since a verifiably infaillable judge is impossible (given that by declaring something infaillable, you've removed any non-self referential way to judge the accuracy of that declaration) open social discussion is the only tools we have to try to move in that direction. Granted, we still have to assume that will sufficent access to information the average interested party will be able to determine a particular truth more often than not, but if that's not the case than we should admit frankly we're interested less in truth than ideological dominance and not ape at being impartial authorities.

This is a long standing piller of the Anglo-Saxon / Common Law and Jurisprudence legal tradition.

Actually, restriction of fundamental rights is allowed under English Constitutional/ Administrative law through the implementation of "proportionality test".

https://www.doj.gov.hk/eng/public/basiclaw/basic15_2.pdf
http://www.law-democracy.org/live/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/foe-briefingnotes-2.pdf
http://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/the-great-...peech-while-protecting-freedom-of-expression/

 

[Red_Crate]

There's no way you can set up an objective determination of "bad" ideology even in principal, as bad is entirely subjective term. To use my three examples: Heliocentrism is obviously only catching on because it's more appealing to small minded materialists rather than those enlightened in God's infallible will, Germ Theorists is more appealing because it allows sinners to not admit they deserve the curses afflicted upon them, and of course the red and black man would want to fudge and inflate their pasts to try to get the pride and respect Western Civilization properly earned (Note: Devil's advocating all of this). Obviously, they are bad and running on ideological appeal, and so must be surpressed so the "good" ideology is allowed to flourish.

If we had an infaillable authority, that would be the only way a system could work in theory. But since a verifiably infaillable judge is impossible (given that by declaring something infaillable, you've removed any non-self referential way to judge the accuracy of that declaration) open social discussion is the only tools we have to try to move in that direction. Granted, we still have to assume that will sufficent access to information the average interested party will be able to determine a particular truth more often than not, but if that's not the case than we should admit frankly we're interested less in truth than ideological dominance and not ape at being impartial authorities.

This is a long standing piller of the Anglo-Saxon / Common Law and Jurisprudence legal tradition.

You get this. Thank you. And not to mention, that if you restrict the discussion of topics through law, even if allowing for earnest discussion of historical events, wouldn't that be the beginning of a slippery slope towards a control of speech that Hitler could've salivated over?

 

[jerseyguy]

This is highly unlikely. As other posters in this thread mentioned, it would require a constitutional amendment or the entire body of legal scholars acting out of character to fundamentally redefine the consensus interpretation of the first amendment. I don't see what such a ban would accomplish to begin with, the cultural penalty against that sort of thing is already strong enough to make a denier a pariah in their communities and an act of career suicide, a person who publicly advocated holocaust denial would be pretty much unemployable.

Legal bans on holocaust denial are counterproductive insofar as media coverage of the trials of deniers provide a public platform for the reprehensible views of someone like David Irving or Ernst Zündel that doesn't exist OTL. It's impossible to stamp these views out entirely, so its better to ensure that these views receive as little publicity as possible.

 

[FillyofDelphi]

Actually, restriction of fundamental rights is allowed under English Constitutional/ Administrative law through the implementation of "proportionality test".

https://www.doj.gov.hk/eng/public/basiclaw/basic15_2.pdf
http://www.law-democracy.org/live/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/foe-briefingnotes-2.pdf
http://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/the-great-...peech-while-protecting-freedom-of-expression/

Yes, of course there are reasonable restrictions. But they must be narrowly defined and talored to be the least intrusive means possible to uphold a vital public responsibility (for example, Incitement to Imminent Violence is restrictable under those test). The onis of proof is on the side attempting to impose the restriction to prove they meet the four requirements: you do not simply get to declare by Fiat that some restriction protects the general welfare in some nebulious and unproven way. A blanket ban on discussion about the efficacy of historical facts do not meet that standard by any stretch of the imagination, unless you're somehow suggesting people are going to start engaging in violence merely because they hear an arguement that such violence haven't occurred before.

Holocaust Denial does not equal Holocaust advocacy. If you want to ban the later, that's way easier.