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Holocaust denier gets three years

 
 
dagmaraka
 
  1  
Wed 22 Feb, 2006 11:44 am
hmmm, I don't think you'd say that if you experienced Stalinism on your own skin.


<Anyhow, as an aside - I just heard on the radio that Larry Summers handed in his resignation letter yesterday - since we were talking about him. Commentaries seem to blame his management style more than the issues of political correctness, however.>
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dagmaraka
 
  1  
Wed 22 Feb, 2006 11:48 am
the stalinism bit was re: louise. walter jumped inbetween. it's not a big deal anyway, just terminology. i think she means to say that those are totalitarian practices, which is fine. 'stalinist' makes little sense, however.
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Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Wed 22 Feb, 2006 11:49 am
Louise_R_Heller wrote:
Sorry, very sorry but this is a travesty.

Please don't bother explaining, this is worse than Stalin.


Just saw this: so Mrs. Louise R. Heller thinks, taking someone according to constitutional laws to a legal court in a democratic country is worse than having millions killed under a dictatorship by Stalin.

Remarkable. But free speech. I know.

(How many Nazi criminals live in Canada, I wonder?)
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dagmaraka
 
  1  
Wed 22 Feb, 2006 11:52 am
actually, walter, canada has laws about them, too. there were trials in the past, i think beth was posting about that.
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Steve 41oo
 
  1  
Wed 22 Feb, 2006 11:53 am
Henderson Mullin, managing director of Index on Censorship:-

"Freedom of speech is freedom of speech. Irving - odious though he is and a propagandist for the most unsavoury cause - has a right to an opinion. If you start imprisoning people for their thoughts then you certainly dont have any freedom of expression. We should expose [him and his followers] for the bigots and fools they are. By jailing people you are creating martyrs.
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Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Wed 22 Feb, 2006 11:55 am
dagmaraka wrote:
actually, walter, canada has laws about them, too. there were trials in the past, i think beth was posting about that.


I know. :wink:
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dagmaraka
 
  1  
Wed 22 Feb, 2006 11:58 am
Mr. Mullin, too has a right to his opinion. That doesn't make his opinion 'right'. I disagree with him for many reasons stated in detail above. I think we are starting to go in circles, repeating what we think - obviously nobody is going to change opinions anymore, which is fine. but what could be said, was said.
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Steve 41oo
 
  1  
Wed 22 Feb, 2006 01:06 pm
dagmaraka wrote:
Mr. Mullin, too has a right to his opinion. That doesn't make his opinion 'right'.
No, it doesnt make him 'right'. But then I dont think all opinions are of equal value or weight. I would rate the opinion of the pope on catholicism higher than mine, and the director of the index on censorship on censorship higher than some other people. But you are correct, it doesnt make him 'right'.
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dagmaraka
 
  1  
Wed 22 Feb, 2006 01:21 pm
hmmm. what makes pope's opinion higher than yours? i guess you're talking about his public expression of his opinion that has a higher impact than if you state your opinion publicly, but in my view, yours and pope's opinion are indeed equal.
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dagmaraka
 
  1  
Wed 22 Feb, 2006 01:22 pm
unless we start claiming people are not equal...?
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Steve 41oo
 
  1  
Wed 22 Feb, 2006 01:56 pm
dagmaraka wrote:
... but in my view, yours and pope's opinion are indeed equal.
Well thats very kind of you. I am of course infallible, even when wrong. Smile
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Steve 41oo
 
  1  
Wed 22 Feb, 2006 02:12 pm
dagmaraka wrote:
unless we start claiming people are not equal...?


no I think you've fallen into the trap that a lot of people make. Of course people are equal as human beings and deserve equal respect and understanding. But there is no natural equality of ideas. Some ideas (such as the idea that human beings have natural equality) really are better than others.

[And imo opinions and ideas that are based on observed fact and rational analysis are superior to opinions based on gut feeling, prejudice guesswork and wishful thinking. Perhaps the comparison withthe pope was a bad example, I really meant my opinion on a subject as an interested lay person compared with an expert. We can all respect the person, even as we have to point out as gently as possible that his ideas are complete rubbish. ]
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dagmaraka
 
  1  
Wed 22 Feb, 2006 02:15 pm
ideas are different from opinions, steve. opinions are just that, opinions and they are equal in substance. their impact will however differ depending on context, status of the person who formulates them publicly, etc...
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dagmaraka
 
  1  
Wed 22 Feb, 2006 02:17 pm
we became awfully phenomenological, didn't we...;-)

sorry, gotta run. but will look forward to catching up in the evening. keep it going, everybody!
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Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Sun 26 Feb, 2006 07:23 am
Only now found this interview with one of my favourite historians at Spiegel online:

Quote:
SPIEGEL ONLINE - February 22, 2006

Jail Sentence for David Irving

"Pity for this Man is Out of Place"

Should those who deny the Holocaust like the British historian David Irving be placed behind bars? SPIEGEL ONLINE discusses weighing rights like freedom of expression against the historical facts with German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler.


http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,173114,00.jpg
Hans-Ulrich Wehler, born in 1931, is one of Germany's most respected historians. He taught at the University of Bielefeld until his retirement in 1996.

Notorious British right-wing historian David Irving was sentenced by a court in Vienna on Monday for denying the full extent of the Holocaust. The verdict has sparked new debate about whether such views should be protected by western values of free speech. Both Germany and Austria outlaw Holocaust denial, as well as Nazi symbols, music and literature.
Some European commentators have called the ruling against Irving hypocritical in light of the recent uproar surrounding the right to publish caricatures of Islam's Prophet Muhammad, which has offended Muslims around the world. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke with one of Germany's leading historians about the balancing freedom of expression and the distortion of the historical facts.


SPIEGEL ONLINE: Professor Wehler, do you think that sentencing David Irving to three years in prison for denying the Holocaust makes political sense?

Wehler: Whether Irving has been sentenced in Austria for three years or for ten years makes no difference at all to me. I consider any kind of political or emotional pity for this man is out of place. But I think that the decisive moment actually took place years ago in London, when Irving was ruled guilty with the help of expert testimony by historians. In the end, the Austrians are just repeating this, two and half years after the fact.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you think that in a case like Irving's it is really necessary to involve the legal system or are we finally able to deal with people like Irving purely with arguments?

Wehler: I am of the opinion that Irving is a desk-bound right-wing radical, and that in fact the only thing which really helps is seeking an open debate. One has to confront him time and again, with great patience, with the correct counter-arguments. There is, however, a fine line: if one hauls right-ring associations into the courts, then one can hardly argue that desk-bound offenders like Irving should be somehow beyond the reach of the law. Nonetheless, in principle I am of the opinion that one should just treat Irving as an exotic person on the right-wing fringe and debate against him when one gets a chance.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Could you perhaps describe a bit how the manner of dealing with Holocaust deniers has developed since the end of the war until now?

Wehler: After the Allies had, completely rightly, prosecuted at Nüremberg and elsewhere, the Federal Republic in the 1950s was a tired state when it came to bringing National Socialism to justice. It was only in the late sixties that a young generation of lawyers and judges came to think the following: "We are the ones who have to crack down. The Allies have done their bit, now we West Germans have to act." For a long time, the Federal Republic had no legal means to deal with those who denied Auschwitz. The legal fine-tuning came only later.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why was this necessary?

Wehler: Of course one can always say that the dispute should be fought only via debate. But in the case of the Holocaust it is a matter of the industrially organized mass murder of six million human beings. And to brazenly deny this, in the peculiar manner of the current Iranian government, is unbearable at least in the German public sphere. For instance, after the first successes of the (neo-Nazi) NPD in the late sixties, right-wing radicals began to pose as "avengers" of a sort. So a ruling was quickly made that one could be prosecuted in Germany if one denied the mass murder of Jews in the Second World War. So it has been a gradual process which didn't get going immediately after 1949.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So how can one reconcile the right to free expression with the prosecution of Irving? Do you consider this problematic?

Wehler: The denial of such an unimaginable murder of millions, one third of whom were children under the age of 14, cannot simply be accepted as something protected by the freedom of speech. There should indeed be a legal zone in which this kind of lie should be covered. However much I am in favor of the right to freely express one's opinion, one cannot allow the denial of the Holocaust to hide behind overly generous freedom of expression.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Outside of Europe this practice often gets criticized. Why is that?

Wehler: Only Europeans find this acceptable, as do bordering lands like the Ukraine or Russia. That the issue is far away for those in Anatolia, Brazil or China and thus uninteresting for the majority cannot be a reason for us to forgo legal prosecution. The universal validity of this criticism or of the prosecution itself cannot be the measure of what one undertakes or ignores.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What do you think of Irving's claim that he's since changed his opinions about the Holocaust because he has obtained evidence lately which proves the Holocaust as fact?

Wehler: I don't know whether his lawyer counselled him to make an orderly retreat. In fact Irving has held certain convictions over a long period of time, and although I don't know him personally, I really can' t imagine that a man who undoubtedly knows the evidence and who has devoted his adult life to modern German history has only now discovered that there really was mass murder. I think that's just a tactical maneuver.

The interview was conducted by Anna Reimann and translated by Anjana Shrivastava.
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Louise R Heller
 
  1  
Sun 26 Feb, 2006 04:14 pm
Yawn...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Ulrich_Wehler


Quote:
.............Wehler is a leading critic of what he sees as efforts on the part of conservative historians to whitewash the German past. He played an important part in the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute) of the 1980s. This debate opened with Ernst Nolte's claims that Stalinism was a greater horror than Nazism.......


The Russians killed 60 million of their own in addition to plenty of foreigners, and Wehler is Stalinist TRASH.......
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Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Sun 26 Feb, 2006 04:17 pm
Louise_R_Heller wrote:
Wehler is Stalinist TRASH.......


You know him personally? (I only heard a couple of his lections and met him only twice - in a bigger group though.)
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Louise R Heller
 
  1  
Tue 28 Feb, 2006 09:35 am
Walter Hinteler wrote:
Louise_R_Heller wrote:
Walter Hinteler wrote:
Just to mention some more legal background:

the "Verbotsgesetz" ('ban law') is origianally from April 8, 1945 and was origianally only created to hinder a new foundation of the NSDAP ('National Socialistic Party'). The latest changes were made in 1992.
According to its § 3g, holocaust is a fact and any denying of it a crime.

Both the prosecution as well as Irving have filed an appeal.A date for the new trial at the highest Austrian court won't be announced in autumn this year.


I'm astounded by this witchhunt, what's the prosecution hoping for, the maximum sentence of 10 years in prison???

This is Orwellian, if something is a proven fact WHY need a LAW with 10 years in prison PENALTY, to punish anyone saying the OPPOSITE???

In and of itself this law makes people WONDER what could be so wrong about that "fact" that it's gotta be enshrined in criminal LAW???? 10 years' sentences aren't meted out in Austria except to murderers and even then rarely!!!



It's Austrian law (btw: it's up to 20 years).There's some discussion going on that this law can't be changed besides by changing the complete constitution: some legal experts have the opinion that the Austrian constittution is per se an anti-nationalsocialistic constittuion.

I'm not an expert in neither Austrian Criminal nor Constitutional Law, just referring from media and law magazines.

Ten years is the very minimum sentence for murder in the Austrian Criminal Code (§75 StGB). It's between 10 years and lifelong.


Mr Hinteler:

You admit being no expert in Austrian law so maybe you should refrain from making statements on that subject. To point out only one out of your several inaccuracies, the maximum penalty for Irving's offense is 10 years, as I said, and not 20 as you imagine.

Either that or the Austrian prosecutor knows less about Austrian law than you do:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/europe/4757506.stm

"...But, speaking from his cell later, he told BBC News the numbers killed at Auschwitz were smaller than claimed.

He is appealing for a reduction in the three-year jail term. Prosecutors are seeking for it to be lengthened.

The Austrian state prosecutor's office said it believed Irving's sentence for Holocaust denial was too lenient in light of a possible sentence of up to 10 years. ...."
As to his view that the number of those killed in Auschwitz was smaller than claimed, that's not in doubt: the original estimate by the Russians was subsequently revised to less than a quarter of the original number.

I'm sorry that in the circumstances I can't be bothered with your extravagant idea that personal acquaintance with historians is needed in order to evaluate their work.
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Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Tue 28 Feb, 2006 10:01 am
Louise_R_Heller wrote:
To point out only one out of your several inaccuracies, the maximum penalty for Irving's offense is 10 years, as I said, and not 20 as you imagine.


I suppose, you can still read German:
Quote:
Verfassungsgesetz vom 8. Mai 1945 über das Verbot der NSDAP (Verbotsgesetz 1947) in der Fassung der Verbotsgesetznovelle 1992:
§ 3 VG (Wiederbetätigung)
[...]
§ 3 g. Wer sich auf eine andere als die in den §§ 3 a bis f bezeichnete Weise im nationalsozialistischen Sinn betätigt, wird, sofern die Tat nicht nach einer anderen Bestimmung strenger strafbar ist, mit Freiheitsstrafe von einem bis zu zehn Jahren, bei besonderer Gefährlichkeit des Täters oder der Betätigung bis zu 20 Jahren bestraft.
Source
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Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Tue 28 Feb, 2006 10:16 am
Louise_R_Heller wrote:

I'm sorry that in the circumstances I can't be bothered with your extravagant idea that personal acquaintance with historians is needed in order to evaluate their work.
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