Group tyranny
Timoth Garton Ash, here.
Putting people in jail for expressing an opinion, no matter how distasteful and objectionable it is, seems self-defeating. Someone imprisoned for Holocaust denial could claim that the imprisonment somehow acts as a sort of implicit verification of their claims. The case for imprisonment is entirely different when it comes to those who proclaim and encourage violence as the principle method of achieving their stated aims. The cowardly fanatics that populate the likes of the Animal Liberation Front finding themselves occupying a prison cell would be good thing, not least due to the fact that imprisonment is generally considered something of an impediment when it comes to carrying out acts of terrorism in the name of animal "rights".
"If someone says "the Nazis didn't kill so many Jews and had no plan for their systematic extermination", he is a distorter of history who deserves to be intellectually refuted and morally condemned, but not imprisoned. If, however, someone says "kill the Jews", or "kill the Muslims", or "kill the Americans", or "kill the animal experimenters", and points to particular groups of Jews, Muslims, Americans or animal experimenters, they should be met with the full rigour of the law."Intellectual refuation and moral condemnation seem about right, alongside being made the object of scorn and ridicule. Very few people have taken David Irving seriously for quite some time now, especially since the loss of his libel case against Deborah Lipstadt.
Putting people in jail for expressing an opinion, no matter how distasteful and objectionable it is, seems self-defeating. Someone imprisoned for Holocaust denial could claim that the imprisonment somehow acts as a sort of implicit verification of their claims. The case for imprisonment is entirely different when it comes to those who proclaim and encourage violence as the principle method of achieving their stated aims. The cowardly fanatics that populate the likes of the Animal Liberation Front finding themselves occupying a prison cell would be good thing, not least due to the fact that imprisonment is generally considered something of an impediment when it comes to carrying out acts of terrorism in the name of animal "rights".
posted by Inchbrakie at Thursday, March 02, 2006
1 Comments:
If somebody says "the Nazis didn't kill so many Serbs" or "the Croats didn't kill so many Russians/Serbs" or "the Turks didn't kill so many Armenians" or "the Nigerians didn't kill so many Biafrans" or "the US didn't kill so many slaves/Red Indians" you will see the problem.
Figures for all of these are, with a greater or lesser degree of partiality, in dispute. It is only in this case where the law is introduced to rule on debate. In fact all genocides are difficult to be certain about precisely because the witnesses & evidence are gone & in virtually all cases both sides have reason to lie (the US claimed Milosevic had killed 500,000 in Kosovo before the war though subsequent investigators have been unable to go above 2,100 mainly killed by the KLA & NATO). The use of such fabricated figures is then often used by the winners to justify their own atrocities (sometimes retroactively for example Halubja is more likely to be mentioned by Western politicians now than when it happened).
It may be that the 6 million Jewish Holocaust figure is correct (pre-war Polish census figures said there were 2.5 million Jews there & there were only a few thousand post war) but the use of force to prevent discussion doesn't prove it.
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