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In Greece, 10 Months In Prison For "Blasphemous" Facebook Page
First time accepted submitter etash writes "A bit more than a year ago a man was arrested in Greece for satirizing a dead monk, after the far-right party golden dawn, petitioned for his arrest. A couple of days ago he was given a ten-month sentence. What actually enraged the religious Greek blogosphere was not the satire. He wrote a fictitious story about a miracle done in the past by this specific monk. The story was then sent to [a religious blog] and then in a matter of days it was copy pasted and presented as true by most of the religious and far-right blogs and news sites. The final act of the dramedy took place when he came out and revealed that the story was not real; he intended to show the absurdity and the lack of reliability of these sites."
EU law covers freedom of speech/expression. The question is whether he can stay out of jail while appealing this bullshit. The Mediterranean countries are our own domestic third world, but with really good food.
He wrote a fictitious story about a miracle done in the past by this specific monk.
If he really wrote it then it wasn't fictitious. You may be looking for the word "fictional".
Thankfully the Separation of Church and state is still "mostly" intact in the USA. Though Texas and several other States like Louisiana and Missouri are working to change that, and a couple have been bitten in the butt by their attempt to get state funded religious Schools mean that ALL religions get to have them!
This is just more proof that religion is just evil. It is a means of controlling what you believe. This is why the religious right in the USA is determined to get creation in the schools. So they can indoctrinate children before they learn critical thinking and realize that it is just a means of controlling them.
EU or specific member countries also have laws that prohibit certain types of speech. For example you can't deny holocaust or promote Nazi ideology. I believe some of EU countries have specific laws that prohibit denigration of religion.
One sheep's "blasphemy" is another man's truth.
Government and law should stay the hell out of religious debates.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Well -since i am a Greek- let me explain.
That guy did a hoax/satire using a dead Greek Christian monk highly respected in my country - it wasn't his first hoax/satire against Christianity...
That was noticed by a right-wing political group and they used an old law for "protecting the religious beliefs/feelings of people against mockery" (created many decades earlier for protecting the Muslim minority) to instil -in an ironic way... we are Greeks...- a sense of logic!
The guy said in an interview he gave in the Greek media that even the police officers and the prosecutors were really upset that they had to charge him... but "dura lex, sed lex" - don't worry, he is not going to jail or anything like that.
Except for the part where education doesn't work with religious fundamentalists. "Thou shalt remain ignorant of anything not printed in this book" is a tenet of most religions, and is dogmatically followed by the fervent believers.
I'm not saying you should pass a law making religious people believe a thing or not believe a thing. I'm just saying you shouldn't have any laws at all regarding religion, especially those that promote respecting it, honoring it, denigrating it, or providing tax evasions for those that practice it.
John
The reason that denying the holocaust is illegal is entirely because of public opinion - or rather public fear as to what it might lead to. ... why single out just the one false statement from all the other false things idiots say?
Germany outlaws both Holocaust denial and various expressions of Nazi culture. They rightly recognize that the danger those pose is political and those would be rallying cries to restore the threat to being a present danger again. There are still neo-Nazis in Germany waiting for their chance. Do you want to give it to them unimpeded? Anti-Semitism is on the rise again across Europe already despite the mass slaughter that is still within living memory and taught in schools.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I don't see how Christians should be embarassed by atheists persecuting each other.
The prankster is likely atheist.
The right wing group persecuting him is provably atheist: being Christian is not defined by labeling yourself as such, proclaiming obedience. MT 21:28, MT 7:22. Forcing people to respect Christ is depriving them from the possibility of respecting its message freely, and that's not only atheist but anti-religious. Obedience is a value only if it comes from choice.
I don't see why commenters here don't attack Law also, since they attack Religion. Because Law was misapplied as Religion was ignored. Do you look for justifications for not following a religion? you do not need any, if you look for the truth honestly and don't find it there.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
There are plenty of neo-Nazis here in the good ol' US of A. The difference is that we have freedom of expression, where if a handful of skinheads goosesteps up and down the street yelling "Sieg heil!", there are a hundred non-skinheads who yell "go home you morons" at them.
The rest of us watch them on the TV, and either abhor, admire, or ignore the actions of one side or the other.
It's important that these idiots be allowed to express their stupid opinions. The basic idea is that it helps avoid creating the "poor suppressed martyrs" who use that to draw other people who feel outcast into their secret clubs.
Does this strategy work? Well, the neo-Nazis here are very marginalized.
John
"Thou shalt remain ignorant of anything not printed in this book" is a tenet of most religions, and is dogmatically followed by the fervent believers.
I'm going to quibble over this point. It is not a tenet of most religions. It is a tenet of a few religions, and some of them have been very loud.
(They've also made good villains with which to smear other religionists. You've been suckered.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Does this strategy work? Well, the neo-Nazis here are very marginalized.
Excellent post and as far as I'm aware you're quite right, Neo-Nazism simply hasn't become a real problem in Western democracies. That's despite the full availability of some of the most emotive and powerful imagery ever employed (such as Hitler's speeches, the Swastika, etc.) which is all still here and just as potent even after all these years.
Free speech for these people and other groups like them is a critical safety valve for society. It also allows the public to judge the words and deeds of said groups for themselves without '3am disappearances' hiding the true extent of a movement.
Yet despite this I've had some (quite heated) arguments with otherwise normal people who would have the Neo-Nazis thrown in prison if they could. Why is this concept of freedom of speech so hard for some people to grasp, even as they enjoy the benefits of a free society?
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
I'm Greek. What's really amusing is that the Golden Dawn party - right wing nuts that they are - are simply using a thin guise of Christianity themselves, and that only to better appeal to the masses. In the eighties the exact same individuals were in the same party publishing their material openly worshiping the ancient Dodecatheon. That's right, Zeus, Hera, all those deities. It came pack and parcel with preaching their nationalist superiority ideals.
They were at best marginalized if not outright ridiculed until the financial crisis hit. Once they realized a whole lot of people were desperate and looking for someone to hate, someone to blame for their misfortunes they also figured out this was a prime opportunity for them to rise in actual power. They reshaped their speeches, packaged their image a little better to appeal to senior citizens and angry young men then pointed a finger to immigrants, Jews, you name it - while of course suddenly featuring a deep faith in all things Christian. Complete with hatred and barely restrained racism, because of course that's what Christianity is all about.
The worst part of this? They have an excellent chance in being a kingmaker in the next elections. It will come down between the current conservative government and a leftist coalition of political powers in Greece, but it's quite likely neither will have the majority on their own. And the Golden Dawn is squarely third in the polls right now... and of course they'll be able to make a deal so that a government can be formed at all.
Neonazis in power. It's a nightmare.
Meh.
Hitler's speeches are in German, and the US public mainly only has memories of the swastika as symbolizing an evil enemy. Thus, swastika-wearing, Hitler-quoting neo-Nazi movements have little resonance with Western/US audiences; the insidious power of Hitler's own words and symbols has little resonance with the American people. However, more "home-grown" groups, promoting similar ideologies but without swastikas or German-language slogans, do get a significant amount of traction in the US --- if you wrap up the ugliest racism, xenophobia, and far-right authoritarianism in an American flag, you can attract quite a following. So, while Nazis-calling-themselves-Nazis are only a fringe joke in the US, Neo-Naziism by other names is far from being "not a problem."
Excellent post and as far as I'm aware you're quite right, Neo-Nazism simply hasn't become a real problem in Western democracies.
As you say, "awareness" is part of the problem. You aren't aware, and neo-Nazism is a problem in Europe.
'Like 1930s Germany': Greek Far Right Gains Ground
Nowhere else in Europe are neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists profiting as greatly from the financial crisis as in Athens. As they terrorize the country with violence, the police stand back and prosecutors are powerless.
Marian Kotleba: Slovakia’s New Neo-Nazi Governor Only Latest of Right-Wing Extremists Emerging In Eastern Europe
Kotleba, whose organization has long agitated against Slovakia’s Roma (Gypsy) minority, branding them as “parasites,” once belonged to the now-outlawed Neo-Nazi Slovenská Pospolitos (Slovak Community) movement that praised the Nazi puppet government that ruled the country during World War II. Bloomberg reported that Kotleba openly admires praised Jozef Tiso, president of the Nazi satellite state in Slovakia during World War II, which dispatched thousands of Jews to Nazi concentration camps. Kotleba, a 36-year-old former high school teacher, has been notorious for sporting Nazi-style uniforms in public, and also repeatedly arrested and sued for spreading racism and hate (no such charges have ever stuck, however).
Russia: Far-Right Nationalists And Neo-Nazis March In Moscow
Neo-Nazis form expanding networks beyond national borders
The cooperation between right-wing extremists from different countries is gaining strength. Experts warn that this phenomenon could have dangerous consequences.
Neo-Nazi parties on the rise in Europe, Jewish group warns
BUDAPEST, Hungary -- The World Jewish Congress said Tuesday it is greatly concerned about the emergence of what it called neo-Nazi parties in Europe, singling out Greece's Golden Dawn, Hungary's Jobbik, and Germany's National Democratic Party.
A study presented at the congress's assembly in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, highlighted the links among the growing strength of such extremist groups, the European economic crisis and latent Nazi-type tendencies in Europe.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
This opinion was given as a result of a case against a British European Commission official Bernard Connolly, who had written âThe Rotten Heart Of Europeâ(TM), a book critical of the EU.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Connolly was head of the EC unit that dealt with European monetary policy. The book that he wrote was critical of the EC's monetary policies, i.e. he wrote and published a book criticising his own employer. He was fired for it, and appealed his dismissal. The ECJ rejected the appeal (which is kind of understandable). The opinion was justifying Connolly's dismissal by the EC, not attacking his book.
...if a handful of skinheads goosesteps up and down the street yelling "Sieg heil!", there are a hundred non-skinheads who yell "go home you morons" at them.
Does this strategy work? Well, the neo-Nazis here are very marginalized.
Basically I agree strongly with what you wrote in both philosophy and practice. But I cut Germany some slack here, using the US as the example.
Nazism was a “philosphy” that was harnessed to the state within living memory. As a result there are plenty of remaining artifacts around from old driving licenses or professional certificates (e.g. Opticians) or marriage licenses that are still valid documents (old German driving licenses had no expiration dates) which bear swastikas and other nazi references. There are still old granddads who had fun shooting guns in the war. I know one friend’s dad, drafted at 17 in 1944, who's main memories are crazy russians running through hi farm trying to defect to the west. Plus learning to shoot. But every once in a while he uses an old aphorism from his childhood that's not only disturbing, but doesn't even agree with how he lived his life. I am sure there are living grandparents with stories they learned in school in the 30s and who were happy with those times. So since the wound is still fresh, this is a part of trying to heal it.
Compare that to the US. The civil war ended in 1865 but old southern racists survived well into the 1920s (even reaching the presidency, with Wilson) and the Jim Crow legacy continued into the 1960s and beyond. The reconstruction program which was killed early in the US was the equivalent of the reconstruction of Germany, which, in these laws, continues to this day.
I agree with Brandeis that "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants" so feel free speech should be extremely free. But the German's position shouldn't be rejected out of hand.
Nazism clearly has limits since it does not come to power everywhere it exists. But it also is certainly not powerless since it did come to rule in Germany, and it still draws adherents to itself even today.
The Germans are arguably quarantining a vulnerable population.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The truth is that not even the various Churches believe in many of those supernatural gurus or miraculous places. But they can't deny them, because people like to believe in them and they can't afford losing more faithful; because locals earn a lot from religious tourism and the Churches get their share of that money; and possibly because advocating for rationality in religion-based matters for them would be like throwing stones in the proverbial glass house.
Including Atheist fundamentalism, apparently...
What book would that be then?
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Dude, eristic argument is the mainstay of civilization. We're always engaged in the internecine struggle to discredit other parties to our own ends. I'm doing it right now.
More interestingly, this is perhaps the founding principle of the human language capacity.
The Argumentative Theory
From the text itself:
What this fellow did is conduct a hack against pompous insularity. Take a turd, disguise it with some food colouring, put it on their plate when they aren't looking, then watch the gobble it up while the pound the table exclaiming "We don't eat turd!"
What you end up demonstrating is that they distinguish turd from non-turd mainly by social optics, and not by its sensory quality.
Always the rule with those engaged in pompous insularity is that no outsider has standing to challenge their practices unless first vetted by the gatekeepers of the pompous insularity itself.
In order to achieve this, you'll have to master the extremely arduous standards of the profession (prestige barriers are usually high) in the pursuit of an outcome (deflating the eminent within that profession) that will have you black-listed from any form of employment where you could ever hope to receive a personal gain in exercise of the mastery you slaved to achieve. And then the gate keepers mock you when you say "thanks, but no thanks".
It's so much easier to sneak a poop pie onto the buffet table and watch them eat it smacking their lips.
It's the same deal with a packet filter in network security: hard crunchy outside, soft chewy inside. The professional walls are exceedingly hard to breach, but the defences inside those walls (which involve hard intellectual work to sustain) have long since gone to the dogs, yet they behave externally as if their house is in perfect order. This is an eternal story.
What it comes down to is whether one regards this kind of hack, which begins with a small deception, as a valid form of whistleblowing.
Sorry, but this doesn't support your assertions at all. Many of the things on your list there aren't racist at all. Anti-gay groups and sentiment (which of course does seem to be the current focal point for a lot of the right-wingers) has nothing to do with racism; gay people come in all races. Anti-immigration sentiment isn't necessarily racist either; try illegally immigrating into various European countries or Canada and see what happens to you there. Every nation has the right to set immigration laws and limit immigration. In Canada, you need either a job offer for a job they couldn't find a citizen to take, or $300K to deposit into a Canadian bank account, before you're allowed in. Anti-immigrant groups are simply against immigration. Anti-Muslim groups aren't necessarily racist either, they're against a certain religion. Try traveling to Mecca and reciting Bible verses in public and see what happens to you there; most religions are intolerant of other religions. While many of these issues are indeed strong among conservative groups today, to call them "racist" is simply a way of attempting to marginalize them rather than discuss the issues and deal with them directly, and is why this country is so hopelessly polarized, because people on each side utterly refuse to engage in any debate any more, and simply cast the other side as "evil".
As for the rest, those are all pathetically small splinter groups that no one takes seriously. Black separatists? Really? How many of those are out there? "Christian Identity"? I've never even heard of that group. Holocaust deniers are about as numerous and taken as seriously as flat-earthers. KKK and neo-Nazis are the same. The rest are groups less numerous than that.
That's a great point, that there are still some Germans living with their past. But when the war ended, it was clear that Nazism was defeated then and there. Our legacy of slavery moved at a different pace. After the U.S. Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment simply abolished slavery. There were no other laws that suddenly gave the freed slaves any big pile of extra rights, privileges, protections, or reparations that didn't apply to others.
Actually the end of the war was a slow and messy affair (the break in Japan was cleaner) and various successor movements do break out around Europe from time to time (look at the current government in Hungary for example, as well as some parties in the balkans, perhaps including, to reconnect to TFA, Breaking Dawn). Postwar by Tony Judt is a good summary.
In the US those other laws you talk about were passed and implemented, but reconstruction was rolled back after a change in government. It's a nice A/B experiment, actually.