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Germany Wants Facebook To Obey Its Rules About Holocaust Denial
Bruce66423 writes: In a classic example of the conflict of cultures bought about by the internet, Germany is trying to get Facebook to obey its rules about banning holocaust denial posts. From the linked Jerusalem Post article:
[Justice Minister Heiko] Maas, who has accused Facebook of doing too little to thwart racist and hate posts on its social media platform, said that Germany has zero tolerance for such expression and expects the US-based company to be more vigilant. "One thing is clear: if Facebook wants to do business in Germany, then it must abide by German laws," Maas told Reuters. "It doesn't matter that we, because of historical reasons, have a stricter interpretation of freedom of speech than the United States does." "Holocaust denial and inciting racial hatred are crimes in Germany and it doesn't matter if they're posted on Facebook or uttered out in the public on the market square," he added. ... "There's no scope for misplaced tolerance towards internet users who spread racist propaganda. That's especially the case in light of our German history."
I'm pretty sure Germany's had laws about denial of the holocaust since well before modern internet culture was around.
Tits are surely more dangerous to our young and influenceable people than carefully engineered right propaganda.
I thought it was an unconditional surrender.
"There's no scope for misplaced tolerance towards internet users who spread racist propaganda. That's especially the case in light of our German history."
Perhaps a more important lesson "in light of our German history" is learning that dictators require the power to silence opposition...especially political opposition. They can't wield it if it doesn't exist. Now it does. History gives no confidence it won't ultimately be misused. Your own country, along with ancient Greece and Rome, are prime examples of nominal free democracies that gave up "emergency powers" to someone who never gave it back.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
... that still does not mean anyone outside germany gives a flying fuck.
Then you shouldn't have started the Holocaust in the first place.
The reason Germany has these laws is as a form of oppression. After WW2, the Allies wanted Germany to join their side against the USSR, but they needed to make sure the Nazis didn't rise again. This oppressive speech law, and others, were the way that was accomplished. It is a clear attempt to oppress the country's freedom of self-determination.
Don't be mistaken and think that these laws are a model of free speech.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
True: Germany has limited freedom of speech for centuries. It didn't prevent the Nazi rise to power, and it arguably contributed to it.
Perhaps it's time for Germany to actually change its "interpretation of freedom of speech" instead of clinging on to what hasn't worked historically.
So a country that decided to throw its weight around to force its ideologies on a few million Jews (by killing them)...
...has decided to throw its weight around to force its ideologies on a few billion Facebook users (albeit without death resulting, for now)?
Nice!
I just read: "There's no scope for misplaced tolerance towards group a".
I have mixed feelings...
as german (and rest of the world) facebookers are concerned. therefore it should be no problem to hold them responsible under EU law. the thing is - if that was really a concern to germany, they would already have done it. looks more like lip-service to the israelis.
Maas requests that Facebook obeys the law and deletes posts containing hate speech and calls for violence. Such shit is even illegal in the US. However, FB is unwilling to comply. They have no problem filtering naked breasts out (which would in most cases be no problem in Germany, but are a problem in the US for no apparent reason). BTW the hate speech going on in FB in Germany is written by Germans and in read by Germans and it is illegal in Germany, so it would be sufficient if FB would employ people able to read German and delete those posts. However, a company with $4 mrd. revenue is unable to do that? Really?
Maas' statement is to be seen in the light of recent events. Following a larger-than-usual wave of refugees, there has been a major outbreak of racist uproar in (mostly eastern) Germany, not only on the Net, but on the streets, too, with groups of neonazi extremists allied with so-called "concerned citizens" demonstrating, shouting hate and sometimes throwing stones or bottles in front of refugee hostels, and a new arson attack on a refugee hostel every other day (most of them, until now, having been empty at the time of the crime, with no refugees being hurt yet, but I fear that's just a matter of time). German government seems to very, very slowly notice that this comes as a result of a development both their domestic and foreign policies over the last 25 years have some responsibility for.
Hey Germany. If Facebook users are posting things that are illegal in your jurisdiction then go after the users and see how quickly other countries will extradite people who run afoul of your laws.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
if Facebook wants to do business in Germany, then it must abide by German laws.
Does "do business" mean sell advertising or does it mean allowing citizens of Germany to access it's pages. I can see how Germany could legally control allowing foreign companies from doing business in Germany (selling advertising in this case), but I don't see how Germany could prevent its citizens from accessing the whole internet (Facebook in this case), unless it wants to try to be like China or North Korea. I can see trying to restrict the monetary flow in or out of a country, but trying to restrict the information flow seems both wrong and futile.
You question a scientific theory? You test it to prove it's worth.
You question the moon landing? People bombard you with proof.
You question the holocaust? You end up in prison while being called a massive antisemite.
Surely throwing someone in prison for disagreeing with what is generally held to be true is exactly something one of Germany's previous political parties (1920-1945) would do!
Nobody should be imprisoned for questioning facts lest a number of truths could be hidden under the banner of racial hatred.
Lets all start making posts denying the existence of Germany. Is that also against German law?
Have political officers in brown shirts take them to the train station for "relocation", make them leave all their clothes on the ground when they arrive and have a nice "shower"? And don't forget to confiscate all their wealth, foreign and domestic?
Sorry, but it's too easy. This is a case where Godwin's Law doesn't apply because it's actually about Nazi history.
So, someone writes something that could be construed as hate speech in Germany, which is a crime, right?
Some other person, in Germany, instructs their browser to download that hate speech.
Who is guilty of the crime of hate speech? The person who wrote it legally, or the person who brought it into Germany illegally?
Let that one simmer for a while.
Remember, servers don't PUSH pages, they are REQUESTED, so Facebook is certainly not guilty here.
I'll go get some popcorn...
This is what happens when extraterritoriality expands unchecked. If you are not a citizen of Germany, you did not consent to be governed by the German government. Their laws should not apply to you. If they want to rule you they should give you citizenship along with all the rights of a German citizen and have you consent to that arrangement.
Of course the USA is no different. In 2009, Gary Kaplan, the boss of London-based gambling company BetOnSports, fell foul of a US law that bans Americans from placing bets online even on websites outside the US. He was jailed for four years. In 2006, three British former NatWest bankers were extradited to the US to face fraud charges, in a case that frieked out the British business community. At the time, the bankers said their crimes had taken place in the UK and the victim was a UK bank hence they wanted to be tried in Britain.
Of course to some degree you need jurisdiction preventing piracy at sea and so international treaties are needed in this case that allow countries to consent to having their citizens tried in another country.
Here, perhaps Facebook could block content using IP addresses, but in the case of the EU 'Right to be forgotten', the European Commission wants Google's search results censored throughout the world. That is absurd! And claiming that "It doesn't matter that we, because of historical reasons, have a stricter interpretation of freedom of speech than the United States does" is a legitimate legal argument for limiting free speech means that for all practical purposes the first amendment is gutted. China could ban the Wikipedia page on Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent mass killings by the Chinese army. Christian sites could be banned by Islamic regimes. Anything to do with psychology or science that offends any regime would be censored. We would be back in the dark ages.
I think there is another point. Some rights are inalienable - meaning they are incapable of being alienated and surrendered. Free speech is one of those rights. The fact that the EU fails to recognize this fact, does not change it. Indeed this concept was hinted at during shortly after founding of the UN when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was unanimously agreed. The preamble states:
Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.
Hi pla - you imply with your comment that Germany is doing the same mistake by oppressing opinions about the holocaust.
May I suggest you think about the victims of the holocaust for a moment.
The holocaust was indescribable cruel and wrong.
We Germans will not accept that the victims are further humiliated by the denial of the holocaust.
Regards,
Joerg
Think of Germany's situation after WWII. They had a bunch of war criminals and could prosecute and punish them. Those were the people running camps, the soldiers guarding camps, anyone who explicitly knew what was happening and helped it happen.
But every single person in the country knew the Nazis had been rounding up jews and killing anyone who helped hide them. Many had to realize that millions of jews had disappeared and there weren't anywhere near enough soldiers left in country to guard and take care of them. Many knew that some jews were being used as slave labor. So basically, an unknown but large percentage of the country didn't outright commit war crimes but did collaborate with the Nazis to some degree.
You can't prosecute 25% of your country. So they just said "We aren't going to pretend this didn't happen. it's illegal to deny it happened. But we aren't going to let it happen again either -- it's illegal to try and spread racial hate through speech." It was a compromise to prevent having to throw 20% of the country in jail. It's not crazy, it's just very foreign to American concepts.
Oh, the irony: germans telling the company founded by a jew to censor holocaust denial.
Full AC disclosure: Yes, I am in fact an ethnic German. Yes, I have read a pre-'45 german edition of Mein Kampf. Yes, I consider the continued existence of my tribe important. And no, this has not made me a hitlerphile or neo-nazi, on the contrary.
Pshaw! Everyone knows Holocaust denial never happened.
"It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocause to adopt a central doctrine of their murderes"
This is really the question that applies...
Should corporations (a.k.a "moral persons") have more rights than national citizens? Should they be allowed to ignore laws they don't like and replace them with "our corporate policies"? Or, should there be a new international framework to regulate internet communication, rather than trust self-regulation?
Managers of Facebook consider holocaust deniers to have higher morals than women breast-feeding. This is a typical example of what self-regulation will bring.
Facebook managers should face the same legal consequences than the publisher of a German newspaper publishing the same posts. Unless, of course, the answer to the initial question is Yes, in which case there is no reason to forbid sales of drugs through Internet...
OK, if you have a law, than how about you take legal action against the people saying things you don't like then, Maas. Why should other people in other countries do your job for you?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Or better yet, have them click some sort of agreement where they agree they're not german. Just some sort of legal mechanism to move the jurisdiction of the site even more clearly out of their legal authority.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
There have been a ton of complaints about blood-libel pages and Facebook says they fall under their free-speech policies.
Bark less. Wag more.
As a native German, I have to say that 99% of the responses I read here are so WAY OFF reality, I'm absolutely stunned.
Just a few short comments for those of you who care to be educated:
- Maas politely invited Facebook to have a discussion on that topic. Nothing more, no laws or courts involved.
- Mentioning Nazi topics is not at all prohibited in Germany. On the contrary, the topic is extensively discussed in history school books, every-night TV documentations, exhibitions, public memorials in every city and town (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein), and our schoolchildrens' education on the topic is probably the most extensive in the world. A visit to a former concentration camp is mandatory for everyone in high school.
- The book "Mein Kampf" is not at all prohibited and may be sold if it includes academic historians' comments.
- What _is_ prohibited is showing certain Nazi symbols (e.g. swastika) or using Nazi expressions (e.g. "Sieg Heil!" or "Mit Deutschem Gruss!") in a supportive context. This very sentence, for example, is perfectly legal in Germany, because my context is explanatory, not supportive.
- Of course there is protection of free speech in Germany. And that freedom ends exactly where freedom of others starts. What is prohibited is public speech that aims at depriving minorities (religious, ethnical, etc.) from constitutional rights, or calls for criminal acts. If can't personally find this to infringe on my freedom.
I wonder if it's some kind of genetic thing?
(Joke of course, I get along fine with Germans, they don't seem to like their government either)
If I were in his shoes, I'd do the math and figure out that deleting any Nazi FB pages and telling them to fuck off was good for business. I would ALSO tell the german government to go fuck themselves, since the freedom of speech is not negotiable.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Der Jude Zuckerberg must OBEY! Schnell, dispatch Death Kommando Totenkopf "Sieg Heil" under the command of kamarad Heinrich von Schutzstaffeln to punish this untermensch!
We'll see how this works out
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Germany is trying to get Facebook to obey its rules ...
First Google, now Facebook is suffering censorship. At least harassing Google was motivated by profit and when Google decided to obey the rules, German politicians realized they weren't so clever after all and shut-up.
Usually such a debacle is argued from jurisdiction and jurisprudence legalities, 'free speech'/'information wants to be free', or 'business will absorb the cost of doing business' philosophies. But 'too big to fail' corporations have a lot of momentum that the world depends on. For Facebook, it comes from the fact that everyone else is on Facebook. If it chose so, Facebook could shun all German subscribers, thereby suddenly disconnecting Germany from a ubiquitous and popular information stream. This will require all of Germany to subscribe to a new service and deal with the inefficiency of trans-coding global information streams to it and censoring those streams.
Can they be more specific about what they want banned? Do they not want people to be able to see the info on facebook within Germany? Or do they not want people to be able to post it on facebook from within Germany? or something else?
Without knowing exactly what they are asking for we can't properly tell them how what they are asking for is impossible.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
- Of course there is protection of free speech in Germany. And that freedom ends exactly where freedom of others starts. What is prohibited is public speech that aims at depriving minorities (religious, ethnical, etc.) from constitutional rights, or calls for criminal acts. If can't personally find this to infringe on my freedom.
I find it useful to allow people to speak such offensive things. This makes it easier to identify the assholes.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I love politicians
Germany is perfectly correct that someone cannot stand up in a public square in Germany and state Holocaust denials. In Germany. This does not translate to a Spaniard making a video and posting it on YouTube where German citizens can view it.
That's the problem being faced now. The laws apply within a country's borders and they're trying to figure out how to apply them to technology that crosses their borders. In the previous example the Spaniard is doing nothing illegal. The German citizen may be by viewing the video - that would take a lawyer to answer.
Facebook is a social media platform. There is no one simple solution since there are millions of people posting their personal opinions at any given time. And lots of pictures of food but that's not as much of a problem. Germany is telling Facebook that it's their responsibility to enforce German laws across their entire user base. This is not practical nor is it right.
Sure. Close the Facebook offices in Germany. Don't allow German-based companies to advertise on Facebook. Fine. That's 'not doing business' with Germany. But they can't do much more than that unless Germany blocks all of Facebook. And we all know how well that works.
Germany needs to understand the difference here. They can't tell a Spaniard that laws in Germany apply to them just because they have something on the internet that Germans can view. It isn't going to happen and they need to focus on what they can control rather than what they cannot.
the problem is CONTEXT
If what you are saying is in the wrong place and you are seen as drumming up violence then there are actual laws to charge you with.
Example if you said all members of NOTWHITE race need to be rounded up and taken to "work camps" where they belong and you were known to have a fleet of vans then you could be arrested for HATESPEECH in my area.
For the last generation or so laws that target Holocaust denial are almost entirely about targeting critics of Israel.
I've read that 97% of the inhabitants of Gaza are antisemites. Authoritative poll.
The thing I least love about Slashdot is the instant mod-up of unsupported assertions. The defining quality of the geek to my way of thinking is fact-based decision-making.
The US invented the internet. We set the rules, not you.
This is precisely why the UN should never be able to get anywhere near the internet. For all the faults of the US, it has the strongest free speech protections of any country in the world by leaps and bounds. In Europe, free speech doesn't exist because it is illegal to hurt someone's feelings.
Germany Wants Facebook To Obey Its Rules About Truth Cover Up
You may find this interesting and very related:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=0ba_1430022407
Usually you have to do more than think homosexuals are an abomination : you have to make a threat of violence. For example : "I think Antony Wiener is a pervert , an abomination unto god and is bound to suffer eternally in hell (insert more jeer and insult" would not be falling under hate speech law. But add "and somebody should kill him / burn him / maim him" etc... then it falls under hate speech law. Pretty much all sort of threat of violence. It does not have to be with a name either "i think all homosexual should be killed" would fall under it.
The "it gives more power to haters" is actually a myth. Reducing the access to information in some case DO reduce the number of people affected by it. I think germany got it partially right (well the allies actually which imposed the laws after war): reducing the access to nazi stuff by forbidding its praising , but at the same time allowing all citation in the name of education. It is a win win. Naturally for people which think *any* speech should be free, including the fire in theater one, that might sound disturbing. But such people usually were not born in a theater of war, or grew to see the last traces of the WW2 being reconstructed and their parents & grand parents tells them all sort of horror story about people getting massively killed , tortured, or being disappeared and never seen again. Once you live through it, you gain a certain understanding that allowing some speech, particularly populist hate speech, allows some kind of fascist to get power using them. Forbid that sort of hate speech, and their power to utter it publicly to the mass is limited, hobbled.
Given their history, I have no problem with them wanting to clamp down on Holocaust deniers. However they seem to think that there is just some magic button they can press over at Facebook to prevent such content from being seen by German users. This is not the case. It would take human censors reviewing every German post to do it. From Facebooks perspective it would be cheaper and easier to just pull the plug on German users completely and not allow anyone from a German IP address to access Facebook at all. Unless Germany wants to foot the bill for the manpower to police Facebook posts from Germany-based accounts. In any event I can't see how they'd expect to censor all Holocaust-denying posts, even ones from non-German IP addresses; that would be enforcing their laws on citizens of other countries.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Someone who puts out some "speech" or someone with a receptive nervous system to take this message in and goes gaga with it?
I think the receptive part in this game owns the problem because it keeps it going.
Seems to be a basic behavioral circuit in humans and to make laws managing this in some way or another leads to repression and makes the repressed impulse stronger.
american here, german wife, son. soldier. come at me bro. hahahahahha sehr geil du penne
Just block facebook - worldwide - that's the easy solution and it would be for the greater good of mankind too. FB is a blight.
IMHO.
I run a few websites. Some of those are blocked in SE Asia for no reason I can tell, but they are blocked nonetheless. The main one is technology how-tos. Thailand and India block it, but Japan, Vietnam, China, Singapore, Indonesia and Nepal do not. I don't get it.
Germany should block FB already.
Hey, Germany, does denial of the Armenian holocaust count?
If so then WTF is anyone considering Turkey for EU membership?
If not then WTF double standards anyone?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
if Facebook wants to do business in Germany,
And if it doesn't, then what?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"It doesn't matter that we, because of historical reasons, have a stricter interpretation of freedom of speech than the United States does."
No, it's international law, but maybe Germany (and perhaps others in the EU) would prefer to forget the ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)
You don't think that. You want to, but you don't.
FUCK YOU!
First you help Hitler try to exterminate the jews, and now you engage in yet another bout of fascism...
let's nuke the fucks. it's not too late.
Every decade another million is added to the total.
Jews keep inflating the numbers every chance they get.
Come on Germany, ban slashdot now
Bullshit. You're wrong.
The number has been steady at six million jews killed for several decades now.
If anything, the number has gone down since the 1960's
Here's a typical example.
The USA Holocaust Museum says six
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/ar...
The Wiesenthal Center, which is about as jewish as is possible to be, says six million.
http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/si...
use usenet much?
This is not about "free oppinion" but about "redefining the past to prepare future crimes".
In germany you are free to promote national socialism as long as you do not deny its past flaws. This way a fascist has a harder time to prepare future crimes.
In the US you are free to promote pedophelia as long as you do not deny its past flaws. This way a pedophile has a harder time to prepare future crimes.
There is also the Markus Nessler parable:
One day some stranger starts following you while shouting "you stole my money, my jacket and my shoes!"
He continues to do so for some days then starts shouting "someone help me to get back my money, my jacket and my shoes!"
A couple of days later people start demanding from you to give back that mans money, jacket and shoes.
And some days later the man with help from some people takes away your money, your jacket and your shoes by force.
And everyone will say "you had it coming, he asked you for days to give back his money, his jacket and his shoes".
And that is the difference between "free speech" and "redefining the past to prepare future crimes". And thats the reason why you can shut up people by court order. Even in the US.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
sh1tbook is a place for useless cr4p . nobody cares
juegos para pc
Is the argument that evil, at any extreme, has the right to expression, in the name of free speech?
Does it follow then that you are willing to have the representatives from ISIS come to your local high schools and colleges and use their persuasive tactics to entice your neighbors and their children to massacre innocents in the name of some evil interpretation? Sleep well.
Why shouldn’t a country that has experienced an evil, magnitudes greater than ISIS, be allowed to determine what can, and what cannot, be said or distributed in its borders? [Remember, Americans think God gives them the right to pollute and police the world and everyone’s rights - it printed right on the dollar bill; “In God We Trust.”]
If you live in a country that interprets an eighteenth century individual ‘right', without taking 21st century technology into the equation, you are probably amongst the group that thinks some other 18th century ‘right’ also applies to 21st century weapons.
Fortunately only one country in the first world actually thinks that way. It’s also the same country with hundreds of religions that similarly interpret wisdom from preachers 2,000+ years ago as if nothing else has changed in the mean time. Those 'right thinking' people also control the dozens of states that allow Creationism to be taught as science, and they want their ‘rights' to have that interpretation included on national test standards. Twisted logic isn’t it?
Facebook operates and makes profit in many countries with limitations on information and the distribution of personal data. (China, Egypt, Dubai, Russia, India, EU etc.) they can and should respect German law in that country, or they should choose not to do business there. Easy. When Google couldn’t follow Chinese rules of censorship, they chose not to do business there. Today, Google’s principles have compromised the profit is more important than some ‘rights’.
There is no American ‘right’ to project its labyrinthine 18th century concepts into other countries where people consciously choose to limit the right of ISIS (or Nazis) to talk to their impressionable youth.
To paraphrase Zhou Enlai, "Let’s all check back in a hundred years and see if the American experiment continued to work.” No need for the rest of the world to follow them over a cliff.
I don't know what is crawling in their head's, I don't say there wasn't any holocaust. But they force people to believe about the holocaust, and other stuff. They forbid the swastika, a symbol used for thousands of years, they don't forbid fascism and allow a neo-nazi demonstration. I think should have their priorities straighten out.
Read your post. You may think you are arguing based on logic, but upon deeper investigation, it's all a bunch of emotional arguments. Think of how you were feeling when you wrote it. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
To elaborate on "Mein Kampf":
According to Wikipedia it is prohibited to make new copies of that book because of copyright law and the current copyright holder (the state of Bavaria) protects its right internationally. This does not include the English translation of the book for which the rights have been sold before the end of WW2.
i know there was no holocaust because i was not there to see it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The holocaust never happened. It is fake propaganda by the Zionists. Germany is suppressing the truth.
Does this post mean slashdot will be banned in Germany?
So until the USA clears up its act, I don't give a shit what other countries are doing to facebook.
Whilst I can appreciate Germany wants to stamp out the neo-nazi rhetoric, at the same time they go way too far, For example if you say that actually only 5.5 million Jews were gassed rather than 6 million then they will throw the book at you and it's a minimum sentence of 3 months and up to 5 years. It should be a civil matter not a criminal matter, imprisonment for at the minimum 'insulting' some group is insane.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Dmitry Sylkarov. Bradley Manning. Aaron Schwartz. Wikileaks. Julian Assange.
In the case of the first two, their crimes that they were charged with and forced to face were MERELY SPEECH. Exhortation to join a fatwah against the USA and kill infidels, but no actual killing done. No act other than speech.
Oh, and start talking on the phone about how you're going to kill the president and see how free your speech is.
This is untrue only a third are coming from the Balkan. One third from Syria, Afghanistan and Irak, and the rest from somewhere else.
Here in German the official numbers and their interpretation from the Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (BAMF) (engl. Federal bureau of migration and refugees)
http://www.bamf.de/SharedDocs/...
No it is not. The thing is you are not allows to write hate speech on walls and on the Internet. And you are not allowed to encourage people to commit crimes.
Is it so you can take extrajudicial action outside the law against them? I thought you had rule of law? If you and society want to know who these people are so you can do something about it, then you should, under rule of law, rather than mob rule as you seem to want now, code it in law. If you DON'T want to do anything about it, then what the hell was the point of identifying the asshole?
Its good to want. It builds character.
Free-speech is anchored in the German constitution. The whole issue is not about censoring. Every German is entitled to voice his or her own opinion but what is illegal is to deny facts established by courts.
If you go around an tell everyone that person X is a ... that's unlawful until he is found guilty by court. Likewise if you go around and tell your neighbors that their daughters are safe from and a that convict next door who has been found guilty by 3 courts... also illegal. The latter extrapolates to crimes which include the Holocaust... denying it is illegal.
I'm all for free-speech, but applaud those Germans. It's entirely sensible to demand removing hate-speech, personal attacks or insults and calls for violence which would be unacceptable in meatspace. See how long you would last touring a major city and putting up posters reading "Help me kill all . Pick up ". Why would that be acceptable on the internet?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
can't talk about it?
The number of deaths on the plaques at the camps have been dropping, one fell by 2.5 million (IIRC it went from 4 million to 1.5 million).
So, 6 million minus 2.5 million is only 3.5 million. Yet the Tribe keeps saying "6 million died!" -- as Mark Knopfler said in "Industrial Disease", "Two men say they're Jesus; one of them must be wrong."
If it's a crime to make it less of a tragedy, are they prosecuting those who changed the plaque?
The "gas chambers" were woefully unsealed, and would have killed the guards standing outside if they had been used. The chimneys were added after the war, to make it look more dangerous. In reality, they were merely showers, in which they deloused people -- typhus was what killed most of those who died.
I'm fortunate not to have ridiculous laws restricting my ability to question and understand my present and past.
Very few members of the Tribe are descendants of Shem, so it's illogical to call those who point out their crimes "anti-Semite".
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
So what if someone denies that there is holocaust denial? Is that also illegal in Germany?
Similar to the upcoming US election results
The swastika is not a "Nazi symbol" any more than a pyramid or eye is a "US symbol". It is one of many similar symbols used in religions throughout the world. In India, for instance (a coworker from there informed me), they use it both "forwards" and "backwards", e.g. "SS" and "ZZ", as power symbols.
It's amusing that "Mein Kampf" is legal to be sold only if it contains revisionist remarks! That'd be like the US government making the Bible illegal to sell, if it didn't contain the US government's "explanatory remarks" -- laughable and ridiculous. Definitely not amusing for those forced to live under such restrictions, though.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I agree, some of my argument is ‘appeal to emotion’ and written as an emotional response. (I am not Spock.)
As humans, I believe many of our responses to evil, be it murder, child molestation, slavery, genocide, rape, prisoner abuse, certain government actions, violations of our perceived ‘rights' - are all emotional. There are people who, based on their emotional beliefs, make logical arguments for those actions (think ISIS, Stalin and Abu Ghraib - not to say that the last is anywhere near the evil magnitude of the first two examples).
Also, as people, cultures or countries, we determine which rights (i.e. laws) we grant to ourselves and how extremely we interpret their interaction. Fortunately, those change over time, we select new rights and sunset old ones (e.g. the right to treat people as property, aka slavery, also in the Constitution), but it would be hard to argue that emotions weren't involved. The 'logic' seems to follow whatever people emotionally determine to implement as rights (e.g. freedom from a king). Some people and countries are more collectivist, some more individual rights oriented, some religious, some believe in government driven economies, some prefer less government influence, some don't like their history denied, others edit their history liberally - all believe they are logical and often for 'the good of the epeople'.
So reducing it to emotional questions, demonstrates to me the ridiculousness of trying to impose America's version of rights into other environments and conversely the reverse:
Does ISIS have the right to come to your local schools and spread their message in the name of Free Speech? Should somebody from Syria lecture you about their ‘rights.'
Does Baidu have the right to publish results in the US that include misleading statements about corporations and stocks that have been pre-censored by it's government to encourage people to invest or subsidize Chinese industries? Should the US government require that type of information be removed or blocked? [BTW, I don’t think Baidu is wrong or evil, they are providing a service within the confines of their culture and legal system.]
In the end, who determines where the rights of one country intersect the rights of another? Don’t forget your ‘right to privacy’ from some foreign (or domestic) power.
Does ISIS have the right to come to your local schools and spread their message in the name of Free Speech? Should somebody from Syria lecture you about their ‘rights.'
Ok, let's consider this a Reductio ad absurdum.
Nah, that's not how freedom of speech works. You have the right to speak, but you don't have the right to make anyone listen.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
http://whatreallyhappened.com/...
Mein Kampf's text is integral and uncensored. If you don't want to read the remarks then don't. But they give context and meaning to the delusions written by Hitler. Otherwise you'd end up with people taking to Mein Kamp like the funamentalist christians take to the literal interpretation of the bible (only difference with Isis is that the former don't chop heads yet while the later do). Not a good thing to have. Context is important.
Hitler was democratically elected
He wasn't. He was appointed by Paul von Hindenburg
Culture clash I (partially) agree.
Mostly, because you came to love Fox News.
Free (manipulative) speech can hurt.
It *has* hurt you hard, in the past.
No other *developed* country has been hurt by more *manipulative* free speech:
Climate change: On par with China, hold back 3 decades behind anyone else ;)
Gun control: Behind any country, exept Afghanistan and Jemen, every other day another shooting, another NRA ground hog day
Racism: Obama didn't change a thing. If you would like to get your daily dose, just follow Donald on Facebook
Seems like a pretty simple problem to solve, if you ask me.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Minister Maas' goal is not primarily to ban holocaust denial from Facebook. It seems more an attempt to ban "hate speech" against an immigration policy which has gone out of control. More than 800000 illegal immigrants are expected to enter Germany this year - some from Syria, most of them from the western balcan states like Serbia, Albania or Mazedonia. About 70% of them are muslims, about 70% are men. Of course this causes mixed feelings among many Germans who don't believe in the official statements that Germany could manage this kind of mass immigration. While there are surely some statements that people make on Facebook about immigration that are disgusting my impression is a that Maas just wants to move the focus away from the irresponsible immigration politics of his government and discuss about "racism" and "hate speech" instead.
Again, the comparison to the Bible is apt. Do you think that "context is important" with respect to the Bible, and that the government should enforce its sale only if it includes said government-approved contextually-added comments? (Analogies are important, even if this one isn't car-related.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
The consequence of this may be that Facebook removes all German users, advertisers, and blocks access from Germany. They have a large enough user base to be able to afford that, and may in fact do it just to avoid judgement in the court of public opinion, much less dealing with what to them would be a minor legal problem.
Okay, Holocaust denial and inciting racial hatred are crimes. Fine, whatever. But Facebook isn't the police. It isn't their job to keep people from getting in legal trouble. If someone is trying to break the law in Germany, let them so the police can arrest them. You don't tell a heroin dealer "Shh! You'll get in trouble!", you call the cops.
So, you say the numbers are going up every decade "Every decade another million is added to the total."
and then I say no, the numbers have been going down over the years
and then you supply a link that gives a lower number than before.
But you don't understand that your link just said that I'm right and you're wrong, do you?
How can Facebook allow that? Mark Zuckerberg is Jewish, so he should fix this. Many famous Jews have German sounding names; Zuckerberg, Spielberg, Portman, Goldman, Sachs, Lehman, Silverberg, Beckham, Silverstein, etc.
Actually weren't something like 10 million or more killed in the camps? Last I noticed, Jews did not deny that others died in the camps, too.
Yes, ISIS should have the right to spread their propaganda.
Of course there is protection of free speech in Germany. And that freedom ends exactly where freedom of others starts. What is prohibited is public speech that aims at depriving minorities (religious, ethnical, etc.) from constitutional rights, or calls for criminal acts. If can't personally find this to infringe on my freedom.
Can you explain which ones of those goals have required id Software to strip all swastikas out of Wolfenstein in order to be able to publish it in Germany? Were they trying to deprive some minorities of their rights? Which ones were it?
Okay -- but it's still, now, less than "6 million" due to simple math (or, are you arguing that the entire reduction was solely from "non-Jewish deaths"? That'd be a new one to me). They tried to show 6 million died during WWI as well. They have a prophecy in their Talmud saying Israel won't fully be restored to the Jews until 6 million of them die in a fire -- which is why they so needed those delousing showers to be killing ovens. They want to jump the gun on their own prophecy! It's no wonder there are so many anecdotes about them being greedy.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.