War Without End
The global war against terror from a British perspective
FAQ Popular Topics Search Memberlist Usergroups Register
Profile Log in to check your private messages Log in
UK and World News Spam Audit Ignore List
A Fascist America: How close are we?
War Without End Forum Index -> Wake Up America! Your Government
is Hijacked by Zionism
View previous topic :: View next topic
Author Message
Alpha
Lieutenant
Joined: 06 Jan 2003
Posts: 22302
Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2005 2:10 am Post subject: A Fascist America:
How close are we?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Fascist America: How close are we?
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5070
Back to top
Alpha
Lieutenant
Joined: 06 Jan 2003
Posts: 22302
http://www.amren.com/0103issue/0103issue.htm#cover
March 2001
Return to the Dark Ages
Censorship is on the rise.
Is it coming to America?
by Jared Taylor
Americans think of Europeans as essentially like themselves. They
believe European societies are like their own-rooted in the rule of
law, freedom of religion, democratic government, market competition,
and an unfettered press. In recent years, however, Europeans have
given up an essential liberty: freedom of speech. It is true that in
the United States prevailing orthodoxies on some questions are
ruthlessly enforced but it is still legal to say just about anything.
Not so in much of Europe. In the last decade or so countries we think
of as fellow democracies-France, Germany, Switzerland and others-have
passed laws that limit free speech for the same crude ideological
reasons that drove the brief, unsuccessful vogue of campus speech
codes in the United States.
Today in Europe there are laws as bad as anything George Orwell could
have imagined. In some countries courts have ruled that the facts are
irrelevant, and that certain things must not be said whether they are
true or false. In others, a defendant in court who tries to explain or
defend a forbidden view will be charged on the spot with a fresh
offense. Even his lawyer can be fined or go to jail for trying to
mount a defense. In one case a judge ordered that a bookseller's
entire stock-innocent as well as offending titles-be burned!
Just as Eastern Europe is emerging from it, Western Europe has entered
the thought-crime era, in a return to the mentality that launched the
Inquisition and the wars of religion. It is a tyranny of the left
practiced by the very people who profess shock at the tactics of
Joseph McCarthy, an exercise of raw power in the service of pure
ideology. The desire not merely to debate one's opponents but to
disgrace them, muzzle them, fine them, jail them is utterly contrary
to the spirit of civilized discourse. It is profoundly disturbing to
find this ugly sentiment codified into law in some of the countries we
think of as pillars of Western Civilization. At the same time, these
laws cannot help but draw attention to the very ideas they forbid.
Truth does not generally require the help of censors.
There are two subjects about which Europeans can no longer speak
freely. One is race and the other is Nazi Germany. “Anti-racism” laws
generally take the form of forbidding the expression of opinions that
might stir up “hatred” against any racial or ethnic group. In some
countries, it is now risky to say that genetic differences explain why
blacks have, on average, lower IQs than whites or to say that
non-white immigration should be prevented so as to preserve a white
majority. There are probably parts of every issue of American
Renaissance that could be banned in some European country, and we have
an obvious interest in opposing censorship of this kind.
In one case a judge ordered that a bookseller's entire stock -
innocent as well as offending titles - be burned!
Far more prosecutions have taken place, however, in connection with
what is called “Holocaust revisionism” or “Holocaust denial.” This
appears to cover any skepticism about the generally-accepted view that
the Nazis had a plan to exterminate Jews and managed to kill some six
million, mostly by gassing. There is considerable variety in the laws
that forbid disagreement on this matter (see sidebar, page 6), but the
Jewish Holocaust has become the one historical event on which people
in France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Holland, Poland, Austria,
Lithuania (and Israel) can be legally compelled to agree. It is still
legal to dissent from Holocaust orthodoxy in Italy, Sweden, Denmark,
Norway, Britain, Ireland, and Croatia, but there is powerful pressure
in some of these countries to join the censors. Third Reich Jewish
polices are of no special interest to AR, but it is outrageous that
any point of view on any question be forbidden.
In the United States there is widespread complacency over this blatant
thought control practiced by our closest allies. This complacency
proves the utter lack of integrity of those who make principled
free-speech claims for Communists, pornographers, rap “artists,” and
flag-burners, but who will not lift a finger to stop the persecution
of “racists” and “Nazis.” Liberals get dewy-eyed over the First
Amendment only when it suits them, and are quietly delighted to see
their opponents dragged off to jail because of their opinions. Indeed,
several thousand Europeans are arrested every year who, if they were
leftists, would be lionized as “prisoners of conscience.”
Indifference, even joy, over their fate is the contemptible sentiment
that prevails across the political spectrum even in America.
France has had perhaps the most colorful history of modern European
censorship, perhaps because it has the longest history of Holocaust
revisionism. The leftist Paul Rassinier cast doubt on accepted views
as early as the 1950s, but it was in 1978 that revisionism came to the
attention of a larger European public. In that and the following year
Prof. Robert Faurisson of the University of Lyon published two
articles in the newspaper Le Monde asserting that there were no
execution gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camps. Mr. Faurisson,
an expert at textual analysis who made his case from original
documents, provoked a storm of opposition.
Nine anti-racist and concentration-camp survivor organizations brought
civil and criminal suits against Prof. Faurisson for “falsification of
history in the matter of the gas chambers,” a curious charge brought
under the French anti-racial-discrimination law of 1972. In April
1983, the Paris Court of Appeals found Prof. Faurisson innocent of
“falsification of history” but found him guilty of the equally curious
crime of “reducing his research to malevolent slogans,” and made him
pay a small fine. At the same time, the court upheld the right to
express any opinion on the existence of Nazi gas chambers (presumably
so long as it was not expressed “malevolently”), concluding that “the
value of the conclusions defended by Faurisson rests therefore solely
with the appraisal of experts, historians, and the public.”
This was a setback to the suppressers of free speech, who responded
with what is known as the Gayssot law-named for the Communist deputy
who promoted it-signed into law in 1990 by President François
Mitterand. This law made it a crime punishable by up to 250,000 French
francs (at that time approximately $50,000) or one year in prison or
both to dispute the truth of any of the “crimes against humanity” for
which Nazi leaders were charged at the Nuremberg trials. Prof.
Faurisson, who had continued to publish views on the Holocaust, was
the first to be convicted under this law, and was fined 100,000 francs
in April, 1991, a penalty reduced on appeal to 30,000 francs. He has
not given up his work and has been repeatedly found guilty of the same
crime. At last count, he has also been physically assaulted ten times
and on at least one occasion was nearly killed.
Although the Gayssot law was controversial when it was passed, the
French are now happy with it. According to a 1998 Sofres poll, 79
percent think it necessary “because one does not have the right to say
anything one likes about the extermination of the Jews.”
The extent of this sentiment explains why there were other convictions
for Holocaust-related comments before passage of the 1990 Gayssot law.
In 1987 the leader of the French National Front Jean-Marie Le Pen was
fined under anti-racism laws, not for denying the existence of Nazi
gas chambers but merely for describing them as a “detail” or “minor
point” in the history of the Second World War. Astonishingly enough,
not only must a Frenchman affirm a certain historical fact, he must
attribute to it a certain prescribed importance.
Another French celebrity-turned-thought criminal is Brigitte Bardot,
the former actress. In retirement she has become an ardent
animal-rights activist and has often denounced the ritual slaughter of
sheep by French Muslims during the festival that marks the end of the
Ramadan fast. She has also spoken in more general terms, lamenting
that “my country, France, my homeland, my land is again invaded by an
overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims.” Like Prof.
Faurisson, she is impenitent and has been fined at least three
times-in 1997, 1998 and 2000-under the 1972 anti-racism law. A judge
concluded that Miss Bardot was guilty of inciting “discrimination,
hatred or racial violence,” and that her condemnation of Muslim
practices went beyond any possible concern for animal rights.
There has been a host of other less-well-known Frenchmen convicted
under the censorship laws. In May, 1999, the editor of a
small-circulation magazine Akribeia was fined 10,000 francs ($2,000)
and given a suspended six-month sentence for writing favorably about
Paul Rassinier, the founder of French revisionism. At his arrest,
police strip-searched Jean Plantin and confiscated his two computers
and a dozen computer disks, destroying the results of several years’
research. In September 2000, a 53-year-old French high school teacher
in Lemberg in the Moselle region was fined 40,000 Francs ($8,000) and
given a one-year suspended sentence for telling his students that the
Third Reich gas chambers were used for delousing clothes and that the
concentration camps were not extermination centers.
Censorship cases now get little attention in France unless there are
unusual circumstances or the defendant is a celebrity. In July 2000, a
local National Front politician in the Rhône-Alpes region, Georges
Theil, was charged with “disputing the existence of crimes against
humanity.” In what he thought was a private e-mail exchange and using
a screen name, he had written, “Homicidal gas chambers never existed
for the simple reason that they were simply and profoundly
impossible.” Mr. Theil had not counted on the diligence of the French
police, who tracked him down through his Internet service provider,
Wanadoo, and hauled him into court where prosecutors asked for a
six-month suspended sentence. Cases of this kind, which show how
deeply the French police are willing to burrow into what people think
are their private lives, have been completely ignored in the United
States.
Two recent censorship trials that did receive international attention
were “the Garaudy affair” and the successful attempt to shut down
certain activities by the American Internet portal Yahoo. The Garaudy
scandal is particularly instructive because it shows how willingly the
left will sacrifice its own to the gods of Third Reich orthodoxy.
Roger Garaudy was born in 1913, served in the French army, joined the
wartime Resistance, and sat in the French National Assembly as a
Communist, first as a deputy and later as a senator. For 25 years he
was a major theoretician for the Communist Party, but broke with the
comrades over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He
continued to teach philosophy and promote anti-racism and socialism.
He converted to Islam, and enjoyed great prestige as one of France's
most influential public intellectuals.
Over the years he took an increasing interest in the Palestinian
cause, and came to believe Jews were exaggerating the horrors of the
Holocaust in order to squelch criticism of Israel. This and other
views expressed in his 1995 book The Founding Myths of Modern Israel
(published in English in 2000 by the California-based Institute for
Historical Review) unleashed not only a flood of criticism but
likewise brought the octogenarian into court for violation of the
Gayssot law. Prof. Garaudy's impeccable credentials as a leftist and
anti-racist were no defense. In February, 1998, he was duly fined the
equivalent of $40,000 after a trial that caused a sensation in France
and throughout the Islamic world. Probably no event has prompted more
interest in Holocaust revisionism among Arabs than the trial of this
French Muslim who defended Palestinians. Religious and political
leaders from Egypt to Iran denounced France for putting him on trial,
and the wife of the president of the United Arab Emirates contributed
$50,000 to his defense. Egyptian Nobel laureate in literature Naguib
Mahfouz wondered about the health of Western societies in which it is
commonplace to deny God but a crime to doubt the Holocaust.
The affair took on yet another tragi-comic dimension when Abbé Pierre,
one of the most popular and admired men in France, made a few offhand
remarks in support of Prof. Garaudy. Abbé Pierre is a Capuchin friar
whose real name is Henri Groulès. He came to be known as “the abbé”
during his work with the French Resistance smuggling Jews out of
occupied France. He has devoted his life to good works for the poor
and for immigrants, and has a reputation something like that of Mother
Theresa. He had become acquainted with Prof. Garaudy and shared his
concern about Israel's treatment of Palestinians. After a few comments
in favor of his old friend, he was horrified to discover that despite
much backtracking and many apologies his reputation had vanished. He
acknowledged he had not read the book, called on Prof. Garaudy to
correct any errors, and disavowed any association with Holocaust
denial. Even so, leftists whom he thought were lifelong friends turned
on him, kicking him out of the International League Against Racism and
Anti-Semitism, a French anti-racist organization of which he had long
been a member. Perhaps the cruelest blow was his expulsion from
Emmaus, the charitable organization he himself had founded. Although
not charged with violation of the Gayssot law, Abbé Pierre fled to
Italy and hid in a monastery until the controversy blew over.
The French case against the American Internet giant Yahoo, which is a
gateway to search engines, auctions, shopping and much else caused
only a brief murmur of disapproval in the United States, but is an
ominous first step in bringing the Internet under the control of
European censorship laws. The same International League Against Racism
and Anti-Semitism of which the abbé used to be member-known by its
French acronym LICRA-joined the French Union of Jewish Students in
suing Yahoo to stop Internet auctions of Nazi medals, arm bands,
photos, autographs and the like. France's anti-racism laws forbid
commerce in anything “racially tinged,” and the California-based Yahoo
promptly removed these auctions from its French web site.
This was not enough for LICRA and the Jewish students, who insisted
that Yahoo find a way to block French Internet users from reaching
Yahoo sites in the U.S., where auctions continued. Yahoo said it was
technologically impossible, and the court appointed a panel of three
computer experts-American, British, and French-to render a ruling. Two
of the experts said it could not be done, but Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez
chose to believe the Frenchman, who said it could. In May 2000, he
gave Yahoo two months to make it impossible for French Internet users
to reach the Nazi auctions. He said he would fine the American company
100,000 Francs (now $13,000) a day if it did not, since the sale of
Nazi souvenirs offended “the collective memory of the nation.” Judge
Gomez also ordered Yahoo to pay 10,000 Francs to the plaintiffs LICRA
and the Union of Jewish Students. A LICRA spokesman hailed the ruling
as a great victory for democracy, of all things.
The French case against Yahoo was an ominous first step in bringing
the Internet under European censorship laws.
The next month Jerry Yang, a co-founder of Yahoo, said his company
would ignore Judge Gomez’ order. “Asking us to filter access to our
sites according to the nationality of web surfers is very naïve,” he
said, adding, “we are not going to change the content of our sites in
the United States because someone in France is asking us to do so.”
Six months later, in January 2001, Mr. Yang ate crow when Yahoo
decided “voluntarily” to stop auctioning anything that bears a
swastika or any other “hate” symbol such as a KKK insignia. “Yahoo
recognizes that we were right,” exulted LICRA, and Ygal El Harrar,
chairman of he Jewish students, welcomed “the return to its senses by
the American company.” Incredibly, Yahoo claims daily fines had
nothing to do with its decision. Noting that it already bans auctions
of live animals, used underwear, and tobacco, it is pretending it is
was only adjusting its list of forbidden products.
No one is fooled. Lee Dembart wrote in the International Herald
Tribune on Jan. 15, 2001, that the precedent has now been set for any
country to try to control the Internet all over the world. China could
threaten to fine sites that promote the Falun Gong Buddhist cult,
which is illegal in China. Arab countries could fine Internet sites
that sell Jewish memorabilia, since such things no doubt offend their
“collective memory.” But by and large the American media have had
nothing to say about what amounts to the imposition of French law on
Americans. Needless to say, there would be a frenzy of denunciation if
it were not “Nazis” who were being shoved off the net but, say,
abortion-rights activists.
In the minds of Americans Switzerland is an orderly, sensible country
of decent, independent-minded people. It is also perhaps the only
country that has ever brought censorship upon itself through
referendum. Over the weekend of Sept. 24 and 25, 1994, the Swiss voted
by a majority of 54.7 to 45.3 percent to make it a crime, punishable
by fine and/or up to three years imprisonment, to “publicly incite
hatred or discrimination” or “deny, grossly minimize, or seek to
justify genocide or other crimes against humanity.” Half of all Swiss
cantons voted against the new law but thanks to the overall majority,
it went into effect Jan. 1, 1995.
Swiss authorities had not actually needed this law to censor
foreigners. In November 1986, the Geneva police stopped two French
Holocaust revisionists-Pierre Guillaume and Henri Roques-from giving a
press conference and banned them from speaking publicly in Switzerland
for three years.
The first Swiss citizen to fall afoul of the new law was Arthur Vogt,
an 80-year-old retired school teacher. On June 3, 1997, a court in
Meilen fined him 20,000 Swiss Francs ($15,000) for mailing copies of a
revisionist book to seven acquaintances and for publishing a private
newsletter in which he had written revisionist essays.
In December 1997, a court in Vevey sentenced Aldo Ferraglia, an
Italian citizen, to four months in jail and court costs of 15,075
francs. He was also made to pay 28,000 francs in “atonement” to three
Jewish organizations for having distributed a number of Holocaust
revisionist books, including Roger Garaudy's The Founding Myths of
Modern Israel. At the Ferraglia trial the judge defended the new law
by explaining it did not forbid opinion, only the public expression of
certain opinions-a distinction that may be a little too fine for
Americans.
By June of last year, there had been no fewer than 200 trials and 100
sentences based on the 1995 law. As in France, such trials no longer
attract much attention. Probably few Swiss heard about it when animal
rights activist Erwin Kessler went to jail for two months for writing
that Jews who practice ritual slaughter of cattle are no better than
concentration-camp guards.
The press took only slightly more notice of Gaston-Armand Amaudruz
whom a Lausanne court sentenced to a year in prison for articles he
wrote in his monthly newsletter Courrier du Continent, which he
started in 1946 and had only about 500 subscribers, mostly in France.
Mr. Amaudruz holds a doctorate in social and political sciences and
has been a teacher of French and German. These are the words for which
the 79-year-old paid with a year in prison: “For my part, I maintain
my position: I don't believe in the gas chambers. Let the
exterminationists provide the proof and I will believe it. But as I've
been waiting for this proof for decades, I don't believe I will see it
soon.” At sentencing, the judge criticized Mr. Amaudruz’ lack of
remorse and noted that he had continued to violate the law, writing
“Long live revisionism” in the issue of the newsletter that appeared
just before the trial.
Perhaps the most prominent Swiss to be found guilty under the
censorship law is 49-year-old school teacher Jürgen Graf. In March,
1993, after the publication of his 112-page book, The Holocaust on the
Test Stand, in which he cited reasons to doubt the accounts of
extermination, he was fired from his job as a teacher of Latin and
French at a private secondary school. The French banned the book in
1994. Before long Mr. Graf found himself in court, and in July, 1998,
he was sentenced to 15 months in jail for various revisionist
writings. Sentenced along with Mr. Graf was his 70-year-old publisher,
Gerhard Förster, who got 12 months. The court fined both men 8,000
Swiss francs ($5,500) and ordered them to turn over 55,000 francs
($38,000) in proceeds from book sales. Presiding Judge Andrea Staubli
said the defendants’ “remarkable criminal energy” and lack of remorse
justified harsh punishment.
Their defense counsel protested that he could not even try to explain
the reasons for Mr. Graf's statements without, himself, being
prosecuted under the same law. He also argued in vain that censorship
law violated the free-speech provisions of the European Human Rights
Convention which Switzerland has signed. Wolfgang Frölich, an engineer
called to vouch for the authenticity of Mr. Graf's findings, found
himself threatened with prosecution if he testified. Just as absurdly,
the court included The Holocaust on the Test Stand in its reasons for
finding Mr. Graf guilty even though he wrote it before the 1995
censorship law.
Mr. Graf decided to flee the country rather than spend 15 months in
prison. In November 2000, he ended up in Iran, where he planned to
stay for some time. He has been welcomed by scholars in Tehran, and
was invited to give lectures at Iranian universities. Mr. Graf does
not intend to return to Switzerland until the country restores the
right of free speech. As we will see, he is not the only European to
go into exile rather than face jail as a prisoner of conscience.
Since the end of the Second World War, beginning with de-Nazification,
Germany has had censorship laws unthinkable in the United States. Nazi
songs, salutes, and symbols are illegal even in private, and the
country has been as aggressive as any in trying to expand the effects
of its own repressive laws beyond its own borders. By now, thousands
of people have fallen afoul of anti-Nazi, and “incitement to racial
hatred” laws, which violate the German constitution's own guarantees
of freedom of expression. Any number of quite remarkable cases of
state-sponsored thought control have gone almost completely unreported
in the United States.
Fredrick Toben was born in Germany in 1944 but emigrated with his
parents to Australia when he was ten, and is an Australian citizen. He
studied at Melbourne University and at universities in Heidelberg,
Tübingen, and Stuttgart, and has a doctorate in philosophy. In 1994 he
established the Adelaide Institute, in the Australian town of that
name, to promote Holocaust revisionism. He sent some material to
Germany, and was arrested in Mannheim in April 1999 during a visit. He
was held without bail until his trial seven months later and was
charged with “incitement to racial hatred,” “insulting the memory of
the dead,” and “public denial of genocide.” The court sentenced Dr.
Toben to ten months in prison but let him off with a fine of 6,000
marks ($3,500) on the strength of time already spent in prison. As in
Switzerland, it is impossible to mount a defense against these
charges. Defendants and even lawyers who try to explain or justify
their statements have been immediately charged with additional
offenses right in the courtroom.
The prosecution tried to charge Mr. Toben on additional counts because
of articles on his Australia-based Adelaide Institute web page
(www.adelaide institute.org), but the court ruled that his only
violation of German law was to have sent printed matter directly into
Germany. Foreign Internet sites were not covered by the law even if
Germans could read them. As Deputy Interior Minister Brigitte Zypries
explained in July 2000, “That's life and that's the Internet . . . .
You can't build a wall around Germany.” Since the government could not
use the most serious evidence against him, Dr. Toben got off lightly;
the shortest previous sentence for his crimes had been two years, and
the prosecution was asking for two years and four months.
However, in December 2000, in a very significant ruling that went
virtually unnoticed in the United States, Germany's highest court, the
Bundesgerichtshof, reversed the lower court. It said German law
applies to any ideas or images Germans can reach from within Germany,
so someone who posts a swastika on a web page anywhere in the world is
a criminal under German law. Dr. Toben, whose case provided the high
court with the basis of this ruling, could presumably be the subject
of an extradition request. As we will see below, Dr. Toben faces
problems enough back home in Australia.
One of the few Americans to notice and comment on this extension of
German (and French) law to the Internet was Rabbi Abraham Cooper of
the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. “We commend the German
authorities for sticking to their commitment,” he said; “it's their
democracy, these are their laws.” He went on to praise the French,
too: “We have to commend the Germans and the French for basically
saying ’In our societies, this is how we deal with the problems of
hate, racism and Holocaust denial. You in America have your own laws,
but at least respect our values.’ “ Perhaps Rabbi Cooper would be
pleased to see European-style censorship in the United States.
The case of Germar Rudolf is likewise remarkable. Born in 1964, Mr.
Rudolf graduated summa ***** laude in chemistry from the University of
Bonn and is a certified chemist. After serving in the German air
force, he entered a Ph.D. program at the prestigious Max Planck
Institute for Solid State Physics. While still at the institute he
carried out a forensic physical examination of the gas chambers of
Birkenau and concluded that for a variety of technical reasons they
could not have been used for executions. In 1993 he published his
findings in what is called The Rudolf Report, and was promptly
dismissed from the Max Planck Institute. A court in Stuttgart ruled
that the report “denies the systematic mass murder of the Jewish
population in gas chambers” and was therefore “popular incitement,”
“incitement to racial hatred,” and “defamation.” The court rejected
Mr. Rudolf's request for technical evidence about the truth or
falsehood of his report, ruling that the “mass murder of the Jews” is
“obvious.”
Mr. Rudolf has continued to commit thought crimes, editing a
compendium of revisionist articles called Grundlagen zur
Zeitgeschichte [Foundations of Contemporary History]. In 1996 a court
fined his publisher 30,000 marks ($18,000) and ordered all copies
seized and burned. Police raided Mr. Rudolf's apartment three times,
and in 1996 he was finally sentenced to 14 months in prison. Rather
than serve time he fled to England, which has anti-racist laws but
where Holocaust denial is not (yet) a crime. He is now director of
Castle Hill Publishers, which issues revisionist works, and publishes
a German-language revisionist quarterly. Jewish groups have brought
pressure on the British government to enact laws to outlaw Holocaust
denial so that Mr. Rudolf can either be prosecuted in England or
extradited to Germany. Like Jürgen Graf of Switzerland, unless free
speech is restored in his homeland, he will go to jail if he ever
returns. Recently he moved to the United States and has applied for
amnesty as a political refugee. It will be interesting to see how the
INS, which has stretched “political persecution” to include
wife-beating and making fun of homosexuals, will avoid granting him
asylum.
One German defendant who did not flee the country was the elderly
historian Udo Walendy, publisher of the “Historical Facts” series of
booklets. In May, 1996, the district court of Bielefeld sent him to
prison for 15 months, and a year later a court in Herford added 14
more months to his sentence. He was also fined 20,000 marks ($12,000)
when 12 copies of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf were found in his
possession. Judge Helmut Knöner of the Herford court took the curious
position that Mr. Walendy was guilty not of a sin of commission but of
omission:
“This [case] is not about what was written-that is not for this court
to determine-but rather about what was not written. If you had devoted
just a fraction of the same exactitude to highlighting the other side
[of the Holocaust question], you would not have been sentenced.”
Here we find the tortured reasoning to which censorship laws
invariably give rise. To have failed to write about a particular
historical event in a balanced manner is a crime that can send a
historian to jail. In the court's view, this one-sided writing was
“meant to disturb the public peace,” not withstanding the “exactitude”
of Mr. Walendy's work. Moreover, although Mr. Walendy has been a model
prisoner he was denied the usual grant of release after serving
two-thirds of his sentence. Authorities explained that this was
because he was unlikely to change his views.
It is possible to argue that Austrian censorship laws have already
claimed a life. In 1995, Werner Pfeifenberger, a German professor of
political science published an essay called “Internationalism and
Nationalism: a Never-Ending Mortal Enmity?” in a collection issued by
Austria's Freedom Party (see AR, Dec. 1999, and March 2000). A
prominent Jewish journalist attacked the essay, accusing Prof.
Pfeifenberger of writing in a “neo-Nazi tone,” and “extolling the
national community.” Because the professor had criticized the 1933
Jewish declaration of an international boycott of ermany, the
journalist also accused him of reviving “the old Nazi legend of a
Jewish world conspiracy.”
The German state of North Rhine-Westphalia dismissed Prof.
Pfeifenberger from his teaching position, and a court in Vienna
prepared a case against him under Austrian anti-Nazi laws. On May 13,
2000, just a few weeks before the trail, Prof. Pfeifenberger took his
own life. His lawyer explained that Prof. Pfeifenberger faced ten
years in jail under the charges, did not expect a fair trial, and had
already spoken of committing suicide. As in Germany and Switzerland,
Austrian law does not permit a defendant to argue the veracity of his
statements; offensive “tone” or “diction” is sufficient to secure
conviction.
United States citizens have fallen afoul of German censorship
laws-without the slightest gesture of support from their own
government. Hans Schmidt of Pensacola, Florida, runs the
German-American National Public Affairs Committee, which publishes a
newsletter. Mr. Schmidt, who fought in the German army, moved to the
United States after the war and became a U.S. citizen. In 1995, on a
trip to Germany to visit family members, German authorities arrested
him for having sent some of his newsletters to Germany. They held him
in jail for five months but released him in conjunction with the first
part of his trial. Mr. Schmidt, who could have been sentenced to five
years in prison, slipped out of the country rather than stay for the
rest of his trial.
Another American, Gary Lauck of Lincoln, Nebraska, was not so lucky.
Known as “the farm-belt Führer,” Mr. Lauck is an unapologetic
supporter of Nazism, and has shipped a considerable quantity of Nazi
material to Germany. In March, 1995, he was visiting Denmark, a
country that does not have anti-Nazi laws, but in an operation of
questionable legality, the Danes extradited him to Germany. In August,
1996, a Hamburg court convicted him of inciting racial hatred and
distributing illegal materials-which he did legally in the United
States and not in Germany-and sentenced him to four years in jail. He
served his sentence and returned to the United States, where he
continues to promote Nazism.
At almost the same time Mr. Lauck was on trial in Germany, the
American citizen Harry Wu-a fervent critic of China-slipped into China
illegally on a mission of support for dissidents and was arrested. The
U.S. State Department mounted an extraordinary effort to secure his
release, but completely ignored Germany's prosecution of Mr. Lauck.
Another curious case involving the United States is that of a young
German musician Hendrik Möbus. Mr. Möbus said provocative things about
Jews, gave the Nazi salute during a concert, and later turned up in
the United States. In a little-known incident in the summer of 2000,
federal officers arrested Mr. Möbus with the intention of extraditing
him to Germany, even though his offenses were not crimes in the United
States. Apparently thinking better of this unjustifiable proceeding,
the government released Mr. Möbus, who promptly turned the tables by
suing for political asylum. With the help of William Pierce of the
West Virginia-based National Alliance, Mr. Möbus has hired immigration
lawyers to argue his case on the grounds that he will be persecuted
for his political beliefs if he returns to Germany.
One of the common difficulties for applicants for asylum is that they
must prove they face a realistic threat of persecution. In Mr. Möbus’
case, the German authorities have already issued an extradition
request in which they openly state they want to send him to jail. Once
again, it will be interesting to see how the INS responds.
Neo-Nazi music is increasingly popular in Germany, and bands play a
constant cat-and-mouse game with the police. Most make their
recordings in secret studios or across the border in Poland, and the
recordings are then pressed in the United States. The CDs come back to
Europe via Sweden, where the material is not illegal. Mere possession
is a crime in Germany, but the authorities estimate there are more
than 100 neo-Nazi bands operating clandestinely.
Some repressive measures fall short of imprisonment. In August, 2000,
the German postal bank, which is part of the government-owned post
office, systematically shut down all accounts used by any group it
considered “far-right.” These included Germany's two main nationalist
parties, the German Peoples’ Union (DVU) and the National Democratic
Party (NPD). Postbank chairman Wulf von Schimmelmann explained that
the measure was “a contribution to political hygiene and cementing of
democracy in Germany.”
Thought-control can take a comical turn. In August, 2000, Dresden
police ordered a 25-year-old man to get a haircut because he had
shaved the back of his head leaving only the letters “SS,” in the
distinctive angular script used by the Nazis.
Mein Kampf has been banned in Germany for years, and German companies
have been quietly enforcing the ban overseas as well. Publishing giant
Bertelsmann polices its US-based website bookstore for titles
forbidden in Germany, and is trying to do the same with
Barnesandnoble.com, of which it owns 40 percent. Mein Kampf is banned
in several other countries, including Holland and the Czech Republic,
where distributors were recently fined. There is considerable irony in
suppressing Hitler's turgid autobiography. For years it was common to
say that if only people had read it in the 1930s they would have
stopped Hitler in his tracks. Now we must presumably be kept from
reading it for fear we will follow its advice.
Until 1995, Spain was a popular refuge for dissidents facing
prosecution elsewhere in Europe but in that year it passed new laws
putting it firmly in the camp of the censors. The first conviction
came in November, 1998, when bookseller Pedro Varela was sentenced to
five years in jail for “incitement to racial hatred” and “denying or
justifying genocide.” His case began in December, 1996, when police
raided his Librería Europa bookstore in Barcelona and confiscated
20,000 volumes. Nearly two years went by before he went to trial
because many of the books were in English, French, or German, and the
court insisted that they be translated into Spanish. In addition to
the five-year prison term, the court fined him 720,000 pesetas
($5,000) and ordered all 20,000 books burned-even though only 30 of
some 200 titles were found to violate the law.
In December 1998, Mr. Varela appealed the sentence to the provincial
court or Audencia of Catalonia, which ruled unanimously in April 1999
that the censorship law violates guarantees of free expression in the
Spanish constitution. The case will now go before the Constitutional
Tribunal in Madrid. In the meantime, Mr. Varela's 20,000 volumes have
not yet been burned, but he has not gotten them back either. He
restocked his store and continued to operate, but in January 1999, a
mob of “anti-fascists” smashed through the protective metal shutters
of his shop, ransacked it, and burned hundreds of books. Police
arrived but did nothing. Mr. Varela rebuilt his store and continues to
sell books.
In Britain, despite campaign promises from Tony Blair that Labour
would ban Holocaust denial, in early 2000 Parliament resisted pressure
from Jewish groups to do so. Home Office Minister Mike O'Brien
explained that the government was unable to “strike a balance between
outlawing such offensive statements while ensuring that freedom of
speech is not unduly restricted.” Since 1986 the Public Order Act has
made incitement to racial hatred an offense, but Jewish groups argued
this law was inadequate because prosecutors have been unable to show
that Holocaust denial incites hatred. This is not to say that these
laws have never been used. Although enforcement is sporadic, a few
racial nationalists have been convicted.
Originally prosecutors had to prove a defendant intended to stir up
hatred, but that was difficult. Later the laws were broadened to
permit conviction if hatred was stirred up whatever the intent, but
that was also hard to prove. Now, it is sufficient to show a
“likelihood” that some act will incite racial hatred, and it was on
this basis that Spearhead editor John Tyndall and British Nationalist
editor John Morse were tried together and convicted by a single jury
in 1986. The prosecution's tactic was to read page after page of
“offensive” material in court and the cumulative effect seems to have
convinced the jury what they wrote was “likely” to incite hatred. The
judge decided the crime deserved six months in jail. Mr. Tyndall, who
after serving his sentence returned to editing Spearhead, despises
incitement laws but believes they have the beneficial effect of
keeping racial nationalists from using intemperate-and ultimately
unpersuasive language.
Nick Griffin, now head of the British National Party, received a
suspended sentence after a similar conviction in 1998. He also edited
a magazine, which discussed Holocaust revisionism and opposed
non-white immigration to Britain. In his case as well, there seems to
have been no clear line between acceptable and unacceptable opinions;
his magazine apparently created an overall atmosphere that was
“likely” to incite hatred.
Some British anti-racism measures approach outright insanity. As
reported in the July 2000 issue of AR, a recently-passed law
forbidding “racially threatening or abusive words” was recently
invoked against a Cambridge man who got into a whispered argument in a
library. A woman overheard Robert Birchall tell Kenyan-born Mugai
Mbaya to “go back to your own country,” and reported him to police.
Mr. Birchall was fined 100 pounds. In the city of Gloucester police
officers are reported to have been sent to eat in ethnic restaurants
and listen in on the conversations of other patrons so they can charge
them with crimes if they say rude things about other races.
Perhaps even more than to Europeans, Americans feel kin to Canadians
and perhaps Australians-fellow English-speakers who have established
themselves far from the homeland. But here, too, traditions of free
speech have crumbled under the pressure of special-interest groups. In
October 2000, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity
Commission ordered Frederick Toben-back from prison in Germany-to
remove Holocaust revisionist material from the web page of the
Adelaide Institute. Commissioner Kathleen McEvoy said Mr. Toben
violated the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act by “having published
materials inciting hatred against the Jewish people.” She also ordered
Mr. Toben to post a lengthy apology. Mr. Toben refused, saying he
would not apologize for material he believed to be factual and that
any proceeding against him was immoral if truth was not permitted as a
defense. The government-funded commission has no enforcement powers,
but could initiate proceedings to have Mr. Toben jailed for contempt.
In Tasmania, the commission has also accused an associate of the
Adelaide Institute, 58-year-old Olga Scully, of selling anti-Jewish
material and putting it in mailboxes. She also refused to apologize,
and the commission announced plans to take her to court. The
Russian-born grandmother says she is not intimidated and is “quite
prepared” to go to prison.
It will be a surprise to many Americans to know that our
next-door-neighbor Canada now has a nearly 20-year tradition of
censorship. In 1981 a well-liked secondary school teacher and mayor in
Lacombe County, Alberta, named Jim Keegstra was reported to be telling
his social studies students that Jews run the world. The school board
fired him-which it no doubt had the right to do-but Canadian
authorities also charged him with violating section 281 of the
criminal code, which prohibits spreading hate against an identifiable
group. Mr. Keegstra remained unrepentant during a ten-year legal
battle that took him to the Canadian Supreme Court, which upheld his
conviction.
The most famous Canadian thought criminal is undoubtedly Ernst Zundel,
a German who immigrated to Canada in 1958 and established himself as a
commercial artist. Since the mid-1970s he has published and publicized
Holocaust revisionist materials, and in 1983 he was charged under
section 181 of the criminal code, which prohibits spreading “false
news” that the purveyor knows to be false.
His case became something of a cause célèbre, and the trial dragged on
for eight weeks before reaching a conviction. Mr. Zundel filed
numerous appeals and in 1992 the Supreme Court ruled the law under
which he was convicted unconstitutional because it was “an
unjustifiable limit on the right and freedom of expression.”
Mr. Zundel was not out of court for long. At the urging of Jewish
groups, he was brought before the Canadian Human Rights Commission in
what must be one of the most Kafkaesque censorship proceedings of
modern times. There is a section of the Canadian criminal code written
to outlaw telephone answering machines with “hate messages.” It makes
it illegal “to communicate telephonically” “any matter that is likely
to expose a person or persons to hatred [for reasons of race,
ethnicity, etc.].” In a tortured interpretation of this law, Mr.
Zundel was charged on the basis of a web page that contains Holocaust
materials by him and by others. Although the site is commonly known as
the Zundelsite, it is based in the United States and run by an
American.
Ironically, the Human Rights Commission has been asked to find Mr.
Zundel guilty because he is associated with a foreign web page that
publishes articles that, in print form, have been found to be legal in
Canada. Indeed, the first and lengthiest of the pamphlets cited in the
charge is the very one cited in the previous case that was thrown out
by the Canadian Supreme Court! What is more, this case has dragged on
for an astonishing five years. At the same time, the chairman of the
Human Rights Tribunal has conceded that “the truth is not an issue
before us. . . . The sole issue is whether such communications are
likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.” Mr.
Zundel, who has spent an estimated $140,000 on the case, recently gave
up even trying to defend himself, saying “I would rather save my money
and appeal their grotesque ruling when it comes out.” Amazingly, the
case continues to drag on without him, with final arguments expected
in late February.
Yet another prominent censorship victim has been Doug Collins and the
newspaper that used to publish him, the North Shore News. In February
1999, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal found Mr. Collins
guilty of acts “likely to expose Jews to hatred or contempt.” Found
criminal were four columns he wrote in 1994. Interestingly, the
tribunal decided that taken individually none of the columns was a
criminal act, but taken together they were. The tribunal ordered Mr.
Collins and the North Shore News to desist from further incitement to
hatred, and to pay $2,000 to a Jewish man who had brought the charges,
as compensation for injury to his dignity and self-respect. It also
ordered the paper to publish the judgment in full, which was perhaps
the first time the government ever forced a Canadian newspaper to
print something against its will. Mr. Collins now publishes on the
Internet.
Canadian authorities have been very unpredictable in their enforcement
of laws against “incitement of hatred.” They have never been bothered
by the lyrics of black rap “musicians” who openly urge blacks to kill
whites, but it has taken a very close look at academic studies of
racial differences. Canadian customs authorities have seized many
shipments of books from the United States including Race, Evolution
and Behavior, by Philippe Rushton (reviewed in AR, Dec. 1994). Prof.
Rushton, who teaches psychology at the University of Western Ontario,
has been himself investigated for inciting hatred and nearly lost his
job because of his carefully-researched studies of racial differences.
Other books Canadian customs have held at the border include Shockley
on Eugenics and Race (reviewed in AR, Jan. 1993), Race, Intelligence
and Bias in Academe by Roger Pearson, The Dispossessed Majority by
Wilmot Robertson, and The Immigration Invasion by Wayne Lutton and
John Tanton.
The United States does not have censorship laws but we are creeping in
that direction. Hate crime laws are an ominous step, because they add
penalties to crimes based on motive. Until the passage of hate crime
laws sentencing did not depend on the motive of a crime but whether it
was premeditated or spontaneous. You could punch a man because he was
fat, black, insulted you, or seduced your wife, and you were guilty of
assault. Now, certain motives-that is to say certain thoughts-bring
heavier penalties. In February of this year, a Houston, Texas, judge
sentenced 21-year-old Matthew Marshall to no fewer than ten years in
jail for burning a cross in front of a black family's house. People
who commit gruesome violent crimes often get less jail time.
We have also had a few cases of censorship almost as absurd as those
that have begun to crop up in England. In August, 1998, Janis Barton
was leaving a restaurant in Manistee, Michigan, and walked by another
group waiting to be seated. Those in the other group spoke to each
other in Spanish, and Mrs. Barton said, out loud, “I wish damn Spics
would learn to speak English.” One of the Spanish-speakers filed a
complaint and Mrs. Barton was charged with the crime of committing
“insulting conduct in a public place,” on the grounds that what she
said were “fighting words” that could provoke violence. A jury bought
that argument and the judge sentenced Mrs. Barton to 45 days in jail
(she served only a few days). This is an odd case that may not be
repeated, but it clearly shows the direction in which hypersensitivity
to the feelings of non-whites is taking us.
Another worrying step towards censorship is a law passed just last
December 15, which requires all libraries receiving federal money to
use content filters on computers connected to the Internet. The idea
is to protect people from pornography, violence and “hate speech,” but
the makers of filtering software invariably give it a leftist slant.
The federal government is using the power of the purse to restrict
access to certain views and information.
The full-blown, unabashed censorship laws in Europe and Canada are a
giant step backwards in the history of Western Civilization. It was
perhaps one of the most significant conceptual breakthroughs in human
thought to recognize that the social cost of suppressing “error” is
far greater than the damage unchecked “error” can do when men are free
to refute it. It is cause for great sadness that our European brethren
have stepped back into the mentality of the witch hunt, forcing their
citizens into exile and making them prisoners of conscience.
Indeed, it is in the defense of prisoners of conscience that Amnesty
International (AI) made a name for itself, and cases like those
described here would appear to be tailor-made for them. According to
their own publications, prisoners of conscience are “people who are
imprisoned, detained or otherwise physically restricted anywhere
because of their beliefs, color, sex, ethnic origin, language or
religion, provided they have not used or advocated violence.” Every
person mentioned in this article and thousands more have been charged
with crimes because of the non-violent expression of beliefs. AI goes
on to say that “all people have the right to express their convictions
and the obligation to extend that freedom to others” and that “Amnesty
International seeks the immediate and unconditional release of all
prisoners of conscience.”
A number of people have appealed to AI to intervene on behalf of
imprisoned Holocaust revisionists but AI refuses. In 1995 it affirmed
“Amnesty International's intention to exclude from prisoner of
conscience status those who advocate the denial of the Holocaust . . .
..” They took this step on the grounds that dissent from accepted views
on the Holocaust means one has “advocated national, racial, or
religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination,
hostility or violence.” What this means is that AI does not consider
someone a prisoner of conscience unless it agrees with him.
It is probably true that some of the people charged under incitement
laws really do want to stir up hatred-something that however
reprehensible is legal in the United States and should be legal
everywhere-but there is no evidence whatever that this is the motive
of people like Robert Faurisson, Fredrick Toben, Pedro Varela or
Germar Rudolf. It is the people who oppose their work who appear to be
driven by hatred. Furthermore, as British prosecutors have found, it
is unclear just how disputing the existence of gas chambers or the
number of Nazi victims incites hatred against anyone. People are not
suddenly going to start hating Jews just because a pamphlet convinces
them the Nazis killed only one million rather than six million.
It would be more plausible to say that anyone who harps on slavery,
Jim Crow, and segregation is inciting hatred against whites, or that
anyone who describes the way Indians mutilated the bodies of Custer's
men at Little Big Horn is stirring up hatred against Indians. If you
scoff at the miracles in the Bible are you inciting hatred against
Christians? If not, why not? After all, neither the truth of the
statements nor the intent of the speaker matters. Laws of this kind
cry out for abuse and invidious application.
Obviously of concern to American Renaissance is the possibility that
any description of race or sex differences could be considered
incitement to hatred. What if the French and the Germans decide
discussions of race and IQ are hate-mongering? This is actually more
logical than saying skepticism about gas chambers makes people hate
Jews. Will AR be banned in Europe? Will people who write for AR be
arrested if they go to Europe?
Laws about inciting hatred are really very simple: If you hurt the
feelings of certain people you can be charged with a crime. So far,
the people about whose feelings one must be most careful are Jews.
Pressure from Jewish organizations has turned what may have been
intended as universal prohibitions into prohibition of opinions that
upset Jews.
Laws of the French, German, and Austrian type that specifically
prohibit Holocaust denial likewise reflect the pressure of Jewish
organizations. There is only one historical event in all of human
history-an event of particular interest to Jews-about which the law
forbids dissent. Legally requiring acceptance of a historical event is
an absurdity on its face, but why just this one? In January 2000, the
French National Assembly voted officially to recognize the Turkish
“genocide” of Armenians during the First World War. There are many
people who strongly dispute the number and circumstances of these
deaths; Turkey angrily withdrew its ambassador after the vote. No
doubt there will be vigorous “genocide denial,” “whitewashing of
crimes against humanity,” and “insulting the memory of the dead.” Why
will this not be a crime in France? One can only conclude that it is
because Armenians have less influence than Jews.
But the real shame is how few people, either in Europe or the United
States, are willing to oppose this clampdown on freedom. The left
loves to quote lines attributed to Martin Niemoller (1892-1984), the
German Lutheran minister interned by the Nazis:
“First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I
wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak
up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I
didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.”
The message, of course, is that we must be vigilant against wrongs
done even to people with whom we may disagree, because if we do not
resist evil we may some day be its victims. European censorship laws
are precisely the kind of creeping evil Niemoller warned against, but
the left ignores them because it has no principles and the right
ignores them because it has no spine. Censorship is therefore on the
march in Europe and licking at our own borders. We have entered a new
Dark Age.
The Law is an *****
The laws under which Europeans, Canadians and perhaps now Australians
can be prosecuted for thought crimes are of several kinds. The first
includes the French Gayssot law, which, though amazing, clearly says
what it means: No one is to dispute the genocide or other crimes
against humanity for which the Nazi leaders were put on trial at
Nuremberg after the war. There is no ambiguity about this. Anyone who
says the Nazis did not have an extermination program is a criminal.
Laws that forbid “incitement of hatred” are much more ambiguous. These
laws are particularly frightening because there is no way to know what
they mean. Presumably, if it is against the law to “incite hatred”
there should be no conviction unless it is proven that something
caused hatred. The prosecution should produce someone who, having read
the offending work or heard the offending speech or seen the offending
picture or symbol, became a hater. None of the censorship laws
requires this. Courts have decided without the slightest evidence that
anyone who takes a position on certain questions-even if all he does
is deliver this view to subscribers who have paid to receive it-is
“inciting hate.” The other breath-taking aspect of these laws is that
intent does not matter either. It makes no difference if someone
sincerely believes he is uncovering the truth; if what he says can be
construed as likely to incite hate, he can end up in behind bars.
Finally, there are laws that have no clear meaning at all. What does
it mean to “glorify National Socialism” or “insult the dead” or
“whitewash the crimes of the Nazis”? Crimes that depend on wording as
vague as this-and there have been plenty of convictions under them-are
close kin to Communist laws that forbade “anti-Soviet behavior” or
“parasitism.” These were justly decried in the West, but there is
almost complete silence about anti-Nazi laws. In the United States
vague prohibitions of this kind are clearly unconstitutional.
Another astonishing aspect of these laws is that truth is not a
defense. Once again, in the United States, the law is clear: Truth is
an absolute protection for anyone charged with making hurtful,
damaging, or embarrassing statements about anyone or anything. In the
American colonies this tradition dates back to the famous John Peter
Zenger trial of 1735. Zenger, publisher of the New York Weekly
Journal, was charged by British authorities with publishing articles
“tending to raise seditions and tumults among the people of this
province, and to fill their minds with contempt for his majesty's
government.” Zenger was arrested, jailed, and tried. Jurors, however,
were persuaded that “truth ought to govern the whole affair of
libels,” and in concluding that what Zenger had written was true, both
set Zenger free and, in effect, rewrote the law.
To many people, it seems preposterous that anyone who disputes
gassings at Auschwitz or doubts Germany's extermination program could
appeal to the truth as a defense. However, in cases of this kind facts
are of so little importance that there have been convictions for
statements that appear to be almost certainly true. British historian
David Irving, who in 2000 lost a celebrated libel case against an
anti-revisionist author, was fined $30,000 by a German court for
telling a German audience that the Auschwitz gas chamber is a post-war
reconstruction. Even the Polish curator at Auschwitz has conceded it
is a fake, but Mr. Irving is a criminal and the curator is not. A
different German court is seeking Mr. Irving's extradition for having
said the same thing to a different German audience.
James Alexander, one of the lawyers who defended John Peter Zenger,
would have been appalled. “Freedom of speech,” he wrote after the
trial, “is a principal pillar in a free government: when this support
is taken away, the constitution is dissolved and tyranny erected on
its ruins.”
.
|
