How can countries like Germany and France have laws that imprison people for an opinion?
Germany and France have laws against the denail of the gas chambers. Numerous people have been fined and/or imprisoned under these laws.
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Germany and France have laws against the denail of the gas chambers. Numerous people have been fined and/or imprisoned under these laws.
They don’t. Holocaust deniars are not punished for an opinion, but for hate speech, antisemitic incitement and slander and insult of the dead, the survivors, and their relatives. If you deny the Holocaust, you claim that all these people who suffered through it and all those who lost family in it were liars, and that there were some kind of Jewish conspiracy to make it up.
And nobody gets arrested for personally believing the Holocaust didn’t happen. Only few people were convicted for Holocaust denial and they were active neo-Nazis who actively promoted Nazi propaganda that contained Holocaust denial. I saw that in your other question you asked about Ernst Zündel in particular. Well that is a very clear case. He was convicted for incitement and slander, not for an opinion.
Holocaust denial is not only illegal in Germany and France, but also in many other countries which are all free democratic countries. These countries also have general laws against racist and antisemitic agitation and against slander. This is not in contradiction with the principle of free speech. Free speech has its limits when people harm others and deliberately spread lies in order to incite hatred.
Because they don’t have the Bill of Rights that we do.
And in much of the world, aposty is a crime, as is blasphemy. They can do it because the system of government in those countries allows such laws to exist.
Germany and France are more socialist than the U.S. They do have relatively good protections for freedom of speech and the press, for the most part. But they will sometimes arrest people who openly state certain opinions if they’re really inflammatory and have a potential for inciting violence. In other words, a citizen in those countries does have certain civil rights but cannot exercise them irresponsibly to the detriment of society, and the government can decide to prosecute you if they determine that you abused those rights. Here in the U.S., a civil right, by definition, is *yours* to abuse and you cannot be punished merely for that.