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.
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 war-time
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 life-long 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 Emma-us,
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 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 the 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.
Switzerland
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.
Germany
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 cum 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 Germany, 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.
Other Countries
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 Glouc-ester 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.
What These Laws Mean
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.
-end-
Reprinted from: American Renaissance - www.amren.com
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