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> But watching the events of the past few years unfold I am no longer convinced that this would really make the world a better place. One hard truth: it would

by pmlnr 6y ago

> But watching the events of the past few years unfold I am no longer convinced that this would really make the world a better place. One hard truth: it would have been enough to look at European laws made after WWII, and adopt them in the US as well in the first place.

dan-robertson 6y ago
What do you mean by “European”? And what laws are you talking about? Does this include the laws made in East Berlin or other communist countries? Do you think Le Pen didn’t get into power because of free speech laws? It seems to me like she just didn’t have quite enough support to get in. What about the laws made in post-communist countries like Poland or Hungary or Belarus? (Or Lithuania or Latvia?) Perhaps you mean countries like Sweden or Norway? It does at least seems to make the news there when some neo-nazi is punished for what American prosecutors would have to consider free speech.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pmlnr 6y ago
  I thought it's obvious from the context, but examples include denying the holocaust being a crime.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    I don't see why a future collapse into tyranny of a country in Europe would have to involve a revival of the symbols of any particular defeated regime. If they needed symbols for propaganda purposes, they'd draw from legal symbol pools, like Roman culture. (It "worked" once...) More likely, they would draw from contemporary symbols that already had positive sentiment associated with them. The point being, it's not clear whether German speech laws are frosting or cake. If the German people wanted to destroy Europe and themselves, that would be enough whether they did it with the symbols of a defeated dictator or not. People point to European speech laws as examples of reasonable protections, but I'm not sure if they're stopping anything. The real bar against the collapse of liberal democracy is the fact that the people living in those countries don't want it to happen, and understand why it would be bad for them.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > I don't see why a future collapse into tyranny of a country in Europe would have to involve a revival of the symbols of any particular defeated regime. In the US, at least, the current (seemingly unsuccessful) slouch towards tyranny definitely does involve the revival symbols of a particular defeated regime: the Confederacy (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/us/Kevin-Seefried-arrested.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/us/Kevin-Seefried-arreste...). Though it might not really be a "revival," since the symbols were never really killed off in the first place. A lot of the flashpoints building up to this one involved removal of these symbols.
      - mcguire 6y ago
        It might also be worth pointing out that those flashpoints were originally put into place deliberately, in a mostly failing attempt to bring the country back together, and then left in place until they went off.
    - stretchcat 6y ago
      > More likely, they would draw from contemporary symbols that already had positive sentiment associated with them. Yes I think so. In fact, that's precisely what the nazis did with the swastika. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_use_of_the_swastika_in_the_early_20th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_use_of_the_swastika_in...
    - notabee 6y ago
      Symbols retain power for a long time. That's why we're not seeing a swastika revival in interior design or anything like that, even in places where the Nazis did not exist. Another good example is the U.S. confederate flag, which only existed officially for a few years and was decided against by a bloody and brutal military loss. However, it's retained enough significance that someone just pranced through the U.S. Capitol with it. If it doesn't have power as a symbol, why not pick a new flag? Obviously banning a symbol is not going to prevent future violent movements by itself, but it also seems wise to not leave still-hot embers of symbolic power lying around for the next would-be demagogue to fan back into a fire. People trying to pick up those old symbols are giving a very strong signal about their ideology. I agree that the main bulwark of a society against falling into fascism is its people's memory of the past and willingness to prevent recurrence of such episodes though.
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    I guess my question is really what the effect of such laws was? Obviously there has been general prosperity and peace between the Western European countries but this may have been due to other reasons. There doesn’t seem to be much more resilience in the population to the kind rhetoric we’ve seen recently in America. Indeed, there seem to be many parallels. Maybe the laws helped but we see less difference now as Europe after the war started “further behind”? It’s certainly true that holocaust denial is illegal in Germany. It isn’t, for example, illegal in the U.K. (there was a libel case lost by David Irving against someone who called him a Holocaust denier where he tried to prove he was a legitimate historian however), and there are surveys showing that some percentage of the population don’t really believe it (but maybe this is the fact that for even seemingly trivial survey questions, some proportion of people give the wrong answer). I suppose here I would just point out that Europe is a big place.
glogla 6y ago
Interestingly, "typical European Free Speech laws" are both more and less restricting than you would see in the US - there's more limits on harmful ideologies and violence but less restrictions on sex and nudity, for example. Of course it's not just constitutions and laws - movie ratings are not de iure laws but work that way de facto - and EU limits other things, like advertisement of pharmaceuticals. Comparing the different approaches needs finesse and not just "free US vs non-free Europe".
- freeflight 6y ago
  > there's more limits on harmful ideologies and violence but less restrictions on sex and nudity, for example. Also more mindful about privacy, in many EU countries one can't just doxx people, not even criminals. A popular example is this story about a Swiss parliament secretary who got fired for posting nudes from her workplace. EU outlets censored her face and left the nipple [0], US and AUS outlets showed her face but censored her nipple [1], while the British Mirror pixelated both [2]. [0] https://images05.österreich.at/sex_01.jpg/rl2015_article_slideshow/153.346.409 https://images05.xn--sterreich-z7a.at/sex_01.jpg/rl2015_arti... [1] https://www.9news.com.au/world/swiss-secretary-posted-nude-selfies-from-inside-parliament/6f7eb011-5bfa-43ce-98a1-42a269c70559 https://www.9news.com.au/world/swiss-secretary-posted-nude-s... [2] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/secretary-working-swiss-parliament-posted-4006923 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/secretary-working-s...
eznzt 6y ago
"In Europe, Speech Is an Alienable Right: [the European Court of Human Rights] upheld an Austrian woman’s conviction for disparaging the Prophet Muhammad." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-free-speech-criticize-muhammad-echr-ruled/574174/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr... Is this really what you want?
- mcguire 6y ago
  "She held “seminars” in which she presented her view that Muhammad was indeed a child molester. Dominant Islamic traditions hold that Muhammad’s third wife, Aisha, was 6 at the time of their marriage and 9 at its consummation. Muhammad was in his early 50s. The Austrian woman repeated these claims, and the Austrian court ruled that she had to pay 480 euros or spend 60 days in the slammer. The ECHR ruled that Austria had not violated her rights." So it appears that she set out to attack Islam and then received a relative slap-on-the-wrist for it. Neither of those affect the principles, but still....
  - neartheplain 6y ago
    There should be nothing illegal about “attacking” a religion with words, all the moreso if those words are factually accurate.
    - erichocean 6y ago
      It's incitement. Donald Trump was just impeached for the same thing.
      - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
        I think everyone knows that in this new era of US politics the president will be impeached at least once every year after his party will lose the House.
      - rubyist5eva 6y ago
        Absolutely ridiculous. Unless you are credibly telling people to actually go and commit violence, it is no such thing.
bitcurious 6y ago
What about the lessons of Europe before WWII? The lessons of fascism and authoritarian communism arising in heavily censored states without the right to free expression? The lessons of fascists and communists enacting further censorship and surveillance as a means of enforcing their power? The lessons of fascism and communism corrupting well-meaning laws, laws initially curtailing civil liberties for the safety of society as a whole?

by pmlnr 6y ago

dan-robertson 6y ago

What do you mean by “European”? And what laws are you talking about? Does this include the laws made in East Berlin or other communist countries? Do you think Le Pen didn’t get into power because of free speech laws? It seems to me like she just didn’t have quite enough support to get in. What about the laws made in post-communist countries like Poland or Hungary or Belarus? (Or Lithuania or Latvia?) Perhaps you mean countries like Sweden or Norway? It does at least seems to make the news there when some neo-nazi is punished for what American prosecutors would have to consider free speech.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pmlnr 6y ago
I thought it's obvious from the context, but examples include denying the holocaust being a crime.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  I don't see why a future collapse into tyranny of a country in Europe would have to involve a revival of the symbols of any particular defeated regime. If they needed symbols for propaganda purposes, they'd draw from legal symbol pools, like Roman culture. (It "worked" once...) More likely, they would draw from contemporary symbols that already had positive sentiment associated with them. The point being, it's not clear whether German speech laws are frosting or cake. If the German people wanted to destroy Europe and themselves, that would be enough whether they did it with the symbols of a defeated dictator or not. People point to European speech laws as examples of reasonable protections, but I'm not sure if they're stopping anything. The real bar against the collapse of liberal democracy is the fact that the people living in those countries don't want it to happen, and understand why it would be bad for them.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > I don't see why a future collapse into tyranny of a country in Europe would have to involve a revival of the symbols of any particular defeated regime. In the US, at least, the current (seemingly unsuccessful) slouch towards tyranny definitely does involve the revival symbols of a particular defeated regime: the Confederacy (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/us/Kevin-Seefried-arrested.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/us/Kevin-Seefried-arreste...). Though it might not really be a "revival," since the symbols were never really killed off in the first place. A lot of the flashpoints building up to this one involved removal of these symbols.
    - mcguire 6y ago
      It might also be worth pointing out that those flashpoints were originally put into place deliberately, in a mostly failing attempt to bring the country back together, and then left in place until they went off.
  - stretchcat 6y ago
    > More likely, they would draw from contemporary symbols that already had positive sentiment associated with them. Yes I think so. In fact, that's precisely what the nazis did with the swastika. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_use_of_the_swastika_in_the_early_20th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_use_of_the_swastika_in...
  - notabee 6y ago
    Symbols retain power for a long time. That's why we're not seeing a swastika revival in interior design or anything like that, even in places where the Nazis did not exist. Another good example is the U.S. confederate flag, which only existed officially for a few years and was decided against by a bloody and brutal military loss. However, it's retained enough significance that someone just pranced through the U.S. Capitol with it. If it doesn't have power as a symbol, why not pick a new flag? Obviously banning a symbol is not going to prevent future violent movements by itself, but it also seems wise to not leave still-hot embers of symbolic power lying around for the next would-be demagogue to fan back into a fire. People trying to pick up those old symbols are giving a very strong signal about their ideology. I agree that the main bulwark of a society against falling into fascism is its people's memory of the past and willingness to prevent recurrence of such episodes though.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  I guess my question is really what the effect of such laws was? Obviously there has been general prosperity and peace between the Western European countries but this may have been due to other reasons. There doesn’t seem to be much more resilience in the population to the kind rhetoric we’ve seen recently in America. Indeed, there seem to be many parallels. Maybe the laws helped but we see less difference now as Europe after the war started “further behind”? It’s certainly true that holocaust denial is illegal in Germany. It isn’t, for example, illegal in the U.K. (there was a libel case lost by David Irving against someone who called him a Holocaust denier where he tried to prove he was a legitimate historian however), and there are surveys showing that some percentage of the population don’t really believe it (but maybe this is the fact that for even seemingly trivial survey questions, some proportion of people give the wrong answer). I suppose here I would just point out that Europe is a big place.

glogla 6y ago

Interestingly, "typical European Free Speech laws" are both more and less restricting than you would see in the US - there's more limits on harmful ideologies and violence but less restrictions on sex and nudity, for example. Of course it's not just constitutions and laws - movie ratings are not de iure laws but work that way de facto - and EU limits other things, like advertisement of pharmaceuticals. Comparing the different approaches needs finesse and not just "free US vs non-free Europe".

freeflight 6y ago
> there's more limits on harmful ideologies and violence but less restrictions on sex and nudity, for example. Also more mindful about privacy, in many EU countries one can't just doxx people, not even criminals. A popular example is this story about a Swiss parliament secretary who got fired for posting nudes from her workplace. EU outlets censored her face and left the nipple [0], US and AUS outlets showed her face but censored her nipple [1], while the British Mirror pixelated both [2]. [0] https://images05.österreich.at/sex_01.jpg/rl2015_article_slideshow/153.346.409 https://images05.xn--sterreich-z7a.at/sex_01.jpg/rl2015_arti... [1] https://www.9news.com.au/world/swiss-secretary-posted-nude-selfies-from-inside-parliament/6f7eb011-5bfa-43ce-98a1-42a269c70559 https://www.9news.com.au/world/swiss-secretary-posted-nude-s... [2] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/secretary-working-swiss-parliament-posted-4006923 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/secretary-working-s...

eznzt 6y ago

"In Europe, Speech Is an Alienable Right: [the European Court of Human Rights] upheld an Austrian woman’s conviction for disparaging the Prophet Muhammad." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-free-speech-criticize-muhammad-echr-ruled/574174/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr... Is this really what you want?

mcguire 6y ago
"She held “seminars” in which she presented her view that Muhammad was indeed a child molester. Dominant Islamic traditions hold that Muhammad’s third wife, Aisha, was 6 at the time of their marriage and 9 at its consummation. Muhammad was in his early 50s. The Austrian woman repeated these claims, and the Austrian court ruled that she had to pay 480 euros or spend 60 days in the slammer. The ECHR ruled that Austria had not violated her rights." So it appears that she set out to attack Islam and then received a relative slap-on-the-wrist for it. Neither of those affect the principles, but still....
- neartheplain 6y ago
  There should be nothing illegal about “attacking” a religion with words, all the moreso if those words are factually accurate.
  - erichocean 6y ago
    It's incitement. Donald Trump was just impeached for the same thing.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      I think everyone knows that in this new era of US politics the president will be impeached at least once every year after his party will lose the House.
    - rubyist5eva 6y ago
      Absolutely ridiculous. Unless you are credibly telling people to actually go and commit violence, it is no such thing.

bitcurious 6y ago

What about the lessons of Europe before WWII? The lessons of fascism and authoritarian communism arising in heavily censored states without the right to free expression? The lessons of fascists and communists enacting further censorship and surveillance as a means of enforcing their power? The lessons of fascism and communism corrupting well-meaning laws, laws initially curtailing civil liberties for the safety of society as a whole?