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> but the government will decree what is and is not allowed speech Do you mean "free speech"? Here in germany have free speech, except for denying the holocaus

> but the government will decree what is and is not allowed speech Do you mean "free speech"? Here in germany have free speech, except for denying the holocaust (And this makes really sense, as this is simply wrong)

MrYellowP 5y ago
There is no "free speech, but". It's a binary. You either have free speech, or you don't. Limited free speech is, by definition, not free. It's limited.
rightiousrob 5y ago
How does it makes sense to put any truth into stone by law?
- _jal 5y ago
  Read some history of how that came to be. You might still disagree when you're done, but I suspect you'll at least be able to answer your own question.
  - rightiousrob 5y ago
    I know the history very well, but the law telling me what's true and what not, that rubs me the wrong way.
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      Maybe go read the law then.
      - rightiousrob 5y ago
        Which basically says that openly challenging: - the exact number of 6M victims. - the singularity of this event. - that this event is incomparable to any other historical event Is a crime. Given that the number of victims is an estimate and might even be higher and also there were events in history like china's cultural revolution, Stalin's great cleansing and the killing fields in Cambodia (to name a few) that law does not sound to be that reasonable as it might sound initially
        _jal 5y ago
        > Given that the number of victims is an estimate I'm very used to engineers' quibbles, very focused views ending up being very narrow views, clever/stupid explanations of why various laws can't be enforced, and so on. But this has the be the biggest instance of missing the point, intentionally or not, I've seen in quite some time.
        tpush 5y ago
        > [...] and also there were events in history like china's cultural revolution, Stalin's great cleansing and the killing fields in Cambodia (to name a few) [...] Under the assumption that is meant to be a sincere argument: The difference between the holocaust and those crimes is that Germany's the country primarily responsible for the former, giving special meaning to the denial of that crime and the law banning its denial.
        formerly_proven 5y ago
        None of these things are in the law, so gg to you for lying on the internet while trying to defend lying about the holocaust. Well played.
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        I don't think this person is lying. I think they genuinely believe they know what they're talking about. (Which is almost worse.)
        okl 5y ago
        That's not what the law says. Btw, not only in Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_Holocaust_denial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_Holocaust_denial
    - hobofan 5y ago
      You do realize that the law at its core is a collection of assertions (= truths) that a society lives by?
      - flippantdev 5y ago
        That's not even remotely true. Laws are not truths, they're a collection of arbitrary rules. Socrates discussed this like 2000 years ago...
- gary_0 5y ago
  No legal system anywhere can be absolute about not determining what the "truth" is, even when it comes to speech. The most common example is yelling "fire!" in a crowded theatre and causing a panic. Or posting a bomb threat to social media. That kind of mischief is illegal in most places as there's actual harm. And the law will have to determine the truth that there was no fire or no bomb, and that your speech had no purpose except to cause harm. Another example is speech used to commit fraud or extortion. Were your profitable lies to exploit the vulnerable based on a genuine belief, or did you have criminal intent? The law will have to decide, and the situation will not always be clear, and often it comes down to determining intent. In the case of holocaust denial, in Germany the potential harm of allowing it is seen as more genocide, so they've calibrated their free speech laws in respect of that. But there's never an exact place to draw the line; every legal system is going to have to make such judgment calls.
  - d110af5ccf 5y ago
    I believe your reasoning is faulty. In the vast majority of cases the law lays out rules and a court will attempt to determine various facts (ie truths) and interpret the rules in some broader context. Codifying truth into law is quite unusual and seems like a bad idea to me. But then prosecuting people for hurling insults also seems like a bad idea to me - I guess I'm just thoroughly American.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Don’t forget that not all legal systems rely as much on precedences as the US/UK one though, so that may also cause a difference.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
formerly_proven 5y ago
In practice it's pretty hard to get convicted for that, because the law does not outlaw merely denying the holocaust.
- rightiousrob 5y ago
  But it does doing so publicly. There was a recent trail where an 80 year old woman got sentenced for publicly expressing her believes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Haverbeck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Haverbeck
  - martin8412 5y ago
    Did you read the article? She's been a vocal Holocaust denier since the end of the war. She's not a random person doubting the Holocaust and stupidly saying it in public. She was the wife of one of the higher ups in the Nazi party.
  - okl 5y ago
    > Another article by Haverbeck-Wetzel in the Voice of Conscience (November/December 2005) posited a thesis that Adolf Hitler was "just not to be understood from the believed Holocaust or his alleged war obsession, but only by a divine mission in the world-historical context." > In the Hamburg court, she insisted the status of Auschwitz as a place of death is "not historically proven" and is "only a belief". I think she deserved her 10 months in prison.
tut-urut-utut 5y ago
Free speech in Germany exists only in theory. Just try opposing official government measures in public and you quickly get cancelled.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ben_w 5y ago
  > cancelled What do you mean by this word? I’ve seen it used as a political meme, but the usage always makes it seem like the supposed victim has some kind of entitlement to be a widely admired public figure regardless of what they say or do, without regard to the fleeting nature of fame and the fickleness of public admiration.
  - vanviegen 5y ago
    Thank you. That gives clear and concise words to my qualms about 'cancel culture'.
    - mk81 5y ago
      Are you fucking 8 years old. Why do you think you have a right to never be disagreed with?
      - ben_w 5y ago
        Given @vanviegen thanked me and put the phrase in quotations, I think their problem is with the quotation rather than referent. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotation-is-not-the-referent https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotat...
        mk81 5y ago
        Not really sure who I was intending to respond to, but I don't think it was you. Sorry.
aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
>except for Ok, so you don't have free speech.
- ywain 5y ago
  What country does? Even the US has laws against libel, hate speech, etc.
  - d110af5ccf 5y ago
    I believe libel in the US involves demonstrating actual harm. The only thing I'm aware of here that I would consider a true infringement of freedom of speech is our obscenity laws. SCOTUS has (sadly) upheld at least some of them.
  - hash872 5y ago
    The US does not have laws against 'hate speech', this is completely incorrect. Libel is a civil matter, and the US is commonly described as having the highest bar to proving libel in the developed world
    - ywain 5y ago
      Yeah, I was mistaken about hate speech laws, sorry about that. My point though was that all countries do restrict speech in _some_ manner (for perfectly valid reasons), and I don't understand this fascination with "free speech" as some sacred concept that must be either whole or completely useless.
  - finite_jest 5y ago
    From Wikipedia: "The United States does not have hate speech laws, since the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that laws criminalizing hate speech violate the guarantee to freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution." [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hate_speech&oldid=1057298826#Hate_speech_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hate_speech&oldid...
oytis 5y ago
My impression is that most restrictions to the freedom of speech in Germany are rather in civil law than in criminal law. It is very easy to get (successfully) sued for saying things that is. It is nearly impossible to speak about sexual harassment - because the perpetrator can sue you for intruding his private life. More generally it is basically impossible to say anything negative about someone if you can't prove it true - it is considered slander. By contrast in the U.S. as far as I know it's up to whoever accuses you of slander to prove that what you say is untrue. That creates a whole large area where you can speak freely about someone while not being able to accuse them legally before the court - in Germany that would either fall into "slander" bucket (if what you say has public significance but you can't prove it) or "private life" bucket (if what you say has allegedly no public significance even if you can prove it true).
- bentley 5y ago
  Most Americans would be surprised that the German interpretation of “the untouchable dignity of man” prohibits even insults (“Beleidigung”). There was a case in 2018 of an American who got in a tussle with German airport police, called them Nazis, and was subsequently charged with defamation.[1] Clearly she wasn’t literally describing them as students of the philosophy of Adolf Hitler, but rather calling them authoritarians in a demeaning and insulting way. In the U.S. one might expect her to be charged perhaps with disorderly conduct or something similar, but punishing her for her words would require that there be some actual injury done to the officers’ reputation. Obviously ridiculous statements that no reasonable person would believe don’t fall under defamation in the U.S. A famous example was in the 1980s when Jerry Falwell unsuccessfully sued Hustler for publishing a fake interview with him claiming he drunkenly lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse. Certain depictions of violence are also considered to inherently violate human dignity as a whole (“Gewaltdarstellung”). That seems to be why there’s traditionally been so much video game censorship in Germany, like green blood or replacing all characters with robots[2]. [1] https://www.presseportal.de/blaulicht/pm/74262/3844730 https://www.presseportal.de/blaulicht/pm/74262/3844730 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHIpHOVB9ew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHIpHOVB9ew
  - ben_w 5y ago
hutzlibu 5y ago
"Here in germany have free speech, except for denying the holocaust" Well, technically, there are also a lot of other things you cannot say (like with most states). Insults, false accusations, hate speech, riot speeches etc. But interestingly we still also have a blasphemy law, even though it is very soft now, from what it used to be.
- mk81 5y ago
  >But interestingly we still also have a blasphemy law, even though it is very soft now, from what it used to be. At this point, the only way this will ever be enforced is when someone blasphemes the Quran.
int_19h 5y ago
Germany also bans "extreme" political parties. And no, that doesn't just mean the Nazis - the Communist party was also banned under the same law, for example. In general, it seems to cover any party with a platform that is in conflict with liberal democracy (even if, say, it's a platform of radical direct democracy, although I don't think this was ever tested in practice)?

MrYellowP 5y ago

There is no "free speech, but". It's a binary. You either have free speech, or you don't. Limited free speech is, by definition, not free. It's limited.

rightiousrob 5y ago

How does it makes sense to put any truth into stone by law?

_jal 5y ago
Read some history of how that came to be. You might still disagree when you're done, but I suspect you'll at least be able to answer your own question.
- rightiousrob 5y ago
  I know the history very well, but the law telling me what's true and what not, that rubs me the wrong way.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    Maybe go read the law then.
    - rightiousrob 5y ago
      Which basically says that openly challenging: - the exact number of 6M victims. - the singularity of this event. - that this event is incomparable to any other historical event Is a crime. Given that the number of victims is an estimate and might even be higher and also there were events in history like china's cultural revolution, Stalin's great cleansing and the killing fields in Cambodia (to name a few) that law does not sound to be that reasonable as it might sound initially
      - _jal 5y ago
        > Given that the number of victims is an estimate I'm very used to engineers' quibbles, very focused views ending up being very narrow views, clever/stupid explanations of why various laws can't be enforced, and so on. But this has the be the biggest instance of missing the point, intentionally or not, I've seen in quite some time.
      - tpush 5y ago
        > [...] and also there were events in history like china's cultural revolution, Stalin's great cleansing and the killing fields in Cambodia (to name a few) [...] Under the assumption that is meant to be a sincere argument: The difference between the holocaust and those crimes is that Germany's the country primarily responsible for the former, giving special meaning to the denial of that crime and the law banning its denial.
      - formerly_proven 5y ago
        None of these things are in the law, so gg to you for lying on the internet while trying to defend lying about the holocaust. Well played.
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        I don't think this person is lying. I think they genuinely believe they know what they're talking about. (Which is almost worse.)
      - okl 5y ago
        That's not what the law says. Btw, not only in Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_Holocaust_denial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_Holocaust_denial
  - hobofan 5y ago
    You do realize that the law at its core is a collection of assertions (= truths) that a society lives by?
    - flippantdev 5y ago
      That's not even remotely true. Laws are not truths, they're a collection of arbitrary rules. Socrates discussed this like 2000 years ago...
gary_0 5y ago
No legal system anywhere can be absolute about not determining what the "truth" is, even when it comes to speech. The most common example is yelling "fire!" in a crowded theatre and causing a panic. Or posting a bomb threat to social media. That kind of mischief is illegal in most places as there's actual harm. And the law will have to determine the truth that there was no fire or no bomb, and that your speech had no purpose except to cause harm. Another example is speech used to commit fraud or extortion. Were your profitable lies to exploit the vulnerable based on a genuine belief, or did you have criminal intent? The law will have to decide, and the situation will not always be clear, and often it comes down to determining intent. In the case of holocaust denial, in Germany the potential harm of allowing it is seen as more genocide, so they've calibrated their free speech laws in respect of that. But there's never an exact place to draw the line; every legal system is going to have to make such judgment calls.
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  I believe your reasoning is faulty. In the vast majority of cases the law lays out rules and a court will attempt to determine various facts (ie truths) and interpret the rules in some broader context. Codifying truth into law is quite unusual and seems like a bad idea to me. But then prosecuting people for hurling insults also seems like a bad idea to me - I guess I'm just thoroughly American.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Don’t forget that not all legal systems rely as much on precedences as the US/UK one though, so that may also cause a difference.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

formerly_proven 5y ago

In practice it's pretty hard to get convicted for that, because the law does not outlaw merely denying the holocaust.

rightiousrob 5y ago
But it does doing so publicly. There was a recent trail where an 80 year old woman got sentenced for publicly expressing her believes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Haverbeck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Haverbeck
- martin8412 5y ago
  Did you read the article? She's been a vocal Holocaust denier since the end of the war. She's not a random person doubting the Holocaust and stupidly saying it in public. She was the wife of one of the higher ups in the Nazi party.
- okl 5y ago
  > Another article by Haverbeck-Wetzel in the Voice of Conscience (November/December 2005) posited a thesis that Adolf Hitler was "just not to be understood from the believed Holocaust or his alleged war obsession, but only by a divine mission in the world-historical context." > In the Hamburg court, she insisted the status of Auschwitz as a place of death is "not historically proven" and is "only a belief". I think she deserved her 10 months in prison.

tut-urut-utut 5y ago

Free speech in Germany exists only in theory. Just try opposing official government measures in public and you quickly get cancelled.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ben_w 5y ago
> cancelled What do you mean by this word? I’ve seen it used as a political meme, but the usage always makes it seem like the supposed victim has some kind of entitlement to be a widely admired public figure regardless of what they say or do, without regard to the fleeting nature of fame and the fickleness of public admiration.
- vanviegen 5y ago
  Thank you. That gives clear and concise words to my qualms about 'cancel culture'.
  - mk81 5y ago
    Are you fucking 8 years old. Why do you think you have a right to never be disagreed with?
    - ben_w 5y ago
      Given @vanviegen thanked me and put the phrase in quotations, I think their problem is with the quotation rather than referent. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotation-is-not-the-referent https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotat...
      - mk81 5y ago
        Not really sure who I was intending to respond to, but I don't think it was you. Sorry.

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago

>except for Ok, so you don't have free speech.

ywain 5y ago
What country does? Even the US has laws against libel, hate speech, etc.
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  I believe libel in the US involves demonstrating actual harm. The only thing I'm aware of here that I would consider a true infringement of freedom of speech is our obscenity laws. SCOTUS has (sadly) upheld at least some of them.
- hash872 5y ago
  The US does not have laws against 'hate speech', this is completely incorrect. Libel is a civil matter, and the US is commonly described as having the highest bar to proving libel in the developed world
  - ywain 5y ago
    Yeah, I was mistaken about hate speech laws, sorry about that. My point though was that all countries do restrict speech in _some_ manner (for perfectly valid reasons), and I don't understand this fascination with "free speech" as some sacred concept that must be either whole or completely useless.
- finite_jest 5y ago
  From Wikipedia: "The United States does not have hate speech laws, since the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that laws criminalizing hate speech violate the guarantee to freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution." [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hate_speech&oldid=1057298826#Hate_speech_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hate_speech&oldid...

oytis 5y ago

My impression is that most restrictions to the freedom of speech in Germany are rather in civil law than in criminal law. It is very easy to get (successfully) sued for saying things that is. It is nearly impossible to speak about sexual harassment - because the perpetrator can sue you for intruding his private life. More generally it is basically impossible to say anything negative about someone if you can't prove it true - it is considered slander. By contrast in the U.S. as far as I know it's up to whoever accuses you of slander to prove that what you say is untrue. That creates a whole large area where you can speak freely about someone while not being able to accuse them legally before the court - in Germany that would either fall into "slander" bucket (if what you say has public significance but you can't prove it) or "private life" bucket (if what you say has allegedly no public significance even if you can prove it true).

bentley 5y ago
Most Americans would be surprised that the German interpretation of “the untouchable dignity of man” prohibits even insults (“Beleidigung”). There was a case in 2018 of an American who got in a tussle with German airport police, called them Nazis, and was subsequently charged with defamation.[1] Clearly she wasn’t literally describing them as students of the philosophy of Adolf Hitler, but rather calling them authoritarians in a demeaning and insulting way. In the U.S. one might expect her to be charged perhaps with disorderly conduct or something similar, but punishing her for her words would require that there be some actual injury done to the officers’ reputation. Obviously ridiculous statements that no reasonable person would believe don’t fall under defamation in the U.S. A famous example was in the 1980s when Jerry Falwell unsuccessfully sued Hustler for publishing a fake interview with him claiming he drunkenly lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse. Certain depictions of violence are also considered to inherently violate human dignity as a whole (“Gewaltdarstellung”). That seems to be why there’s traditionally been so much video game censorship in Germany, like green blood or replacing all characters with robots[2]. [1] https://www.presseportal.de/blaulicht/pm/74262/3844730 https://www.presseportal.de/blaulicht/pm/74262/3844730 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHIpHOVB9ew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHIpHOVB9ew
- ben_w 5y ago

hutzlibu 5y ago

"Here in germany have free speech, except for denying the holocaust" Well, technically, there are also a lot of other things you cannot say (like with most states). Insults, false accusations, hate speech, riot speeches etc. But interestingly we still also have a blasphemy law, even though it is very soft now, from what it used to be.

mk81 5y ago
>But interestingly we still also have a blasphemy law, even though it is very soft now, from what it used to be. At this point, the only way this will ever be enforced is when someone blasphemes the Quran.

int_19h 5y ago

Germany also bans "extreme" political parties. And no, that doesn't just mean the Nazis - the Communist party was also banned under the same law, for example. In general, it seems to cover any party with a platform that is in conflict with liberal democracy (even if, say, it's a platform of radical direct democracy, although I don't think this was ever tested in practice)?