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Let’s say better late than never.
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you will apply this law with the same rigour to every genocide right? right?
Based! Fuck Nazis
Is this tacked on with a bunch of other laws related to criticism of Zionism also being against the law?
Tons of laws Israel is trying to get passed in western countries to associate anti Zionism with Antisemitism.
I doubt this is the only part of the law.
Good, now criminalise Genocide denial.
They did. This is unequivocally a good thing
I need people to pay attention to the popularity of denial of the mass killings by Nazis of transgender people. One of the doctors who performed the first vaginoplasty, on Dora Richter, did also go on to participate in brutal abuses in a concentration camp. Like a dung beetle, a group is rolling around this tiny kernel of truth, coalescing in a ball of shit that ends up like this.
There’s something so vile about this. It has to be deliberate.
DuckDuckGo and Google have always had at least one denialist result in every single Google search I have made about the Holocaust. Back in 2010 - in high school, I remember reading half of a book online which seemed to be the memoirs of an American World War 2 soldier, than abruptly realizing that he was starting to say some really strange things. Never anything quite wrong, but off. I did a little googling, a bit more research, and then started running into names like David Irving.
It’s just such a damn difficult problem to fix. They are insidious. Deniers know that the Holocaust happened. They know that trans people were brutalized and massacred by the Nazis, whether you feel like the “purpose” of the mass killings makes it a genocide or not.
They don’t care. They want stupid people to believe it, because then you can get the stupid people to look the other way. To laugh at people pointing out the patterns.
One of the doctors who performed the first vaginoplasty, on Dora Richter, did also go on to participate in brutal abuses in a concentration camp.
TIL, design of the freezing experiments and he later wrote on them. Worked at the Charité at the time of doing the vaginaplasty, from what I can tell seems to have been a star surgeon. Surgery attracts psychopaths, he probably could not give less of a fuck about the ethics of anything but was interested in the technical aspects. Dora Richter’s surgery was a joint effort with Ludwig Levy-Lenz, generally credited as the father of sex reassignment surgery and working at the Hirschfeld Institute itself. Not terribly surprising they collaborated with the Charité on a novel procedure, it was and is one of the very best hospitals in the world. Not indicted in the Doctor’s trials, you probably do not want to read up on what those people did. I’m serious.
It’s too bad we can’t make being a fucking idiot illegal, but then there wouldn’t be anywhere near enough prisons.
JD Vance will be pissed.
Common nordic W
W Finland
I must be mistaken. I thought the EU had made it illegal. Finland is part of the EU last I checked.
All holocausts?
According to the bill, denial of the Holocaust or other serious international crimes, such as those defined under the statutes of the International Criminal Court, would be punishable by a fine or a prison sentence of up to two years.
Interested to see how this plays out.
Prohibiting Holocaust denial is relatively easy, because we have the benefit of it being history, and we have an ample historical record and a clear consensus among historians. Plus, no one can credibly claim that the legislatures were not thinking of the Holocaust when they wrote the law.
However, how are they planning on applying the law to contemporary international crimes? People make accusations of them all the time. And the other side always denied them. And the actual facts are generally obscured by a massive fog of war that can take years to see through, if ever.
There is also plenty of history where the answer is less clear. Do we really want courts involved in determining if the 15th century conquest of the Canary Islands counts as a genocide. Or if some unnamed mass grave an archeologists unearths was caused by an invading army killing all of a city’s adult males, or simply a burial site for fallen soldiers?
What about the book of Esther. Taken literally, it ends with what is arguably a genocide committed by the Jews against the Persians. However, outside of some Israeli hardliners reinterpreting that ending for contemporary political purposes, it is widely understood that that ending is a literary device, not a literal telling of events. Did my Hebrew school teachers violate this law when they told me we didn’t actually kill 75,000 Persians? [0].
What about the ongoing genocide against white Afrikaners going on in South Africa today? Am I violating the law when I say that genocide is not real, and just something the rightwing in the US invented for domestic political purposes. If the US has such a law, could Trump use it to jail his political opponents who criticized his recent stunt of accepting 60 Afrikaner refugees?
Do we defer to an international body like the ICC or ICJ? In that case, you have just outlawed disagreeing with those bodies.
The UN has repeatedly found it to be a massive human rights violation. Does disagreeing with those findings violate this new law?
[0] As an aside, secular historians generally consider all of Esther to be fiction.
Well the way German law works out that it comes down to established historical fact. As in, the professional consensus of historians, heard as expert witnesses. The wording of the law is (paraphrased) “Acts committed by the NS regime that fulfil the UN definition of genocide”, the historians decide what happened, who did it, judges decide whether it fits the definition. Invoking precedence, in German law, is like invoking someone’s doctoral thesis on a matter of law: It’s a piece of reasoning judges will have to take into account because it’s an argument before court but it’s by no means binding. As such having an ICJ judgement will be helpful, but it does need to be up to standards.
How many have there been? As far as I know it’s “The Holocaust”.
Lots.
A holocaust is a religious animal sacrifice that is completely consumed by fire.
The Holocaust occurred in WW2.
Pretty sure they were talking about genocide in general, not just one genocide.
Genocide is a constant, ongoing foundation of capitalism, colonialism, etc. Sometimes it happens in Europe, sometimes in Palestine… Sometimes they genocide almost all of the inhabitants of USA, Australia, etc.
I’m confused by this comment. Can you explain what you mean by “Genocide is a constant, ongoing foundation of capitalism, colonialism”?
I don’t understand what you mean, and my attempts to interpret it lead me to silly conclusions which I doubt are what you’re trying to communicate here.
From what I understand, “genocide” refers to the eradication of a people or culture. This includes things like killing all Jews/Palestinians (e.g. Nazis and Israelis), imprisoning and “re-educating” an entire ethnic group (like the Chinese are doing to the Uyghurs), and much more.
Colonialism very easily falls into that definition, but I struggle to see how captialism does.
imprisoning and “re-educating” an entire ethnic group (like the Chinese are doing to the Uyghurs),
I’m shocked to see people still rehashing this debunked claim so many years later.
I don’t think you know what genocide is or have a grasp on reality.
They’re not wrong. The deaths of Indians from the Americas and the aborigines from Australia far surpass the technical definition of genocide. Throw in banana republics and other nation building and it is totally arguable that the US has been complicit in many other genocides, for instance.
Sorry, quick nitpick for non-Australians. It’s never “aborigines”, if you’re going to use the term it’s “Aboriginals” (and the capitalisation is important).
Aborigines is kinda like calling Asians Orientals.
well - there’s an ongoing major genocide happening in Gaza that unfortunately no longer pales in comparison. It’s not up there yet, and let’s hope it never gets there, but I definitely see the point of the question of the previous comment.
Holocaust is the name of a particular genocide.
All thumbs are fingers but not all fingers are thumbs kind of situation.
I’m not sure they’re really comparable. The Holocaust was industrialized murder on racial grounds. Gaza and the West Bank are more like the genocide of the Native Americans. A sort of “Give us the land you’re sitting on, or die. I don’t care where you go” as opposed to “I’m going to kill you. No there’s nothing you can do. You are the wrong race and must die”
I don’t even think that’s as much of a distinction as you think.
In 1930s Germany, the Nazi platform was “We’re going to relocate these Jews. We’ll make some kind of settlement for them, or shift them to other nations, who knows.”
Maybe at the end of the war the Holocaust - their “final solution” for the relocation problem was made clear, but even then anyone could have raised questions about where there were going.
Political excuses like “Relocation” are extremely common for Genocide.
The ‘relocation’ wasn’t based on anything the Jews had that the Nazis wanted though, not in terms of physical land anyway. Wealth, sure, but the Nazis weren’t going after Jews because they had money. The Slavs were gone after for land, definitely, because the Nazis wanted all the land to the east and were happy to just murder anyone and everyone living on it, but even that was based on genetics because the Nazis believed the Slavs to be an inferior species.
Again, what Israel is doing is definitely genocide, there’s no arguments there, but it’s not the same as the Holocaust. There’s a reason the Holocaust is seen as more evil than the Holodomor, and it’s because of the sheer industrial evil of it all. A systematic extermination of a people based purely on genetics has some extra weight to it.
Wealth, sure, but the Nazis weren’t going after Jews because they had money.
That’s not entirely matching what I learned from history books. The German Nazis absolutely commit robber/murders. They just extended their murder spree to those of the same ethnicity and other “out-groups” who didn’t own anything to steal.
Again, what Israel is doing is definitely genocide, there’s no arguments there, but it’s not the same as the Holocaust.
No argument there, note my original wording “it no longer pales in comparison”. The Gaza genocide already has millions of victims and tens of thousands of murdered palestinians. That’s unfortunately starting to become visible even on a scale that takes the Holocaust as reference.
That’s not entirely matching what I learned from history books. The German Nazis absolutely commit robber/murders. They just extended their murder spree to those of the same ethnicity and other “out-groups” who didn’t own anything to steal.
It wasn’t “Those people have money, therefore we shall rob them” though. It was “Those people are Jews, therefore they deserve to get robbed”. They were an acceptable target because they were Jewish, not because they had any money.
“Give us the land you’re sitting on, or die. I don’t care where you go”
If the Israelis truly didn’t care where the Palestinians went, they wouldn’t be confining them to a 25-mile long open air prison. Extermination is the goal.
You’re ignoring the West Bank. Palestine is not just Gaza.
What’s your point?
Palestinians in Gaza are not allowed to freely travel to the West Bank.
You’re making a lot of claims about what’s going on in Gaza and making huge, sweeping statements that attempt to correlate Palestinians’ experience with others in history. I recommend you read about what is actually going on in Gaza before continuing. You seem ignorant about some of their most basic and fundamental struggles.
My point is the genocide of the Palestinians is more than just Gaza. The bombing of Gazans is a war crime, yes, but that in and of itself is not genocide. The settlements in the West Bank and overall encroachment on Palestinian territory is genocide, and that’s been going on for decades. If Israel and Egypt suddenly allowed people to leave Gaza and go to the West Bank, it wouldn’t stop the genocide, nor would stopping the bombing or the killings in Gaza, because the fact that Israel is allowing their colonists to displace Palestinians at all is enough to say that their intent is genocidal in nature.
You’re so caught up in the emotive rhetoric about Gaza that you’re ignoring the actual issue at hand. It’s like if the bombings weren’t happening at all, you wouldn’t actually give a shit.
Yeah let’s ask Egypt if they would take them
A sort of “Give us the land you’re sitting on, or die. I don’t care where you go” as opposed to “I’m going to kill you. No there’s nothing you can do. You are the wrong race and must die”
Imagine believing this is a reasonable distinction.
Nobody said it’s reasonable. It is a distinction, tho.
It’s a really important distinction if you’re not a moron. The Nazis rounded up undesireables and killed them. There was no ‘loyalty’, there was nothing those undesireables could have done that would have changed what, in the eyes of the Nazi regime, should have happened to them. They were rounded up, shipped off to camps and exterminated, based purely on their genetics or even perceived genetics.
What Israel is doing is genocide, but it’s not the same as The Holocaust. Israel has a Palestinian population inside its borders, they have voting rights, they have seats in their Parliament. The Nazi Regime would have never allowed ANY of their chosen undesireables to have any representation, because the entire purpose of the undesireables was to be killed.
Now, compare what Israel is doing to Palestinians to what the US Colonies did to the Native Americans, and suddenly it’s a lot more comparable. The Colonists showed up, took land, forced the Native Americans out, and if the Natives resisted in any way, they were murdered. Any attacks on Colonists by Natives were met with overwhelming force and wholesale massacres of Native populations. Sounds a bit similar to Gaza, doesn’t it? Americans just don’t like to make the comparison because then it suddenly puts them in the genocidal hot seat.
This is a dumb law
Is Finland just as based as I think it is? They even got the homeless problem fixed. If only…
Is Finland just as based as I think it i
No, we’re not. There’s a lot of good, and definitely very good in comparison to a lot of other, or even most other countries, but I daresay there are certain problems of our own.
While the systems are all great on paper, reality doesn’t always conform.
I was abused by the police in a manner that I think actually would reach the bar of international crime, as they even cut off my water at one point. I was denied my prescription medication and went psychotic for days on end in a jail cell, while “under supervision for my safety”. I was literally drawing on the walls with my own blood. I didn’t eat. They didn’t care. Now whatever the motivation, the conditions I was kept in and the treatment I got would, I argue, constitute an international crime.
I’ve yet to find a single Finn who doesn’t immediately challenge me when I say that, and then I show proof, they deny it, and I have not gotten a single person to explain to me how on Earth it would be possible for me to self-harm so badly while “under supervision” and why I was not given my medications and fucking urgent medical assistance? I still have scars on my arms and fingers and that was several years ago. Even just according to the Finnish laws, permanent physical harm would constitute a grievous assault, when done on another person. And since I wouldn’t have done that if I weren’t being treated that way (in a cell without a single word to anyone, no knowledge of my rights, which I have a right to hold a physical copy all the time during detainment, lights on all the time, no mattress, no bed, no blanket). The guard even taunted me several times over the radio.
Finns will deny this, just like all the Finnish authorities did. And thus if I can manage to prove that it was actually internationally criminal, then anyone denying it would be a criminal under this law, which sounds kinda nice.
Anyway, the point is that we’re not a utopian democracy, we’re a somewhat socially secure bureaucracy. Like yeah we don’t really have anyone living on the streets, people usually get enough to eat, so “can’t complain”, but that’s just it. Having some things be well doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive to improve the things which aren’t.
Personally, Finland is a great country, but all countries are flawed in one way or another. There’s no utopia anywhere.
Also the thing about Finns being introverts is not even an exaggeration. It’d be a massive understatement to say we’re emotionally reserved and generally avoidant.
I’m so sorry for everything you’ve gone through, this sounds horrendous. But thank you for enlightening me, I know mostly nothing about Finland personally. I hope you’re doing better now though, and as someone who’s been through abuse as well, it’s tough, but in the end, we can get through this. I’m not really good at talks like this, sorry if it’s bad, but just know that I’m rooting for you. It will get better. 🙂
I’m not really good at talks like this, sorry
1000% more supportive than any Finn I’ve ever met, including my family.
So yeah, compared to them you’re a fucking master, mate.
That is very meaningful to me, thank you a lot. People ignoring it is what really gets me, not the personal experience. (It’s not the first time I’ve been in a psychosis due to insomnia/other factors, but when I’ve my meds at home, I don’t end up eating myself.)
I am doing better, yes. Maybe not exactly well yet, but …
I’m sure they have problems like everywhere else, but I would emigrate there in a heartbeat if I could afford it and if they’d let me.
Yeah, I figured. And same, but I’m stuck in the worst part of the US right now. The Bible Belt.
Oof, get outta there if you can
I would, too poor though.
Censorship just hides it. Better would be to educate them. Make them meet with survivors, send them to the remaining concentration camps.
I don’t know if this is really censorship in that way. Like yeah don’t hide the genocide, hide the denial, because it doesn’t deserve a platform. Holocaust denial has no basis in reality, especially considering it’s one of the most well documented genocides of all time.
Don’t censor history, teach the children about all the bad shit humans have done.
Holocaust denialism is censorship. It’s an attempt to hide reality itself by controlling the narrative. If anything, outlawing holocaust denialism is anti-censorship, as it’s helping ensure that Nazis won’t be able to suppress the truth about what happened.
Someone claiming that outlawing holocaust denialism is censorship is trying to flip the script and overwrite reality (or just repeating someone else who is doing so, I guess). It’s like saying “Hey! Stop censoring my attempt to censor others! This is censorship!” It’s a mind game, an attempt at manipulation through deception. Look up the term DARVO: Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender. That’s what saying “Outlawing holocaust denialism is censorship!” is: Reversing the Victim and Offender.
Lies and misinformation and other attempts to deceive and suppress the truth are not a form of free speech. Quite the opposite, they’re what results when free speech remains unprotected.
Exactly
There aren’t that many survivors left, but you wouldn’t know judging by the noise some jewish.groups make while clamoring for reparation.
This is effective censorship – of a bad thing, but still censorship.
Education is the way, don’t let people forget history, remind them of all the horrors the nazi regime inflicted on gays, gypsies, political dissidents, criples, … Remind them genocides are still occurring: in Palestine and elsewhere.
