I'm, a fairly rabid First Amendment fundamentalist. My 1A teacher was DAvid Goldberger, ACLU counsel in the Nazie-Skokie case, defending the right to the Nazis to march in a town then heavily populuated by holucaust survivors. The march never took place olace the chieve Nazi was unmasked as Jew. I oppose Richard Delgado's arguments that "racist" or "fascist" speech should be freed from 1A protections in AMerica or Mackinnon's arguments that "porn" ought to be actionable. Rosa lUxemberg sais in critique of the Bolsheviks that freedom of speech is first and foremost for the speech that we hate.
AT the same time I think that freedom of speech is a contextual principle whose limits ought be decided pragmatically. The exceptioms we have carved out -- currently, effectively, defamation, incitement to immanent illegal actvity, obscentity (rarely prosecuted), asd well as speech that is criminal itself such as solicitation or conspiracy to commit a crime, show that free speech is not absolute. Formerly commrcial specch was less protected, it's hard to objected to that. Even now it must be truthful and most misleading, whereas you haved the 1A right to tell outrageous nondefamatory lies without commercial purposes. And then there are legitimate national security limitations, traditionally the numbers and dates of sailing to troop ships and the like, andf espionage laws generally. Howevere much the govt may have gone overboard the war on terror, surely there are some lergitimate restrictions on speech about government plans to acert or deter attacks.
In view of all this, I note that European socities that have hate speech laws are not notably less free than US socirty and may have a wider tange of political opinion. Smart liberals (in the philosophical sense I've been defending) like the late Bernard Williams (no reactionaly or identity politics advocatre) have said that US fetishization of the freedom of speech is excessive, so that reasonbale opinion differs.
I would not alter our main rules here, but I do understand the desire of countries like Germany and France where fascism and and genocidal racism have a fairly recent living past to treat holocuast denial in particular and racial hate speech in general undersomething like incitement. At least I don't think that is crazy or the first step on a slippery slope of generalized repression.
These clowns in the German jail seem like neoNazi crackpots. One might raise resaonable questions about what happened in the holocaust, such as Arno Mayer's thesis that the murder plans werre not even formulated until the 1941 or so. But anyone who quotes Fred Leuchter is already off the wall. I don't think these clowns should be in jail. But I can see wht the Germans think they maybe should. Does that make me a bad civil libertarian?
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Leigh Meyers wrote:
>
> >Expelled? That would be chilling.... Could I get
> kicked for saying
> >that there's
> >no evidence that Saddam Hussein slaughtered 10s of
> thousands of Kurds?
>
> No. I'd suspect you're wrong, but the evidence is
> murkier, and the
> politics would be completely different.
>
> I'm all for criticizing the use to which Zionists
> put the Holocaust;
> I'm a big fan of Norman Finkelstein's. But
> questioning the facts of
> the Holocaust - even if it's just questioning
> details (4 million or 5
> million?) - is streng verboten in my book.
>
> Doug
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