OT: European Free Speech Issues

[RestoreTheRepublic]

Randomly today I came across an article about Jean-Marie Le Pen, a French politician who is a member of the far right National Front Party. The article claimed that Le Pen has been fined several times by European Courts for his controversial remarks about the Holocaust. Also, a reference was made to a British historian who received a 3 year prison sentence for denying the Holocaust.

My question is, is Europe this bad?? I am not particularly familiar with European law, but I did not realize the strict restrictions on speech imposed on Europeans with regards to controversial issues.

[GreenCardSeeker]

Most European countries today have "hate laws" that permit the state to sentence offenders to several years in prison simply for expressing opinions. Sweden has a hate crime defined as an attack by a majority group against a minority group, with Jews, Muslims and homosexuals explicitly defined as minority groups to be protected. The maximum possible sentence is four years, though with the way society is set up, they don't need to hand out that long sentences since they can bar the offender from employment etc for long periods as an added measure, so they don't have to have draconic sentences in their records.

Germany also has draconic "hate laws", with special focus on national socialism. Any kind of nazi imagery or recitation of nazi music is explicitly outlawed, new or old. The law permits banning organizations and making it a crime participating in these banned organizations. A German nazi rock singer named Michael Regener was sentenced to three years and four months in prison for setting up the band Landser and making several quite explicit records.

I know France, Great britain and Spain also has similar "hate laws", though Sweden and Germany are the worst. Most EU countries seem to have adopted laws like these recently, though I'm not familiar with every country. The German chancellor Angela Merkel also wanted to have an EU agency that would track the movement of all speech violators across all of EU.

So it's safe to say there's not much in the way of freedom of speech in Europe.

[RestoreTheRepublic]

Thanks for the response. That's disheartening to hear, when the government begins to define what constitutes free speech we are in trouble.

[GreenCardSeeker]

Yep. And really sad when in the 21th century, many people here are still happy about the bans on dissenting views, then they don't have to hear anything that conflicts with what they've been taught.

Ever since Marxism became a force to be reckoned with in Europe, it's been a battleground of totalitarian ideologies, the way it goes is that you join a movement and make it your purpose to silence the opposition, then have faith in that your leadership will make all the right decisions. It's very different from the USA. After world war 1 in Germany, when the new republic tried was being set up, the Communists immediately tried to overthrow it as well as chase any conservatives or liberals(the European meaning) off the streets. Then another movement appeared called national socialism that defeat the Communists at their own game, with these militant Communists ending up in concentration camps eventually. You'd think by now these people would have learned that there is a better way of politics, the example set by the USA, yet in the 21th century, they're still the same. Social democracy is virtually identical to Communism, they've just been able to achieve their power through reforms and not through revolutions.

I think Sweden and Germany are the two countries where liberty has had its hardest time entering. Totalitarianism is appealing. I find it interesting that Germany now even has a partial ban on Scientology, calling this religion "anti-democratic". How many ideologies and religions can you ban before you have to admit that you are this very thing yourself?