Posted on 02/28/2006 11:11:33 AM PST by rcocean
Of course we can; nothing at all has changed. There are still millions of people in extermination camps; millions more in concentration camps; and millions more than that in labor camps. All political dissent is still crushed like a gnat beneath a jackboot. All civil liberties are still thoroughly and ruthlessly suppressed. And of course the entire nation is still mobilized for a genocidal war of annihilation against all its neighbors.
Yeah, but they might put you in jail for it.
All these people warning about how the prosecution would make him a martyr were stunningly wrong. He's a skunk, and now he's an even better known one. I suppose when he gets out of prison he'll be rewarded with a nice flat in Tehran or Istanbul, where he can cowtow to his keepers in relative comfort.
I agree. Expose the guy as the Nazi apologist he is.
He would change his tune after a few months of the ghosts there working on him.
Get him to explain rooms there like this one:
Look at it this way-if he wasn't in jail, he'd be doing commentary on CNN.
They've been doing that for centuries. Hasn't helped them a bit. In fact, they used to be a far larger country ~ a major power even.
Now they float around in a punchbowl.
Eventually even Austria will figure it out, but probably not soon.
BTW, the prisoners are in China these days. Fur Shur we should not be encouraging the Chinese in this sort of thing by allowing the Austrians to keep on doing it like old times when there was a Kaiser in Deutschland and an Emperor in Austro-Hungary, and the Turks were the Ottoman Empire!
You'll get no argument from me on that. (A nice change!)
Darned good Alpine skiers, though.
So, pass a law to outlaw Nazi party derivatives.
They've done that, too.
The real reason behind these laws is that Austria would like the world to think of it as a slightly more cosmpolitan version of Switzerland, with snow and coffee and waltzes and palaces, and any vocal reminder of their enthusiastic Nazism embarrasses them and does damage to their public image.
It's even more galling when a Brit decides to excuse the Holocaust "on their behalf." Imagine a French public official lionizing Bull Connor and the KKK, he'd be more hated by Southerners than if a native son had done the same.
Precisly why jail term serve no real purpose.
It would serve an excellent purpose--it would make the South look serious in its attempts to challenge its past, without actually alienating the unreconstructed southerners who would never identify personally with a Frenchman.
Ah, but where would this stop? The First Ammendment is already all but shredded now. It is much better to have a free society than get all worked up over what cranks and kooks think or say. Advocating jail for frivolous opinion is very much like Germany of WWII. "Dissidents" shared the fate of the Jews. Stalin imprisoned people for such trivialities as well. How far toward emulating those two states would you like to go?
I don't think we need a law like this in the U.S. and would oppose it if it were introduced.
European countries like Germany and Austria have three key differences from the U.S. They have never enshrined freedom of speech as a founding principle of government, they have seen democracies turn into bloody dictatorships through legal means and racist demagoguery, and they have experienced the destruction of genocide and total war within recent memory. They would compromise freedom of speech and even democracy if it means preventing the latter two consequences. The equation they've worked out is that they've found a brake on the slippery slope. Americans wouldn't feel the same way, but it's not our experience.
Sometimes I worry that we're already nearing the precipice along that slippery slope.
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