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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Arwon |
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Arwon Bazu                   Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| Why not Hugo Chavez? | |||
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Arwon Bazu  Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| The Holocaust denial debate is interesting because, in mainstream terms, it's not about whether the Holocaust happened, but whether people should be able to say it didn't. It's a debate about the debate. I mean everyone knows it happened, but should Holocaust denial be a criminal offense as it is in some places (David Irving, British historian, is in an Austrian jail as I write)? Are some things too extreme, offensive and wrong to even be discussed and put up for debate? | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| It's not just about "threats to America". It's about the big trends and news stories. Iran and nukes are nothing new, but Chavez has become emblematic of a widespread new leftish swing in Latin America generally, and reportage on the fates of Chavez-type politicians throughout Latin America have been a significant news issue all year. It's one of the bigger stories in the world.
The other possibility is either Al Gore or that Stern guy from the UK treasury, because the global warming debate has been one of the biggest issues of the year too. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| Two reasons. Firstly, it's hate speech, since the implied corollary of Holocaust denial is the ieda that it's a Jewish hoax to further their interests by generating sympathy. Generally countries with holocaust denial laws have hate speech laws more generally, In Canada or the UK, for example, you could probably prosecute holocaust deniers under more general hate-speech laws due to the less proscriptive nature of common law systems.
Second, it's a proxy law, useful for smacking really objectionable political groups in countries that are afraid of resurgent Nazism, especially those countries which participated in the Holocaust. When a particular behaviour, such as Holocaust Denial, so neatly correlates with extreme political groups, it's a useful tool to limit their behaviour and the effectiveness of their political organisation--since a legal political party is more effective than an illegal one, if you stick restrictions like this in as proxies, you can make life difficult for these groups without actually banning them.. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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I'll quote John Ralston Saul here, on the essential difference:
The holocaust was a genocide carried out in a rational, planned manner by a society essentially run by the same principles as ours. It MUST remain absolutely taboo for that reason, because once you start to deny that it was a calmly and clinically and logically carried-out genocide of a group of people, by a society functionally identifiable with our own, you start to forget what modern planning and governance is truly capable of - the euphimistic creepery, the dispersal and thus avoidance of final responsibility, the defence of the indefensible by perfectly sane people. Once we start to forget these aspects, that the Holocaust was the darkest possible side of our rational, planned, post-God societies and think of it as "just another massacre" by man in his brutal state of nature, we start to go back down that evil slope. Most massacres are due to absence of effective government and functional administration and so forth... the Holocaust was caused by it. (edited by Arwon on 12-22-06 02:37 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| If you want an intra-Jewish example about why the Holocaust is worse, in order to forestall any accusations that it's considered different and sacrosanct because it was the Jews (and they, like, control the media)... how about the persecutions in the Stalinist USSR, or going further back, any number of other pogroms and bouts of ethnic cleansing across Eastern Europe and beyond. I mean, where is Spanish Jewry these days? (edited by Arwon on 12-22-06 02:50 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| It's because it's hatespeech, and closely associated with Neo-Nazis and their violent and anti-social behaviour. It doesn't so much incite violence as provide a way for violence to be more effective.
I'ma quote myself from the last Holocaust Denial thread: "The issue here is the absolutism of free speech. You claimed free speech is absolute in all cases. Clearly it isn't. Speech can cause harm, we've demonstrated cases in which speech can cause harm, ranging from holocaust deniers adding fuel to the neonazi fire, to trolling cartoons deliberately inciting people with a very different attitude to their prophet and to the printed images, to yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre. The right to free speech must be balanced against other often contradictory rights, just like each other. Free speech does not mean freedom to deliberately and intentionally incite hate and incite violence, or to cause unjustified public panic, because that violates other folks' rights. For example, in the case of Holocaust denial, it violates the right of people to feel safe from fucking Nazis. Now, different countries balance these two conflicting rights differently, but the point remains, free speech is not an absolute any more than any other right is." Many people feel that denying the holocaust is basically the same thing as saying "I believe group X should be violently opposed and, if we get the chance, removed from society". This is because there's a virtually 100% correlation between anti-Semetic hatred and holocaust denial. It's essentially a code for the incitement of hatred and therefore intended to impinge on the rights of the target group to live in peace and security, yatta yatta yatta. Now, what people who're against hate-speech laws need to ask themselves is whether they're against hate speech laws, or against considering holocaust denial as hate speech. They're two different arguments and we're kinda having both. (edited by Arwon on 12-22-06 02:57 AM) (edited by Arwon on 12-22-06 02:59 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| SS, that wasn't an accusation against you, it was a joke. At any rate, it can be kind of the unspoken corrollary of "the holocaust is considered special because it was Jewish" is the recognition that Jews are now a strong and influential group in society compared to most other vitims of genocide. Jews are now insiders in western society... honorary white people, if you will. That can be spun as "the Jews control society" but it doesn't need to be. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| What I said earlier was appallingly worded, let me rephrase:
Now, what people who're against Holocaust Denial Laws need to ask themselves is whether they're against hate speech laws, or against considering holocaust denial as hate speech. Two different arguments. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| I don't agree that hate speech laws DO actually restrict freedom of speech in any serious way. I mean, Ireland and New Zealand, for example, are probably more open and free societies with less self-censorship despite the fact that they have hate speech laws and America doesn't. There is no real slippery slope here. You wanna talk about freedom of speech issues, you'd be much better off focussing on the odious sedition laws that've been passed in various countries.
As we've already gone through, free speech isn't an absolute right any more than any other right is an absolute. The generally accepted principle for restricting free speech is the harm principle, that's why we have libel laws and so forth. Hate speech - that is, people getting up and loudly and publically saying things that are intended to be intimidating, insulting, harassing and offensive to certain groups of people, intended to stir up hatred and contempt and even violence -- can potentially do demonstrable harm by themselves, in that they target and aim to undermine specific racial/ethnic/etc groups, and moreover, they aim to create tensions and divisiveness and contribute to a climate of fear and violence. Why should these forms of abusive trolling be protected speech? Frankly, the right of people to stick up posters or shout through megaphones about how horrible Ethnic Group X are and how everyone should stay away from them and not serve them in shops and tell them to go back to their own countries and so forth, isn't a right worth protecting. Once it becomes specifically, hatefully and incitefully targetted at a specific group of people, then applying criminal penalties for this anti-social behaviour is pretty reasonable. They're not really political, and really, free speech laws are about protecting political speech more than anything. Racial abuse, inciting hatred, etc, is just a powerfully anti-social form of behaviour, similar to laws about disturbing the peace and so forth. No, you can't really eliminate the hatreds and ideas behind the speech acts, but you can still use laws like this to make it a bit harder for them to actually, you know, undertake these threatening and harassing behaviours towards people.
Nah, if you're gonna speak of that you need to include the decimation of native peoples in Australia (complete disappearance of the Tasmanians, the only successful genocide in history), Latin America, Africa, etc, as well. Horrible as it was, the experiences of natives in the USA hasn't been unique. Moreover, the historiographical debates over these various things are still fairly complex and unresolved, and the fact that even calling them full-on "genocides" is debatable kinda demonstrates their relationship to the Holocaust. The difference though, is still what I said earlier, about the cold, clinical, utterly gratuitous nature of the Holocaust and how it was an exp (edited by Arwon on 12-22-06 07:35 PM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| They're different categories of thing. The Holocaust was the Holocaust, and I can't think of another organised industrialised deliberate extermination that can be set alongside it. By contrast, I think it's illustrative that no one colonial atrocity can be singled out, they're better understood as all falling under the grim and complex banner of "colonialism". I hesitate to call them genocides, but that's a matter of much historiographical debate. You don't need to know about the Tasmanian aboriginals specifically because that's just one of the more extreme examples of a process that repeated itself throughout the world over a period of 3 or 4 hundred years. You don't need to be aware of every specific battle, massacre, failed uprising, in every corner of the world, to be aware of the nature of Colonialism as a whole.
A few examples: Did you know that a century after Columbus made landfall in Hispaniola, the natives of that island were virtually extinct? Ever notice that Argentines seem a great deal more European than other Latin Americans, and if so, did you know it's because the native populace of that area was virtually wiped out? What about the Germans in South West Africa (modern Namibia) who actually, rarely for a European colonial power in Africa, set out to wipe out entire groups of natives? The thing is, though, A LOT of the miseries of the natives of the Americas, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific, were part of the general dynamic of one society claiming the territory and resources of another. Colonialism SUCKED. It continues to be the biggest shaping influences, usually for the worse, in most parts of the world. While horrible, these atrocities weren't really of a different kind than earlier periods of human history. It was still just stronger societies fighting wars of aggression to subjugate other groups of people, take their resources, increase their own power, etcetera. These still strike me as different than the Holocaust, which was a singularly abysmal event and easily the worst crime committed in human history. I baulk at attempts to equate it with colonial atrocities, because the sum total of colonialism just feels different to what Hitler attempted to orchestrate. In terms of cruelty, deliberateness, cool rationality, and so forth, the colonial question still pales compared to what the Holocaust demonstrated modern industrial societies are capable of doing to people. But here's perhaps the key point: just by saying that something wasn't as bad as the Holocaust, the worst crime in history, doesn't mean you're trivialising it. I just don't think it's terribly useful to try to equate colonialism with the Holocaust, because they're better understood as different things. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| How about the fact that Holocaust denial is an organised, actual, existing movement? It's not a consequence of trivialising the genocidal history of colonialism or whatever or giving the Jews special treatment, it's a conseuqnece of the fact that HOLOCAUST DENIAL EXISTS AND THE OTHER THINGS YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT DON'T. Holocaust denial is a crime in about a half dozen European countries and Israel, and that's because these are places which have specific social and historical imperatives compelling them to want to severely repress anything smacking of resurgent anti-Semitism and Nazism. THAT separates Holocaust denial from other ideas. The implicit, automatic association with hategroups and Nazism. There are groups which more or less think that Jews are evil society-destroying parasites, and Holocaust denial is for them an important part of their hateful ideas. THAT makes it different. Practically speaking, Holocaust denial is always associated with hate-speech. Practically speaking, based on what happens in the real world, the Holocaust is a different ballgame.
No such equivalent hate/denial groups exist around any other ethnic group or any other massacre, and that's why there's not denialist movements surrounding them. There's no reason in Europe, to deny that say, the Native Americans, were given smallpox blankeys because there's no anti-Amerindian Nazis who want to deny that in order to deny them sympathy or whatever. It's partly also because of the previously discussed different nature of the Holocaust versus other massacres (as a gratuitious, industrialised, rational genocide). The Holocaust strikes closer to home, and so there's higher stakes for those denying it. Moreover, it could simply be a matter of different legal codes. Civil versus Common Law. Civil Law systems, of which continental European countries are examples, can be much more specific and proscriptive in their legal systems than can Common Law systems of the Anglo variety. The fact that Holocaust denial is the only idea of its kind that specifically needs combatting means that they might as well just make a law specifically saying that, to avoid confusion. If your hypothetical made-up hate-group denialist movements actually did exist and were problems, well they'd pass a law against them, too. Simple. Talking in the abstract about denial of random other massacres is meaningless, because these other ideas don't really exist for various historical and social reasons. If they did, and if there were hate-groups for whom denial of these things was an essential plank of perpetuating their own hateful ideas about other groups, then we could begin to discuss equivalency, but until then, Holocaust denial occupies a special place because there are organised hate groups who push the idea as part of their general hateful anti-Semetic agenda. With NO other group is this true, especially of the societies which, you know, HAVE anti-denial laws in addition to regular hate-speech laws. edit: 'blankeys' was a typo but I'm leaving it in. (edited by Arwon on 12-23-06 02:25 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| Well, now you get the point, so it was apparently effective. Anyways, I'm playing the ball, not the man (albeit aggressively). (edited by Arwon on 12-23-06 02:31 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| Sin, thinking is generally *less* affected than motor skills and inhibitions and stuff. I've occasionally experiened a situation where I've been drinking quietly and not realised I was kinda slaughtered until I've had to stand up. If you were reading and engaging in regular conversation and therefore concentrating on one thing at a time, there's no reason why you wouldn't have been fine based on that stuff. Drunk is also what you make of it--if you're sitting there analysing the feeling and consciously or unconsciously trying not to let on that you're a bit drunk, you're less likely to act really drunk.
The phrase "easier to be an idiot" is key. It's essentially true, but you are being over-simplistic in describing the weakening of that little voice of moderation... a LOT of things, MOST of what's classically associated with drunken behaviour, they flow from the lessening of the strength of that little voice in your head. Being drunk doesn't mean NO capacity for self-regulation and self-control, it just makes it harder due to things like slower reaction speeds. It also doesn't really put things in your head that aren't already there, so often alcohol merely helps you do things you may have wanted to do anyway (this particularly regards to relations with the opposite sex, naturally). What you've described sounds about typical for a quietish drunk, because after all, not everyone becomes a wild lunatic when they drink. (And room spinning and stuff isn't when you're drunk, it's when you're extremely drunk). The first time I drank I downed a bottle of vodka over the course of a night, discovered I couldn't feel pain and spent about half an hour testing this out. The next morning I was very bruised. (edited by Arwon on 12-26-06 11:03 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| OH SHIT THE WORLD ENDED | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| Autralia isn't going to be developing nukes, although we were trying until the 60s when the US and UK shut us out of their research, which I suppose was a bit galling given that the Brits fucking tested their nukes on our land and on our soldiers...
At any rate, our Midget Methodist Master John Howard seems to want us to become an energy super-power (and use the global warming means nuclear power furphy to wedge the left). Basically we're just going to become the world's Uranium dealer (OMG SELLING TO CHINA THE SKY IS FALLING), since practically no major nuclear country or prospective nuclear country could be self-sufficient in uranium with nuclear weapons or power. So we'll be like OPEC but with uranium. (edited by Arwon on 12-27-06 01:00 AM) (edited by Arwon on 12-27-06 01:04 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| Probably about as bad as we'd feel if we were invaded by aliens or something. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| Your definition of "fascist" is way too broad. Authoritarian corporatist military juntas ain't fascist. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| Oddly enough, it's Russia that's the country most likely to be lurching towards fascism right now.
I should also point out to blackhole that Pinochet didn't really become a gung-ho free-marketeer and turn the country into a laboratory for Chicago-school economists until a bit after the coup (nothing like a reactionary military junta to get those pesky unions and civil society groups out of the way of your abstract economic experiments). At the time, the main concern of American foreign policy was averting a (democratically elected) socialist Chile, a second Cuba in the Americas. The nature of Pinchet's and ideology, inasmuch as there was one, was very very secondary. Economic ideology and market systems and stuff didn't have a whole lot to do with the events of 73 (especially when you consider that at this time, the US wasn't even embarking on any sort of brave new Friedmanesque/Thatcherite experiments... it even had price and income controls at one point around 1973), it was all basic realpolitik, according to the false logic of the Cold War and especially the idea that anything that vaguely smelled of leftiness must be being directed from Moscow. (edited by Arwon on 12-28-06 12:29 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6305 days |
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| Well, it can be said to be heading in that direction. Aside from the obvious closing of political space, the tendency for regime opponents to disappear and so forth, it exhibits a few of the classic features, there are definite parallels with inter-war Germany. Deep socioeconomic problems that are easily blamed on external sources. Resurgent nationalism tied to this recent decline and nostalgia for a glorious past, the "stab in the back" in the form of the collapse of the 80s and 90s, a strong sense of paranoia and xenophobia and racism and willingness to exploit ethnic tensions between Russians and other nationalities within Russia, swaggering self-confidence and arrogance on the international stage coupled with paranoia and intolerance. Putin's not gonna lead the country into fascism unless some massive crisis propels it in that direction, but the danger is a successor could easily inherit and exacerbate these trends.
The danger is easily overstated however. A politically odious Russia is mainly a danger to its own people and immediate neighbours... its wide array of cataclysmic social problems kinda hobble it, but even so, it's worrying and depressing. (edited by Arwon on 12-28-06 12:39 AM) |
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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Arwon |
