Censorship and the Empire: Dieudonne and the Uses of “Anti-Semitism”
by Diana Johnstone
When power becomes blatantly criminal, it’s time to make people shut up. That time seems to have come throughout the Empire. Freedom of speech is increasingly threatened, both in the United States and in “old Europe”, although the attacks come from quite different angles.
In the United States, the assault is clearly led by far right fanatics such as David Horowitz, who is inciting students to denounce professors who dare try to teach them something they didn’t think they already knew. The purpose is clearly to ban criticism of United States war policy.
In old Europe, the assault is more subtle and probably less lucid in its aims. It is led n part by people who consider themselves on the left and who seem blissfully unaware of the danger of limiting freedom of speech.
In Germany, it has long been illegal to deny that the Holocaust took place: the offense called “the Auschwitz lie” can be punished by up to three years in prison. German television insists relentlessly on Hitler and his crimes, as if he were still lurking in the wings. This has done nothing to prevent the rise of neo-Nazi groups. It may even have helped them grow, in accordance with the phenomenon, demonstrated in the Soviet zone, that establishing “official truth”-even if true-can be the best way to make many people believe the contrary. But more than that, the far right in Germany seems to be gaining ground as a result of widespread disillusion, especially in Eastern Germany, with the neoliberal economic policies that were supposed to bring prosperity but instead have brought growing unemployment and poverty.
In any case, the center left government of Social Democrats and Greens has undertaken to react to rightist demonstrations by broadening the law against “Volksverhetzung”-a concept that can be translated as “incitement of the masses” or “poisoning of the minds of the people”. In the future, it should not be enough to prosecute persons who “approve, justify, deny or play down genocide of Jews and gypsies” in a way apt to “disturb public peace” (a vague notion). The new law would make it equally criminal to speak in any of those ways about any case of “genocide” condemned by any international court whose jurisdiction has been recognized by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Now, judicial history is marked by famously unjust verdicts reversed after long struggles to right the wrong. But the German law could make it a crime to challenge the International Tribunal on Former Yugoslavia, set up by NATO powers to control and manipulate political conflict in the Balkans, when it officially convicts Serbs for “genocide”. Anyone who points out that the Tribunal’s definition of “genocide” has been contrived for political purposes, and that its procedures are blatantly prejudiced, might risk being arrested.
Full Article: counterpunch.org