>
> > Within the parameters you set, I have to agree
> (you
> > mean "Banning *political* speech"?)
>
> It looks like political speech to me (nasty
> politics, yes, but
> political speech nevertheless)
I disagree with this assessment. I do agree with your
conclusion, but I am afraid there is rather more at
stake.
You see what is probably missing in the whole
discussion and what is extremely difficult to
reproduce in a fairly level-headed back-and-forth on
this list is the amount of fear the Nazis and their
descendants can still inject into political discourse
in Germany and Austria. Basically, someone who denies
the holocaust claims that one of the most horrible
events in European history did not occur. Letting them
getting away with this statement is in a very obscure
way like endorsing Neonazi policies with its lies and
ugly consequences.
Getting away with this kind of lie means to many
people Neonazis still get away with anything.
Including murder. So, what you consider banning
political speech - and justifiably so, I might add -
has a rather different texture in Central Europe. In
Europe, silence means consent. Denial of the obvious
means endorsement of the same.
So what you are calling political, is rather more
elemental than that. If political speech aimed at the
vast majority of the population threatens them with
murder, dictatorship etc, and precisely that has
occurred in the past, you do not wait for political
freedoms to be terminated by those guys, you make it
clear that any kind of threat of this kind is taken as
a criminal act. I refer to the analogy of murder and
incitement to murder again, because this kind of
political speech amounts to it.
No political discourse can be conducted when one side
threatens the other with termination.
I am not sure I made it more clear. I havent slept in
36 hours.
-Frank
>
> -- b
>
>
___________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Model Search 2005 - Find the next catwalk superstars -
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/hot/model-search/
