I was just sayin’. Ernst Zuendel, convicted Holocaust denier, was sentenced to five years in prison in Germany. (Photo: EPA)
BBC News reports that 67-year-old Ernst Zuendel, has been sentenced to 5 years in prison for violating Germany’s law against denying the Holocaust.
Actually, he had been convicted on 14 counts of — as the BBC put it — “inciting racial hatred” and “denying that the Nazis killed six million Jews during World War II.”
Interestingly, Mr. Zuendel had spent much of his adult life in Canada — having lived and worked there since 1958, and where he wrote a little book called “The Hitler We Loved and Why.” But the Canadians decided he was a security threat in 2005 and sent him back to Germany.
His troubles stemming from laws against denying the Holocaust began shortly thereafter.
From the BBC:
During his trial in the western German city of Mannheim, he was accused of using “pseudo-scientific” methods to try to rewrite the accepted history of the Nazi Holocaust in 14 pieces of written work and Internet publications.
Zuendel had denied the charges, asserting his right to free speech, and questioned the constitutionality of the laws being used against him.
Mr. Zuendel’s sentence comes just two months after another Holocaust denier, the British author David Irving, was released on appeal after spending more than a year in an Austrian prison. He was convicted on charges of denying the Holocaust in February, 2006, and was sentenced to a three years in jail, but he appealed for a reduced sentence. In December, a Vienna court changed Mr. Irving’s sentence to probation.
Germany is hoping to make denying the Holocaust a crime across the whole of the European Union. But some critics have argued that the spread of anti-Nazi speech laws in Europe risks going too far. From Gerard Alexander, writing for the conservative American Enterprise Institute:
Of course, all governments restrict some speech. But free expression is so foundational to democracy that there is usually a strong bias against restricting speech unless it poses a compelling and even imminent danger to others. The most pervasive and durable restrictions meet that test, applying to things like child pornography, false statements that result in demonstrable harm (defamation), the exposure of national security information, commercial fraud, and the proverbial shouting of “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
In addition, European countries have never had America’s strong free-speech tradition. Nevertheless, three disturbing trends now underway in Europe together represent the greatest erosion of democratic practice in the world’s advanced democracies since 1945. First, anti-Nazi laws are being adopted in places where neo-Nazism poses no serious threat. Second, speech laws have been dramatically expanded to sanction speech that “incites hatred” against groups based on their religion, race, ethnicity, or several other characteristics. Third, these incitement laws are being interpreted so loosely that they chill not just extremist views but mainstream ones too. The result is a serious distortion and impoverishment of political debate.
According to the BBC, Berlin would also like the European Union to adopt its own practice of banning Nazi symbols like the swastika.