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FINLAND MOVES TO CRIMINALIZE HOLOCAUST DENIAL
I've been making some updates previously here on the new right-wing government including a nationalist party, Finns Party, and the ongoing racism scandal after it turned out that some of the ministers from that party had a history of racist comments, even playing around with Nazi implications. You can read this, this or this for more context.
For some time now, the actual survival of the government has been predicated on an "anti-racist statement" demanded by Swedish People's Party, the most liberal and pro-minority (chiefly their own Swedish-speaking minority but also all other ones, in some way) party in the government.
The statement was published yesterday and mostly just contained platitudes, basic repetition of already-existing laws and government program parts and promises to "launch programmes", "improve dialogue", "support the work done" etc that basically amount to very little. The actual actions also contains parts obviously intended to placate Finns Party, such as new campaigns against honor violence, gang violence and so on, as well as a promise to look into banning Communist symbols alongside with Nazi ones.
You can read it here if you wish. Its main purpose, of course, has been to allow everyone to save face sufficiently to keep the government going on, so that it can get on to doing the other tasks that the parties it consists of wish it to do, ie. implement a pro-business economic policy and limit immigration.
However, the one concrete detail that has aroused some attention abroad has been a promise to criminalize Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial has not been formally criminalized in Finland and before this Finnish governments have actually resisted proposals and demands by institutions like EU to do so, chiefly on the basis that antisemitic acts could already be charged under ethnic agitation laws if need be.
In practice Holocaust denial is very rare in Finland and there's been only a couple of cases that have seen court action, mainly since Holocaust in general is not as important in Finnish discourses as in many other countries. Finland has had a tiny Jewish community, maybe a few thousand at any given era, and during the actual event Finland deported eight Jewish refugees to Germany but otherwise did not follow German demands to relinquish the country's small Jewish community, and Jewish soldiers fought on the front while Finland participated in Operation Barbarossa, with three Jewish Finnish soldiers even being offered the Iron Cross by Germans, who had troops in Lapland.
In general, it might be said that one reason for the comparatively less attention being paid to Holocaust than in many other countries is that Soviet crimes against humanity loom so large. Thus far, for instance, while other European countries have commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day, Finland has had a “Remembrance Day for the Victims of Persecutions", and the local press often uses this day to talk about Soviet persecutions, like the Soviet ethnic campaign against Finns in the 1930s. (This is one of the things that the anti-racist statement also promises to change.)
I have sometimes seen local Nazis post Holocaust denial stuff, but even this happens in a very perfunctory way and is clearly not a top concern in comparison to immigration or, say, GLBTQ+ stuff. Maybe that is because internationally a popular antisemitic argument has always been blaming the Jews for communism, socialism, feminism and the New Left, and Finland as had plenty of all of those (a socialist revolution, one of the largest Communist parties in Western Europe per capita etc.) with barely any Jewish participation.
One of the few actual instances to have actively demanded Holocaust denial criminalization and generally stronger actions against antisemitism are the Christian Democrats, a small socially conservative Christian party, which is firmly pro-Israel and based on evangelical movements that subscribe to dispensationalist theology, which is currently also in gobernment. As such, it's very likely that this was one of their demands. However, it doesn't seem to have been one that has caused particular troubles for the Finns Party to accept, since it's not related to their true concern - immigration - and the party also has some history of giving soft support to Israel simply on the basis that the Finnish Left is firmly pro-Palestinian.
As such, I don't expect this to be particularly consequential, since it basically criminalizes something that has very rarely happened anyway and which would arguably often already be banned under other laws. If anything I'd expect it to increase Holocaust denial, simply since there's already a conspiracy theory community suspicious of anything the government does and who might be expected to go "If it's banned there must be some truth to it, eh?"
Holocaust denial is a factually incorrect position to take that bears an implicit threat against Jewish people. Given the fact that threatening statements are already acceptably considered 'beyond the pale' I don't see this as a free speech issue. It is instead explicitly codifying the idea that 'yes we know what you're doing, so cut it out' -- the venn diagram of people who deny the holocaust and hold anti-semitic views is practically a circle. Since it simply builds off of an already acceptable principle, why does it matter if a specific type of factually incorrect statement is explicitly legislated against?
I don't understand this. So anything deemed 'beyond the pale' is no longer speech? Let's examine this logic.
It's a given god exists and blasphemy is implicitly harmful and causes violence (looking at you charlie hebdo).
Therefore, speaking against god isn't a free speech issue.
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Sure, in the same way that criticizing the Emperor is not a free speech issue.
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Well, how do you know that? Presumably you weren't there. Did you see it? Did you go into the lab in history class and measure it? Did you receive a vision from God whereby you were commanded to write seven comments to the seven forums of rationalism? No, you believe the Holocaust because you read about it or watched some YouTube videos (I hope you aren't relying on personal instruction from public schoolteachers for your epistemology). Why do you believe those sources? Was it eyewitness testimony from someone claiming to be a Holocaust survivor? You can watch interviews with people claiming to be abducted by aliens. Did they cite documents from the time period? Documents can be forged, important documents, documents which change the course of history because people believe them.
The reason I believe the Holocaust is because of bounded distrust. There are enough eyewitness accounts that make sense considered together, enough plausible-seeming documents that match up with everything else we know well enough, and perhaps most importantly, there is a small army of people dedicated to poking holes in all of this who have come up mostly empty. They are the mechanism by which distrust is bounded. It is vital for a healthy information ecosystem that people be allowed to question everything.
This is not true at all. There are many examples, but one of the most significant that comes to mind is the revisions to the alleged Majdanek "extermination camp". The Soviet prosecution submitted into evidence the claim that 1.5 million were murdered in a "Huge Death Factory of Gas Chambers and Crematories." Official Soviet-Polish investigation concluded there were seven gas chambers, a claim which stood as "history" for decades.
In the 1990s Revisionist scholars including Carlo Mattogno visited the archives and discovered original construction documents and work orders proving the hygienic purposes of the facilities which were allegedly homicidal gas chambers- including real shower rooms, laundry facilities, and delousing facilities. They disproved the technical possibility that the alleged structures could have operated as homicidal gas chambers. They also concluded a tragic but more realistic death toll of around 42,000 at the camp mostly due to catastrophic hygienic conditions and disease like epidemic typhus.
In 2005 the Majdanek Museum conceded most of the revisions pressed by Revisionist scholars, including revising the claim that 5 out of 7 of the alleged "gas chambers" served that purpose and revising the claimed death toll to 78,000, a 95% decline from the figure reported at Nuremberg by Soviet investigators.
The Revisionist research and methodology has proven to be true for Majdanek, and most sources including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum no longer even consider Majdanek an "extermination" camp after these recent revisions. The position of Holocaust Deniers is that a similar revision is needed at several other camps, where nearly identical claims of "factories of death" have been made with wildly exaggerated death tolls by Soviet investigators and eyewitnesses based on very thin evidence.
This revision is especially significant since Majdanek was the very first alleged "extermination camp" conquered and investigated by the Soviets in late 1944. The Soviets lied about a grand factory of death, crematories, and gas chambers in 1944 well before they liberated Auschwitz where they made precisely identical claims including the exact same accusation of the method of mass murder. The disproven claim made by the Soviets that the SS men climbed onto the roof to drop Zyklon B through the ceiling in fact made a public debut at Majdanek in 1944, and the same claim was later made at Auschwitz in 1945. The fact that the 1944 "investigations" have been disproven by Revisionists, even conceded by mainstream sources, shows that suspicion should be cast on identical claims made by identical investigators after Majdanek, which includes every camp.
Majdanek proves it is possible for an extermination camp to be "proven" by courts, witnesses, and historians, only for Revisionists to debunk the consensus with a proper historical and scientific methodology. The only question that remains is, were Revisionists only right about Majdanek, or are they also right about the other alleged camps? My position is that the revisions which they forced at Majdanek are also required at several other camps, where identical claims have been made by identical investigators and witnesses. But it's not correct to say they have "come up empty." They have disproven an entire "extermination camp".
That's an argument for revising the death toll downwards. That's not an argument that the holocaust never happened.
Yes, politically correct brigade pretends they are the same thing, but we don't have to accept their framing. At least some mass killings of racial undesirables, mostly Jews, were carried out by the Nazis during WWII, which is the definition of the holocaust.
It is not simply a matter of revising the death toll downwards, it's a demonstration that Revisionists are correct about the fallibility of the body evidence that has been used to "prove" the extraordinary claim that millions of people were murdered inside makeshift gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Revisionists contend that this narrative was psychological warfare, similar to the psych warfare that produced the most infamous propaganda in WWI about the German "corpse factories".
The Holocaust is not simply the claim that there were some killings of Jews, as that is a claim Revisionists do not contest. The Holocaust includes the claim that there was an official policy to exterminate the Jews and that millions were murdered in makeshift gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Those are the claims Revisionists contest, and Majdanek is not simply a revision of the death toll, it's a demonstrated case of the Revisionist model of the narrative being proven true for one of the 6 alleged "extermination camps." It's a case where, as Revisionists say, Soviet investigators, witnesses, courts, and historians all colluded to perpetuate an entirely false narrative that became "history" for decades, until Revisionists did the archival research and proved their case such that even the Majdanek museum could no longer hold the narrative together without abandoning the vast majority of it.
I’m assuming that as a revisionist you acknowledge that at least some Jewish communities were exterminated deliberately by the axis powers?
Because yes, obviously gas chambers is besides the point and the specific death toll doesn’t actually change the valence of the events. I don’t think you can dispute say, the crimes of the iron guard, or that the Nazis did wipe out plenty of Jewish communities.
Gas chambers are not "besides the point", the claim is that about half of all the Jews killed were murdered in these makeshift contraptions. There is no mainstream authority whatsoever that allows you to affirm "the Holocaust" without also affirming the gas chamber story, that story is an indispensable pillar of what constitutes "the Holocaust".
Yes there were communities that were killed, i.e. there were widespread reprisals against Jewish civilians in response to partisan activity, which was tragic but considered legal at the time. There were likewise Russian and Ukrainian and Polish and German communities that were wiped out and ethnically cleansed before, during, and after the war. We are told Jewish suffering is special because there was a specific policy to secretly exterminate them all, a claim which Revisionists refute, and that millions of them were herded into shower rooms and then gassed. "The Holocaust" as such absolutely depends on the truth of those claims, if those claims are false then the Holocaust narrative is also false by the definition put forward by all of its proponents.
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You don't have to accept their framing in the same way that a sovereign citizen doesn't have to accept the framing of a cop writing him a traffic ticket. If you don't want to go to prison (in many countries) or be fired from your job (in the US) then you do have to accept the common definition.
On the motte we can use the literal definitions of words.
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Thank you for proving my point. You can take potshots at which specific events happened at which specific locations. You can point out places where the initial investigators were wrong. What I have never seen is an explanation for what happened to all the Jews? Were the pre-war censuses wrong? Were the post-war censuses wrong? Where did they go? Pretty much every Jew can tell you about family members who died in the Holocaust. Are they all wrong?
I mean the obvious explanation for the censuses, and this is coming from someone who's pretty sure the Nazis exterminated at least some Jewish populations in WWII for no wartime reason, is "they don't tell us anything because they occurred before and after the most destructive war in human history, and Jews lived disproportionately along the battlefront between two major armies with pretty bad records for noncombatants and which was experiencing a wartime famine". Even if there weren't deliberate mass killings you'd expect the numbers of Jews to decline.
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Of course this is not a case of initial investigators being wrong, this is a case of investigators, courts, witnesses, and historians being systematically and insistently wrong for decades upon decades, including to this day. It's not a "potshot" to point to precedent for Revisionists being proven correct, especially since you have claimed they "came up with nothing". There is precedent for their case against the "gas chamber" narrative being proven correct at a formerly alleged "extermination camp", and the very first one in the historical timeline at that.
Census data is noisy, especially in the context of this topic. But if you are claiming that something specific happened, like a million people were brought to this exact area, killed, and then buried, it's pretty disingenuous to accuse Revisionists of taking "potshots" for critically analyzing the veracity of those claims.
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This position relies on the definition of "holocaust".
If I come out tomorrow with a book saying that really, six hundred billion jews died in the Holocaust, are those who claim only six million deniers? What if people do some serious research and say that while six million is possible, a more likely number is some figure in the mid-five millions. Is that "holocaust denial"? Are the claims of victimhood so sacred that no factual investigation can be brooked? Is the truth so fragile that it can't stand up to the intellectual onslaught of some rando cousin-fuckers and the race-hate of the middle east?
Obviously the holocaust happened, but that is exactly why we should allow investigation, questioning, even rampant racist lying. A lot of bad things have happened in history, and they are all fair game for study and criticism. The moment you privilege one particular atrocity, you lay all history fair game for partisan groups to wall off sections sensitive to their ingroup.
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The importance of freedom of speech has to do with the fact that censorship is prone to abuse, and truth is not reliably obtained by censorship. The statement "But this time, the thing being censored is actually false" comes with a "according to me and my allies" qualifier, and even if I agree with you that in this case you're correct that doesn't mean that censorship isn't a political maneuver. It is still a use of force by the strong to silence the weak (or else it wouldn't work) and being strong is not sufficient proof that the use of force is just (or else there would have been no holocaust to deny).
The whole point of the freedom of speech is that the free market place of ideas is a more reliable path to good outcomes than is oppressing the weak when you feel really convinced that they're in the wrong. That's exactly what the Nazis did, and no amount of "But that's different because they were wrong [according to us]!" will change the fact that it's the same reasoning and the same justification.
In other words, if holocaust denial is clearly false and evil, then it won't need to be censored because anyone denying the holocaust will come off as clearly delusional and evil. If it's not so clear, then it actually needs to be hashed out, or else there will be unintegrated resentment and distrust building and the regime would have actually earned this distrust by choosing to close the path to feedback.
Abiding by the principle of free speech means voluntarily refusing to censor what you can censor, because you place more faith in the free expression of ideas to reach good conclusions than you do in your own ideology if it cannot sustain free expression of ideas. It's saying "Hey, maybe my head is up my own ass, and so to be appropriately humble I will refrain from oppressing the weak just because I think they're wrong and evil, and make sure that they stay uninfluential on their own merits".
And it works. While I'm sure they exist, I have never actually heard anyone deny the holocaust and I'm not even sure I've even met someone who wouldn't judge a person negatively for daring to suggest it didn't happen. This is an easy case, and if we can't even refrain from thumbing the scale when our ideological enemies are so easily defeated by pointing to the truth, we have no chance on anything remotely hard.
I would push even further than Nybbler and assert that "the Holocaust should happen" is not specific and concrete enough to be a candidate for "call to violence" exception.
Given the very special treatment of the holocaust in comparison to other genocides one could make a good case that the holocaust legislation amounts to little more than anti-blasphemy laws.
Agreed.
If you can say "Maybe it's true though?", no matter how abhorrent, it is speech that needs to be protected. In fact, the more abhorrent the more it needs the protection.
You can't "Maybe it's true" a call to violence like "Shoot this bastard".
"Maybe it's true this bastard should be shot"?
That would apply if the person said "This bastard should be shot", instead of the statement they hypothetically said.
Which does bring in the complication of how you deal with mafia threats like "Nice place you got there. Would be a shame if something happened to it". But again, the principle is clear: you're allowed to express that people have nice things, and you're allowed to argue that this bastard should be shot, you're not allowed to threaten.
So the burden is on you to make the case that "this bastard should be shot" or "nice place, would be a shame" is actually a threat, because the statement it is pretending to be is absolutely protected speech.
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This is simply a specific implementation of 'anti inciting to violence' provisions of speech, clearly defined and accepted within constitutional law consistantly around the world in most democratic countries, in order to make it easier to specifically target a clearly delineated type of person -- neo-nazis.
Which part do you have a problem with?
A. Laws restricting speech with respect to things like inciting or the promotion of violence etc exist? B. Holocaust denial is automatically considered to be 'hate speech'; whether by means of common law/case precedence or explicit laws to that effect? C. Censorship exists?
This isn't about preventing some 'unpopular truth' from coming out, it's a specific mechanism being used to target a specific hateful counter-culture.
Simply put, no it is not.
The "call to violence" exception isn't really an exception because you're not actually punishing speech.
If I kill Betty and bury her body under the old church, then if I'm ever caught saying the words "I killed Betty and buried her under the old church", I'm likely to go to jail because I said those words. But it's not "punishing speech", it's punishing violence -- murder, specifically. And in the same vein, if I say "Give me your money or I will kill you", it is not "speech", it's the counterfactual violence which I am using to extort you. Speech is needed to communicate the evidence of guilt, or convey the threats, but it's the violence itself that calls for punishment -- and that's why I can say the words "Give me your money or I will kill you" here, or "I killed betty and buried her under the old church" without getting or deserving punishment for it.
If you are actively attempting to coordinate unjust and illegal violence, then again, it's the violence that's a problem. But it has to be unjust and illegal violence. Making the case that parking tickets should be given in a certain case is not "advocating for violence" just because their policy, if accepted, would ultimately lead to violence against anyone refusing to pay the parking tickets. It's the illegal parker's "resisting arrest" that will be deemed violence. And that's fine and good, because if we as a society decide that it makes sense to enact new parking rules, we as a society agree that people parking there are defecting and doing the wrong thing -- even though this "bears an implicit threat" against people who like to park there.
Saying "The holocaust should happen" is vague as fuck. What's that even mean? "The jews are vermin, which we should exterminate"? That's absolutely a threat of 'unpopular truth' to the people who want to ban it, even though I don't feel particularly threatened myself because I'm solid in the fact that it's not true. But that also means I don't feel a need to censor in order to stop the ideas from spreading.
"Show up by the old church wearing swastikas, and round up any jew in sight" is a call to violence, and you should arrest those people for attempting violence -- if you have sufficient evidence that the violence is real, that is. If someone is merely arguing -- even incorrectly -- the factual case that we'd be better off if jews were genocided, then that is factual speech and absolutely 100% speech that needs to be protected.
The bottom line is this:
If it were true, would it be important to know?
If we'd really be better off exterminating jews, because jews really are so parasitic as to be more comparable to tapeworms than productive members of society (and therefore "the holocaust should happen"), then that would be very important to know.
If we just disagree that it's true, then we use our words like grown ups instead of having tantrums at ideas that upset us to think about.
Applying "If it were true, would it be important to know?" to "Show up and round up the jews", we immediately find that it is not applicable, because there is no truth value to be found. If the statement has no truth value because it isn't a proposition but an actual call to violence, then respond to the actual threat of violence accordingly.
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Once you're defining things to be "inciting or promotion of violence etc" when by plain language they aren't, the you're just implementing arbitrary censorship with a figleaf. You can replace B with "support of the Social Democratic Party is automatically considered to be 'hate speech'" to see why.
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"The Holocaust didn't happen but it should have" is a threat. "The Holocaust didn't happen" is a marker for neo-Nazis and other unsavory sorts but is in no way itself a threat.
Edit: The first isn't really a "threat" (certainly not in the sense the US takes it), but it is vaguely threatening. The second simply is not.
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What’s with the recent wave of Holocaust Denial legislation? Has it been some kind of hot topic recently? I mean Kanye gave an interview in a gimp suit to Alex Jones but it just made him look crazy even to the antisemitic conspiracy theory community(and, to note, Jones pushed back against Kanye’s praise of Hitler). As far as I know there hasn’t been other examples of prominent Holocaust denial or even antisemitism(well, maybe a basketball player, but he also came off as a general loon) recently. And yet pushing for Holocaust denial criminalization seems to be a major push as of late, even in countries that the holocaust shouldn’t by all rights be much of a topic in(Canada, Finland).
In this case, it is specifically due to domestic policy concerns, and the most obvious reason is precisely because it's not much of a topic here and largely inconsequential. Ie. in a situation where the government is, on the other hand, pushed by one party to make a face-saving anti-racist statement and, on the other hand, pushed by another to not have that statement have any particular teeth since they fear a consequential statement might limit their desired policies, it offers a way to do something that's visible and attention-grabbing enough to score the image points the first party wants and, on the other hand, not really limit the other party's desired policies (which are related to things other than Holocaust or similar questions) all that much.
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It's a political cudgel to wield against your enemies.
Politician A: Let's ban holocaust denial
Politician B: Let's not restrict free speech
Policitan A: Politician B is a Nazi
Its inconceivable that Holocaust denial would be a a top priority in 2023 unless there were political points to be scored. Any time spent discussing this nonsense could conceivably be spent on real problems.
Good example of this: Every year for a decade or more, there has been a UN resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism. Back in 2017, an old friend of mine—a single, middle-aged Seattle woman with all the political attitudes that implies—shared a link to this article about the US, fuming about how "shameful" it was that the US stood nearly alone in voting against it. I pointed out that the Obama administration had voted against it as well, which took a bit of the wind out of her sails, but she was already committed, so she said that was shameful, too.
The rest of the story:
This looks a an interesting piece of evidence for the relative weakness of the US Deep State. The UK (and, as far as I can see, most other western democracies) has a “policy” of abstaining rather than voting against these bullshit resolutions if they are going to pass anyway (which they usually are, because the slightly evil bloc of third world dictatorships that look to Russia and China for leadership is a majority). The reason for this is that it doesn’t affect anything, and voting against generates friction for the career diplomats whose day job is making nice to slightly evil countries. The elected government, on the other hand, would be better off with the positive media attention it would get for public ally opposing slightly evil UN resolutions. There is a Yes Minister episode about how the UK Deep State pulls this off.
The reason why the US votes against these resolutions is that the multiple layers of political appointees at the top of the State Department are, in this case, able to overrule the Deep State in a way Jim Hacker was not.
I don't know. I'm not sure that US politicians get credit for consistently voting against this resolution. My perception that it's mostly ignored, and when people pay attention to it, it's "OMG, the [current] administration doesn't want to condemn Nazis! I'm so ashamed to be American!"
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I mean I guess the question is why not vote for? These resolutions don’t do anything, after all. Is it just to stick it to Russia?
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Btw, as in Italy, another example of how any right-wing party in the West is going to adopt liberal policies at the end.
In this case, it’s a policy explicitly rejected by a number of left/liberal govts and mainly advocated by one (small) conservative party.
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Imagine someone was raised in a country where the Holocaust is officially denied, and then goes to college in a country such as Finland or Germany in which denying the Holocaust is a crime. This student is genuinely uncertain if the Holocaust occurred, and starts conversations about the Holocaust with his classmates and presents arguments he was given as a child about why the Holocaust was faked by powerful interests. He is sternly told that it is a criminal offense to bring up such arguments. If he is a good Bayesian, how should this criminality cause him to update? (Of course, I don't think the Holocaust was faked.)
The Netherlands has laws on the books as-is, and this doesn't happen. So much so that I've seen your precise exact situation play out in university, and the resulting answer not being 'WRONGTHINK BAD' but 'here you go, you can look at these things.'
If one were to point someone to incontrovertible evidence that the Third Reich tried to systematically murder every Jew in Europe, what would that be?
It'd be the subject of any-odd number of boring history classes university students go through to get their education.
Maybe I asked the wrong question since you chose to answer a different one, do you need me to rephrase?
I'm not a Dutch legal expert, and neither are you. All I know is that these things are discussed without anyone being jailed, prosecuted, or even told this'll invite legal trouble.
Not any more.
This has effectively been law since at least 1995, when the courts ruled that holocaust denial is a crime; the recent addendum is effectively codifying legal principles that have been around for a generation. I'm not a fan, either, but the chilling effect on honest discourse isn't there.
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An Iranian student in Finland would then be deciding which government is lying to him, and he presumably has strong priors in that regard already.
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Presumably, in case of Finland, that would depend on the actual formulation and application of the law, which doesn’t actually exist yet (expect as a proposal).
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Is weeding out those who have trouble with resolving the confusion towards "whatever the overwhelming societal consensus backed by the local monopoly on violence wants me to believe" a bug or a feature? Society's wheels are greased with a million falsehoods, oversimplifications and truths that are too hard to verify for the vast majority of people, and not all of them are as memetically reinforced as this one. Perhaps having a conspicuous honeypot (which I'd also estimate to be in the third category, even if some cosmetic details may be fudged, which only serves to raise its attractiveness) is better than letting the compulsive contrarians advance through society and wind up somewhere where they can do real damage.
Feels like a feature to rulers, but is a bug.
People bred for compliance tend to get conquered.
I don't know about that. If I try to think of particularly low-agreeableness/insubordinate peoples, the ones that come to mind are marginal ethnic groups like Chechens and Borderers, who historically tended to be brought to heel by adjacent empires with superior state capacity enabled by having access to a deep pool of soldiers and bureaucrats.
You've inverted the criterion. You should look at societies that have successfully eliminated dissent, not societies that are entirely made of dissenters.
What happened to China, the perpetually great Empire that invested significant cultural, technological and political capital to make its population as docile as possible? What happened to the Ottomans, who had comparable technology to Europeeans and then banned the printing press? What happened to the Soviet Union, whose dissenters turned a backwater laggard into a superpower but enforced strict ideological conformity?
State capacity is only useful if you can wield it effectively, and eliminating dissent eventually prevents this.
If it did, it failed. Chinese history is history of endless revolts, urprisings and civil wars, revolts that sometimes succeeded.
Traditional China based on "mandate of heaven" ideology effectively justified and encouraged revolt, Christian Europe based of "noble blood" and "divine right to rule" made revolt blasphemy and effectively eliminated dissent from the lower classes. In China, common peasant overthrowing Son of Heaven and stepping on his place was SOP, in Europe peasant becoming king was something unthinkable.
In China, every peasant boy knew he could be emperor when he grows up (and finds few friends to help him). In Europe, every peasant knew that God made peasant a peasant and king a king, and dispute it was to dispute God himself.
No surprise that European history was history of stable society where kings and nobles ruled undisputed for millenia, while Chinese history was chaotic one where everything was burned down regularly every two or three centuries.
When/where in Europe are you thinking about, specifically?
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People say this, but the person I associate most with divine right is not Charles I, but Oliver Cromwell - who genuinely believed that God had ordained him as ruler of England. The strong religious beliefs in Europe did not lead to peace and unity, but the opposite - to decades of war as men sought to topple ungodly or heretical princes. And far from crushing dissent, the early modern period saw the birth of liberalism. John Locke and John Lilburne were the contemporaries to Oliver Cromwell.
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This is not a particularly accurate summation of events. European feudal monarchies in the sense that we understand them crystalized in the breakup of the Carolingian empire, where might most definitely made right rather than strict blood claims making right. The history of the middle ages is then one of near constant warfare over who ruled what, resolved generally by might makes right, with blood claims added as a legitimizing principle. And then of course with the wars of the protestant reformation the whole system gets overturned, absolutism only lasts for a few centuries(a century in England, two in France and most of the rest of the continent, and it never took hold in the Netherlands) and was never a particularly stable equilibrium anyways.
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Is... is one allowed to ask where said society is heading when the wheels are being greased so readily but it appears you can't switch which direction you're traveling?
I am fundamentally unconvinced that 'compulsive contrarians' are more likely to cause damage than any other person who seeks out and obtains power.
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