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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?"
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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