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Notes -
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?"
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).
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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