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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?
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".
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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