Ursula Haverbeck gets prison for Holocaust denial: free speech under attack
If you believe in free speech, the idea that nothing should be censored, that nothing is unsayable, then you should defend Ursula Haverbeck’s right to liberty. Haverbeck, a far-right Nazi fan, has been convicted of sedition in a German court for denying the Holocaust.
Ursula Haverbeck is a deeply-unpleasant individual. Her repeated Holocaust denial makes liars of the ghostly murdered and the honourable living who vow to never forget the German-state’s industrial murder of Jews, gypsies and other Untermensch who fell short of the ideal. At 87-years-old, it’s unlikely she’ll read any more books, listen to the facts and change her mind. Her cherished bigotry defines her. And that’s the way she likes it. In 2010, a Munich court gave this racist a suspended sentence of six months for much the same offence. She didn’t stop.
The question we are concerned with is why her words constitute a crime?
Haverbeck has been sentenced by the district court Hamburg to ten months imprisonment for telling a German TV show that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, but a work camp, that millions of Jews were not murdered. Perhaps she thinks they drowned in their own sweat? But let’s not now delve into the Haverbeck mind. We’ve seen books, films, bones, tattoos, scars and testimonies to know the inside of her head is a poisonous and cramped place. The German prosecutor spoke of her “hair-raising bullshit” and “fanatical blindness”. We’ve seen enough.
Our problem is with the State deciding what can and cannot be said. Haverbeck and her supporters should be out-thought in open debate, their twisting of history and perversion of the mighty human spirit shown for what it is.
But criminal? If expressing your beliefs is criminal, then what of the ritualistic way in which Halal meat is killed? Those liberal Danes want it banned, reasoning that slitting an animals’s throat is barbaric and far less morally right than firing a bolt into its brain. Denmark’s minister for agriculture and food Dan Jørgensen told Denmark’s TV2 that “animal rights come before religion”.
In 2013 the Council of Europe read a report by former Germany MP Marlene Rupprecht, thought it rather brilliant and passed a resolution stating how it “is particularly worried about a category of violation of the physical integrity of children, which supporters of the procedures tend to present as beneficial to the children themselves despite clear evidence to the contrary. This includes, amongst others… the circumcision of young boys for religious reasons…”
Hang the Jews’ covenant with God that makes circumcision a must. The rights of a cow are more vital than Islamic mores and spiritualism. Ban it all. The defiant can wait for the glare of the searchlight and the Gestapo knock.
Let us be in no doubt. Once you allow the State to tell you what beliefs are criminal, however well-meaning the impetus behind the purge, the result is the same: repression, censorship, division and an abdication of free thought and will.
You wonder who is playing God – and why we let them…
Posted: 26th, November 2015 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
