AHC: Holocaust denial illegal in US.

Your challenge is to have Holocaust denial banned in the US. The POD can occur at any time after VE Day. Bonus points if denial of other genocides, such as the Armenian genocide, is also banned. What sort of changes to America would be needed to accomplish this?
 
You'd need to abolish the 1st Amendment. Critique of historical points isen't going to be banned by any Supreme Court in the later 20th century as long as that principal stands.
 
You'd need to abolish the 1st Amendment. Critique of historical points isen't going to be banned by any Supreme Court in the later 20th century as long as that principal stands.

Not necessarily, but you'd either need a Constitutional Amendment or a court interpretation of the 1st Amendment as having restrictions (which is a really slippery slope).
 
Not necessarily, but you'd either need a Constitutional Amendment or a court interpretation of the 1st Amendment as having restrictions (which is a really slippery slope).

I appreciate your work, Emperor, but that's only half the post. As I said in the section you diden't bold, no Late 20th Century Supreme Court is going to be streching jurisprudence that far, and I'd be curious to see just what legal principals they could scrape together to ban legitimate questioning of a historical assertion and pointing out of conflicting evidence (or potential thereof). It smacks way too much of blatent Soviet-style totalitarian social control to fly during the Cold War without RADICAL shifts in the surrounding legal culture.

Now, advocating for the Holocaust is a different matter entirely: that could call under incitement to violence, or even saying it was a good/right thing might be streched under the obscenity exception. But denial/skepticism of its actual existence (especially if done using a scholarly method) falls well on the white side of the legal grey area.
 
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Countries that would be more likely to pass such laws would be Australia, Netherlands, Portugal, and Switzerland. All of which do not have laws targeting Holocaust denial in particular, but currently have laws against either targeting ethnic groups through hate speech or celebrating past crimes against humanity in general.
 
I appreciate your work, Emperor, but that's only half the post. As I said in the section you diden't bold, no Late 20th Century Supreme Court is going to be streching jurisprudence that far, and I'd be curious to see just what legal principals they could scrape together to ban legitimate questioning of a historical assertion and pointing out of conflicting evidence (or potential thereof). It smacks way too much of blatent Soviet-style totalitarian social control to fly during the Cold War without RADICAL shifts in the surrounding legal culture.

Now, advocating for the Holocaust is a different matter entirely: that could call under incitement to violence, or even saying it was a good/right thing might be streched under the obscenity exception. But denial/skepticism of its actual existence (especially if done using a scholarly method) falls well on the white side of the legal grey area.

I have the flu. Sorry.
 
It should be quite possible to accomplish, actually: Freedom of Speech covers personal opinions, it doesn't cover blatant distortions of physical fact. You know the classic metaphor about shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire? Here it'd be sort of be the reverse: claiming "There's No Fire!" when there is a fire going on, and said fire is quite clearly visible for all to see; or as an even more extreme scenario: claiming that "It's Not Arson!" when it was arson, and said arsonist was publicly witnessed doing so, including the one making the claim to the contrary.

The Holocaust has mountains of evidence and witness testimony proving its existence, so denying it ever happened is essentially comparable to committing perjury in a court of law to cover for a known and proven criminal, thereby making the denier a complicit accessory to their crimes.
 
Yes it does.

If Freedom of Speech were to cover distortions of fact, then wouldn't perjury, false advertisement, fraud, and lying while under oath not be crimes?

Freedom of Speech has its limits, and Holocaust denial should be one of them. Your opinion ends where physical reality begins: you can believe whatever you want, but not believing something doesn't make that something stop existing. If that were true, then cancer wouldn't a problem. Saying the Holocaust never happened doesn't make Auschwitz disappear overnight.
 
If Freedom of Speech were to cover distortions of fact, then wouldn't perjury, false advertisement, fraud, and lying while under oath not be crimes?

Freedom of Speech has its limits, and Holocaust denial should be one of them. Your opinion ends where physical reality begins: you can believe whatever you want, but not believing something doesn't make that something stop existing. If that were true, then cancer wouldn't a problem. Saying the Holocaust never happened doesn't make Auschwitz disappear overnight.

This is a valid position, but it is an understanding of free speech that seems to be at odds with legal precedent in the United States. The challenge, then, is to somehow change that.
 
Dunno, add jewish influence (read as "politics sympathetic to jews or jewish ones, not "ZIONIST CONSPIRACY") in American lawmaking? USA doing it in hopes to better relations with Israel?

Or maybe, if we go full nuts, go for Twilight of the Red Tsar and have America doing it after a second genocide of Jews with the hopes to stick it to the Soviets.

Regarding the First Amendment, I don't think that is that Big of a issue. The people that say that Banning Holocaust Denial is against it is literally repeating what American Holocaust deniers believe.
 
This is a valid position, but it is an understanding of free speech that seems to be at odds with legal precedent in the United States. The challenge, then, is to somehow change that.

Perhaps a major incident occurs where a group of Neo-Nazis use Holocaust-denial logic as an excuse to try to worm their way out of some high-profile federal crimes or something? I don't know how that could happen, but that's all what I can think of to make it a Supreme Court-level issue for the 1st Amendment.
 
Pardon me, but why would you even consider it? It would just be a slippery slope to more and more authoritarian anti-speech laws, as the other posters stated, not to mention such a concept would be egg on the face of the Founders, the Consitution, and the basic principles of America.

Not to mention if you institute such laws, people will have their eyes on them, and curious as to why they cant deny it, so they might find information that allows them to find out why people might deny it, which in turns creates more deniers. See what I mean?
 
Regarding the First Amendment, I don't think that is that Big of a issue. The people that say that Banning Holocaust Denial is against it is literally repeating what American Holocaust deniers believe.

Just because a legitiment criminal will plea Not Guilty if they think the Prosecution can't prove their guilt does not make a plea of Not Guilty evidence of guilt. After all, a legitimently innocent person will also plead not guilty. American legal code starts with the presumtion the accused is innocent, and it's your job to prove their actions violated the law in an objective way. The First Amendment embodies this by declaring all speech legal UNLESS it meets one of the few defined exceptions. To establish a standard otherwise would be to establish a presumtion of guilt, not innocence, which is anthema to the entire legal tradition.

Clear and Present Danger/Incitement to Violence, Obsenity, Defamation/Libal... making a statement of fact (not one of the moral value of the Holocaust conceptually, but weather or not the event transpired as claimed) that one legitimently beleives to be true can't fit under any of them
 
It should be quite possible to accomplish, actually: Freedom of Speech covers personal opinions, it doesn't cover blatant distortions of physical fact. You know the classic metaphor about shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire? Here it'd be sort of be the reverse: claiming "There's No Fire!" when there is a fire going on, and said fire is quite clearly visible for all to see; or as an even more extreme scenario: claiming that "It's Not Arson!" when it was arson, and said arsonist was publicly witnessed doing so, including the one making the claim to the contrary.

The Holocaust has mountains of evidence and witness testimony proving its existence, so denying it ever happened is essentially comparable to committing perjury in a court of law to cover for a known and proven criminal, thereby making the denier a complicit accessory to their crimes.
I appreciate this position but it really is a slippery slope. If you go on this path then anti vaxxer opinions, denial of moon landings, flat earth theories must all be banned. Probably climate change denial too.
 
I appreciate this position but it really is a slippery slope. If you go on this path then anti-vaxxer opinions, denial of moon landings, flat earth theories must all be banned. Probably climate change denial too.

Good. Because they're all fucking stupid. The Moon Landing Hoax in particular, since that's just insulting and Un-American.
 
The danger is, if you ban certain ideas or arguments, what's to prevent it from going into things like opinions or dirty/politically incorrect jokes? The US is predicated on the concept of personal freedoms; taking away others, whether for good intent or otherwise, is going to set bad precedents. What if popular opinion swings a certain way, and people are ordered not to talk about climate change or the prison system.

Remember, the surest way to critique a law is; are you willing to have that law work against you as you are having it work for you?
 
Oh, this should be a fun thread to watch.

But anyway, in my opinion this is basically as on the edge of asb as it gets. After ww2, I really don't see something like the first amendment being changed in anyway after the US fought countries that basically stood for the antithesis of free speech in most occasions, alongside the rise of the Soviet Union, (someone not known for being particularly tolerant of free speech) and the start of the Cold War.
 
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