The one thing these cartoon and movie events are good for is to see who exactly understands the total concept of "free speech" and those who do not.
Nigel Duara is one of the latter
Nazi Julius Streicher never pulled a trigger in the Second World War. He never ordered anyone to die. He was a soldier in the First World War, not the second. But Nuremberg judges found him guilty of crimes against humanity and saw fit to sentence him to death for what he had written during the war. American soldiers carried out his execution in 1946.
And it should never have happened. In fact, that he was sentenced to death and it was carried out underscores exactly why emotional cripples and those with impulse control issues ought never be allowed to decide what speech is allowable and protected.
There are remedies in law for libel and slander as there should be but I wouldn't vote to convict anyone who wrote something I disagreed with with a crime against humanity.
Western society expressed universal horror this week over the extrajudicial killings of those involved in the publication and dissemination of an irreverent, left-leaning satirical weekly in Paris. [my italics]
Extra what? This idiot seems to be of the opinion that cartoons, offensive to some, even many, constitutes something worthy of indicting of a crime. His implied statement is that the killings would be
justified had there been some sort of trial.
Seriously.
But the largely forgotten execution of Streicher serves as a reminder that Western society also has set limits on what is deemed acceptable speech.
Libel, slander, speech exhorting immediate violence against persons or property. Speech that would cause a normal person to fear for their physical wellbeing and act in a manner that if done in a group setting could cause many deaths (the shouting fire in an auditorium). That is all.
Now some politicians and certain left bending people also try to define "hate speech" all of which under the US Constitution at least is unconstitutional. France has such "hate speech" laws and I say it is highly hypocritical for them to have such laws on the books. But that is all.
Few would suggest that there is moral equivalence between the terrorist mass killing of cartoonists for purported blasphemy and the judicially sanctioned execution of a Nazi war criminal.
Actually I think this author just did. His only "quibble" with the execution is that it didn't have "judicial sanction". As far as this idiot is concerned drawing [very] unflattering pictures of someone's prophet is as actionable as crimes against humanity like Jew burning.
Los Angeles intellectual property attorney Donald Zachary said. "What we should learn from it is we should never make that mistake again. We should be happy we advanced to the point where we do not kill people for speech, but it wasn't always so."
Actually Donald, In recent history it is only Muslims who are moved to kill over "blasphemy". The so called "western world" moved on from that bullshit some time ago.
In the case of Streicher, the tribunal acknowledged in his indictment that he was never involved in the planning of war crimes, nor was he involved with policies that led to war. For this, he was acquitted of crimes against peace, one of the two charges against him.
Which is why he ought never have been on trial in the first place.
But the judges found that he was guilty of crimes against humanity. "Week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism and incited the German people to active persecution," the indictment said.
Streicher published Der Sturmer, a font of virulent anti-Semitism in print and cartoons. Many of the modern tropes of anti-Semitism found a place in the horrific depictions of Jews as rapists, murderers and worse; some entries relegated them to subhuman, monstrous status and called for their extermination.
You know what? There are cartoons about Mike Brown that are just like that too. There are cartoons out there about black people in general like that too. I wouldn't vote to convict not a single one of the authors over that.
What's more is that such a conviction completely lets the public off the hook for their own ability to reason. No matter what kind of unfactual information is presented, it is by making sure that everyone can speak (and write) that we allow voices of fact and reason to counter the propaganda of others. But people like to put blame on
other people for their own failure to think and act. And so Streicher was really the stand in for the collective failure of the German people.
Nigel should be out of a writing job. That would be justice.
