I think it is very fair to say that while some people have spoken against Muslims continuing presence in Europe, and a few may even have been killed by thugs, NOBODY has EVER set up an industrial human group elimination even approaching the scale or success that the European Nazi death machine did. Six million is simply orders of magnitude more deadly especially for a long resident non-combatant unarmed minority. It was also the cherry on top of thousands of years of abuse and occasional regional cleansings and spasms of murder all over Christendom.
People seem to want the Holocaust to be the same as any other oppression, but it is of a vastly different scale, even though interrupted by the German loss of WW-II, it is still akin to a nuclear war for its effect on the ~18M Jews of the world. So deeply invested were the Nazis in killing us they diverted rail stock and resources from holding the eastern front against the Soviets to kill more Jews.
That said while I find it vile and tasteless, I support anyone’s right to figuratively trample on the bodies of my murdered family, though it strikes me as making rape jokes at the expense of a known rape victim.
Of course there are non-democratic methods for preventing the outright abolition or the silent circumvention of core rights. Those safeguards exist in every civilized system of government (sorry, dear friends from the UK…).
But there are always trade-offs between the various core rights. A constitutional court / supreme court will reject “invalid” limitations, limitations that go too far, and limitations that have no good reason. The rest is decided democratically.
How is that the US has democratically passed laws that institute the death penalty?
I would call that a rather obvious limitation on a core right. The supreme court must have concluded at some point that the death penalty is neither “cruel” nor “unusual” (What were they smoking? It’s obviously both…). So, the elected legislature gets to decide whether to murder murderers. The right to life is limited, and the limits are set democratically.
In the same sense that there is no free speech in Europe because of hate speech laws, there is no right to vote in the US because felons are disenfranchised. We can debate the individual limitations to core rights as much as we want, but to say there is no room for democratic decisions on where to set those limits is just not true.
EDIT: That said, the particular French law in question just came into force last November. It does seem excessive, there is significant opposition to it, and I doubt it has been tested in the higher courts yet.
Would the mishap in Rwanda count? 70% of the Tutsi population of the country, estimated half to one million, gone in roughly 100 days.
Lower in absolute numbers but still within the order of magnitude, higher in virtually all counts relative to the demographics or area, done in much shorter time.
Sadly, genocides aren’t anything exceptional in the history of mankind. We’d do better to go after root causes that give us some chances to prevent or at least attenuate the next ones than arguing that there is The Exceptional One when in fact it more or less is not. Putting one on the pedestal is making us blind to the other ones, with possible catastrophical results.
And if the people in Rwanda decided to make a law that made denying or distorting the current historical account of that genocide against the law it’d be applauded.
You may have mistaken what @dobby has going there. This will clear it up, then back to Rwanda =? =/=? Holocaust.
Genocide = Holocaust
Oppression =/= Genocide
k?
Putting the Holocaust on a pedestal, as you say it, has done quite a bit in preventing the erosion of our historical collective memory on the matter.
The same cannot be said of the genocide instance you selected, but wouldn’t it be nice if they -had- to remember it as it happened & that others learning of it would get that account & not the poo-poohed account of people with agendas that allow them to discount history?
There is no right to vote because the Constitution doesn’t give anyone the right to vote. The Constitution only says that if the states do give people the right to vote, they cannot abridge that right for various reasons—mainly race and sex. However, the fourteenth amendment—the first amendment to limit the ability of states to abridge the voting rights of any male citizen—includes this specific language:
But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Note that excluding people from voting on the basis of criminality is seen as acceptable under the constitution, and at any rate the penalty for excluding voters for improper reasons would simply be a pro-rata reduction in the voting power of those who were allowed to vote.
The death penalty existed at the time the constitution was written, so it’s not so much that Congress passed laws that instituted the death penalty as that the Constitution failed to clearly and explicitly prohibit it. Another thing the constitution failed to do was establish a right to life. The closest we get is the fourteenth amendment, which only says:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The taking of life, so long as due process has been followed, would seem to be acceptable under the constitution.
Whether or not it is cruel and unusual punishment under the fourteenth amendment is another question, but it’s very much not a democratic question. If it is cruel and unusual punishment (as it was between 1972 and 1976), then democracy has no say on whether we can limit the right against this form of cruel and unusual punishment.
I take your point that there may be laws that affect fundamental rights that may be constitutional. But the legitimacy of these laws comes from their approval by a constitutional court, and not from being democratically passed. It isn’t that these free-speech limiting laws are OK because they were democratically passed by the people of France, but because they have (or have not) been found to be constitutional.
The most relevant comparison might be to the Armenian genocide, which may have killed an even greater percentage of Armenians. The French passed a law, similar to the holocaust denial law, making it specifically illegal to deny the Armenian genocide. You can imagine how well that went over with Turkey. This law was found to be an unconstitutional limit on free speech. It’s difficult to see why this democratically passed limitation on free speech is unconstitutional but the Jewish holocaust law is constitutional, even if it does point out the primacy of non-democratic processes in determining how and when fundamental rights may be abridged.
I think it’s less than fair to suggest a few Bosniaks “may even have been killed by thugs.”
[quote=“dobby, post:62, topic:49966”]
NOBODY has EVER set up an industrial human group elimination even approaching the scale or success that the European Nazi death machine did.
[/quote] The Armenian genocide might have qualified, if only there were more Armenians to kill. But we better discount them because they didn’t have more people to slaughter, so they can’t compare in terms of scale.
As opposed to the long history of Christian-Islamic relations, including the expulsion of 4% of Spain’s population?
“I’ll turn your other cheek!” thwack 
Interesting. Thanks for the interesting insights in the American constitutional tradition; I feel that the legal constructions involved are very different. It seems that most of the rights that I take for granted as basic human rights and as a European citizen, don’t officially exist in America. Well, they might, as a legal theory used by judges who read between the lines, and they might exist as de facto rights, but they’re not there on paper.
Continental European legal tradition seems to be much fonder of spelling things out explicitly:
When the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) went into force, the death penalty still existed in many European countries. Article 2 of that convention specified quite clearly that everyone has a right to life, but that right can be limited by law for a limited set of purposes. One of those limitations was death penalty imposed by a proper court of law; other liminitations (still in force) state that laws may allow killing in self defense, or to risk killing a criminal when arresting them.
The 6th Protocol on the ECHR, which was ratified by the various countries between 1983 and 1997, removes that exception, but that was after those countries had decided (democratically) to stop using the exception.
Compare also article 10 of the ECHR, on freedom of expression:
It sets out a basic right and specifies criteria for what exceptions may be passed democratically (“as are prescribed by law”). Whether a particular exception/limitation violates the ECHR is decided by the courts if it is challenged. This would be the case when a limitation does not fit any of the allowed exceptions as set out in the convention.
But the democratic decision is still involved, because most of the time, we do not want to use all the exceptions that would be permissible.
But I think any real disagreement that we might have on this issue is probably obscured by the different legal traditions we base our arguments on. Time to end this discussion before the topic closes.
I greatly appreciate the work Greenwald has done for free speech and anti-terrorism-theatre, but he fucks himself by ascribing to “the west” the same with-us-or-agin-us attitude he is locked into with in his battle with the security establishment. This isn’t France’s first rodeo with religious terrorism, and he shits on his allies by not knowing what they had to go through to get past Catholic theocrats and Nazi-sympathizers.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
