SOMETIME SOON Americans will lose their freedom of speech. When it happens, most of them won’t even notice.
After an intense and carefully orchestrated lobbying effort by prominent Jewish and Christian leaders, punctuated with veiled threats of violence from spokesmen for major Black and Hispanic organizations if their demands for legislation are not met, a bipartisan group of congressmen will sponsor a bill prohibiting “group libel.” Leaders of both the conservative and the liberal factions in the Congress will speak eloquently in favor of the bill, and debate will be minimal. The bill will pass by an overwhelming majority, the President will sign it immediately, and media commentators will render unanimous verdicts of “well done” and “it’s about time!”
And the American people will not even look up from the sports page or the television schedule. What do they care that henceforth anyone who “publishes, or causes to be published, or conspires with others to publish or to cause to be published, any statement likely to cause mental harm or distress to any group or class of persons identifiable by race, color, religion, or national origin will be liable for a term of imprisonment in a Federal penitentiary not to exceed five years”? [1] That’s none of their business, and haven’t they been assured that the law will be used only against “extremists”? Why should any decent, law-abiding citizen want to cause mental distress to a racial, religious, or national group, anyway?
Such laws already have been enacted in Canada, Britain, France, West Germany, and a dozen other Western countries, with hardly a murmur of dissent — except from a handful of those troublesome “extremists.” Americans have a reputation for being somewhat more troublesome than their racial kinsmen elsewhere — a reputation which may or may not be deserved — but the people who are pushing for the enactment of group libel laws are taking no chances: they see the United States as still in the softening-up stage, with the actual legislation to silence those citizens who might write or say something unkind about minorities still a year or two away.
The big gun being used in the softening-up process is the “Holocaust” — the alleged extermination of six million Jews in “gas ovens” by the German government during the Second World War. The argument is that since words often lead to deeds — and in Germany criticism in the 1920s and 1930s of Jews and what they were doing to the morals, the institutions, and the economy of that country led to Jews being rounded up and exterminated in the 1940s — then criticism of Jews (or Blacks or Orientals or Hispanics) in America in the 1980s might very well lead to roundups and exterminations in the 1990s. Therefore, in order to avoid future nastiness, let’s outlaw all such criticism — group libel — now.
One might wonder why a more indigenous theme is not used — say, lynching, which is something to which most Americans can relate more easily than to “gas ovens.” Why don’t the silencers argue that uncensored talk about Blacks in the decades after the U.S. Civil War — talk identifying them as the rapists of White women, for example — led to scores of them being snatched from jails and strung up on conveniently located telephone poles; therefore, it ought to be against the law for anyone to identify criminals by race or for anything to be said about the criminal tendencies of an identifiable ethnic, racial, religious, or national group?
Well, there are many reasons for preferring the Holocaust over the lynching of Blacks or the massacre of Indians on the American frontier or any other indigenous hatefulness for convincing Americans to give up their freedom of speech. For one thing, the prime movers behind the censorship drive are themselves not indigenous; they feel more at home with the Holocaust than with anything purely goyisch. For another, the Holocaust is not merely a dead piece of history, like lynchings and Indian massacres. It is alive and growing. It grows a bit with each retelling, in fact.
Originally Posted by Dan Druff
Are you saying that the Holocaust deniers have a point?
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