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| quote: | Originally posted by imokruok
Ok, this one's easy. In France, Oriana Fallaci's book "The Rage and the Pride" was 'taken to court,' where the court actually heard arguments on whether to censor or ban her book. The book was not banned, but the French, Swiss, and Austrians have frequently had actual cases in court to determine whether a book will be allowed to be published within the country. One book on bin Laden has been placed on hold while the government investigates the plaintiff's claims. Yes, the government.
"Hate speech" in many countries has also been banned, while in the US, the government believes that what constitutes "hate" is not a matter for the government to be deciding with respect to speech. As I mentioned before, neo-Nazi and far-right groups have been censored by their governments, mainly in France and Germany. They must print their materials in the US, and base their websites here. (And when Iranians set up foreign broadcasting organizations to preach democracy to their country...they don't go to Europe. They do it from the US - why? The broadest speech protections.)
Canada, by the way, is on the way to making parts of the Bible hate speech, as people use scripture to speak out against homosexuality.
In Britain, defamation and libel laws are so strong that even moderately divisive books and articles must be run through legal departments before being published -- a de facto censorship under the law.
And the list goes on...even though this was not necessarily the point that fuzzygreen was trying to make. |
According to FuzzyGreen (above) it wasn't that point he was trying to make - but there's still solid arguments here. Let me just throw in my view on some of them.
First of all, the censorship issue with books. I'm not that surprised that the French government shows this behaviour. After all Chirac is the personification of arrogance and know-all attitude. Furthermore, the French have a large muslim minority living among them, which they apparently have decided not to upset. Why the Swiss and the Austrians are behaving in similar manners is beyond me. However, as you only state that there have been court rulings on banning of books, and not whether any books have actually been banned, this could also be an indicator of a liberal justice system, which takes upon it any cases that special interest groups come up with.
As to the limitations on hate speech: I wasn't around when WW2 took its toll, but from what I hear, some attrocities took place. Some people think that if you prevent people from speaking hatred towards minorities, then you prevent society as a whole from going down the slide of facism once again. If this view is correct then I would actually applaud this limitation of freedom. However, I think it is a crap argument - and gets disturbingly aggrevated when I see France, Belgium, Sweden, etc. criticising governments in other European countries only for containing right wing groups.
About Britain: Didn't know that - quite surprising if it is true.
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