From: danisch@ira.uka.de (Hadmut Danisch)
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 94 13:46:26 PST
To: pmetzger@lehman.com
Subject: Re: Oh No! Nazis on the Nets
Message-ID: <9402102126.AA09063@deathstar.iaks.ira.uka.de>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



> Could I publish a newspaper containing Nazi propaganda in Germany?

What do you want to hear?

If I say yes, then you call the german Nazis. 
If I say no, then we have no press freedom in your eyes.

Give us a chance to have 'press freedom' *and* to protect us
against Nazis.

> No?
> 
> Then everyone doesn't have the right to produce a newspaper, does
> everyone?

Don't mix this! 

Whether *everyone* has the right to produce a newspaper and
whether you can print *everything* into a newspaper, are two different
things. Can we allow to print everything into a newspaper? No, not
everything. And I think, the law is well choosen. The important detail
is, that you are not forbidden to print a newspaper before, but they
can be after you *after* you have print anything bad. 
For example you are not allowed to call for hating other races,
but this is not special for the press. This is everywhere.

The limits for the press are low and they forbid themes only
which are *real* criminal [at least in my oppinion].

Look at the mailbox system used by neo-nazis. We can't allow
this. But if we take them their mailboxes away, everyone says
"The Germans don't even allow computers". You can't have both.

In the last months they found nazi-newspapers with exact descriptions
of how to build bombs and lists of people to be killed for speaking
against nazis. You do not expect us to accept this, do you?
The restrictions against such things are not a law against the 
press. It is forbidden, independend whether it comes in a newspaper
or whereever else.


> I feel it is a fundamental right to be able to publish whatever
> newspaper one would like to publish, and I say that as a Jew who lost
> most of his family to Nazi murderers in the second world war.

Again, I feel beeing pressed to an answer which will be wrong, whatever
I answer.

> Restrictions on speech ultimately backfire, providing oppressors with
> mechanisms to silence opponents. Protection from Nazism must come from
> strong respect for the freedom of all to express themselves and live
> as they wish so long as they do not harm others, and not from
> preventing the dissemination of "dangerous" ideas. 

Spoken well, but far away from reality. 

If you see 100 Nazis and 10.000 people. The 10.000 don't have a job,
don't have money, don't know what to do and are not the intellectual
elite. They have a lot of problems and don't know where the problems
came from and how to solve them. Now come 100 Nazis and tell them,
everything were the fault of ugly, stupid foreigner, which steal
their jobs, rape their women and are bad by nature, they should be
killed or thrown out. 

Now you see, that a lot of these 10.000 are going to believe this.
Many of them come from the German Democratic Republic and they learned
to believe everything anyone tells them. Other just want to beat anyone.

Do you want to do nothing and let them continue until it is too late?
Didn't we have this before?



> Only when a neonazi
> attempts to beat someone up or set fire to a building does his action
> become the legitimate subject of prosecution. 

No, then it is too late. When building are burning, people die. 
Some turkish people died because their house was set on fire. You can't
bring them back.

Can't you remember what Americans told about the Germans when the
two american sportsmen were beaten some months ago?



> The oppression of
> communication or of ideas, regardless of how repugnant, is
> incompatible with a free society.

A free society must be able to defend. If the target of the
communication is to stop the society beeing free, a free society
can't accept this. A free society must be free to *stay* free.




Hadmut