ZGram - 4/11/2003 - "Zundel's Crimes of Opinion"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

April 11, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

A meek pro-Zundel commentary for your Zundel files:

[START]

Zundel's Crimes of Opinion

by Pierre Lemieux

On February 5, Ernst Z=FCndel was arrested at the Tennessee home he 
shared with his American wife. His crime: allegedly overstaying his 
visitor's visa, according to immigration cops. He was handcuffed, 
whisked away, and detained by U.S. authorities for two weeks. He is 
now barred from the U.S. for twenty years. On February 19, after two 
weeks of detention in the U.S., he was deported to Canada, and has 
been detained in an Ontario jail since then. It is very difficult to 
defend Z=FCndel, despite the fact that the only crimes he has ever been 
charged with are crimes of opinion. To defend Z=FCndel's freedom of 
speech, I submitted a piece to the Globe and Mail (Toronto) op-ed 
editor, asking if he was interested; he very politely replied with 
only one word: "No."

Z=FCndel, 63, is a German citizen who lived legally in Canada from 1958 
to 2001. During that period, the federal government turned down 
Z=FCndel's requests for Canadian citizenship. The feds now want to 
deport him to his country of origin, because "he financially and 
ideologically supports militant white supremacist/neo-Nazi groups."[1]

Z=FCndel is a "revisionist" who claims (if I understand correctly) that 
the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis is much lower than usually 
claimed, and that there was no official Nazi Holocaust strategy. In 
the late '80s, Z=FCndel was convicted of the old Criminal Code offense 
of "[publishing] a statement, tale or news that [one] knows is false 
and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief to a public 
interest." Since Z=FCndel did not think that his opinions were false, 
he was actually prosecuted for crimes of opinion. Indeed, the Supreme 
Court overturned his conviction.

Z=FCndel has never been charged with hate propaganda per se, i.e., 
"communicating statements, other than in a private conversation, 
[that] wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group," a 
crime that appeared in the Canadian Criminal Code in 1979. But this 
is obviously what the state thinks he is guilty of.

The right to defend unpopular, offensive, and even false opinions has 
been very much part of the Western liberal tradition. On the 
contrary, the Nazi barbarians were not exactly great defenders of 
freedom of speech: for instance, article 23 of the 1920 program of 
the Nazi party called for a "legal assault against conscious 
political lies."[2]

The standard arguments for free speech are - or perhaps were - well 
known. We cannot know the truth value of a hypothesis if its 
opponents are forbidden to challenge it, or if its proponents are not 
allowed to defend it. Most of an individual's beliefs, including his 
scientific beliefs, are justified by his perception that they have 
emerged unscathed from the free confrontation of ideas and the 
unrestrained search for truth. In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill wrote: 
"Strange it is that men think that some particular principle or 
doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so 
certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To 
call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny 
its certainty if permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those 
who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without 
hearing the other side."[3]

Around the Great Hall of Hart House at the University of Toronto, the 
famous words of John Milton are inscribed: "When a City shall be as 
it were besieged and blocked about, her navigable river infested, 
inroads and incursions round, defiance and battle oft rumoured to be 
marching up even to her walls and suburb trenches =8A then the people, 
or the greater part, more than at other times, wholly taken up with 
the study of highest and most important matters to be reformed, 
should be disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, even 
to a rarity and admiration, things not before discoursed or written 
of."[4]

There are many cases where expressions of opinion are, or can be 
considered to be, hate propaganda. Libraries and bookstores are full 
of statements by famous authors that fall foul of hate laws. Just 
think about Baudelaire calling the Belgians "animals," "molluscs," 
and "civilized monkeys." Would Nietzsche, Marx, or the Surrealists 
pass the test of hate literature? What about Franz Fanon, a Marxist 
prophet of decolonization, who preached violence against the "race" 
of the colonizers in North Africa?

If history is any guide, it would be na=EFve to assume that hate 
legislation will only be enforced against unpopular lunatics. Indeed, 
Canadians have heard calls to use hate laws in linguistic or ethnic 
politics. The range of political opinions that can be construed as 
inciting hatred is almost indefinitely extensible.

Hate laws, we are told, are meant to protect social peace. But 
history shows that freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and 
individual liberty in general, are the most efficient social 
mechanism ever discovered to promote tolerance and peace. Censorship 
is one of the surest ways to frustration, victimization, political 
confrontation, intolerance, and violence.

Another argument for hate laws is that na=EFve citizens may fall prey 
to false information or propaganda, and that the state must protect 
them against their own gullibility. This is a very disturbing 
argument, which considers citizens as infants, and wards of wise 
politicians and bureaucrats.

Many so-called hate propagandists are stupid people whose political 
ideas I would not want to be associated with. But then, so what? Is 
it a crime to be stupid? And who decides who is?

Z=FCndel's website rails against "extreme individualism," and the 
"international trade cartels that shutter American industries and 
shatter family lives and entire communities". It promotes populism 
against "unconscionable plutocrats whose only loyalty is to their 
pocketbook." But there is something for everybody on the 
"Zundelsite." And, like the Fuehrer himself, Z=FCndel and his friends 
are not the most consistent of ideologues - except in their attacks 
on the Jewish scapegoat.[5]

Perhaps Z=FCndel's neo-Nazi sympathies show up most clearly when he 
talks about smoking. Today's tobacco industry spokesmen, he writes, 
"should have consulted the Fuehrer." He explains, approvingly, that 
"Hitler youth had anti-smoking patrols all over Germany, outside 
movie houses and in entertainment areas, sports fields, etc., and 
smoking was strictly forbidden to these millions of German youth 
growing up under Hitler."

I am not necessarily suggesting that Z=FCndel would make a good 
consultant for Health Canada or the U.S. Environmental Protection 
Agency, but that, however repulsive his opinions are, he should not 
be persecuted for expressing them.
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References
1. See also my "In Defense of Hate Literature (Sort of)" (London: 
Libertarian Alliance, Political Notes No. 137, 1997); reproduced at 
http://www.pierrelemieux.org/artspe.html.

2. Maurice Torrelli and Ren=E9e Baudouin, Les droits de l'homme et les 
libert=E9s publiques par les textes (Montr=E9al: Presses de l'Universit=E9 
du Qu=E9bec, 1972), p. 63. My translation from the French version; 
underlines in the original.

3. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 
p. 20-21; available at http://www.bartleby.com/130/ (visited March 
29, 2003).

4. John Milton, Areopagitica (1644) (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 
Inc., 1951), pp. 46-47; available at 
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/areopagitica.html (visited March 
29, 2003).

5. The story is told by Z=FCndel's wife at http://zundelsite.org.
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Pierre Lemieux is co-director of the Economics and Liberty Research 
Group at the Universit=E9 du Qu=E9bec in Outaouais, and a Research Fellow 
at the Independent Institute (California). E-mail: 
PL@pierrelemieux.org.