Canada tosses out Internet ‘Hate Speech’ Law

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Canada tosses out Section 13 — Internet 'Hate Speech' law

By Michael Hoffman

www.revisionisthistory.org

Both of the following reports from the establishment media in Canada are defective. They omit the role of lawyer Doug Christie in battling for free speech in Canada for more than 25 years. This is an enormous omission in that British Columbia's Christie, together with Ontario attorney Barbara Kulaszka and independent activists Paul Fromm and Marc Lemire, have fought most assiduously for the civil liberties of Canadians. Christie has been constantly harassed and threatened, and pilloried in the media. While the media prefer to showcase as Canada's principal poster-boy for Internet freedom,  Ezra Levant, who publicized Danish anti-Muhammad cartoons, the main victims of this Zionist "Section 13" law have been "Holocaust" revisionist Ernst Zundel, Marc Lemire, Terry Tremaine, Heritage Front, Catholic Insight Magazine and Canadian Liberty Net, in addition to hundreds of thousands of Canadian Internet users who have been intimidated by the Stalinist "Section 13" of Canada's "human rights" law. 

A couple of caveats: with Section 13 gone, the Canadian Criminal Code itself continues to provide for up to two years in jail for "spreading hate against identifiable groups" (with the exception of identifiable German, Palestinian and Christian groups who can be hated to the full measure of Zionist fury without fear of prosecution). The difference between Section 13 prosecution and prosecution under the Criminal Code is that under the latter, prosecution must be initiated by a provincial attorney general, whereas under the now defunct Section 13, the "Human Rights" commissars themselves could begin a prosecution on flimsy grounds and in hearings in which truth was not a defense (!).

Second, Haroon Siddiqui of The Star, who is, unfortunately, in favor of censorship, nonetheless has some sobering words for those now conferring on Canada's hypocritical neocon Conservative politicians, laurel wreaths of freedom for having eliminating Section 13: "Those hailing the death of Section 13 as a victory for free speech include many of the same people who routinely muzzle those whose views they do not like. They delayed the entry of Al Jazeera English (television) to Canada. They pressure universities to shut down the annual Apartheid Week that highlights the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. The Harperites cancelled federal grants to Kairos, the ecumenical Christian aid group, as well as to the Canadian Arab Federation and Palestine House, because they would not toe Ottawa's (Zionist) foreign policy line..."

Furthermore, wherever lawyers are steeped in conformity to the legal standards of the British Commonwealth of Nations, freedom of speech is abridged. Here in the U.S. a New Zealand-trained attorney has written a book, The Harm in Hate Speech,  published by Harvard University and endorsed by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, which insinuates that opponents of Talmudism and Zionism should be prosecuted in the U.S. and speech should be regulated. A characteristic of the rabbinic/Talmudic mentality is the delegitimization of opposition. Radical contradiction is not tolerated by Talmudic rabbis and their epigones (though the appearance of dissent is essential to the p.r. image of their tyranny). 


At present the First Amendment is unassailable, but let U.S. intelligence stage another 9/11 type of "terrorist outrage," and the resulting panic and stampede of fear may very well result in "national security" abridgements to our Bill of Rights, such as were in place after America's entry into the First and Second World Wars; and since the "War on Terror" is perpetual, any such limitations would likely be permanent. The Harm in Hate Speech helps to prepare the path to the overthrow of our God-given rights. 

By all means let us lift a glass to the Canadians who may now use the Internet with less fear, but at the same time we must remain vigilant concerning the threat to our own precious rights in these United States. 

Conservatives strike blow for freedom

Tories yank Section 13 of human rights act like noxious weed

By Ezra Levant | Winnipeg Sun

To understand how Canada got an Internet censorship law, also known as Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, you must go back in time to 1913. That’s when John Ross Taylor was born in Toronto. Something about Taylor just wasn’t right. In his 20s, as the world lurched towards the Second World War, Taylor openly sided with the Nazis. He was interned during the war. After the war, despite the absolute repudiation of Nazism, Taylor didn’t give up hope. He continued to call for Canadians to throw off our liberal democracy in favour of dictatorship. And, of course, he seasoned that with a dose of anti-Semitism and anti-black racism, too.

It was pitiful: He’d print up some pamphlets, climb to the top of an office tower, and dump them off the roof, like confetti, hoping that would foment a revolution. What a deluded loser. But Taylor was never violent. If you turn the sound off when watching reels of him on the news, you’d mistake him for a banker — always dressed in a three-piece suit, the kind of thing you’d expect from the grandson of a Toronto alderman. But he just wanted an all-white Reich here in Canada.

Obviously this bothered right-minded people after the war, especially Jews in Canada, many of whom were survivors of the Holocaust. Canada’s Official Jews — the bosses of the now-defunct Canadian Jewish Congress — pressed their friends in the Liberal Party for laws banning Taylor’s anti-Semitic rants. And in 1966, a committee appointed by the justice minister proposed new laws to ban hateful speech. The Cohen Commission specifically mentioned Taylor by name as a rationale.

Using this harmless buffoon as an excuse, they recommended infringing on freedom of speech for all Canadians. “There is an evident distinction between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ public discussion, and the state has as great an obligation to discourage the latter as it has to maintain the former,” they wrote. So in 1977, Parliament passed the Canadian Human Rights Act, and Section 13 made it illegal to publish anything “… likely to expose a person … to hatred or contempt.”

Well, around that time, telephone answering machines were all the rage. And Taylor, now a senior citizen, saw this as his magic weapon for convincing Canadians to go fascist. He would stand around street corners in Toronto, handing out cards inviting people to get a racist message by calling his answering machine. Seriously.

Taylor was charged — and convicted — of having a mean answering machine message. He appealed it all the way to the Supreme Court — which heard the case in 1990, when he was 80. They ruled against him, four to three.

Gentle reader, do you think after such a stubborn life Taylor complied and unplugged his answering machine? He did not. And thus he served nine months in jail — more than most Canadian rapists do.

For more than 30 years, Section 13 had a 100% conviction rate for the thought crime of hurting someone’s feelings. What an abusive law. What an un-Canadian law. What a ridiculous law in the age of the Internet. Last week that law was pulled out, like a noxious weed. In 20 years time, I predict it will be regarded as one of the Conservatives’ greatest legacies: Freedom.

Section 13: How the battle for free speech was won 

Charlie Gillis on five years, two tribunals, a raft of secret hearings, a Supreme Court challenge and a turning point

By Charlie Gillis, Maclean’s magazine, June 19, 2012  

For all the passion it stirred, you’d think it would get a noisier send-off. An ovation, maybe. Or tears.  Instead, Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act slipped quietly beneath the waves last week during a night-time sitting of the House of Commons—victim of a private member’s bill and a trailer load of toxic publicity. Brian Storseth, Conservative MP for Westlock-St. Paul, had glanced anxiously around the chamber as his kill bill went through its third reading. “The benches weren’t full,” he recalls. “That always makes for a bit of extra heart pumping.”

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson had voiced support for the legislation. So had the Prime Minister. The result, then, was never in doubt: at 9:35 p.m. on June 6, by a vote of 153-136,  Parliament got Canada’s human rights bureaucrats out of the business of policing speech on the Internet. There was a scattering of applause, and handshakes for Storseth (the bill requires the rubber stamp of Senate approval). “To be honest, it’s all a blur,” says the three-term MP, laughing. But if the passage of Bill C-304 represents a fundamental shift in Canadian culture, you’d never have known it that night. Members dealt with a few housekeeping matters, then waded through a supply bill. Finally, one by one, they trickled out into the cool Ottawa night.

The effect of killing Section 13 will be debated for years among anti-racist groups and civil libertarians. But it is undoubtedly a turning point. Since 1999, Canadians who felt aggrieved by material transmitted online have been encouraged to seek redress under federal human rights law, which targeted material “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt” based on grounds of discrimination like race, religion or sexual orientation. Storseth’s bill repeals the provision outright, leaving the Criminal Code as the primary bulwark against the dissemination of hate propaganda by electronic means.

With it will go one of the most divisive disputes to grip the country since the introduction of the Charter of Rights itself—a contest of values that over the past five years has pitted Canadians’ desire to protect minorities from discrimination against the bedrock principle of free speech. Mainstream media outlets, most notably Maclean’s, have been hauled before commissions to answer for their published content. The commissions themselves have come under fire for allowing their processes to be used as a bludgeon against legitimate expression, tailored as they are to encourage complainants to come forward. Meantime, a Saskatchewan law similar to Section 13 has become the subject of a Supreme Court challenge that could invalidate hate-speech provisions in most provincial human rights codes. By year’s end, it is conceivable that no human rights commission in the country will be in the business of adjudicating published material.

Is Canada ready for this brave new world of unfettered expression? There was no shortage of critics last week predicting a flood of online hate now that the legislation is gone. “It leaves a huge gap,”says Darren Lund, a University of Calgary professor and human rights activist. “There are so many hate sites right now on the Internet, and I think some reasonable monitoring of the hatred they’re spewing fits with the Canadian ethos of living harmoniously in a democracy.”

The question, of course, is what constitutes “reasonable” and, on that, our values appear to be shifting. The story of Section 13’s demise is in part one of evolving opinion among interest groups, politicians and institutions who were appalled by the spectre of rights commissions being used as instruments of press control, worried that it would make free-speech martyrs out of basement-dwelling hate-mongers. “We recognized the inevitable,” says Marvin Kurz, national legal counsel for B’nai Brith Canada, the Jewish organization that once regarded the legislation as its best weapon against neo-Nazi hate propaganda. “We saw that public respect for Section 13 had ebbed, to the point that even our own people no longer supported it. For a law like that to work, it has to be supported by the people.”

Some folks like to offend. Ezra Levant knew he would stir anger, for instance, when in 2006 he published the notorious Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in his now-defunct magazine, the Western Standard. Yet even Canada’s leading right-wing gadfly—hungry to get his Calgary-based biweekly some attention—never imagined his decision would land him before a provincial human rights bureaucrat, with the looming threat of hefty financial penalties. Syed Soharwardy, a Calgary imam, complained to the Alberta Human Rights Commission, claiming the illustrations were an affront to the dignity of all Canadian Muslims. Two years later, Levant sat, scarlet with anger, at a pro forma interview as Shirlene McGovern, an investigator with the commission, blandly asked his “intent and purpose” in publishing the images.

Levant had demanded the right to video-record the proceedings, and the resulting footage became a YouTube sensation. Hunching over a conference table, he unleashed a rant that began with him proclaiming the right to “publish what the hell we want, no matter what the hell you think,” and ended with him inviting McGovern to assume the worst about his intentions. “I published the cartoons in the most unreasonable manner. Whatever offends you, I reserve the right to publish, for whatever offensive reason I want. I reserve the right to publish the cartoons for exactly the reason they complain about.”

If there was a watershed moment in the debate, this was it. Levant’s interview (or, as he put it, “interrogation”) became a top 10 hit on YouTube, sparking unaccustomed conversation about the chilling effect of Islamic sensitivities on public discourse. By then, Maclean’s was facing similar complaints over 18 separate articles, including a book excerpt in which columnist Mark Steyn argued high birth rates and the spread of radical ideology in Muslim countries represent a threat to Western values and ways of life.

To maximize publicity—or to raise its chance of winning—the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) complained not just to the federal commission but to those in Ontario and B.C. as well. The Ontario commission ruled it did not have jurisdiction to hear the complaint; the Canadian commission dismissed the case without referring the matter to a tribunal. But the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal went ahead with a hearing, combing the content of Steyn’s excerpt for offending material, judging the articles fit for public consumption but chiding Steyn for trying to “rally public opinion by exaggeration and causing the reader to fear Muslims.”

The CIC claimed moral victory. “We are delighted the tribunal has discredited the content of the articles that Maclean’s and Mark Steyn have been publishing,” said lawyer Faisal Joseph. But few others were cheering. Even long-time believers in Section 13 were astounded by the spectacle of a state tribunal reviewing a newsmagazine’s content, while questions of fairness abounded. With no evidence of intent, and without proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, critics noted, the tribunal was clearly prepared to brand someone a racist—one of the most reviled labels in Canadian society. “This is a serious business,” Wayne Sumner, a University of Toronto philosophy professor who has studied hate speech, told Maclean’s in 2008. “The proper place for it is in a criminal court, not a human rights tribunal.”

More troubling signs would later emerge, as the procedures and practices of human rights panels came under scrutiny. It turned out that one man, a former commission employee, had been lodging practically all of the Section 13 complaints investigated by the Canadian Human Rights Commission. For a time, Richard Warman had been acting as an investigator while complaints he’d made were before the commission. Officials’ insistence that Warman never wore both hats on the same file was less than reassuring.

Small wonder, then, that Storseth’s bill struck a chord, gaining support from unexpected quarters. B’nai Brith, which had used Section 13 to shut down the website of notorious hate-monger Ernst Zundel, got behind the legislation. “The whole Maclean’s-Mark Steyn fiasco was one of the spurs,” says Kurz, the group’s lawyer. So did the Toronto Star, a normally staunch supporter of state protections for minorities. “Most Canadians have no sympathy for hate-mongers,” the left-leaning paper said last December in an editorial. “But an unwarranted, creeping chill is being cast over free speech, absent any real problem.”

That broad-based backing might explain the muted political response to last week’s vote—a nominally free one which nevertheless split down party lines. While the opposition NDP lamented the end of a tool that helped shut down hate sites, the Liberals let the vote pass with no comment, as did most interest groups representing the country’s minorities. “The only guys I see speaking up for it are a couple of white lawyers who might profit from it,” Levant crowed earlier this week. “It is one of the great pleasures of my life to see the tide turn on this issue, and to know that I played a small role in it.”

Still, the section had its fans, many of whom now wonder what the future holds for the remaining patchwork of provincial human rights law meant to combat hate. In Alberta, Premier Alison Redford is on record saying that province’s provision, Section 3, should be repealed. In Saskatchewan, the government is awaiting a Supreme Court decision in the case of William Whatcott, an anti-gay activist sanctioned for distributing handbills labelling homosexuals as “sodomites” seeking to socialize children into accepting their lifestyle. Incendiary as Whatcott’s rhetoric was, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin suggested during a hearing last winter that he might not have known he was running afoul of Saskatchewan’s vaguely worded rights code. “An ordinary Lutheran pastor should be able to look at the act,” she said, “and without being a Supreme Court scholar, be able to know whether he can say this or that.”

Even if the provincial statutes survive, notes Lund, the Calgary professor, they are aimed only at printed material; only the federal act empowered commissions to crack down online, where most of today’s hate propaganda is spread. That leaves web-promulgated hate under the exclusive domain of the criminal justice system, where the standards of proof are much higher, and convictions rarer. To even lay a charge, says Stephen Camp, president of the Alberta Hate Crime Committee and a former commander of the Edmonton police hate crime unit, officers must be able to show the material was wilfully promoted; that it targeted an identifiable group; that it met the common-law test of a hate material—and all beyond a reasonable doubt. In short, a lot of complainants will go away dissatisfied.

The rest, presumably, will fall to civil society, which is arguably where the onus belonged to start with. 

For decades, interfaith groups and non-religious organizations have been promoting tolerance. In recent years they’ve been complemented by hard-core activists who patrol the Internet, ferreting out hate sites and gathering information for the benefit of police. One such organization, the Anti-Racist Canada Collective, told Maclean’s it would keep up its efforts despite the loss of Section 13. “There is an irony, in that its absence might actually make it easier for us to collect intelligence,” a spokesman said in an email. “Online haters may become less reticent about posting their real views.”

That’s not much comfort to groups seeking to silence speech that merely offends. But as the battles of the past five years ease into perspective, even they are reconsidering their positions. Not long after Syed Soharwardy filed his complaint against Levant, for instance, the Calgary imam found himself on the receiving end of his own human rights complaint—from a group of women who claimed they’d been prevented from speaking and subjected to abusive language during a meeting at his mosque.

Experiencing the human rights ordeal from the other side was an eye-opener, he later acknowledged, telling Maclean’s: “I am now quite certain that the best way is for the parties to have dialogue. We need to be able to listen to each other. Human rights commissions should be there, but they are for questions of housing and employment and access to the workplace—not for disputes that are about freedom of speech.” (End quote from Maclean’s). 

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French Revisionist Roger Garaudy, 1913-2012

By Michael Hoffman

The New York Times has decided to deny the French philosopher Roger Garaudy, who died June 15, an obituary notice, even though he was mentioned in the Times 45 times during his lifetime. 

We shall indeed note his passing here, however, and commemorate his life. He was the author of The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics  for which the French government fined him thousands of dollars and imposed a suspended prison sentence. In recent years, he claimed that the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. were perpetrated by the Bush administration in order to launch wars in Afghanistan and later Iraq. After Garaudy published his controversial book, one of the most famous men in France came to his defense. This was the Catholic priest Abbé Pierre (1912-2007), a champion of the poor who opinion polls said was among the best-loved men in France.  

Abbé Pierre brought down wrath on himself by defending Garaudy's work which stated that (counterfeit)-Israel exploited the "Holocaust" to put itself "above all international law." Abbé Pierre sent Mr. Garaudy a five-page letter lauding his "passion for the truth," his "astonishing and illuminating erudition" and his "scrupulous" research. 

The priest, born Henry Grouès, took on the nom-de-guerre of Abbé Pierre while resisting the Nazis in World War II, when he helped rescue Judaic people and others sought by the Nazis, including the younger brother of General Charles de Gaulle. Abbé Pierre founded an international humanitarian movement, Emmaüs, in 1949. He shot to fame in 1954 when he launched a national campaign for the homeless. With his familiar beret, walking stick and brown robes of a Capuchin monk, he enjoyed access to the offices of the president and prime minister. Even after endorsing Garuady, French television viewers in 2005 voted Abbé Pierre the third greatest French person of all time, after de Gaulle and Pasteur. 

Now to Mr. Garaudy himself, first from the French media and then from a Muslim source:

French Holocaust revisionist philosopher Garaudy dies

(AFP) – June 15, 2012 

PARIS — Roger Garaudy, a communist and darling of French intellectual society until he denied that the Nazis used gas chambers to kill Jews during World War II, has died aged 98, officials said Friday.

Garaudy was fined 120,000 francs (18,000 dollars) by a Paris court in 1998 for his anti-Zionist work "The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics". The court found that his account had distorted the wartime deaths of an estimated six million Jews.

He died on Wednesday in the Paris suburb of Chennevieres, local officials said. Garaudy, who converted to Protestantism, Catholicism and finally Islam, joined the French resistance and was held in Algeria as a prisoner of war of France's collaborationist Vichy regime. He joined the French Communist Party after the war, was elected to the French parliament and became a member of the Senate. But he was expelled from the Communist Party in 1970 after he criticised the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, although he had defended the Soviet intervention in Hungary 12 years earlier.

A big man with glasses as thick as his southern French accent, Garaudy was for years seen as someone who symbolised the "dialogue of civilizations." The author of around 70 books, Garaudy described himself as a Don Quixote fighting the windmills of capitalism. Within the Communist Party hierarchy he was known as "the Cardinal" both for his sense of authority and his attraction towards the Church. 

He was for years the darling of the French media and intellectual milieu for his philosophical work and his political courage. But that ended with his conversion to Islam in 1982 and subsequent criticism of Zionism, which turned him into a pariah. The head of Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, in 2006 cited his treatment as an example of the West's "hypocrisy and duplicity".

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Roger Garaudy, renowned French Muslim thinker, passes away

June 17, 2012

Paris-- World renowned French Muslim thinker Roger Garaudy died on Friday in the Paris suburb of Chennevieres after prolonged illness. He was 99. He will be laid to rest on Monday in Paris.

Formerly a prominent communist author, he converted to Islam and wrote several books which have been controversial due to his anti-Zionist positions and denial of the Holocaust.

Widely acclaimed as the most important international Muslim cultural personality of the 20th century, Garaudy was the winner of several prestigious awards, including the King Faisal International Prize for Services to Islam in 1986.

His masterpiece – Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israelienne – was the most controversial because of his boldness to deny the Holocaust by calling it a myth and that it had not taken place.

Garaudy was born to Catholic and atheist parents in Marseilleson July 17, 1913. He converted at age 14 and became a Protestant. During World War II, Garaudy joined the French Resistance, for which he was imprisoned in Djelfa, Algeriaas a prisoner of war of VichyFrance.

Following the war, Garaudy joined the French Communist Party. As a political candidate he succeeded in being elected to the National Assembly and eventually rose to the position of deputy speaker, and later senator. He became a leading party theoretician for the FCP and authored scores of scholarly works.

Garaudy remained a Christian and eventually re-converted to Catholicism during his political career. In 1970, Garaudy was expelled from the Communist Party following his outspoken criticism of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Garaudy converted to Islam in 1982, later writing that “The Christ of Paul is not the Jesus of the Bible,” and also forming other critical scholarly conclusions regarding the Old and New Testaments. As a Muslim he adopted the name “Ragaa” and became a prominent Islamic commentator and supporter of the Palestinian cause.

Garaudy authored more than 50 books, mainly on political philosophy and Marxism. In 1996 Garaudy published his most controversial work, Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israelienne, later translated into English as The Founding Myths of Modern Israel. Because the book contained Holocaust denial, French courts banned any further publication and on 27 February 1998 fined him 240,000 French francs. He was sentenced to a suspended jail sentence of several years.

Following his trial and conviction in France, Garaudy was hailed in the Muslim world and received substantial public support. In Iran, 160 members of the parliament signed a petition in Garaudy’s support. Senior Iranian officials invited him to Tehran and received him warmly. Iranian leaders condemned Israel and the West for bringing Garaudy to trial. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei cited Garaudy for his work in exposing the Zionists’ “Nazi-like behavior.”

Garaudy has been hailed throughout the Islamic World as “the most important international cultural personality of the 20th century,” “Europe’s greater philosopher since Plato and Aristotle.” Even in recent interviews, Garaudy repeated his claim that the Holocaust is a myth, stating that the genocide of Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War was “invented as a myth by Churchill, Eisenhower and De Gaulle to justify the destruction and occupation of Germany. In December 2006 Garaudy was unable to attend the international conference to review the global vision of the Holocaust due to health reasons. (End quote)

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Worst case of ethnic cleansing in western history

The Hoffman Wire

June 18, 2012

The European Atrocity You Never Heard About

In the largest episode of forced migration in history, millions of German-speaking civilians were sent to Germany from Czechoslovakia (above) and other European countries after World War II by order of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union.

By R.M. Douglas

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION • June 11, 2012 
http://chronicle.com/article/The-European-Atrocity-You/132123/

The screams that rang throughout the darkened cattle car crammed with deportees, as it jolted across the icy Polish countryside five nights before Christmas, were Dr. Loch's only means of locating his patient. The doctor, formerly chief medical officer of a large urban hospital, now found himself clambering over piles of baggage, fellow passengers, and buckets used as toilets, only to find his path blocked by an old woman who ignored his request to move aside. On closer examination, he discovered that she had frozen to death.

Finally he located the source of the screams, a pregnant woman who had gone into premature labor and was hemorrhaging profusely. When he attempted to move her from where she lay into a more comfortable position, he found that "she was frozen to the floor with her own blood." Other than temporarily stanching the bleeding, Loch was unable to do anything to help her, and he never learned whether she had lived or died. When the train made its first stop, after more than four days in transit, 16 frost-covered corpses were pulled from the wagons before the remaining deportees were put back on board to continue their journey. A further 42 passengers would later succumb to the effects of their ordeal, among them Loch's wife.

An estimated 500,000 people died in the course of the organized expulsions; survivors were left in Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves.

During the Second World War, tragic scenes like those were commonplace, as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin moved around entire populations like pieces on a chessboard, seeking to reshape the demographic profile of Europe according to their own preferences. What was different about the deportation of Loch and his fellow passengers, however, was that it took place by order of the United States and Britain as well as the Soviet Union, nearly two years after the declaration of peace.

Between 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians—the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16—were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland. As The New York Times noted in December 1945, the number of people the Allies proposed to transfer in just a few months was about the same as the total number of all the immigrants admitted to the United States since the beginning of the 20th century. They were deposited among the ruins of Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves as best they could. The number who died as a result of starvation, disease, beatings, or outright execution is unknown, but conservative estimates suggest that at least 500,000 people lost their lives in the course of the operation.

Most disturbingly of all, tens of thousands perished as a result of ill treatment while being used as slave labor (or, in the Allies' cynical formulation, "reparations in kind") in a vast network of camps extending across central and southeastern Europe—many of which, like Auschwitz I and Theresienstadt, were former German concentration camps kept in operation for years after the war. As Sir John Colville, formerly Winston Churchill's private secretary, told his colleagues in the British Foreign Office in 1946, it was clear that "concentration camps and all they stand for did not come to an end with the defeat of Germany." Ironically, no more than 100 or so miles away from the camps being put to this new use, the surviving Nazi leaders were being tried by the Allies in the courtroom at Nuremberg on a bill of indictment that listed "deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population" under the heading of "crimes against humanity."

By any measure, the postwar expulsions were a manmade disaster and one of the most significant examples of the mass violation of human rights in recent history. Yet although they occurred within living memory, in time of peace, and in the middle of the world's most densely populated continent, they remain all but unknown outside Germany itself. On the rare occasions that they rate more than a footnote in European-history textbooks, they are commonly depicted as justified retribution for Nazi Germany's wartime atrocities or a painful but necessary expedient to ensure the future peace of Europe. As the historian Richard J. Evans asserted in In Hitler's Shadow (1989) the decision to purge the continent of its German-speaking minorities remains "defensible" in light of the Holocaust and has shown itself to be a successful experiment in "defusing ethnic antagonisms through the mass transfer of populations."

Even at the time, not everyone agreed. George Orwell, an outspoken opponent of the expulsions, pointed out in his essay "Politics and the English Language" that the expression "transfer of population" was one of a number of euphemisms whose purpose was "largely the defense of the indefensible." The philosopher Bertrand Russell acidly inquired: "Are mass deportations crimes when committed by our enemies during war and justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies in time of peace?" A still more uncomfortable observation was made by the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, who reasoned that "if every German was indeed responsible for what happened at Belsen, then we, as members of a democratic country and not a fascist one with no free press or parliament, were responsible individually as well as collectively" for what was being done to noncombatants in the Allies' name.

That the expulsions would inevitably cause death and hardship on a very large scale had been fully recognized by those who set them in motion. To a considerable extent, they were counting on it. For the expelling countries—especially Czechoslovakia and Poland—the use of terror against their German-speaking populations was intended not simply as revenge for their wartime victimization, but also as a means of triggering a mass stampede across the borders and finally achieving their governments' prewar ambition to create ethnically homogeneous nation-states. (Before 1939, less than two-thirds of Poland's population, and only a slightly larger proportion of Czechoslovakia's, consisted of gentile Poles, Czechs, or Slovaks.)

For the Soviets, who had "compensated" Poland for its territorial losses to the Soviet Union in 1939 by moving its western border more than 100 miles inside German territory, the clearance of the newly "Polish" western lands and the dumping of their millions of displaced inhabitants amid the ruins of the former Reich served Stalin's twin goals of impeding Germany's postwar recovery and eliminating any possibility of a future Polish-German rapprochement. The British viewed the widespread suffering that would inevitably attend the expulsions as a salutary form of re-education of the German population. "Everything that brings home to the Germans the completeness and irrevocability of their defeat," Deputy Prime Minister Clement Richard Attlee wrote in 1943, "is worthwhile in the end." And the Americans, as Laurence Steinhardt, ambassador to Prague, recorded, hoped that by displaying an "understanding" and cooperative attitude toward the expelling countries' desire to be rid of their German populations, the United States could demonstrate its sympathy for those countries' national aspirations and prevent them from drifting into the Communist orbit.

The Allies, then, knowingly embarked on a course that, as the British government was warned in 1944 by its own panel of experts, was "bound to cause immense suffering and dislocation." That the expulsions did not lead to the worst consequences that could be expected from the chaotic cattle drive of millions of impoverished, embittered, and rootless deportees into a war-devastated country that had nowhere to put them was due to three main factors.

The first was the skill with which the postwar German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, drew the expellees into mainstream politics, defusing the threat of a potentially radical and disruptive bloc. The second was the readiness of most expellees—the occasionally crass or undiplomatic statements of their leaders notwithstanding—to renounce the use or threat of force as a means of redressing their grievances. The third, and by far the most important, was the 30-year-long "economic miracle" that made possible the housing, feeding, and employment of the largest homeless population with which any industrial country has ever had to contend. (In East Germany, on the other hand, the fact that the standard of living for the indigenous population was already so low meant that the economic gap between it and the four million arriving expellees was more easily bridged.)

The downside of "economic miracles," though, is that, as their name suggests, they can't be relied upon to come along where and when they are most needed. By extraordinary good fortune, the Allies avoided reaping the harvest of their own recklessness. Nonetheless, the expulsions have cast a long and baleful shadow over central and southeastern Europe, even to the present day. Their disruptive demographic, economic, and even—as Eagle Glassheim has pointed out—environmental consequences continue to be felt more than 60 years later. The overnight transformation of some of the most heterogeneous regions of the European continent into virtual ethnic monoliths changed the trajectory of domestic politics in the expelling countries in significant and unpredicted ways. Culturally, the effort to eradicate every trace of hundreds of years of German presence and to write it out of national and local histories produced among the new Polish and Czech settler communities in the cleared areas what Gregor Thum has described as a state of "amputated memory." As Thum shows in his groundbreaking study of postwar Wroclaw—until 1945 and the removal of its entire population, the German city of Breslau—the challenge of confronting their hometown's difficult past is one that post-Communist Wroclawites have only recently taken up. In most other parts of Central Europe, it has hardly even begun.

Still less so in the English-speaking world. It is important to note that the expulsions are in no way to be compared to the genocidal Nazi campaign that preceded them. But neither can the supreme atrocity of our time become a yardstick by which gross abuses of human rights are allowed to go unrecognized for what they are. Contradicting Allied rhetoric that asserted that World War II had been fought above all to uphold the dignity and worth of all people, the Germans included, thousands of Western officials, servicemen, and technocrats took a full part in carrying out a program that, when perpetrated by their wartime enemies, they did not hesitate to denounce as contrary to all principles of humanity.

The degree of cognitive dissonance to which this led was exemplified by the career of Colonel John Fye, chief U.S. liaison officer for expulsion affairs to the Czechoslovak government. The operation he had helped carry out, he acknowledged, drew in "innocent people who had never raised so much as a word of protest against the Czechoslovak people." To accomplish it, women and children had been thrown into detention facilities, "many of which were little better than the ex-German concentration camps." Yet these stirrings of unease did not prevent Fye from accepting a decoration from the Prague government for what the official citation candidly described as his valuable services "in expelling Germans from Czechoslovakia."

Today we have come not much further than Fye did in acknowledging the pivotal role played by the Allies in conceiving and executing an operation that exceeded in both scale and lethality the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It is unnecessary to attribute this to any "taboo" or "conspiracy of silence." Rather, what is denied is not the fact of the expulsions themselves, but their significance.

Many European commentators have maintained that to draw attention to them runs the risk of diminishing the horror that ought properly to be reserved for the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities, or giving rise to a self-pitying "victim" mentality among today's generation of Germans, for whom the war is an increasingly distant memory. Czechs, Poles, and citizens of other expelling states fear the legal ramifications of a re-examination of the means by which millions of erstwhile citizens of those countries were deprived of their nationality, liberty, and property. To this day, the postwar decrees expropriating and denationalizing Germans remain on the statute book of the Czech Republic, and their legality has recently been reaffirmed by the Czech constitutional court.

Some notable exceptions aside, like T. David Curp, Matthew Frank, and David Gerlach, English-speaking historians—out of either understandable sympathy for Germany's victims or reluctance to complicate the narrative of what is still justifiably considered a "good war"—have also not been overeager to delve into the history of a messy, complex, morally ambiguous, and politically sensitive episode, in which few if any of those involved appear in a creditable light.

By no means are all of these concerns unworthy ones. But neither are they valid reasons for failing to engage seriously with an episode of such obvious importance, and to integrate it within the broader narrative of modern European history. For historians to write—and, still worse, to teach—as though the expulsions had never taken place or, having occurred, are of no particular significance to the societies affected by them, is both intellectually and pedagogically unsustainable.

The fact that population transfers are currently making a comeback on the scholarly and policy agenda also suggests that we should scrutinize with particular care the most extensive experiment made with them to date. Despite the gruesome history, enthusiasts continue to chase the mirage of "humane" mass deportations as a means of resolving intractable ethnic problems. Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, in a much-cited study, has advocated population transfers as a valuable tool so long as they are "conducted in a humane, well-organized manner, like the transfer of Germans from Czechoslovakia by the Allies in 1945-47." John Mearsheimer, Chaim Kaufmann, Michael Mann and others have done likewise.

Few wars today, whether within or between states, do not feature an attempt by one or both sides to create facts on the ground by forcibly displacing minority populations perceived as alien to the national community. And although the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has attempted to restrain this tendency by prohibiting mass deportations, Elazar Barkan maintains that such proscriptions are far from absolute, and that "today there is no single code of international law that explicitly outlaws population transfers either in terms of group or individual rights protections."

The expulsion of the ethnic Germans is thus of contemporary as well as historical relevance. At present, though, the study of many vital elements of this topic is still in its earliest stages. Innumerable questions—about the archipelago of camps and detention centers, the precise number and location of which are still undetermined; the sexual victimization of female expellees, which was on a scale to rival the mass rapes perpetrated by Red Army soldiers in occupied Germany; the full part played by the Soviet and U.S. governments in planning and executing the expulsions—remain to be fully answered. At a moment when the surviving expellees are passing away and many, though far from all, of the relevant archives have been opened, the time has come for this painful but pivotal chapter in Europe's recent history to receive at last the scholarly attention it deserves.

R.M. Douglas is an associate professor of history at Colgate University. 

This essay is adapted from his new book, published by Yale University Press, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War.

Editorial Reviews for Orderly and Humane

Review

“Orderly and Humane is an outstanding and well-written work that fills a significant gap in books written in English about this large subject and the very period of its compass. It ought to be in every serious American library and should be required reading for scholars interested in the history of the end of the Second World War and the years thereafter in Europe.”—John Lukacs, author of The Future of  History and Five Days in London, May 1940

(John Lukacs )

“R.M. Douglas has written a fair-minded, deeply researched and courageous book that carefully demystifies the claims and accusations surrounding the awful history of the expulsion of the ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. A first-rate work, Orderly and Humane compels us to admit that the postwar expulsions were not simply a regrettable accident but a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing on a breathtaking scale that decisively shaped postwar Europe’s history.”—William I. Hitchcock, author of The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Consequences of Allied Victory in World War II Europe

(William I. Hitchcock )

“The tragedy of the post-World War II ethnic German refugees and expellees has been told before but no account is based on so many original documents from so many countries as Douglas’s eminently readable work.”—Istvan Deak, Columbia University (Istvan Deak )

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45th anniversary of the Israeli sneak attack

Lest we forget...

June 8, 1967: 34 Americans killed, 174 wounded by "our great ally in the Middle East"

Today is the 45th anniversary of the deliberate Israeli sneak attack on the USS Liberty

a day that should live in infamy, but is instead shrouded in obscurity

"Deliberate sneak attack" - no, that's not a "conspiracy theory," it was the view of the late Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as of the survivors of the attack. 

The best book on this massacre of American sailors by the Israelis is The Attack on the Liberty by James Scott (which mentions Admiral Moorer on p. 280). Scott's book is in the "must-have" category.

The following news report is incomplete and inadequate (failing to mention Admiral Moorer's views and making reference to "conspiracy theory" are but two of its defects). I am reprinting it here because it does document the abject cowardice of our flag-waving, "super-patriot" Congress that is too frightened to publicly honor the Americans who were sacrificed on the altar of the Israeli lobby. 

Remembering USS Liberty at 'Sad Little Gathering'

June 8, 2012

Military.com| by Bryant Jordan

On Friday, Patricia Blue-Rousakis plans to be at Arlington National Cemetery where she has spent many June 8ths for the past 15 years.

There, she’ll join with a handful of survivors of the 1967 attack on the surveillance ship USS Liberty, which was struck by Israeli air and naval forces. The group will hear a retired chaplain say a prayer, visit with those in attendance -- some, like herself, who lost family members on the Liberty -- and then go off to lunch in Alexandria, Va.

But even after so many years, and knowing full well that the topic of the Liberty is widely viewed as poisonous, the visitors still note the absence of political and military officials at the observance.

“We talk about it among ourselves,” said Blue-Rousakis, whose first husband, Alan Blue, was a National Security Agency linguist on the ship. He was among the 34 men killed and 174 wounded in the attack.

“Of the family members and the survivors, every single one of us at one time or another has invited our representative from [the House] and the Senate. And no one has ever shown up. No one. It’s a very sad little gathering.”

It’s just not the politicians, she said.

Forty-five years after the attack, no uniformed officers are expected to attend the ceremony.

“They won’t do it. They absolutely will not do it,” she said.

The lightly armed American spy ship was strafed, napalmed and torpedoed by Israeli air and naval forces for more than an hour in broad daylight during the Six-Day War. But for a crewman gerry-rigging a radio to get a message out to the fleet, many Liberty survivors believe they would have been sunk with all hands.

President Lyndon Johnson accepted Israel’s apology for the attack, but it has remained hotly controversial ever since, a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists. Alternative theories about Israel’s attack -- about it being deliberate; about cover-ups -- have made the topic of the Liberty too radioactive for members of Congress or Pentagon leaders.

Journalist and author James Scott, whose father survived the attack, wrote in “Attack on the Liberty” that Johnson believed the attack was deliberate. But he let Israel off the hook because he feared “alienating” American Jewish leaders, from whom he was getting “pressure” for escalating the war in Vietnam.

Joseph Meadors, a Liberty survivor and the current president of the Liberty Veterans Association, said he and his predecessors have been inviting members of Congress to Arlington since they began holding the observances in the 1980s, he said.

“This year I’ve invited every member of Congress who represents a congressional district where a USS Liberty KIA lived,” Meadors said. This meant invitations to lawmakers from 21 states. So far three lawmakers have said they would send staffers, but as of Wednesday one staffer had bailed out, saying there was a scheduling conflict.

This is usually how it works, Meadors said. He said he’d be surprised if the other staffers show.

One lawmaker, Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, responded to the invitation with a brief note to be read at the ceremony. Cornyn offered his “deep sympathy to the friends and loved ones of the 34 brave Americans who were lost that day.

“Although words are hardly adequate, please know that you and your families are in my thoughts and prayers.” The note spoke of honoring the dead who protect the United States, and of remaining dedicated, “just as they were dedicated, to the principles foundational to our Constitution, we must willingly defend them whenever necessary.”

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New Harvard book attacks First Amendment freedom

The Harm in Hate Speech

By Jeremy Waldron 

Hardcover, 304 pages

Harvard University Press (June, 2012)

"In this elegantly written, fair minded, and carefully reasoned book, Jeremy Waldron raises important issues about the real harm caused by certain kinds of speech. His argument is certain to give even free speech absolutists pause.” --Louis Michael Seidman, Georgetown University

An Extraordinarily Biased and Obtuse Attack on the First Amendment

Reviewed by Michael Hoffman at Amazon

Mr. Waldron proceeds from the premise that "hate speech" consists in stereotypical redneck bigotry and assorted "anti-semitic" attacks. He ignores the deluge of Talmudic hate speech that has poured forth in recent years from Orthodox rabbis execrating Arabs and gentiles.

Here is one example of his obtuse approach to the subject, from p. 195:

"Suppose someone puts up posters conveying the opinion that people from Africa are nonhuman primates.... Maybe there was a time when social policy generally ... could not adequately be debated without raising the whole issue of race in this sense. But that is not our situation today.... In fact, the fundamental debate about race is over - won, finished. There are outlying dissenters, a few crazies who say they believe that people of African descent are an inferior form of animal; but for half a century or more, we have moved forward as a society on the premise that this is no longer a matter of serious contestation."

What Waldron forgets (or doesn't wish to mention) is that the source for the disgusting charge that Africans are non-human is the "Rambam," the illustrious Rabbi Moses Maimonides who, in the uncensored edition of The Guide of the Perplexed (cf. Shlomo Pines), rules that Black people are midway between apes and humans. What does Waldron make of the fact that the most eminent rabbi in Judaic tradition is one of the hate speech "crazies" whose malevolent racist influence over western society is incalculable? He doesn't deign to say from the Mount Olympus by which he judges what is and is not "hate speech.” One gets the sense that even to mention Maimonides in the same breath as some white bigot from the deep South is beyond Waldron's tightly circumscribed mentality. He's representative of the Zionists-are-always victims syndrome, permanently in denial concerning racist rabbis and Judaic gentile-haters.

Another major flaw in his argument is the fact that the USA has existed for many decades without the kind of regulation of expression that Waldron espouses, and our society did not sacrifice civility or decency because we safeguarded speech from the Old World fiat that "error has no rights." Americans have always asked to the contrary, who decides what is error? This book does not exhibit any doubts. It is certain of its mission -- to determine what constitutes hate speech, who are the hateful speakers and how they are to be punished. You'll find similar rationales in tattered Bolshevik CHEKA handbooks.

The hidden agenda in this volume is the use of laws against hate speech to suppress speech that is hateful to Zionist commissars, Israeli chauvinists and bigoted adherents of hateful religious texts such as the "Mishneh Torah" (Hilchot Melachim 11:4); "Tanya;" "Torat Hamelech"; "Baruch Hagever;""Romemut Yisrael Ufarashat Hagalut;" Kitzur Shulchan Aruch (167:15); and the Gemara itself in tractates such as BT Sanhedrin 57a . Waldron might have taken the time to parse the infamous rabbinic hate speech acronym for gentile women: NSHGZ (Niddah, Shifcah, Goyyah and Zonah) which is too filthy to explicate here.

The Harm in Hate Speech introduces, under a pretense of human rights for all, a means to gain legal advantage over one's political rivals and opponents -- stigmatized as haters, they will be prosecuted and silenced, while rabbinic and Zionist haters will be portrayed as victims and gain relative immunity. It's one thing for the author to put forth this unspoken double-standard; it's quite another for him to fail to even anticipate questions about the fairness of his criteria for what constitutes hate speech.

Reading this book one gets the distinct impression that Talmudic megalomania is at work and that no amount of Arab-hating West Bank settler racism, or Crown Heights, Brooklyn goyim-bashing, is ever going to qualify as "hate speech." Rather, what will be outlawed is the body of thought that forms the traditional consensus patrum of American society. The truth behind the facade is that the "intolerable" hurt feelings which candid speech by the American yeoman and populist supposedly generates, is reason enough to overthrow the First Amendment, although Waldron has sufficient wit not to frame his revolution in those terms. He seeks “regulation" not abolition of the First Amendment.

There is a gulag being prepared in these United States by people like Mr. Waldron for those who challenge Talmudic racism, Zionist war crimes and the imperial personalities who justify them.

The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights is one of our nation's most blessed gifts to the world, let us uphold it to our last full measure of devotion.

Michael Hoffman is the author of Judaism's Strange Gods and the editor of Revisionist History newsletter.

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