Bad Speech

I noticed a couple of disturbing items in the news yesterday. Seemingly opposite in their purpose, both are foreboding illustrations of government policies designed to restrict debate about the past.

The first comes from France. A professor of Japanese at the University of Lyon is the subject of a criminal investigation for questioning certain aspects of the Holocaust.

Prosecutors in the southern city of Lyon said the investigation would focus on "denying crimes against humanity." France anti-racism laws have made denying the Holocaust a crime, punishable by fines and even prison.

Now I don't think I'd like to invite any Holocaust-deniers over for Sunday dinner, but shouldn't there be some outrage about the supression of free speech? Isn't this precisely the type of speech that civil liberties organizations were designed to protect?

The second case also involves atrocities in World War II and again ties in with Japan. But the angle is completely different.

Japan’s education minister said this weekend that Japanese history textbooks have had a “self-tormenting” view of World War II and that he is relieved current texts have cut back on criticism, reports said Sunday.

“There was a time when Japanese textbooks were full of nothing but extremely self-tormenting things saying that Japan was bad,” Education Minister Nariaki Nakayama told a town hall meeting in southern Oita prefecture on Saturday, the Asahi and Nihon Keizai newspapers reported.

“We have tried to correct that,” he said. “I’m really glad that recently there are fewer words such as ‘comfort women’ and ‘forced relocation’ used in textbooks, he said.

Many Japanese officials and historians have come forward recently to deny atricities committed at Nanking. There is, of course, a great difference between what an individual is allowed to say, and a government-sanctioned statement to the same effect.

The French undoubtedly have no stomach to arrest foreign nationals for denying the Chinese holocaust, but wouldn't that be fun to watch?