Holocaust Denial: Laws and Public Policy
Holocaust denial has been present since the fall of the Third Reich and continues to build an underground following to this day. This paper presents a look at the major players in Holocaust denial and revisionism, the various laws allowing and restricting denial and appropriate suggestions to help prevent this movement from continuing to thrive behind the guise of freedom of speech.
Holocaust Denial and the Law: A Comparative Study
The understanding that law has a representative function in society and that every unpopular accused needs to be prosecuted sets the dynamic for this book – an incisive read into one of the thorniest problems of expression and interpretation of history. It is extensively researched and carefully written with evidential proof about how courts in Germany, France, Canada and United States resolved dilemmas posed by Holocaust-denial litigation. While on one hand the work gives an understanding of the legal processes or situated forces in question when adhering to the principles of legal fairness, on the other hand it studies criminal prosecution of the deniers and critically assesses the need of “protecting” the Holocaust from its (right wing) extremist commentaries. Though some might argue that Holocaust Denial is old news as there’s a general acceptance of deniers, Robert Kahn advocates that society must criminalize Holocaust denial “for its assault on truth; the offense it gives to survivors; or the danger of a right-wing (or anti-Semitic) revival it carries with it.” (p. 2). Very few books on comparative criminal procedures can be read in common parlance. Kahn writes the severity and complexity of the problem with clarity, painstakingly explaining every narrative, legal provision, code and related symbolic representation in the legal cases lucidly. This substantiates diverse legal norms and the attitudes both for and against them, an insightful read for criminal lawyers, criminologists, researchers with an interest in legal pluralism, legal writing, international law and human rights, as well as scholars of history and genocide studies. He demonstrates that a specific historical experience of a country with the holocaust has an impact on the expectations of how the denial trial should unfold; for example, when thinking about a criminal trial, the inquisitorial (judge-centred) approach bears a different procedural meaning for a German or French than for an American, as does the idea of political censorship. Kahn agrees with Geertz’s anthropological interpretation that all law is local knowledge and not just a “placeless principle” (p.5) – as oft-perceived in the West, political factors
Household economy and gendered labor in the 17th centurya.d. on Guam
Abstract The gendered division of labor in household economies is well known in documentary accounts of many societies, although archaeological evidence for it is often elusive. Our study compares ethnohistorical accounts of household organization with archaeological patterns at a 17th-century village on the island of Guam in the Marianas archipelago to determine if these different sources of evidence provide similar insights. We investigated archaeological assemblages from two latte (megalithic) buildings to document their economic activities. Unexpected differences in their assemblages revealed that economic activities varied between the two latte buildings. They were domiciles of a single economically integrated household, but their disparate functions likely signaled a gendered division of labor. This study reveals aspects of gendered labor that documentary accounts do not fully describe. Our findings suggest that the assumption that domestic buildings were functionally redundant in traditional societies must be tested on a case-by-case basis.