I happen to live in one of these countries (which name is easy to find out, continue reading...). While I certainly do not deny the Holocaust, on the contrary, I'm against these kind of laws. Should politicians decide what the historic truth is? because it can go both ways.
So in that country of mine, some politician (well I should say the president of that country) wanted to force school teachers to make pupils learn that colonialism "had positive effects on the colonized people". So where does it stop? shouldn't we let this to researchers or specialists to decide whether or not that's true? why should a some politician,who isn't an historian, be able to decide in their place?
I note that this applied only to people publishing things they knew was false, not to people who sincerely believed what they were saying.
> So where does it stop?
Your example is the government forcing the teaching of falsehoods, which is wildly different from forbidding the distribution of hate speech.
Yes. An important part of learned helplessness (playing the victim) is ignoring broadly accepted definitions.
The ability to deny ideas is the ability to deny all speech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
"In logic and critical thinking, a slippery slope is a logical device in which a person asserts that some event must inevitably follow from another without any rational argument or demonstrable mechanism for the inevitability of the event in question."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Zundel
Nevertheless, my example certainly applied before 1992, and yes, it served as a signal. Public policy has changed, the Supreme Court decided that something else had greater weight. That doesn't invalidate the fact that it is still a signaling mechanism.
> I've long been proud that we have been willing to refute bad arguments rather than just imprisoning those who make them.
That's your opinion, which you've carefully crafted to sound "obviously meritorious," and you're entitled to it, but the "we" you speak of is far from universal, and the way in which you put it is not one I accept.
Citation needed. We're not on the Wikipedia list of countries in which Holocaust denial is either implicitly or explicitly illegal. [1]
As a Canadian, I've long been proud that we have been willing to refute bad arguments rather than just imprisoning those who make them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial#Laws_against_...