Comment by iamnothere | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamnothere | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't know why you lie, but you do.

I hate to invoke HN guidelines, but this accusation violates "Assume good faith".

Here's another source, this time from the National Review:

Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law. Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech. And, in the opinion of the leading Jewish organization of that era, no more than 10 per cent of the cases were mishandled by the authorities. As subsequent history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/reasonable-restriction...

So now you have both the Atlantic and the National Review claiming this. Are they both mistaken? Lying?

Did the New Yorker plagiarize that last sentence from the Atlanitc? It's in both of your excerpts, almost identically.

I found this fascinating so did a bit of research:

Both the National Review article and this piece (https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2012/04/words-and-deeds/) by Flemming Rose credit Alan Borovoy for having been the original author of that passage (in his 1988 book When Freedoms Collide: The Case for Civil Liberties).

The New Yorker article is based on Bob Mankoff interviewing Flemming Rose and it looks like Flemming Rose may have been slightly misquoted in a way that made the attribution less clear: the bit where it says:

> In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.

Flemming Rose is attributing both sentences - "pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor" & "As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it." to "a present-day civil-rights campaigner" or Alan Borovoy.

Thanks for the research, I was having trouble figuring out where this came from exactly. I was hoping to find translations of the original laws, but no luck. Somehow I imagine that this info is hard to come by now, unless you visit some European library archives.

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