A Stitch in Haste

Two more tales of thought suppression from Europe (and a Europe wannabe):

ITEM: File this under "calls for outrage" --

An Austrian man who used an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler for his cell phone voice mail has been sentenced to two months in prison.

Police accidentally came across the message on the 20-year-old's phone in 2004 when they called to question him about a burglary.

Prosecutors say he downloaded the message from the Internet. It includes the repeating of the phrase "Sieg Heil!"

The defendant says that the download was a "spontaneous act" and that he did not fully embrace the meaning of the oath.

He was sentenced to a year in prison for theft and fencing stolen goods, but the court decided to tack on two extra months for using the oath.

There is a law in Austria that makes Nazi propaganda a crime.

MY TAKE: So a ringtone is "Nazi propaganda"? I wonder whether "The Producers" would be banned in Austria.

I still say that, eventually if not now, there should be a sunset clause for zero-tolerance of all-things-Nazi in Germany and Austria. Then again, I think the First Amendment is a neat idea that Europe might want to replicate. Go figure.

(Via Fark.)

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ITEM: Speaking of the Holocaust, some have suggested that it has resulted in a "crowding out effect" in that people now pay less attention to the other infamous genocides of history. At the top of many people's lists is the Armenian Massacre of 1915-1923 in the Ottoman Empire (i.e., present-day Turkey). The entire ethnic Armenian population was either murdered or dispossessed and evicted — roughly one million people.

Turkey doesn't like to be reminded of that:

A writer has been fined 3,000 lira (£1,300) under a much-criticised law against insulting Turkish identity.

Zulkuf Kisanak was first given five months in jail, but an Istanbul court then reduced the sentence to a fine.
...
He is among more than 60 writers and publishers, including novelist Orhan Pamuk, to face charges under the law.

Mr Pamuk is on trial for telling a newspaper: "One million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares talk about it."
...
The European Union, which has agreed to start formal membership talks with Ankara, has described the Pamuk case as a litmus test of Turkey's eligibility to join.

MY TAKE: This is of course far more obnoxious than the "all things Nazi" ban in Germany and Austria — those bans forbid embracing past atrocities rather than the exposing them. Still, there's a wide middle ground between these two extremes, which invites far too much suppression of free speech. than the exposure of past atrocities. (UPDATE: Turkey is now reportedly considering repealing the law in question.)