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Federal Court of Australia Ruling [2002] FCA 1150 Tuesday, 17th September 2002
The Australian Federal Court has ruled that issues of fact cannot be discussed openly and freely; in certain cases the facts of an issue are not relevant, and the right to openly and freely discuss an issue does not exist.
One cannot discuss whether the alleged gas chamber in Auschwitz was for delousing or murdering prisoners.
One cannot discuss the relevance of ground penetrating radar scans of Treblinka.
One cannot discuss whether 6,000,000 was a propaganda figure invented by Stalin, or whether 1,500,000 was the number of individuals of a particular cultural group intentionally killed.
(Under 500,000 is now accepted by the German Government as having been killed by gassing—it was claimed to have been done in a converted mortuary, now it is claimed it was done in two farm sheds outside the camp complex.)One can still, for the moment, discuss the 3,000,000 German prisoners of war murdered by the United States in the two years after the cessation of hostilities on direct orders from the Presidency.
One can still, for the moment, discuss the Royal Australian Navy´s bombardment of Newcastle, NSW under the guise of a Japanese attack to stir up some patriotic, pro-war sentiment, or government involvement in the Port Arthur massacre.
But on certain issues the court has ruled that no discussion can be entered into.
This situation is remarkably similar to the trial of a woman in medieval Germany. She was accused of witchcraft, and of murdering and eating her child. Her husband disputed this, and the baby´s body was exhumed. The court ruled that the facts of the corpse´s existence were irrelevant, that in fact it was an illusion created by the devil, and the woman was burnt at the stake. There was an official ‘reality’, and physical reality was not recognised by the courts if it contradicted the official version.
This situation is essentially the same as existed in Stalinist Russia, and still exists in North Korea, where the facts are over–ruled if they are not in accordance with official doctrine. The Federal Court in Australia has ruled that there is an ‘official version’ of this part of history—the Jewish Holocaust—and that no questioning of this government viewpoint will be tolerated. There is an official ‘reality’, and physical reality is not recognised by the courts if it contradicts the official version.
It has often been said that the constitution of Australia, in this case the Bill of Rights, does not give any right to freedom of speech; the only legal freedom of speech it guarantees is the right of elected officials to say anything in Parliament without fear of lawsuit. The court has emphasised this; that citizens have no freedom of speech, no right of open discussion, on any topic that the courts choose to deny it.
There are questions on how many people of a particular cultural grouping—they are not a racial grouping—died in Germany during the mid-forties of last century, about why they died, about how they died. Ground penetrating radar scans of alleged mass graves, forensic analysis of sites alleged to have been used for gassing humans, interpretations of written orders or the lack thereof. All these issues may not be discussed in Australia by order of the Federal Court. The fact that you can show that GPR scans of an area prove that there are no bones and no ground disturbance may not lead onto a statement that therefore there is not a mass grave present. The fact that forensic analysis of samples taken from walls show that acknowledged de-lousing rooms do show traces of poisonous gas residue, but samples from rooms claimed to have been used for mass–murder do not show traces of such residue, may not lead onto a statement that therefore the actuality of such gassing is questionable.
Our forefathers were required to resort to armed insurrection to gain Magna Carta—their first constitutional safeguard from abuse of power by government.
Must we now do the same?
