Ruimu wrote:
Well, erh... It's not my imagination. I listed those few topics (I may have missed a couple more) that are actually under legal censorship in France. (The law against negationism is, imho, a very awful law, one of the worst in this country, but a necessary one in the context.) Censorship means here that it is forbidden to publish a book that will be an apology of suicide, paedophilia, or denying the reality of some crimes against humanity (without having to prove anything). If you write a book stating that "Mr XY raped Z...", you may face a libel suit, and have to prove your allegations. (That's very different, as you can see.)
I understand you're likely not a lawyer, but do you (or anyone else) know to what extent this requires *you* to be presenting the arguments, vs. reporting on others? For example, we *do* have articles on Holocaust deniers, summarizing their arguments (including that infamous "there were no Nazi gas chambers" report a few years back), and we *do* have information on the arguments of philosophers who wrote in favor of suicide. We're not personally promoting these viewpoints, but to be a reasonable encyclopedia we do have to give them a fair summary. In the Holocaust denier case we can fairly easily point to a lot of other evidence that the Holocaust actually did exist, and conclude that historians generally disagree with them, which probably covers us. But with suicide, we can't really reasonably conclude "these philosophers were wrong, and suicide is bad and you shouldn't do it", since there is no accepted consensus answer to "is suicide always bad, sometimes bad, or never bad?"
So I guess my question is: can we still get in trouble for publishing a neutral description of pro- and anti-suicide arguments (and those in between), without concluding in favor of either?
-Mark