Rwanda is pursuing his second Client Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza that he went to defend in Rwanda because she poses a real threat to winning at the polls in the August elections in Rwanda. They accuse her of genocide denial because she also admits that the current government officials have a lot to answer for on the atrocities they committed against their own citizens. Mind you, she is adamant that the Tutsi genocide of 1994 took place. But what do you expect from a government that jails Tutsi political opponents, sole survivors in their families of the genocide for a crime none other than genocide denial. This is the case of Deo Mushayidi and many other Tutsis. Erlinder is in Jail in Rwanda because the government of Rwanda does not tolerate disagreement. They have a lot to hide and Erlinder discovered and told inconvenient truths.

To compare the Rwandan genocide to the genocide of the Jews is comparing apples and oranges. The dynamics are totally different. NO organized groups of Jews had murdered any Germans. The rebellion by Paul Kagame in 1990 to 1994 made of Tutsis had murdered thousands of innocent civilians and sent another million to refugee camps.

The Tutsi army credited with stopping the genocide is known to have systematically killed thousands of innocent civilians that they rounded up in meetings of by bus loads and killed. That is the inconvenient truth that they don’t want to face.

We should not ignore such denials, but the response should be not prison sentences but public debate.

This is an old argument for free speech (for my money best articulated 150 years ago by J.S. Mill in On Liberty), but I’ll make it here anyway. The best way to fight a loathsome lie is the truth. The truth not only doesn’t need criminal penalties to prop it up, but is actually hurt by that. When the truth is government dogma and contradicting it carries a prison sentence, many people stop seeing it as the truth and see it only as official dogma.

When you ban the lie, it still spreads. Germany has banned speech defending Nazi ideology, but neo-Nazi groups thrive there. You cannot abolish an idea by force of law — even a really loathsome false idea. The banned lie spreads in the dark without being confronted by an enthusiastic passionate defense of the truth. The kind of defense that a government official wielding a gavel simply cannot make.

Don’t ban lies. Debate them openly.

P.S. To clarify — I’m defending only the freedom of “hate speech” that is not inciting to immediate violence. Incitement to immediate violence, when followed by immediate violence, should be seen as conspiracy to commit a violent crime.