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The importance of freedom of speech has to do with the fact that censorship is prone to abuse, and truth is not reliably obtained by censorship. The statement "But this time, the thing being censored is actually false" comes with a "according to me and my allies" qualifier, and even if I agree with you that in this case you're correct that doesn't mean that censorship isn't a political maneuver. It is still a use of force by the strong to silence the weak (or else it wouldn't work) and being strong is not sufficient proof that the use of force is just (or else there would have been no holocaust to deny).
The whole point of the freedom of speech is that the free market place of ideas is a more reliable path to good outcomes than is oppressing the weak when you feel really convinced that they're in the wrong. That's exactly what the Nazis did, and no amount of "But that's different because they were wrong [according to us]!" will change the fact that it's the same reasoning and the same justification.
In other words, if holocaust denial is clearly false and evil, then it won't need to be censored because anyone denying the holocaust will come off as clearly delusional and evil. If it's not so clear, then it actually needs to be hashed out, or else there will be unintegrated resentment and distrust building and the regime would have actually earned this distrust by choosing to close the path to feedback.
Abiding by the principle of free speech means voluntarily refusing to censor what you can censor, because you place more faith in the free expression of ideas to reach good conclusions than you do in your own ideology if it cannot sustain free expression of ideas. It's saying "Hey, maybe my head is up my own ass, and so to be appropriately humble I will refrain from oppressing the weak just because I think they're wrong and evil, and make sure that they stay uninfluential on their own merits".
And it works. While I'm sure they exist, I have never actually heard anyone deny the holocaust and I'm not even sure I've even met someone who wouldn't judge a person negatively for daring to suggest it didn't happen. This is an easy case, and if we can't even refrain from thumbing the scale when our ideological enemies are so easily defeated by pointing to the truth, we have no chance on anything remotely hard.
I would push even further than Nybbler and assert that "the Holocaust should happen" is not specific and concrete enough to be a candidate for "call to violence" exception.
Given the very special treatment of the holocaust in comparison to other genocides one could make a good case that the holocaust legislation amounts to little more than anti-blasphemy laws.
Agreed.
If you can say "Maybe it's true though?", no matter how abhorrent, it is speech that needs to be protected. In fact, the more abhorrent the more it needs the protection.
You can't "Maybe it's true" a call to violence like "Shoot this bastard".
"Maybe it's true this bastard should be shot"?
That would apply if the person said "This bastard should be shot", instead of the statement they hypothetically said.
Which does bring in the complication of how you deal with mafia threats like "Nice place you got there. Would be a shame if something happened to it". But again, the principle is clear: you're allowed to express that people have nice things, and you're allowed to argue that this bastard should be shot, you're not allowed to threaten.
So the burden is on you to make the case that "this bastard should be shot" or "nice place, would be a shame" is actually a threat, because the statement it is pretending to be is absolutely protected speech.
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This is simply a specific implementation of 'anti inciting to violence' provisions of speech, clearly defined and accepted within constitutional law consistantly around the world in most democratic countries, in order to make it easier to specifically target a clearly delineated type of person -- neo-nazis.
Which part do you have a problem with?
A. Laws restricting speech with respect to things like inciting or the promotion of violence etc exist? B. Holocaust denial is automatically considered to be 'hate speech'; whether by means of common law/case precedence or explicit laws to that effect? C. Censorship exists?
This isn't about preventing some 'unpopular truth' from coming out, it's a specific mechanism being used to target a specific hateful counter-culture.
Simply put, no it is not.
The "call to violence" exception isn't really an exception because you're not actually punishing speech.
If I kill Betty and bury her body under the old church, then if I'm ever caught saying the words "I killed Betty and buried her under the old church", I'm likely to go to jail because I said those words. But it's not "punishing speech", it's punishing violence -- murder, specifically. And in the same vein, if I say "Give me your money or I will kill you", it is not "speech", it's the counterfactual violence which I am using to extort you. Speech is needed to communicate the evidence of guilt, or convey the threats, but it's the violence itself that calls for punishment -- and that's why I can say the words "Give me your money or I will kill you" here, or "I killed betty and buried her under the old church" without getting or deserving punishment for it.
If you are actively attempting to coordinate unjust and illegal violence, then again, it's the violence that's a problem. But it has to be unjust and illegal violence. Making the case that parking tickets should be given in a certain case is not "advocating for violence" just because their policy, if accepted, would ultimately lead to violence against anyone refusing to pay the parking tickets. It's the illegal parker's "resisting arrest" that will be deemed violence. And that's fine and good, because if we as a society decide that it makes sense to enact new parking rules, we as a society agree that people parking there are defecting and doing the wrong thing -- even though this "bears an implicit threat" against people who like to park there.
Saying "The holocaust should happen" is vague as fuck. What's that even mean? "The jews are vermin, which we should exterminate"? That's absolutely a threat of 'unpopular truth' to the people who want to ban it, even though I don't feel particularly threatened myself because I'm solid in the fact that it's not true. But that also means I don't feel a need to censor in order to stop the ideas from spreading.
"Show up by the old church wearing swastikas, and round up any jew in sight" is a call to violence, and you should arrest those people for attempting violence -- if you have sufficient evidence that the violence is real, that is. If someone is merely arguing -- even incorrectly -- the factual case that we'd be better off if jews were genocided, then that is factual speech and absolutely 100% speech that needs to be protected.
The bottom line is this:
If it were true, would it be important to know?
If we'd really be better off exterminating jews, because jews really are so parasitic as to be more comparable to tapeworms than productive members of society (and therefore "the holocaust should happen"), then that would be very important to know.
If we just disagree that it's true, then we use our words like grown ups instead of having tantrums at ideas that upset us to think about.
Applying "If it were true, would it be important to know?" to "Show up and round up the jews", we immediately find that it is not applicable, because there is no truth value to be found. If the statement has no truth value because it isn't a proposition but an actual call to violence, then respond to the actual threat of violence accordingly.
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Once you're defining things to be "inciting or promotion of violence etc" when by plain language they aren't, the you're just implementing arbitrary censorship with a figleaf. You can replace B with "support of the Social Democratic Party is automatically considered to be 'hate speech'" to see why.
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