@matthew_d_green France has a political tradition of government-approved truths. Holocaust denial is illegal rather than stupid. Not recognising the Armenian genocide is also illegal, rather than stupid, etc. Once the government decides the correct history, competing histories become illegal.
🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/teirdes/status/1625821087941394432
@matthew_d_green The legislative process is probably too slow to dictate the truth of real-time events, however.
🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/teirdes/status/1625821681771024387
@matthew_d_green France, like all Western democracies, suffers from long-term imposition of "states of exception", where deviations from due process or human rights are made perpetually, but end up being undiscussed due to lacking news-worthiness after a week.
🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/teirdes/status/1625821894367739904
@matthew_d_green A more esoteric example of "government-approved truth" is a friend of mine who was taught in school that Leonardo da Vinci is French, because he was born in Nizza (Nice). Nizza was Italian at the time, but is French now.
🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/teirdes/status/1625823258695110658
@matthew_d_green But that mostly affects people who are more likely targets of search warrants, arbitrary arrests or police violence. It's never a sufficiently large group at any particular time that it affects election outcomes.
🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/teirdes/status/1625822289013968897