Negare e punire

Denial and Punishment: it takes two to tango abstract: According to the Italian Law 116, holocaust denial is an aggravating factor of incitement to racial hatred and the only effective way of fighting it is by making it illegal. Both claims are open to a variety of critical concerns. under which conditions is it appropriate to consider the deniers' recurring assertion (" There were no gas chambers in Auschwitz ") as an oblique case of incitement? And how is an official prohibition to express this and other false statements liable to affect the uptake of their indirect allegations? In a bid to demonstrate that, far from being a dissuasive measure, an anti-negationist law is destined to help the deniers perform the perlocutive effects virtually contained in their speech acts, this paper analyses the communicative techniques adopted by European deniers from the time of the Faurisson affair to the present day to show how censorship has always been their most powerful rhetorical ally.