On the Fence | Freedom speech and interpretation collide

Ian Saxine Columnist

My warm feelings about European freedom of speech have taken a big hit this week. After being inspired by the show of solidarity many European newspapers displayed in reprinting the Muhammad cartoons over which Danish embassies were attacked, I was dismayed to read that Austria is throwing a man in jail for a pair of speeches he made 17 years ago.

The man in question is David Irving, a 67-year-old British historian—and I use the term loosely—who has made himself a name as an apologist for Adolph Hitler. His most famous book was Hitler’s War, published in 1977 and notorious for Irving’s statement that Hitler didn’t know about the Holocaust until late 1943. After the storm broke over his controversial claim, Irving remained a focus of controversy as he made other dubious statements doubting the existence of parts—or all—of the Holocaust, culminating in a 1989 statement made in Austria in which he denied that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were real.

Many European nations have made Holocaust denial a crime, the strictest on this count being Germany and Austria, the core of Hitler’s Third Reich in the 1930s and 1940s. Understandably skittish over allowing Nazi admirers a voice, those countries have made any sort of fascist parties illegal, along with any public statements supporting the Holocaust in print or otherwise.

The regrettable part of this is that it is so unnecessary. David Irving is an historical quack, and his assertions denying the truthfulness of the Holocaust can be easily refuted by all of the firsthand accounts from survivors, guards, liberating troops, civilians, the reels and reels of footage of films taken by liberating forces of the masses of bodies being bulldozed into graves. Then there are the hundreds of thousands of shoes, the gold teeth, and all of the other grim physical evidence of genocide. Why does a Nazi-loving goofball need to be tossed into jail to prove all of this? If we’re all so secure in the undeniable nature of the horror of the Holocaust, why does a historian have to be punished for making a claim?

“But Ian!” you tell me, “Holocaust denial is hate speech, because it implies that Jews are trying to gain something by making up the Holocaust.” Maybe, but just because you imply that a wronged group is lying doesn’t mean you are inciting violence and hate. Does this mean that anyone who reinterprets and questions history has to pass the hate test? Can’t we rely on historical evidence and good judgment here?

David Irving never stood up and said that anyone should harm anyone else, and so he hasn’t incited anyone to violence by any stretch of the imagination. Austria does give his baseless arguments the allure of the forbidden, because now ill-informed people out there will give David Irving’s arguments a look because a government imprisoned him for making them. The cross-burning loonies in America can stand up and claim their “Jewish media lobby-communist-homosexual conspiracy” is at work again, pointing at Austria. Just as bad, now all of the whiners in the Middle East are looking up from their burning effigies of the Danish Prime Minister and saying, “Hey! Europe is being hypocritical! You allow the mockery of the Prophet, but not Holocaust denial!” The average ill-informed, torch-wielding rioter in the street will conclude that Europe really is out to get Muslims.

And to my distress, I’d have to agree with them. (The Muslim rioters, not the American Klansmen.) As an aspiring historian, I must reluctantly defend the right of David Irving to write and say whatever he pleases about the Holocaust, at least until he actually incites violence. Criminalizing anything less is a dangerous precedent. Go ahead and ban Nazi rallies. But attacking a historical interpretation, even a bad one, is a very different thing.

Besides, I prefer watching David Irving stumble over his own stupidity, as he had been doing by trying to sue people for calling him a Holocaust denier, and in general making a fool of himself and discrediting his arguments. The final cap came this week, when the cowardly old coot retracted his statements and admitted that the Holocaust did happen. Do we really need to throw him in jail to make a point?

David Irving’s imprisonment coupled with the wave of belated condemnation of the Danish cartoon publications signal the slow demise of free speech in Europe. When it finally does die, I wonder if anyone will even bother to attend the funeral.