His right to say it...
David Irving has been found guilty of denying the Nazi Holocaust in Austria, and has been sentenced to 3 years in prison. I've never been much interested in Irving personally, and am in no position to judge the value of his work in general (although I note with interest that a historian like Prof. Ian Kershaw at Sheffield, one of the leading experts on the Third Reich, and someone who has no doubt that Hitler took a decision to launch a campaign of extermination against Europe's Jews and directed his military staff to carry it out, is willing to cite Irving's work as evidence in the course of his celebrated biography of Hitler) but the point of principle about freedom of speech should be clear - not least as this comes just as the Danish cartoon controversy is dying down. Will the newspaper editors so outraged that anybody could suggest that offensive cartoons of Mohammed should not be published all come out against academic censorship? Those attempting to hide their hypocrisy are going to have a seriously hard time...
Perhaps I should be a little wary of defending Irving's right to publish/proclaim racist nonsense - the "news" that Chomsky defended the right of Robert Faurisson (a French academic accused of Holocaust denial) to print what he liked still appears fresh and shocking in certain quarters, even though it is 25 years old. Perhaps if I ever make a career out of writing, or history (or both!) it will all come back to haunt me...
Nevertheless, the point of principle should be clear enough: either we favour free speech or we don't. Free speech only for those who say 'acceptable' things is precisely the sort of "value" which upheld the power of the genocidal Nazi regime.
Perhaps I should be a little wary of defending Irving's right to publish/proclaim racist nonsense - the "news" that Chomsky defended the right of Robert Faurisson (a French academic accused of Holocaust denial) to print what he liked still appears fresh and shocking in certain quarters, even though it is 25 years old. Perhaps if I ever make a career out of writing, or history (or both!) it will all come back to haunt me...
Nevertheless, the point of principle should be clear enough: either we favour free speech or we don't. Free speech only for those who say 'acceptable' things is precisely the sort of "value" which upheld the power of the genocidal Nazi regime.
posted by UK plc at 7:28 PM
1 Comments:
I was fairly shocked to discover the number of EU states who passed laws in the early nineties criminalising Holocaust denial. A private members bill here was defeated some ten years ago. Any historian worth his/her salt should be loudly protesting Irving's right to say these things in this country. He is a regular speaker at neo-Nazi rallies, and did break Austrian law, so I have little sympathy with his predicament there. I think perhaps declaring after the trial words to the effect "this proves Austria is a Nazi state" may be detrimental to his appeal. Nevertheless, just as I believe it ought to be legal to form a fascist party here, I believe it should be right to deny the Holocaust. Actually, the statements Irving was tried for were not extreme. He said 17 years ago that he could find no evidence of the gas chambers; that all he could find was the witness statements of the pscychiatrically unsound. This is both insensitive and gauche, but not entirely illogical from a methodologically pedantic point of view. In fact, history as a discipline did what it should do. When Irving lost his case against Lipstadt, he was immensely discredited. He was revealed for what he is, and as a result no-one takes seriously his views on the Holocaust. Nevertheless, allowing the debate to take place spurs people to think about the Holocaust, and to realise it did happen and was awful, and perhaps even that it was not unique in many important ways. Repressive legislation would stifle debate, stifle thought, and add to the mythologising of the Holocaust which is increasing the danger that it could happen again. Now is the time for historians to safeguard the integrity of their discipline by proactively voicing the case for free thought, speech and argument.
A current trend seems to be the making equivalent of though and action. If Irving was acting in a way prejudicial to a certain group, he should be brought to heel. If he thinks there were no gas chambers, he should not.
Similarly, there have been moves to ban national front members from the police force. This is unacceptable. Only if their behaviour is out of line (perhaps as a result of their views, perhaps not), should they be barred.
This distinction seems important to me in the debate about free speech, and I wish people woould stop fudging the issue.
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