Holocaust denier: 3-year jail term

[MrBern]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/02/20/austria.irving.trial.ap/index.html

a snippet:
"Monday, February 20, 2006; Posted: 6:31 p.m. EST (23:31 GMT)

David Irving arrives for court with a copy of his book, "Hitler's War."

VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Right-wing British historian David Irving pleaded guilty Monday to charges of denying the Holocaust and was sentenced to three years in prison after conceding he was wrong to say there were no Nazi gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp."

 

[MudInYerEye]

Gee Whiz,
Sentencing David Irving to an Austrian prison is like hiring Cornel West to teach at Temple University. He probably couldn't be happier.

 

[Vladimir Berkov]

Obviously the Austrians have learned nothing from their experiences under the Nazis if they are sending people to jail because of the political or historical ideas they hold.

Sending this guy to prison is just as bad as the Nazis sending someone to prison because they were a Communist or a Catholic or a Jew.

 

[Fu Manchu]

I Respectfully Disagree

Obviously the Austrians have learned nothing from their experiences under the Nazis if they are sending people to jail because of the political or historical ideas they hold.

Sending this guy to prison is just as bad as the Nazis sending someone to prison because they were a Communist or a Catholic or a Jew.

Sir:

The religious and political ideas in Communism, Catholicism, and Judaism are not inherently hateful or disrespectful. While you can object to the harshness of the decision made by the Austrian court, I believe that his actions are similar in intent to a hate crime, such as painting swastikas on synagogues. By arguing that it never happened, Mr. Irving's book effectively slanders the 11 million victims of the Holocaust.

Surely, if you have relatives or friends that died as soldiers during World War II, you can see that it would be both puzzling and hateful to meet a person that outrightly denies the existence of the entire war. That sort of opinion diminishes the value of the sacrifice that those people made and attempts to devalue their suffering. For this reason, Mr. Irving's book is disrespectful of my granduncle and grandaunt, who died as innocent victims of the Nazi death camps in Hungary.

The Holocaust destroyed a large percentage of the Jewish population in Europe. It nearly destroyed our language (Yiddish) and attempted to eradicate our culture. A book that denies these facts seeks to destroy these atrocities in the collective memory of our society. That is unacceptable. The 6 million Jews and 5 million "undesirables" that died cannot express outrage. We must express it for them. For this reason, I believe that the court decision was a sound one.

Fu Manchu

 

[Vladimir Berkov]

Sir:

The religious and political ideas in Communism, Catholicism, and Judaism are not inherently hateful or disrespectful. While you can object to the harshness of the decision made by the Austrian court, I believe that his actions are similar in intent to a hate crime, such as painting swastikas on synagogues. By arguing that it never happened, Mr. Irving's book effectively slanders the 11 million victims of the Holocaust.

I don't believe there should exist such a crime as a "hate crime" either. Painting swastikas on a synagogue is trespass and intentional destruction of property. It is already covered by several crimes, we don't need to invent bogus crimes to cover it. If somebody wants to paint a swastika on their own property it is their right to do so. Just as if someone wants to publish their own book it is their own right to do so.

Surely, if you have relatives or friends that died as soldiers during World War II, you can see that it would be both puzzling and hateful to meet a person that outrightly denies the existence of the entire war. That sort of opinion diminishes the value of the sacrifice that those people made and attempts to devalue their suffering. For this reason, Mr. Irving's book is disrespectful of my granduncle and grandaunt, who died as innocent victims of the Nazi death camps in Hungary.

Of course it is an absurd, and disrespectful book. But there are lots of books like that. It is not the right of government to censor things it thinks are merely absurd or disrespectful. For one thing, no two people have identical views on what is personally disrespectful to them.

The Holocaust destroyed a large percentage of the Jewish population in Europe. It nearly destroyed our language (Yiddish) and attempted to eradicate our culture. A book that denies these facts seeks to destroy these atrocities in the collective memory of our society. That is unacceptable. The 6 million Jews and 5 million "undesirables" that died cannot express outrage. We must express it for them. For this reason, I believe that the court decision was a sound one.

This book does not destroy any so-called "collective memory." Go into a bookstore and look at the books which discuss WW2 or the Holocaust. Count how many say it happened, then count how many say it don't. I am willing to bet that 99% of serious scholarly published literature accepts that the holocaust happened and that it was an atrocity.

Censoring or banning a book like the one in this case gives such a book a power it would never have had on its own. It basically tells the people of Austria that they are too stupid and too childish to recognize obvious falsehoods and lies when they see them, and that if they are not protected from people who are pro-Nazi the whole country will revert over to fascism again.

And this isn't even considering the free-speech issue. You don't have free speech if the government decides what ideas get to be published. Free speech means that there will always be things published which are rude, crude, offensive, false, or just evil. But the alternative to free speech is worse, it is this:

Fu Manchu[/QUOTE]

 

[Bebop]

You can't think that sending anyone to jail for what they mistakenly believe to be true could in any way be correct. Even if they write a book about it. There are plenty of people that believe incredible lies that are easily proven wrong. What about the skinheads and Nazi morons that think the same thing? You can't send them to jail for having idiotic thoughts. I don't understand why anyone would even pay attention to what anyone that believes the Holocaust never happened has to say about anything. Free speech really reveals what people are made of. Let them speak freely and let them make fools of themselves. After all, it's only a stupid opinion that can be disproved. It sounds like someone saying, " The earth is flat." Who cares what some whack job has to say about the Holocaust. I say don't give these idiots power by taking them seriously. Throw them in jail when they break the law.

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

I agree.

You can't think that sending anyone to jail for what they mistakenly believe to be true could in any way be correct. Even if they write a book about it. There are plenty of people that believe incredible lies that are easily proven wrong. What about the skinheads and Nazi morons that think the same thing? You can't send them to jail for having idiotic thoughts. I don't understand why anyone would even pay attention to what anyone that believes the Holocaust never happened has to say about anything. Free speech really reveals what people are made of. Let them speak freely and let them make fools of themselves. After all, it's only a stupid opinion that can be disproved. It sounds like someone saying, " The earth is flat." Who cares what some whack job has to say about the Holocaust. I say don't give these idiots power by taking them seriously. Throw them in jail when they break the law.

Throwing anyone in jail for being a crackpot only makes them into a martyr. Hitler even did some (cakewalk) time in the clink, and it only served to give him time to write Mein Kampf and to solidify his image in the eyes of his followers.

 

[Baron Kurtz]

Austrian collective guilt ...

... for the complicity of their ancestors in these atrocities makes them the harshest punishers of holocaust denial. Funnily enough Irving now admits the holocaust happened. give a crackpot some time in the dock and he'll only win over more adherents.

The conviction is a little wierd, given the current European defence of the prophet cartoons (freedom of speech), but that's another story ...

bk

 

[geo]

Austrian collective guilt ...
for the complicity of their ancestors

For how many generations does there have to be guilt for what ancestors did? Are Germans and Austrians and the others that were with them guilty forever? Also, for how long does French gratitude for being liberated have to last?

In addition to the above, I should also say that I agree with the jail sentence. And no, you can't paint swastikas or any other nazi symbol on your own private property in Germany, and I think that's a good thing.

 

[Baron Kurtz]

Please read me correctly: This guilt (in my opinion unnecessary guilt) is the reason for the law. I'm not defending it or otherwise. Austrians and Germans should not, today, feel guilty about things they did not do. If they were involved they should feel guilty. Just as todays Americans should not feel guilty about slavery.

National Shame, i think is how the Germans refer to it. Is National Shame enough of a reason to stifle debate? That, i think, is the question Irving is asking.

bk

 

[geo]

I don't know if guilt is the reason behind that law. I rather think that it's the danger of a Nazi come-back that forces European countries to adopt these laws, and I think they are right.

 

[Salv]

As long as there are people alive who suffered in the camps, and who saw their families murdered, denial of the Holocaust is a direct assault on their history and humanity. To deny that the Holocaust occurred is to call all those survivors liars. Irving hasn't been locked up for having a controversial opinion; he has been locked up for denying the suffering of millions of human beings.

Is it more important that Irving be allowed to call into doubt the testimony and history of a - slowly dwindling - group of human beings, or that those same human beings be treated with respect? Millions were murdered but according to Irving (in the speeches he made in Austria in 1989 which led to his imprisonment) the Auschwitz gas chambers were a "fairytale"; Hitler had protected Europes Jews; surviving death camp witnesses were "psychiatric cases"; and there were no extermination camps in the Third Reich.

Freedom of speech? What about the freedom of Holocaust survivors to be treated as human beings? I know which option I think is more important.

People will believe Irving, because people believe what they want to believe, and that belief gives licence to racist and anti-Semitic thugs and half-wits to abuse and murder because, well, the Jews didn't really suffer at the hands of the Nazis, it says so in this book right here. I don't expect for one minute that disproving Irvings lies will change the minds of his followers, and letting him spew his hatred and lies in public will not reveal him to be an idiot in the eyes of those who want to believe him.

People can be evil - locking up Irving shows that evil won't always triumph.

 

[jake431]

I am not certain I understand what locking Irving up accomplishes - he believes something false, but he believes it. Mind you, I think it's kind of "neat" that the Austrian government has locked him up and all, but I don't think it's rehabilitating - he's not going to moderate his beliefs, nor is society punishing someone for wrongdoing. So why is he in jail? I am not defending him, his beliefs or people who believe similarly. But I question the appropriateness of the motives that mandate such a sentence.

What's interesting to me is after all this time - after the holocaust, inqiusition etc - there is still a (admittedly small) segment of the popluation that believes in a jewish "conspiracy" to take over the world. And that blows my mind - it seems to me that there's more than enough evidence out there to put that fear to rest.

So what's to be accomplished - what's the point of imprisoning a "wrong" thinker? I don't know, Irving having stupid beliefs is not evil. Deciding what people can and can't think and say is, however, evil.

-Jake

 

[Salv]

So what's to be accomplished - what's the point of imprisoning a "wrong" thinker? I don't know, Irving having stupid beliefs is not evil. Deciding what people can and can't think and say is, however, evil.

-Jake

Having those beliefs isn't evil, true, but disseminating them in public and publishing them, thereby publicly calling into doubt the suffering of millions of extermination camp victims and survivors is, I believe, an evil act. As I said before, Irving has not been imprisoned for being a "wrong" thinker. Considering his punishment as an assault on "freedom of speech" is ill-judged.

 

[Burma Shave]

Amen to that, Jake

It's called thought control. Maybe they can't control what we think, but when the government can put a person in jail for believing in something with which they disagree, they're attempting to control thought.

Same thing with hate crimes. As someone noted earlier, if a person commits a crime against someone because of racial, sexual-preference or religious issues, the crime is what they did, not why they did it. If someone kills a gay man and scrawls a slur on his clothing, the crime is the murder -- not the slur. Every crime that should be punished is already on the books, and attaching the tagline of "hate crime" to the crime should not add anything to the appropriate sentence.

 

[jake_fink]

If there are four basic reasons to imprison someone, 1.a) to prevent them from reoffending while incarcerated, 1.b) to rehabilitate the offender, 2) to protect society and/or 3) to act as a deterrent, I think that putting Irving away is mainly to achieve 2 and 3.

He was not imprisoned for "wrong-thinking". His private views are just that, his own, and subject to no law. He was guilty of promulgating those views and in so doing lending credence to the Nazi and Neo-Nazi movements and to anti-semitism in a country with a rather dodgy history on that score. Austria, as the cradle of Nazisim, feels the need to be especially vigilant. Good.

The argument that free speech is a limitless right is really just too convenient. There are laws that govern libel and slander, and if you were libeled or slandered you would certainly want to use them to your advantage. The living vicitms of the holocaust are essentially being libeled when someone denies their experience. Now, does that mean we can all start denying the Holocaust when the last survivor passes away? There are very few First World War soldiers left alive in Canada, when the last one passes away can we start a movement that declares the First World War a fantasy? Not if the truth means something to us, and if it does we will punish liars... not with impronment necessarily, that's reserved for those whose lies put others at risk. But denying history, denying truth has to be recognized for the dangerous work it is. Remember Stalin:

Here is Trotsky with Lenin... and here is Lenin alone after Stalin wrote his own history.

Wasn't he exercising free speech?

Finally, to be a little bit of a relativist myself, about those Danish cartoons... I have no interest in idiotic, childish, racist cartoons, but now that they're newsworthy, I feel I have a right to see them. Again, they are now part of history and have to be a visible, accessible and accpeted part of the public record. People have died in protests over those cartoons, consulates have burned, people have marched in the streets of Western Europe shouting, "Jihad" - a declaration of war, and an exercise, apparently, of free speech. Free speech is not a simple as it seems.

 

[jake_fink]

Salv, it took me so long, what with the doorbell going and the phone ringing, that you beat me to it. Good work.

 

[nightandthecity]

Fu Manchu, JakeF, Salv?¢‚Ǩ¬¶.I understand how you feel, but free speech is more than just some nebulous ?¢‚Ǩ?ìright?¢‚Ǩ?, it is the cornerstone of enlightenment civilization. I find it very disturbing that right across the political spectrum an increasing number of people seem ready to justify limits on free speech - always the free speech of those they disagree with of course.

The Irving case is particularly worrying in that he recently lost a libel action against Deborah Lipstadt in which his ideas were systematically torn apart in court - as a result of which he himself has recanted. So he is going to prison for something he said 17 years ago and in which he no longer believes.

We have just had two similar cases here in the UK. In the first a leading neo-Nazi was tried for ?¢‚Ǩ?ìinciting racial hatred?¢‚Ǩ? against Muslims. Even though he was aquitted the whole sorry business has simply made him a racist martyr. His ideas are stupid and dangerous, but they are held by a lot of people and it is far better that they should be freely aired and publicly answered.

In the second case a Muslim cleric has actually gone to prison for seven years for the same offence. As far as I can see his crime was to preach Jihad, which is pretty much what Bush and Blair have been doing these last few years. So where does it stop? Maybe we should imprison Socialists who preach violent revolution and Conservatives who preach war. Maybe we should stop religions from preaching at all, they?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve all got a pretty black record. There?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s really no end to it.

The point about free speech is that it is precisely the ideas that those in power - or for that matter democratic majorities - find distasteful that most need to be protected from suppression. Free speech is totally meaningless if it only applies to those ideas that politicians or majorities already find acceptable. In such a situation political dialogue is reduced to the mindless incantation of safe platitudes.

 

[Salv]

nightandthecity - I don't think this is a matter of free speech. I refuse to believe that Irving ever really doubted that the Holocaust happened; there is far too much evidence, survivor testimony and the testimonies of the Allied soldiers, and press-men and women, who saw the camps in 1945 for anyone with any sense to deny that millions of people were systematically murdered by the Nazis. I therefore cannot accept that Irving is just exercising his right to free speech. He is (or was, now that he accepts the Holocaust as real) deliberately attempting to deny the horrors of one of the ugliest chapters in recent world history.

If he held, and voiced, the opinion that those murdered in the camps somehow deserved their fate he would then be exercising his right to free speech; odious as that opinion would be he would be entitled to that opinion. Claiming that there was no systematic, production-line extermination of human lives is not the same thing.

 

[Vladimir Berkov]

If he held, and voiced, the opinion that those murdered in the camps somehow deserved their fate he would then be exercising his right to free speech; odious as that opinion would be he would be entitled to that opinion. Claiming that there was no systematic, production-line extermination of human lives is not the same thing.

What's the difference? Each claim is just one man's personal opinion regarding a set of facts. Why should a man be imprisoned for holding or voicing beliefs which are likely (or certainly) wrong?

And remember, if you think that people SHOULD be able to be thrown in prison for such an offense, what is to stop the government from imprisoning people who believe in Satanism or Christianity or Phrenology or the Flat-Earth Theory or any number of unprovable beliefs?