Irving back in the news
I can’t greet the news that David Irving may be tried for holocaust denial under Austrian law with much enthusiasm, despite the fact that Lord Greville Janner, chairman of the Holocaust Memorial Trust, supports this move. Holocaust denial is morally and historically wrong. But Irving’s previous appearance in court boosted his prestige for all the wrong reasons. The extremist spin machine misrepresented the 2000 case as if Irving were been prosecuted for his views, whereas he was in fact attempting to silence another academic accusing him of holocaust denial. As a result, a controversy-hungry Oxford Union flirted with inviting him as a speaker (much to my chagrin as a member), while morons at C-SPAN introduced his odious person to American national television. But at least in that instance, anyone who knew anything about the case could point out that it was Irving who was attempting to use libel laws to squash views he did not want to hear, and not the other way round. Vile though holocaust denial is, the right to free speech must be defended: both because it is a fundamental element in Western democracy, and because the denial of free speech risks fuelling right-wing conspiracy theorising. That’s not to say we should extend deniers any intellectual quarter, any more than, say, the British government should pander to the so-called ‘legitimate’ concerns of anti-immigration pressure groups.
Update (8 January 2006, 7.36 p.m.): Professor Deborah Lipstadt thinks Irving should go free.
December 27th, 2005 at 1.12 pm
[…] The world is a funny place. In Austria, Irving is to be prosecuted for denying a genocide occurred. In Turkey, Orphan Pamuk is to be prosecuting for admitting a genocide occurred. As I noted previously, Irving’s trial is a bad idea which may have the regrettable effect of giving his lies more attention than they deserve, especially seeing as his professional reputation is already in tatters. Pamuk’s trial for publicly denigrating the Turkish identity in a Swiss newspaper magazine, on the other hand, is a terrible idea which may have yet have good effects. As George Monbiot optimistically notes in today’s Guardian, ‘If there is one course of action that could be calculated to turn these massacres [of Armenians by the Turks] into live issues, it is the trial of the country’s foremost novelist for mentioning them.’ Monbiot suggests that the British have developed a more effective approach to dealing with their own imperial attrocities: they have largely forgotten all about them. This truth makes the rise of media-friendly, revisionist historians who emphasize the blessings of empire, and the commonly heard, yet erroneous, complaint that the treatment of British history in education and by the media makes people ‘ashamed to be English’ by dwelling on the bad bits, all the more disturbing. Something to think about the next time you hear Peter Hitchens ranting on about how good things were in the old days, or Niall Ferguson offering the Americans foreign policy advice. […]
February 22nd, 2006 at 11.39 am
‘Lurker’ made a comment here, but it was clearly intended for my ‘Atrocities denied, censored, and forgotten’ post, so I’ve taken the liberty of moving it there. The trackback link wasn’t working (it’s now fixed), so I assume that was my fault.