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Irving Loses Again
 A
few years ago I had lunch with David Irving, now sentenced to three
years in an Austrian prison for the crime of what in this country is called
exercising free speech. Wouldn’t you know it, the Holocaust came up.
He joked that in America, Holocaust memorials were sprouting up “like
McDonald’s.”  He
added seriously, “I’m not a Holocaust
denier. I’m a Holocaust skeptic.”
I’ve seen Irving several
times since then, twice speaking at conferences he’d arranged, and
never heard him say anything close to “Holocaust denial,” the
crime he has pled guilty to. The plea spared him a full ten-year sentence.
It has become routine to refer to
him as “Holocaust denier David Irving,” but nobody ever seems
to quote him actually uttering a thought crime. In court the other day he
confessed the “mistake” of saying “there were no gas
chambers at Auschwitz,” but added, “In no way did I deny the
killings of millions of people by the Nazis.”
And what if he really had denied it?
Ten years in prison for an opinion? His lawyer called the proceedings “a
message trial.” Actually, of course, it was a blasphemy trial.
The rationale, such as it is, for the
Holocaust-denial laws of Austria (and several other countries) is that if
people are allowed to deny that it happened, it may happen again. By this
logic, the Holocaust is most likely to recur in the United States, since we
have no such laws here. Freedom of speech could lead to a second Holocaust!
Thomas Jefferson has a lot to answer for.
Does that sound just a wee bit
hysterical? It reminds me of the incredible uproar over Mel Gibson’s
film The Passion of the Christ, which, we were assured (in
advance, by people who hadn’t seen it), would cause hatred of Jews
and even “violence” against them.
Now that was a pretty clear test
case of this peculiar theory of historical causation. And the result? Though
the movie was a huge hit, it resulted in not a single incident of violence
against anyone. Even one such incident would have made headlines.
“See what we told you?”
But when no pogroms occurred,
nobody expressed surprise, relief, or the disappointment a prophet of doom
experiences when things turn out all right. Mel Gibson made a lot of money,
Abe Foxman made a lot of money, nobody got hurt. You’d think
everyone would be contented with the outcome.
![[Breaker quote for
Irving Loses Again: But who won?]](2006breakers/060221.gif) Even the people who predicted violence didn’t really believe
it, of course. Nobody in his right mind expected violence. We are so used to
prophecies of violence against minorities, especially Jews, that we
don’t bother keeping track of them, any more than we keep track of
astrologers’ predictions. In the real world, things don’t happen
that way. Predicting another Holocaust is like predicting another Reichstag
fire.
Deep down, we know this sort of
talk is usually absurd. But we also know that it can be risky to say so. So we
let the blowhards blow. That’s how they exercise their freedom of
speech.
Nobody says, or thinks, that what
Irving may have said in Austria in 1989 — the site and date of his
alleged “crime” — caused any violence to occur. Some
rabble-rouser. He may have expressed his skepticism with rude bluntness
(that would be just like him), but that wouldn’t even have tended to
inspire harm. It may have inspired more skepticism, but why is that a crime?
Because to some people, on some
subjects, skepticism is blasphemy, and the Holocaust is one of those
subjects. Austria’s law is aimed at “whoever denies, grossly
plays down, approves, or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or
other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in
broadcast, or [in] other media.”
Whew! That gives the prosecutor a
lot of discretion, and the whole premise of the law — that expressing
an opinion of a calamity can cause the same calamity to recur under entirely
different conditions — is screwy.
No doubt Irving’s lawyer
advised him to cut a deal in exchange for a show of contrition. He avoided ten
years in the slammer, but from now on he will be, in the media, not just a
“Holocaust denier,” but a “convicted” Holocaust
denier or “confessed” Holocaust denier. Not much hope of
“reformed,” “repentant,” or
“recovering” Holocaust denier, I suppose.
Meanwhile, the Holocaust
Prevention Confederation can claim another triumph. Over freedom of
speech.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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