Irving and Free Speech

David Irving is a very unpleasant man. He writes books which espouse hateful ideas by the use of selective use of facts (and is responsible for my one and only act of book vandalism, as a university copy gained some added "notes" - normally I'm loathe to so much as break a spine or fold a page, let alone actually write in books). Until facing a jail sentence, he has consistently denied the existence of the Holocaust:

"Seventy four thousand died of natural causes in the work camps and the rest were hidden in reception camps after the war and later taken to Palestine, where they live today new identities."

- Speech in Vienna, 1989 - quote from the Independent

Even his last-minute "conversion" was less than convincing:

The judge repeatedly asked Irving if he still subscribed to the views articulated in the 1989 speeches. "I made a mistake saying there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz," he conceded. He claimed the Holocaust figure of six million murdered Jews was "a symbolic number" and said his figures totalled 2.7 million.

He said he was not sure how many died at Auschwitz, but he mentioned a figure of 300,000, a fraction of the accepted total. And he still believed Hitler protected the Jews and tried to put off the Final Solution - the systematic killing of all European Jews - at least until after the second world war.

- quote from the Guardian

He is a racist:

Irving composed a poem for [his wife], which ran: "I am a baby Aryan/Not Jewish or sectarian/I have no plans to marry an/Ape or Rastafarian."

- quote from the Guardian

His works encourage assorted right-wing loonies in their own Holocaust denial, allowing them to believe they have "proof" on their side:

A former Australian beauty queen and socialite divorcee has dramatically championed the case of British historian and Holocaust denier David Irving...
In front of camera crews and reporters, Renouf called for the bodies of "so-called Holocaust victims to be exhumed to see whether they died from typhoid or gas"...
Renouf praised Irving for "standing up to the Zionists" before a member of the Austrian press shouted at her: "Do you think your British flag entitles you to bring your Nazi propaganda into this court?"

- quote from the Courier-Mail

He provoked the Austrian courts by returning to the country despite a previous ban and an outstanding warrant for his arrest:

Asked by the Observer last month why he appeared deliberately to court trouble in Austria by returning when he knew he could be arrested and prosecuted, he replied: "I'm from a family of officers and I'm an Englishman. We march towards the gunfire."

- quote from the Guardian

All of this makes him nasty, twisted, misguided, stubborn and a little stupid. It doesn't, however, mean he needs to be locked up. It is understandable why Austria and the other European countries most affected by Nazism have laws against Holocaust denial - law is, after all, developed within the historical context of each nation, and addresses real issues pertaining to its culture and development. The jailing of Irving, however, will not do anything to prevent his ideas from being propogated, and will not dissuade anyone who supports him from continuing in their skewed thoughts.

The only likely outcome of this prison sentence will be to promote Irving to the status of martyr within neo-Nazi ranks (I for one could stand not to hear a Horst Wessel style song with Irving as its hero), and to damage the concept of free speech. Within the recent context of the cartoon riots, this issue is of more importance than it has been for some time, and it is somewhat hypocritical for a European nation to object these protests while simultaneously seeking to restrict the rights of a different opinion to be heard.

In a free society, haters must be free to hate (so long as they don't commit or incite violence based on these hatreds), differing opinions must be allowed to be aired, and debate must be allowed to develop. And only by listening to the likes of Irving can their errors be highlighted. Public suppression of his ideas would not allow other prominent and respected historians to refute his notions, thus allowing the true story to be heard, and possibly even preventing some others from accepting Irving's version of the past as true. Outlawing Irving in effect prevents debate and continued research on an important subject.

As an aside, I have often (well, occasionally) wondered how someone renowned for his archive work and detailed knowledge of his subject area could allow such bias to dominate his work. While this appears to be mainly due to him having already held some rather odious ideas, I wonder it is also in part due to his lack of formal training in historianship. One of the first lessons to be learned is the ability to spot bias in the work of other historians, in the accounts of witnesses, and indeed even in the choice of material recorded within the all-important primary resouces (i.e if you don't want people in the future to know about something, don't leave a papertrail proving its existence. What is absent can be as significant as what is present, particularly so in modern history). Perhaps this has made it easier for him to read his own views into the material he has found?