Tuesday, February 21, 2006

David Irving is jailed for three years for Holocaust Denial

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2049360,00.html

I think this is a dreadful judgement for what it means for freedom of speech no matter how offensive.

I personally believe that the line over freedom of speech should be drawn at speech which threatens accidental or deliberate harm on others, therefore speech and opinion that while deeply offensive does not threaten harm on others should be allowed. This includes Irving’s Holocaust Denial.

There are two other specific reasons why I deplore this judgement

1) It creates an unintentional hypocrisy after many European Nations rightly deplored Islamic reaction to the depiction of the prophet Mohammad as an unwarranted attempt at restricting freedom of speech.

2) Restriction of something even as deeply offensive as holocaust denial cuts against the notion that one of the best ways to deal with bad ideas entered into the boulevard of opinion is to allow it to be subjected to the intellectual and factual dissection (and in the case of really bad ideas, intellectual razing to the ground) the rest of society can subject it to. Locking people up for bad ideas also gives those ideas a cache and sense of martyrdom that those ideas don’t deserve, meaning that the burial that those ideas would have had received in an unrestricted public forum now simmer away unresolved to be picked up at a later date by the disaffected and the politically ambitious who will seek to make a cause celebre out of it's rebel status.

David Irving was shocked that he was locked away and rightly so, it is surprising that in this day and age that a modern European State such as Austria can be as doggedly censorious and prescriptive as this. But then again Austria has never been on the right side of Holocaust history and perhaps the one (erroneous) justification that the Austrian government can give for this law is a fear that public expressions of such an opinion might bring out the underlying racism that doesn’t lie that far under the surface of Austrian society.