David Irving loses in court again

Tuesday's Blue's News contained eight items on the conviction of far-right British historian and scamster David Irving in Austria on charges of Holocaust denial, which is a crime in Austria. I'm putting up the Blue's News items this week, and I obviously thought that was a story worth more than one link. This one from the Guardian tells the story of the trial: Irving jailed for denying Holocaust: Three years for British historian who described Auschwitz as a fairytale by Ian Traynor 02/21/06. (I wrongly identified it earlier in Blue's News as having come from the International Herald-Tribune.)

This Independent article gives some background on the notorious Irving: David Irving: An anti-Semitic racist who has suffered financial ruin by Oliver Duff 02/21/06.

Irving's case is intriguing for several reasons. One is that it's a reminder that European democracies have a somewhat different approach to free speech issues than the United States, although the differences may not be so drastic as they might appear from this case.

The Times of London editorialized on 02/21/06 (Denial Denied):

Yet there remains the sense that the law is used to mask an inability among Austrians to come to terms with their history, and that the country has not experienced the same level of national soul-searching as Germany.

I'm not exactly sure how we measure "national soul-searching". But the Times editorialists seem to have forgotten about one piece of history that relates to this. The post-Second World War 4-power administration of Austria ended with the State Treaty of 1955. That treaty, with the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union, requires Austria to suppress Nazi propaganda and any attempts to restore the Nazi Party. Austria does not recognize Russia as the successor to the USSR for the purposes of that treaty. But its provisions with the US, Britain and France are still in force. That such laws are on the books in Austria has nothing to do with any "level of national soul-searching". It's a matter of complying with their treaty obligations.


That's not to say that the particular law against Holocaust denial is absolutely required under the treaty. But it is to say that those laws emerged from a certain set of historical circumstances, not from some convoluted way to avoid thinking about the Third Reich era.

This conviction is always likely to be understood among many Muslims as hypocrisy on the part of "the West", as preventing smears against "the Jews" by allowing them against Muslims and their Prophet. I don't think that's the right way to see it. But a lot of Muslims are bound to process it that way.

I'm partial to a hardline Jeffersonian approach to freedom of speech and the press. Which I would define as the idea that things work out best when people have the right to say any damn fool thing they want, as long as the rest of us are free to say what a damn fool thing it is.

But in the real world, things are more complicated than that. In EU countries (I'm most familiar with Germany and Austria in this regard), political parties and groups that don't support the constitutional order can be banned. We achieve the same result in the US, but by a somewhat different approach.

And Irving's activities in Austria which got him in hot water were very much connected with his efforts to promote far-right groups in Austria. Irving is a British citizen, and Austria is not the only country that has forbidden him to speak there. He has even been banned from Canada, which is not so easy to achieve.

Deborah Lipstadt, whose court victory over Irving is described in the Independent article linked up, has a blog which is largely devoted to taking on the Holocaust deniers' disgusting nonsense. She noted this about the outcome of this latest trial (Irving's sentence: not just a question of free speech History on Trial blog 02/21/06):

I think one of the things that has been lost sight of in discussion of Irving's sentence is that the judge clearly thought that he was lying and playing with the court when he claimed to have stopped being a Holocaust denier as of the 1990s. ...

In short, there may well have been an issue of perjury here and not just free speech. Irving, as I have said earlier, seems to me to think he can say what he wants with no consequences. ...

It seems to me that judges really hate it when they are toyed with.

This was a lark for Irving. But it did not turn out that way.

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