Civitas Blog

Some with an axe to grind have been quick to exploit the complexity of the situation presented by this conjuncture of events to argue for some position they favour in relation to one of them by demanding similar treatment in relation to it as that which has been meted out in some other case. Thus, both the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference and the British National Party have accused of double standards those who would support newspapers having freedom to publish cartoons of Mohammed, while not being willing to extend similar freedom to David Irving to be free by law publicly to deny in Austria that the Holocaust ever happened.

Ironically, of course, the two organisation draw precisely the opposite practical inferences from their common demand for parity of treatment in these two cases. While the OIC demands neither form of expression be permitted under the law, doubtless to obtain proscription of the one in which it is specially concerned, the BNP demands both forms of expression be legally permitted, again doubtless to ensure the freedom for exression of the opinions it favours.

Liberals, of course, favour liberty, and so their presumption must that there should be freedom of expression unless a compelling case can be made out against it in a specific case. Short of downright incitement to violence of the sort of which Abu Hamza was found guilty, many liberals have found themselves obliged to accept that people such be free to express in public views that fall short of direct incitement to violence, however false, distasteful, and offensive these views might be.

On this view, while the conviction of Abu Hamza was acceptable, since he incited the Muslims whom he addressed in his sermons to carry out acts of violence against non-Muslims, newspapers should be free to publish whatever cartoons they choose, no matter how offensive others might find them, and likewise so should Griffin and Irving be free under the law to express opinions that fall short of incitement.

One very clear example of a liberal who feels reluctantly constrained by liberal scruples to concede this in the case of David Irving is Daniel Finkelstein. In an op-ed piece in yesterday’s Times, after movingly relating his own family’s intimate and tragic personal involvement in the events of the Holocaust, Finkelstein felt constrained to acknowledge Irving should be free to express the opinions that he did and should not have been tried or imprisoned. He writes:

‘It is difficult not to feel anger at Irving. And I do feel rage. But I do not wish him behind bars, not for giving an opinion, not for delivering a lecture, however warped and horrible his opinion is…. I believe that by allowing anyone to assert anything, the truth will triumph, provided that its friends are vigilant and relentless.’

How reasonable and liberal Finkelstein sounds, and how intolerant and illiberal does he make appear all who brought Irving to trial, sentenced him to prison, and framed the laws that enabled them to do so. In this case, however, it is Irving’s prosecutors, not Finkelstein, who are the liberals and tolerant, and it is Finkelstein, not Irving’s prosecutors, who is favouring illiberal intolerance by what he is advocating.

What David Irving did back in 1989 in Austria and for which he has just been convicted was not just publicly to express scepticism about the Holocaust. What he did was publicly to express complete disdain for the notion that anything like it had happened, and before an excited audience of right-wing Austrian students who had invited him to address them in the very country in which Hitler had been born and from which the scourge of Nazism was and still remains far from being removed.

Irving’s speeches were deliberately calculated to enflame their pro-Nazi sentiments and sympathies, by allowing them, and others like them, to dismiss the idea there was anything of which the Nazis and their latter-day sympathisers have cause to be ashamed save their late Fuhrer’s defeat, while simultaneously he fanned their anti-Semitic ire by suggesting that Jews who have made a fuss of the Holocaust have thereby perpetrated on the wolrd a gigantic fraud of which Germany and Austria have been the chief victims, and for having done which they should be made to pay the price.

The Austrian law forbidding Holocaust denial is on a par with and motivated by exactly the same concerns as both there and in Germany, where there is a similar law, as are behind the laws in these two countries that proscribe the Nazi party and the public wearing of Nazi insignia. These laws are motivated not by any illiberal intolerance similar to that which once fuelled Nazism, but by the perfectly liberal concern to ensure that venomous ideology does not flare up there again.

There is a perfectly bona fide liberal case for favouring the legal interdiction in these two countries, and wherever else there is a genuine threat of resurgent Nazism, of the public expression of such opinions as those Irving expressed and for having done which he has been imprisoned. It issues from no less an impeccably liberal source than John Stuart Mill in his famous essay On Liberty which this week has been so often wrongly cited as giving warrant for supposing liberals have no alternative but to condone Irving's saying what he did and to deplore the fate he has suffered at the hands of the Austrian authorities for having said it.

In the first paragraph of the third chapter of that essay that immediately follows the famous one in which Mill defends freedom of thought and expression, Mill adds a caveat to his general commendation of such freedom. He observes:

‘even opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed out among the same mob in the form of a placard. Acts, of whatever kind, which, without justifiable cause, do harm to others, may be, and in the more important cases absolutely require to be, controlled, … when needful, by the active interference of mankind.’

The Austrian students who heard Irving speak may not have thereby been prompted that very night to go out and burn down any Jewish properties. But were such speeches as Irving’s freely allowed in Austria and Germany, there was and remains every reason for the Austrian and German authorities to suppose that before long their streets, and those of their neighbouring countries, would once again echo to the sound of the breaking glass of the windows of shops and places of worship belonging to Jews and other ethnic minorities, and other sounds much, much worse than these.

To illustrate what danger Irving posed, consider a speech he made in March 1990 in the East German town of Halle to an audience of neo-Nazis. The account of it comes from a book about Irving’s unsuccessful libel suit in 2000 against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt for having published a book she had written accusing him of having wilfully and maliciously distorted facts of history, of which he was fully aware, so as cast doubt on the idea that the Holocaust had really happened. A video of his speech was presented as part of the evidence of the defendants to show motive:

‘A trench-coat clad Irving is shown addressing a crowd of young skinheads…. As the ranks of skinheads march in front of him stamping their Doc Martens and waving the red and black Reichskriegsflagge – Reich battle flag emblem of German irredentism since the turn of the century, and a stand-in for the banned Nazi swastika, …in response to a burst of German rhetoric from Irving, they begin chanting: Sieg Heil! Seig Heil! Sieg Heil!’ [D.D.Guttenplan, The Holocaust on Trial: History Justice and the David Irving Libel Case (London: Granta Books, 2001), p. 244]

Again, consider a slogan Irving coined and unveiled to the world at a press conference that he gave in West Berlin in October 1989 which subsequently was used as the slogan of a conference in Munich in 1990 at which Irving spoke. The slogan runs: Wahrheit Macht Frei (The Truth Makes Free), and is a clear allusion to the slogan Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes Free) that festooned the gates of Auschwitz. Clearly, within the context of Holocaust denial what it seems to be suggesting is that, by denying the occurrence of the Holocaust in the manner in which Irving and his like are, legitimacy, and thereby, more importantly, legality, will once again be able to be conferred on the Nazis and their latter-day sympathisers.

This last-mentioned consideration brings me to the question whether, as some have claimed, a custodial sentence of the length Irving received was too severe for a crime he committed so long ago. Had Irving merely been fined or given a conditional discharge, he would have been able and likely to accept the invitation to attend and speak at the Holocaust Denial Conference about to take place in Iran organised by a President of that country who has sworn to wipe Israel off the map and who is busily seeking nuclear capability.

That consideration alone was cause enough for Irving to have been awarded a custodial sentence, notwithstanding his cynical and clearly insincere belated avowal of belief in the Holocaust. The suggestion that the remoteness in time of the speeches for giving which he was punished render that sentence excessive is refuted by the fact that it was only in 2005 that he exposed himself to such punishment by choosing then to return to Austria.

Irving and others like him should not be allowed to deny the Holocaust in the countries which spawned Nazism, especially before gatherings of excited neo-Nazis, only too eager to be able to bask before the world in the aura of legitimacy that Holocaust denial enables them spuriously to pretend they have.

Of all the remarks on this subject that I have come across, by far the most perceptive, in my view was, that among several hundred commenting on a posting about the Irving verdict to be found on the wonderfully informative web-site Little Green Footballs. The comment (number 302) by a John Schneider runs so:

‘Arrested for saying what you think? Can't happen in a free society, right?

'Nothing is simple in the realm of speech. "Turning the prism" factually makes a huge difference. "Mere" Holocaust denial is one thing. Rallying neo-Nazis (cough, Muslims, cough) to another Holocaust under the banner of free speech sounds all too familiar in today's world.'

Returning to David Irving and to Daniel Finkelstein’s qualms about Irving's incarceration for having said what he did, my concluding observation is that is only a pity the Austrian den in which he is currently being detained contains no lions. For it is unlikely the God of Finkelstein and his forefathers would have been nearly as protective of Irving as He is reported to have been of a certain ancient Israelite who shares one, if not the other, of Finkelstein’s names.