[Mb-civic] Freedom of hate speech - Jeff Jacoby - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Freedom of hate speech

By Jeff Jacoby  |  March 1, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

FUNNY PEOPLE, the Austrians. If you're Kurt Waldheim -- a former Nazi 
military officer linked to a genocidal massacre during World War II -- 
they elect you president. But if you're David Irving -- a British author 
who claimed that there never was a Nazi genocide during World War II -- 
they throw you in the slammer.

On second thought, not funny at all. Austria disgraced itself when it 
elected Waldheim president in 1986, apparently unconcerned by the 
revelation that he had served in a German military unit responsible for 
mass murder in the Balkans and been listed after the war as a wanted 
criminal by the UN War Crimes Commission. In a very different way it 
disgraced itself again last week, when a Vienna court sentenced Irving, 
a racist and an anti-Semite, to three years in prison for denying that 
the Nazis annihilated 6 million European Jews.

Irving is a man of great intellectual gifts who devoted his life to a 
grotesque and evil project: rehabilitating the reputation of Hitler and 
the Third Reich. Necessarily, that meant denying the Holocaust and 
ridiculing those who suffered in it, and Irving has long done so with 
relish. ''I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's 
baloney, it's a legend," he told a Canadian audience in September 1991. 
''There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around -- in fact the 
number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very odd to 
say the least -- I'm going to form an association of Auschwitz 
Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars, or A-S-S-H-O-L-S."

Presumably Irving had in mind people like my father, whose arm bears to 
this day the number A-10502, tattooed there in blue ink on May 28, 1944, 
the day he and his family were transported to Auschwitz. My father's 
parents, David and Leah Jakubovic, and his youngest brother and sister, 
Alice, 8, and Yrvin, 10, were not tattooed; Jews deemed too old or too 
young to work were sent immediately to the gas chambers. His teenage 
siblings, Zoltan and Franceska, were tattooed and, like him, put to work 
as slave laborers. Zoltan was killed within days; Franceska lasted a few 
months longer. Of the seven members of the Jakubovic family sent to 
Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, only my father was alive in the spring 
of 1945.

So on a personal level, the prospect of David Irving spending his next 
three years in a prison cell is something over which I will lose no 
sleep. He is a repugnant, hate-filled liar, who even as a child was 
enamored of the Nazis and had a pronounced cruel streak.

But as a matter of law and public policy, Irving's sentence is 
deplorable. The opinions he expressed are vile, and his arguments about 
the Holocaust are ludicrous. But governments have no business 
criminalizing opinions and arguments, not even those that are vile or 
ludicrous. To be sure, freedom of speech is not absolute; laws against 
libel, death threats, and falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater are 
both reasonable and necessary. But free societies do not throw people in 
prison for giving offensive speeches or spouting historical lies.

Austria, the nation that produced Hitler and cheered the Anschluss, may 
well believe that its poisoned history requires a strong antidote. 
Punishing anyone who ''denies, grossly trivializes, approves, or seeks 
to justify" the Holocaust or other Nazi crimes may seem a small price to 
pay to keep would-be totalitarians and hatemongers at bay. But a 
government that can make the expression of Holocaust denial a crime 
today can make the expression of other offensive opinions a crime tomorrow.

Americans, for whom the First Amendment is a birthright, should 
understand this instinctively. ''If there is any principle of the 
Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other 
it is the principle of free thought," wrote Supreme Court Justice Oliver 
Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1928. ''Not free thought for those who agree with 
us, but freedom for the thought that we hate."

It is popular in some circles to argue that the United States should do 
certain things -- adopt single-payer health insurance, abolish capital 
punishment, etc. -- to conform to the practice in other democracies. 
Those who find that a persuasive argument might consider that Irving is 
behind bars today because Austria doesn't have a First Amendment. 
Neither do Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, 
Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, or Switzerland -- all of which 
have made Holocaust denial a crime.

''Freedom for the thought we hate" is never an easy sell, but without it 
there can be no true liberty. David Irving is a scurrilous creep, but he 
doesn't belong in prison. Austria should let him go free -- not for his 
sake, but for Austria's.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/01/freedom_of_hate_speech/
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