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Sun Mar 5 19:43:40 PST 2006

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DENYING THE HOLOCAUST
Feb 23rd 2006  

It is loathsome, but should not be a crime

FABRICATING history is an act of intellectual vandalism that poisons
modern understanding of past misdeeds and heroism alike. But should it
be a crime? In civilised countries, the truth is best policed by
scholars, not criminal prosecutors. Historians who distort, inflate and
invent find their credibility shredded by their peers, not the police.
But David Irving, an author of books about the second world war, is now
starting a three-year prison sentence in Austria (see article[1]) for
remarks he made in 1989 doubting the existence of gas chambers at
Auschwitz. That has won him praise in Iran, where the president,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, recently described the holocaust as a "myth".

Holocaust denial is ridiculous, but it is too common, and too damaging,
to be a joke. It commonly makes four claims: that the numbers of Jews
killed were wildly inflated; that any persecution was matched or
exceeded by allied war crimes against Germans; that Hitler was ignorant
of, or even opposed to, the killing of Jews; and that accounts of
systematic extermination were invented to benefit Israel. 

Holocaust deniers such as Mr Irving are expert at taking anomalies and
contradictions in the historical record and erecting such pyramids of
loathsome nonsense upon them. From the gaps (all explicable) in the
surviving evidence about Auschwitz-Birkenau they infer that the gas
chambers there were a propaganda invention. And not only that: other
details of the Holocaust are invented too. In fact it didn't really
happen: Hitler liked Jews. Or (as the Palestinian movement Hamas
argues) Jews caused the war. Holocaust denial (or "revisionism" as its
pseudo-scholarly advocates term it) uses quibbles, semantics and phoney
logic to befuddle the gullible about the mass murder of millions of
innocents. 

To the fair-minded, such claims are preposterous. But among the
prejudiced, silly and ignorant they flourish, especially on the
internet. They gain a touch of intellectual legitimacy from a handful
of cranky academics--though of these only Mr Irving has any claim to be
a historian. His early works, particularly on military matters, were
acclaimed. Nobody doubts his knowledge of German archives, or his skill
in deciphering the crabbed handwriting of senior Nazis.

But there are plenty of doubts about his integrity. At a libel action
in London in 2000, in which he had every chance to make his best case,
the judge concluded that he was "anti-Semitic and racist", saying he
had "persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated
historical evidence" and "portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly
favourable light."

It is hard to see what the Austrian court's sentence can add to that.
Keeping Mr Irving in jail at most may stop him going to a conference
that Mr Ahmadinejad is convening to "rewrite and revise" the history of
the holocaust. But against that small plus are two big minuses. One is
that the sentence makes Mr Irving look a martyr. The other is that it
makes the West look hypocritical: all too willing to bruise Muslim
feelings, while protecting Jewish ones by law.

Laws against holocaust denial (which 14 countries have) were never a
good idea. The best defence against neo-Nazis is reason and ridicule,
not the criminal law. But at a time when the western world is battling
to defend free speech against religious zealotry, they look
particularly indefensible. It is punishment enough for Mr Irving that
he has lost his professional credibility. He should not lose his
liberty too.

-----
[1] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=5555832

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