Holocaust denier Irving is jailed

Of course antisemitism is wrong, but anti-antisemitism is more wrongerer.

Of course what happened in the second world war was extremely wrong, but using that for the rest of eternity as an excuse to control media and governments all over the world (Every government representative who visits Israel has to visit the holocaust museum first, for instance. That's very understandable, but it's still a mild form of "let's make sure nobody forgets, in case they were going to criticize us" type of brainwashing.) is only going to backfire and recreate the anti-jewish paranoia and hate that had been slowly growing since the middle ages. If it isn't too late for that already, considering what happened in the Palestinian elections and the (not vocal but still visible) support some anti-Israel sentiments are starting to get in lots of European media/population groups.

Anyway. I realise I'm biased against both sides, but I'm going to read up on the history and background of it all, once I find a clear and objective account of the whole mess. If one exists.

That said, jailing anybody for ideas propounded in academic research is shocking. Way to create a martyr, Austria.

Yeah, I don't think this turnout is an especially good one. Especially given the apparent rationale of his defense, which would otherwise be a total blow to Holocaust deniers: his whole argument was that he thought one thing, acquired more information on the matter, and learned he was wrong! (Though the sincerity of that is probably compromised by the part where he's all "I dunno, I'm not an expert on the Holocaust.")

I'm mostly just wondering about the set-up of the laws, since in cases like these they abstract themselves really far from concrete incitement of violence. I mean, the most obvious form of incitement would be standing in front of a mob and saying "get them." A still powerful one would be to print material saying stuff like, I dunno, "we must remove all Jews from our communities" -- that still carries implications and suggestions of actions. But historical revisionism, no matter how much it ties into those same systems of thought (and even when it seems really clear what the thrust of it is) ... it's still removed by a whole lot of abstract steps from concrete incitement. So I wonder how the laws are set up, and what number of steps away from the mob they actually extend.

Irving is a racist. There has been a trickle of 'amusing' letters into the Guardian from correspondents who had even been at school with Irving, who noted his early incidents of outspoken bigotry, and were hardly surprised to find him in the dock trying to Eddie Haskell his way out of it.

Laws here are to prove that the basis for the behaviour is the racist beliefs of the holder, and - whether as a palliative step or not - denying the Jews lost 6 million people when they clearly did, and asserting that they are only playing up for sympathy from the rest of us, is derogatory to both the Jews and his profession. You cannot in effect be jailed for writing "wrong history", just discredited. As a derogator of Jews, it has to be proven to the court that this stance has caused Jews to suffer, directly or through his influence of a group who then acts unlawfully.

Personallly I would sentence the fucker to three years as a cleaner at one of the camp museums and let him think about the experience of ALL the people killed there (I have a half-Roma friend whose grandfather was one of three survivors from one camp).

Yes, you're right, e.g.

"I said that then based on my knowledge at the time, but by 1991 when I came across the Eichmann papers, I wasn't saying that anymore and I wouldn't say that now,"

This is b.s. -- the Deborah Lipstadt libel trial in the UK concluded in 2000.

x-post

Is there any country that jails people for libel?

Add to that the sort of gut-level disgust that almost anyone interested in history feels about a man who, in possession of what even his enemies admit is a prodigious gift for historical research, willfully misrepresents the historical record in order to further some really pernicious ideas amounting backwards for his discipline, well-articulated enough to convince people who don't know better & give ammo to the sorts of dire Nietzschean types who form Nazi groups - well, it's easy to understand how a government might say "fuck it, let's get his ass in jail, at least it'll slow him down." Which is revenge, right, and it's ineffective as a legal strategy: what they mean, presumably, is "we wish David Irving did not exist."

x-post I think the impulse here is to discern between "dissent" and "dishonest dissent" - not legislatable, but I get the impulse, as I say

"'Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces, and they insist on it to the extent that if anyone proves something contrary to that, they condemn that person and throw them in jail.' Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Dec. 8, 2005."

Keep in mind that this is an Austrian law, not a European one. As far as I know Austria is the only European country to have this in their lawbook.

But history is constantly being re-written. Usually we rely on Academics to correct each other. I understand the points made about deliberate disinformation but I'm unhappy about the idea of Official History, especially if it's only applied to the Holocaust.

xpost, about disinformation or falsehood --

Well that would be closer to the rationale I was comparing to libel -- the idea would be that it was a demonstrable lie to claim the Holocaust did not take place, and that somehow we're not allowed to lie about anything that meaningful. But even if you accept that, it's still really hard to draw lines around. How much do you distinguish between manipulative lies (like Irving's) and being mistaken (like Irving decided to claim he was -- "not enough information")? And where do you draw the line between historical facts and interpretations thereof? And at what point does something become an indisputable "fact," anyway? (I suppose some of the rationale of laws like this is to say: "Those are all good questions in the abstract, but millions of dead human beings = the kind of cold hard fact we're willing to legislate.")

xpost NoTime otm - it's quite clear from Irving's military histories that he's utterly capable of drawing the right conclusion; it's a short step to conclude that he's stating a different one for reasons other than that he thinks it's the historical truth

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #7,321 in Books
Yesterday: #369,233 in Books

Just for the record, I'm not much in favor of these sorts of laws; I'm just trying to sort out what some potential rationales for them might be. Thinking out loud more than anything.

these are the questions walter benjamin is asking himself in my course readings for this week.

maybe a benjaminian would like to appear on irving's behalf?

Likewise. If cases like this have any point it's to make us think about the line between speech as an abstract and as an action. Comparing this with the recent Nick Griffin trial is interesting, because you could argue that Griffin's speeches were far more likely to incite actual harm.

(Can a libel mod check that last sentence please?)

It is entirely frustrating trying to get a grip on what the actual rationale behind these laws are, because no one in Austrian public life is willing to discuss them regardless of where they are along the political spectrum. I do get a gut sense that most Austrians don't like the laws as written, but that there is a real sense of international demand that such laws stay on the books -- whether this is expressed as "of course we owe this to the world" or "of course those fuckers out there would be THRILLED to pick on little old Austria again if we dared to repeal or reform these laws."

And FWIW, Holocaust denial isn't predicated on answering those sorts of questions.

xxpost

I don't see how anti-anti-semitism can be wrongerer than anti-semitism. If you think anti-semitism is wrong then surely you are an anti-anti-semitic?

I don't think I'm in favour of these laws either but really Irving gives me the creeps. Just take a look at his website - he's obsessed - I've never seen so many pictures of Hitler. He ponders the whereabouts of Himmlers glass eye at one point for fcks sake. Maybe we shouldn't lock him up but he should at least be allowed to tie his shoelaces together or something.

or maybe we could just get on with the task of intelligently refuting whatever nonsense the silly old fucker spouts, instead of - as RJG notes in an OTM way above - making him into a martyr for the right. christ, how can you be so scared of some nutcase talking bollocks that the only option is to jail him? especially given that ...

I'm dying to see how Arab media react to this. Presumably they will be capitalizing on this as proof of the "double standard" they see.

... the shit is now going to hit the fan vastly.

insanity, basically. fucking insanity.

I can definately see that, Nabisco. The thing is that 'incitement of hatred' is a lot less 'specified' then the Austrian law, which to me seems to exist solely - or for a very major part - because of the history of Austria and the way that country deals with it's history. I'm no expert on that subject, and it probably wouln't justify a law like this for me, but it probably should be taken into account. In The Netherlands, first charges should be pressed against a statement of holocaust denial by, say, a Jewish organisation, before it becomes a lawsuit. It's highly unlikely district-attorneys will act upon this alone. I'm very curious about the judges' verdict in this one though. Discrimination and denial of a fact society takes as 'historic' and 'solid' are two different things. It's like people up this thread already said rightly, how far does your right go to deny what the majority considers 'history' (as facts)? Even if denial is grounded in a discrimitory or racist belief?

I think to some on the far right and elsewhere he will be a martyr if he's imprisoned and a hero if he isn't. Refuting him doesn't get us very far. People have been doing that since day one. As Issac Davis once said "A satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point."

Hell, I don't even want that...he's not worth the effort. I just don't want to see his face for a while.

given my druthers i'd vote against these kinds of laws, but i'm not sure that they are on balance a bad thing. it's tricky.

One of the AEL cartoons displayed an image of Dutch Holocaust victim Anne Frank in bed with Adolf Hitler, and another questioned whether the Holocaust actually occurred. Dyab Abou Jahjah, the party's founder and best-known figure, defended the action on the Dutch television program Nova Saturday.
"Europe has its sacred cows, even if they're not religious sacred cows," he told the program.

Denying the Holocaust is illegal under most European hate speech laws, which outlaw intimidating or inciting hatred toward groups on the basis of their ethnic, cultural, religious or sexual identity. Complaints about alleged hate speech are common but prosecutions are rare and convictions very rare.

That's what it comes down to, I think ... every country has questionable laws on the books. Nobody raises a fuss about them because they're virtually never applied. If you have to spend 20 years knowingly lying in print while passing it off as legitimate historical research in order to get convicted for holocaust denial, the potential for abuse of this particular law is fairly low.

this is an interesting point - if Russia were still monolithic, say a Democratic unified post-Soviet Russia, there might well be anti-Stalinist legislation: it's sort of a question of venue somewhat, I think

Yes, communicating a thought is more active than merely having a thought.

As a derogator of Jews, it has to be proven to the court that this stance has caused Jews to suffer, directly or through his influence of a group who then acts unlawfully

Was this proven in court? Could it possibly be proven in court?

RJG isOTM about making him a martyr, but the point of holocaust denial laws is not that you're "scared of a nutcase", it's that those countries have to draw a line that says "These atrocities happened, we were responsible for it, and nobody is going to say it didn't happen".

It's like a very short and concise truth and reconciliation commission. It might go some way to hindering fascists as they attempt to rise again -- and if they could capitalise on all that great and terrible iconography fearlessly, you better believe they would -- but that's only part of it. It means that nobody can say "it's only propaganda and exaggeration, there's no way we did that", because the truth of it is so established that to say otherwise is criminal.

The sentencing serves no useful purpose, and is pretty much counter-productive I suspect. I like Suzy's idea though.

And as for ...

I'm dying to see how Arab media react to this. Presumably they will be capitalizing on this as proof of the "double standard" they see.

... the shit is now going to hit the fan vastly.

The Arab media can suck a picture of a dick if they equate offensive cartoons with denial of genocide. Especially considering the antisemitic cartoons they themselves run.

o well, there we go. i'm sure nobody had thought of that diplomatic solution.

there are far wider-ranging issues here, and the perception of this sentence by the arab media/muslim society in general is hugely important. but hey, why worry about global relations as a whole when we can argue the point endlessly about the relative merits of austrian law?

suzy, you're awesome and your post was bang-on, but i think you may have surpassed yourself here!

Freedom of speech is never absolute, not even in the free-est of democracies. I do think ultimately freedom of speech should include views such as holocaust denial, odious though it is. But Austria and Germany are in a very special position for obvious historical reasons. A specific law against holocaust denial in those countries seems reasonable given the circumstances.

Census figures for numbers of Jews in these countries pre-1939 and post-1945 anyone? Time perhaps, also, to muse on the sheer gusto and up-and-at'em enthusiasm displayed by so many of the citizens of these countries when it came to ridding their beautiful countries of the scourge of Jews (Belgium aside).

I don't believe these laws are/should be abt "reconciliation" or can/should be tied to an area through a kind of guilt more than just some understandable oversensitivity (& OK learn from history's mistakes etc. but) (laws still not good idea, though). who is responsible, for these atrocities, today?

Namedropping holocaust survivors, woah!

OTM, of course

Irving's a nasty little prick of the highest order, but throwing someone in jail for three years for talking nonsense is just silly.

But none of the people who orchastrated such atrocities are still alive and very few of the people who were directly involved are still with us either. I just think it shows that Austria is a little insecure about itself if it thinks that talking bollocks about the events of 60 years ago will, will... will what? Cause the fabric of society to crumble and it all to happen again?

Interesting parallel with Turkey, where you can be hauled before the courts for saying that the systematic slaughter of millions of Armenians did happen.

I'm of a mind to think that Soviet Communism is not equivalent to Nazism. But I can't be arsed discussing it here

NB I haven't thought this through so I won't take it personally if you rip that apart

what does it matter? the point is they also killed millions.

1. They got beat.
2. They would eventually have run out of Jews.

To deny the Holocaust is not just insulting to Jews, and any attempt to spin otherwise by anyone, ever. has got to be suspect on some level that goes way beyond religious prejudices. Most 'isms' are just ("just") hostile expressions of the subject's own refusal to engage with the other as an equal, and then to deflect blame from the self when personal failure results from those self-same attitudes.

-- Rotatey Diskers With Dadaismus (dadaismu...), February 21st, 2006.

well, stalin *must* be better as he slackened the mass murder *voluntarily*.

I have heard that you can get away with saying that large numbers of Armenians were massacred, but it's only if you call it "Genocide" that you get in trouble. This is indeed quite like the Holocaust deniers, who do accept that many Jews may well have starved to death or been killed, but argue that there was no systematic attempt to exterminate them. Presumably the Wannsee conference minutes are a forgery, as are the records of a speech given by Himmler justifying the extermination of even Jewish children, and all the survivors were fantasists.

I don't know why I am bothering to engage with Holocaust deniers ideas.

It is interesting, bringing in Gulag-denial or whatever. It does seem like there are a lot of different histories that people are interested in denying. The most interesting recent one is Milosovic-denial - not so much denying his existence (although I have never seen him in real life myself - coincidence?) but denying or downplaying his malign role in the wars that engulfed the former Yugoslavia. This is a topic for another time, of course.

I wonder do you get Genocide deniers in Rwanda?

All the groups killed by the Nazis suffered systematic persecution, had their assets stripped and their civil rights taken away before they all became strangers on a train. This is in common with all other genocides since, and asking whether that's too strong a word to apply in subsequent cases seems a bit swingeing considering the sufering documented.

They may not be about it, but I think they played a huge role in it. If there hadn't been laws against it, for years after the fact you'd have former Nazis publishing books claiming "the holocaust was exaggerated" and endless battles for "truth" inside the former axis countries. It's taken Germany all this time to come to terms with WWII, and that's *with* certain truths being taken as read.

who is responsible, for these atrocities, today?
The Nazis remain responsible, and those who would be their successors have to account for those actions. They don't get the option of talking their way out of it or saying "it was all overblown, we didn't do any such thing, maybe one or two bad ones, I suppose, hey vote for me" because of these laws.

Who here is in favour of criminalizing holocaust denial?

theres a million equally valid analogies here & only one right answer to me
I don't think there are a million equally valid analogies. Genocide is the worst thing humanity can do to itself. The holocaust was the worst genocide. Ergo, it's the worst thing humanity has ever done to itself. Does that accord it special status? I think so.

(As for the Japanese, their religion was outlawed after WWII and their culture was systematically rebuilt. That's goin even further than holocaust denial laws.)

I can't say I'm in favor of criminalizing speech, but I think it wouldn't hurt for the United States to consider measures in response to our history of slavery that are in some way parallel to Germany's and Austria's responses to the Holocaust. There's an aside in Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others in which she comments on the nonexistence of an American slavery museum comparable to the Holocaust museum in DC. She observes that the fact that such a museum doesn't exist serves the interest of the US government, because its existence would quite likely encourage social unrest. It's this tiny moment in the book, but I remember reading it and being kind of bowled over by the trueness of it. I think that museum should exist and that the US government should fund it lavishly.

The indigenous populations of the Americas sharply plummetted following the arrival of Europeans from 1492 onward. The native tribes of the Caribbean were eliminated like the Guanches in the Canary Islands the previous century (Crosby 1986). Central Mexico, with an estimated pre-Conquest population of 25 million, was reduced to a residual population of a million in the 17th century. In 1790, when the first U.S. census was executed, there were 300 Indians left in Pennsylvania, 1500 each in New York and Massachusetts, and still some 10,000 in the Carolinas (Braudel 1984 p 393).

At the height of the famine, while confiscating crops from the starving peasants, the USSR exported 1.70 million tons of grain in 1932 and 1.84 million tons in 1933 (close to a quarter of a ton per each victim in each year). The Soviet authorities also banned travel out of the famine affected areas under the pretext that people travelling for food spread "anti-kolkhoz agitation".

The death toll of the famine is estimated at between five and ten million people. The rationale behind the famine as well as the exact number of casualties is unknown because the pertinent archives of the NKVD (later KGB, and today FSB) remain closed to historians in general.

Ukrainian ¨¦migr¨¦ historians were among the first to argue that the famine was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. Today, the governments or parliaments of 26 countries recognized the 1932-1933 famine as an act of genocide. Among them Ukraine, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, United States, and Vatican City. The fourth Saturday of November is the official day of commemoration of the Holodomor victims in Ukraine. Still the Holodomor remains a politically charged topic for many parties, especially in Russia. Some Russian authors continue claiming that the Holodomor was not an act of genocide but a "mere famine".

In this country, right now, I'd be against jailing Irving. In Austria 17 years ago, it was a bigger problem.

'My holocaust's bigger than yours' = irrelevant

The rationale behind the famine
This has always been the key thing about the Holodomor: was it done deliberately to kill the Ukrainians, or was it because the nascent union was close to collapse and they didn't care about the Ukrainians and so nicked their food for their "greater good"?. They sure didn't build any ovens, or expendresources on their destruction.

xpost oh because they were there thats ok then - yes the nazis were pathologically dedicated to genocide but the claim that the holocaust killed more ppl than any other ever is patently false

but the claim that the holocaust killed more ppl than any other ever is patently false
I didn't claim that.

but yeah the idea that japan has had nothing comparable to the holocasut denial laws is wrong.

xpost

"middle class european victims"

fucking horseshit, the VAST majority were poor poles/russians/slavic types.

you called the holocaust 'the worst genocide', i naively assumed you meant by numbers and not because the lives of european jews are worth more than rwandans or central americans

Now that is "patently false & very stupid"

there barely WAS a middle class in most of the places the nazis ran camps, rural eastern europe...

Why thank you, I'm so stupid I never knew either of those things before.

this is a joke, right? The Khmer Rouge rounded up everybody, most ESPECIALLY the so-called "middle class": the #1 target of of Nuon Chea et al were schooteachers

vide also Stalin, cited earlier

And this matters precisely how?

actually, yes, they were, Phnom Penh was a thriving city on the day the DK cadres rolled in and told everybody to get the fuck out because cities were decadent

your point isn't a terrible point, though I can't imagine what your interest is in making it -the Holocaust gets special attention from the west because it's an instance of a group turning on its own: Nazis have to say of people who're actually among their own numbers, "you are not us," which is exactly happens in Cambodia - but the myopic "it's white people watching out for their own!" schtick is really ugly

(and yes the whole concept of "themselves" here is what sets up the problem, but it's firmly in place, and that's part the Shoah's special status to western culture)

xpost when you say shit like this:

if you seriously think white anglos in the latter half of the 20th century are going to extend the same humanity to light skinned eastern european muslims as they are to anne frank & steven spielberg youre sadly mistaken

it makes you sound like a lunatic

i mean this is a county which still only wrote in arabic til like 1930 or something

Where?

when you put it that way (instead of falsely describing the victims as "largely middle class") it sounds less bizarre, but I think you'd go further trying to elicit compassion/educate others about the many other genocides deserving historical attention than starting with "the holocaust wasn't the worst!!" to which people are (rightly) likely to respond suspiciously

If the "last one" was "the psychopatic dediction of the nazis to mass murder" then you're close to my point, yes.

The reason the holocaust was the worst genocide was because up until that point nobody had specifically set out with the sole intention of wiping out another people for no reason other than who they were. Motive matters. Size comes into it, yes, because in some countries they slaughtered 90% of the Jewish population. That’s near-total wipeout.

And the ones that followed them, like the Rwandans, are of course practically equally appalling, and the west is even more complicit in their success. But for sheer scale, in numbers and percentages and awesome dedication to unfounded eradication, the holocaust stands alone.

I don't like especially that we've got into dick-comparing w/r/t to genocide: it's always abhorrent. Which is why laws designed to prevent it are a Good.

there's something missing from this sentence but I hope it isn't directed at me - you'll note from my first post that I don't approve of the laws, I'm just saying I understand how they might feel like doing that

I mean I'm anti-death penalty too but it doesn't mean I wouldn't wanna kill somebody who fucked with my family

is that the new "i'm quitting ilx"?

Instead of talking about class, let's say the following: that the Holocaust looms particularly large for Americans and western Europeans for reasons of promixmity. Let's just say it's "closer." This has to do with geography, culture, class, immigration, ethnicity, and a whole lot of other stuff. But it's a fair point that it's closer to the world and experience of westerners than genocide in Asia. In fact, that closeness is a major part of why it looms so large for us -- because it was so modern, so mechanized, so technical, so official. Because it operated on the level of what we call "civilization," but was so the opposite of civilization! So yes, there's a level on which comparable genocides don't have quite the same impact on westerners, because they're seen as things that happen in chaos, in foreign, less "civilized" spaces -- whereas the Holocaust happened at least in part "here," in the kind of world we inhabit, and to some people who live among us now. This is a pretty natural reaction to have -- being more shocked by what's "close" -- but also probably something we can afford to correct ourselves on, now and then.

-- stet (vmdnb900...), February 21st, 2006.

^^^^ referred to this

john thats a shitty analogy - i personally want to tell holocaust deniers to shut the fuck up just like i personally want to kill somebody who fucks w/ my family, the difference being that the first is legal & does not require govt intervention

I mean really, what use is free speech against this sort of thing? The americans had free speech while they were busy slaughtering the indians, they had free speech while they were enslaving the africans.

do laws against holocaust-deniers equal laws designed to prevent genocide
Becuase they are used to stop the fascists rising again in the countries where, the last time they got a lot of power, they killed just about everything that moved.

Yes, and by the time we're in a such a position as to need those laws ... the people who're committing the crimes are making the laws! WTF use would a german law against genocide have done when the nazis came to power? You nip these fuckers in the bud.

I wish I shared your confidence in that statistic - but this is Austria we're talking about here, not West Hampstead

xpost - m white on point!

i mean on the other hand, if in the midst of a war situation a govt is shutting down papers disseminating proximate disinformation, that's a difft story.

xpost to ethan, except the riaa is more effective honestly.

the finkelstein point i like becuz it is true is that the holocaust industry fuels anti-semitism.

just like this friking irving conviction will -- how is it that one can't deny the holocaust but one can defame islam? must be becuz the elders of zion control everything, no? (hypothetical response in the mind of anti-semite, obv.)

See also on that front deployment of the atomic bomb in Japan! You see a lot of this running through the post-war years: a lot of the aftershocks had to do with people accepting that the "civilized" western world was just as vulnerable to atrocities -- both committing them and being victimized by them -- than many of its residents had ever really let themselves believe. And that's not at all a bad reaction to have. That's not really a matter of accusing westerners of being classist or racist or blind to other people's suffering -- quite the opposite! It's a moment of the west coming to terms, as it does every so often, with the fact that there can be atrocity within itself, too. Bosnia could have been another coming-to-terms moment, too, but it got missed. I can't speak for European reactions, but I know at least party where I put the blame in the U.S. -- and that's the fact that Americans are not generally geographically well-versed, and our news sources run on very obvious patterns and templates, and I think the whole thing wound up mentally slotted, for many Americans, into the same category as usual: "People killing each other in some place with names I can't pronounce."

also important: the carefully planned and industrialized nature of it, which undermined our confidence that technological advance would be accompanied by moral advance (in contrast, the machete-hacking in rwanda seems primitive enough for us to compartmentalize it as something that "couldn't happen here"); the mass media exposure of it, which was something earlier genocides didn't have -- it's hard to imagine it having the impact it did without all of those photos from the camps; and of course the scrupulous, determined documentation of it after the fact -- which is still ongoing (i.e. recent paper by a journalism professor taking american publishers, editors and journalism schools to task for failing to help jewish journalists).

but the acknowledgment of the holocaust is hardly an either/or proposition in regard to other genocides. i think that by defining and clarifying genocide as an idea, it's had the effect of forcing people to acknowledge other mass killings, both before (armenians, american indians, etc.) and since. of course, it hasn't yet actually prevented genocidal killings, and there's no doubt that action in bosnia vs. inaction in rwanda, for example, was largely a function of race and culture.

there's also the side issue that mass killings are not necessarily genocide (the khmer rouge weren't genocidal, were they? i mean, they weren't trying to wipe out all cambodians), and that focusing on whether or not something is technically genocide can actually be an excuse for inaction (e.g. the clinton administration's refusal to call the rwanda killings genocidal, until well after the fact).

anyway, i can't tell what y'all are arguing about. i don't think i disagree with anything ethan's saying, and i'm not sure the people arguing with him do either. otoh, the pattern on political threads of ethan claiming to be either "misunderstood" or arguing a "devil's advocate" viewpoint or whatever is a little disingenuous. you can just admit that you like to stir up shit a little, it's ok.

I would say European reaction was, "Jesus, hold on, this is happening in Yugoslavia!!!!!! In 1995!!!!!" I'd say, by the standards of most of Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia was considered a pretty modern and fairly Westernized state.

He was stopped by police on a motorway in southern Austria, where he was visiting to give a lecture to a far-right student fraternity. He has been held in custody since then.

does this make a difference? how would ethan feel about a slavery-denier lecturing to the kkk?

Compare the two statements

"You know those Muslims, well I reckon they're all potential terrorists and should be locked up"

vs

"I have done extensive academic research into this and have conclusively proved that all Muslims should be locked up as they are definitely potential terrorists".

jesus you guys are fucking morons -- go and read up on this shit before trying this shit. as for 'heirlooms' get fucked. not so many of the polish jews i know of had 'heirlooms'.

the finkelstein point i like becuz it is true is that the holocaust industry fuels anti-semitism.

Finkelstein is an anti-Semite. He's a hero to Holocaust deniers, he wrote one of the comments on the jacket of David Duke's latest book on the dangers of Jewish supremicism. He is completely fucking mental.

Enrique + Time, dudes: NOBODY IS ARGUING that the meat of the Holocaust was aimed at rural folks and not cosmopolitans. But re-read Gypsy's post, and my first ones above it. We're talking about perception of the Holocaust, and why it feels "closer" to modern westerners than certain other events. All anyone is saying is that it had SOME modern-urban and technological qualities that make it much more affecting to modern-urban technological westerners. All anyone is saying is that there are social reasons why The Diary of Anne Frank might seem closer or more affecting to modern westerners than equivalent tales from Polish shtetls. And all anyone has said is that that's probably natural, though we should be careful not to pretend that less urban genocides "matter" less. Do you actually have a problem with that statement?

He's still completely insane.

Uh, no we didn't.

Look, guys, either you're for free speech or you're not. How is academic lying, non-academic lying, speechifying before right-wingers, whatever, even remotely close to shouting "fire" in a crowded theater (the old Oliver Wendell Holmes standard for suppressing anti-war speech during WWI), never mind shouting "fire" behind a firing squad?

Bill of rights ratified: December 15, 1791
13th Amendment to the US Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865)
Battle of little bighorn: 1876

I haven't read much Finkelstein, but you should know by now that guilt by association is the usual fallacy of choice among free-speech opponents. I'm reminded of how Irving was used as a weapon against Christopher Hitchens, and Faurisson against Noam Chomsky--shamefully in both cases.

"Slavery cannot tolerate free speech. Five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South. They will have none of it there, for they have the power. But shall it be so here?"

http://douglassarchives.org/doug_a68.htm

"To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker."

The freedom-to-speak in Austria would result in neo-nazi groups holding rallies with speakers attacking jews from the podiums and chumpers like Irving telling them all how the holocaust wasn't Hitler's doing, so let's honour him! Big banners of swastikas, the iconography of hate, the whole bit. Austria and Germany already know that this sort of stuff finds fertile ground there -- even with the current limitations, fascism is still a problem -- and what's more they and we know exactly what happened last time it got out of hand.

So what do you do? Well, the countries fearful of suicide bombers limit the freedoms of the people by the minimum amount necessary to cause the maximum amount of inconvience to bombers: stop and search and so forth.

The countries fearful of the nazi idea limit the freedom of speech, but do it as tightly as possible: it's only outlawed to deny the most substantial facts about something that's Americans see as so blantatly true it's laughable.

So, yes, it's not great to limit freedom of speech. But it's like a flu vaccination: if a little dose of something nasty can help stop you dying of a big dose of it, get thee to the doctors.

We let the Klan do that here.

The fact of the matter is, Jörg Haider got more votes by flirting cutely with Nazi voters than he ever could have if he'd come right out and said something that's currently illegal under Austrian law.

Obviously, in this country the laws on incitement are so vague that even Irving would have only been on shaky ground at best.

T/S: Millions enslaved v. millions killed

We're STILL feeling the repercussions of slavery, and it was done 140 years ago. Will there EVER be a time that it's OK for assholes to deny the Holocaust?

Yeh, and suicide bombers still make it on to trains. It's not perfect, though they could probably work on the laws w/r/t "coded holocaust denial", but then neither is going "aw shucks can't do nuffin to stop em like".

Still you clearly kno way more than fule like me about these gums: what *is* a good way of nipping them in the bud? While they're still "just talk"?

It probably gets increasingly more important as time goes on. When all the witnesses are dead, the usual historians start to go "yeh well who can really know, you know?". And the Austrians can sa "we know, so shut it"

xpost: yeh but my fear there is that neither of those things were any use the last time round. Hitler and the Nazis were hugely ridiculed and refuted before they ... took power.

How to stop the goons: point out that they're goons. There's also less unemployment in Austria than in the former DDR, and less violent organized neo-Nazi groups at large as well. These things are connected.

There's also less unemployment in Austria than in the former DDR, and less violent organized neo-Nazi groups at large as well. These things are connected.

yes, but you can't legislate for economic prosperity, and you don't rescind the murder laws just because there's more poverty about. You need a solution that gets them whether it's feast or famine.

The wording of that law sounds top to me, even if it were never to be enforced. But you've got the .de: is there a better solution? how does pointing out they're goons help? It didn't last time. (Nor, i must admit, did jailing the leader)

One last derail: I've read him. Heard lectures by him. Read/seen interviews with him. He's insane. Holocaust deniers like him because he a) echoes their sentiments (claims the # of victims has been greatly exaggerated, thinks David Irving's work is important, hangs out with Hezbollah when he visits the Middle East and expresses solidarity with them, and so on), b) is Jewish (it looks nice to have a Jew on your side in the faint hope of shielding Holocaust denial from accusations of anti-Semitism, despite all the, er, talk of worldwide Jewish conspiracies to exploit the Holocaust and consolidate Jewish power in American. Not coincidentally, that's exactly what Finkelstein writes about regularly, similarly using his Jewishness as a shield to protect him from the exact same accusations. If the shoe fits ... )

Conclusion: he is mental. He's also an unbelievably sloppy "scholar", relying mostly on secondary and tertiary sources, writing derivative essays that criticise other people's original research rather than forming new ideas of his own, etc.

And what will prevent Nazi-like parties taking power in Europe again is the changes in the political system that have taken place since WWII, which includes freedom of speech.

Didn't Haider debunk that? How does freedom of speech prevent their rising again? By allowing us to mock them? I'm sure that'll work. And as the Nazis proved, give them an inch of political power and they can just steal the mile.

Facism won't be wearing a swastika next time -- maybe a cross, or a Danish caroonist's t-shirt, but not a swastika.

What worries me most is not that you're right -- I think you are -- but that you can say "next time" and still be right.

And his party has fallen apart enough that any idea of Haider as a new powerful Facist leader just looks silly these days.

obviously, secondary schools are different from a public arena, and I'd be very wary about abridging speech in almost all if not all ways in any society, but i see a distinction with potentially some importance between historical events (data), the essential contours of many of which are sufficiently well-established as to be irrefutable, and ideas/interpretations about same. scientists who misuse data can be subject to professional sanctions and public humiliation. corporations that falsify or destroy data can be sanctioned or held liable in a case or controversy.

My own derail:

1-2 million blacks died during the Middle Passage; 10-12 million Africans were enslaved; more than 4,700 blacks were lynched through 1964; segregation was enforced by terror and violence through the 1960s.

x post

Am I the only one who thinks it's a bit weird when Europeans talk about slavery as if it was the sole responsibility of the US?

until all of a sudden the flu mutates, turns into something far, far worse and wipes out society. this analogy will fit several scenarios: you choose.

in general the best way to avoid the flu is to keep yourself healthy and be aware of situations in which you can catch it - not to trust in sticking-plaster measures such as vaccination.

in general the best way to deal with nonsense-spouting holocaust deniers is to keep your mind healthy and keep refuting them publicly - not to trust in sticking-plaster measures such as jailing them for three years and turning them into fucking poster-boys for a whole new generation of neo-nazis who can now legitimately say their right to free speech is being suppressed.

and hark, what's that sound we're all ignoring? why, it's thousands of furious islamists! but hey, why worry about that when there are cheap points to be scored based on relative knowledge of european and american history?

oddly, i feel a cold coming on.

What right to free speech is this? The one they themselves want to nick off everybody else? Rights, even universal ones, are usually proscribed in certain situations.
Our american chums have the right to bear arms, but they don't get to take a gun in the Oval office, or even on a plane.
They've got the right to free speech, but if they threaten the president the SS will be along shortly. Hell, nobody gets to lie in court or they go to jail. (So think of holocaust denial as perjury in the court of public opinion?)
They've got the right to religion, but if they decide their religion says that ID is "science" they still don't get to [open can of worms here].

I agree that universal rights are a Good in a perfect world. This isn't a perfect world, we need to make kinks and flex to hit our ideals to the world.

Also, what muslim outcry is this we're ignoring? There's nothing on the tapes.

Fallaci schmallaci, what's this Pink Panther business???

I mean, most people know that violence and force "work." I don't buy the notion that repression doesn't "work," or that terrorism doesn't "work." Both governments and citizens have used both tactics for all time. (The Allies defeated the Axis powers using them.)

The question becomes: What do they work for? Did WWII make the United States a less repressive world power? Did the war on Communism make us more or less like the enemy? When do we stop fighting?

Repression "worked" against anarchists advocating the murder of police and ruling society in the late 1880s, though it's typical of the historical pattern that anarchism was mostly over as a mass radical movement before anyone resorted to bombs.

Now those defending the Austrian law seem to draw on the same logic that guided the judge who presided over the 1886 Haymarket trial, after which four men were hanged explicitly for their speech (to quote the judge in 1893):

"They incited, advised, encouraged, the throwing of the bomb that killed the policemen, not by addressing the bomb-thrower specially, and telling him to throw a bomb at that or any specified time or occasion, but by general addresses to readers and hearers; by every argument which they could frame; by every appeal to passion which they could make; advising, encouraging, urging, and instructing how to perform acts within which the act of throwing the bomb was embraced."

http://www.crfc.org/americanjury/visual_library/century.html

at what point do smug westerners realise that resorting to "logic" - and i use the word advisedly given some of the arguments on offer here - is pissing in the wind when you're dealing with religious fanatics?

Also, what muslim outcry is this we're ignoring? There's nothing on the tapes.

ah, silly me. i forget that the seething anger and sense of injustice that foments suicide bombers etc is announced to the world via megaphones and the AP wire service.

if i were a radicalised young muslim living anywhere in the world, watching what i perceived as the enormous double standards of a west that can in my opinion insult allah without comeback, and then jails a man for comments he made almost two decades ago, i'd be somewhat incensed. i'm not saying this is logical, or reasonable. but, you know, raving nutters tend not to be.

uhhhhh, the klan enslaved people? you idiot.

i was arguing this! because ethan said the victims of the holocaust were middle-class and had "heirlooms". in context of 1940s eastern europe, middle-class = urban.

We're talking about perception of the Holocaust, and why it feels "closer" to modern westerners than certain other events.

the problem with focusing on 'perception' here is that the perceivers don't know shit.

All anyone is saying is that it had SOME modern-urban and technological qualities that make it much more affecting to modern-urban technological westerners.

that's one way of looking at it; as i said upthread, the reason the shoah is a 'holocaust apart' is because of its industrial-scale organization, involving construction of a vast network -- it's qualitatively different from the japanese massacres in china or the destruction of the australian native population in this way.

All anyone is saying is that there are social reasons why The Diary of Anne Frank might seem closer or more affecting to modern westerners than equivalent tales from Polish shtetls.

'schindler's list'?

And all anyone has said is that that's probably natural, though we should be careful not to pretend that less urban genocides "matter" less. Do you actually have a problem with that statement?

-- nabisco (--...), February 21st, 2006.

the shoah wasn't particularly urban, so i disagree with your premiss.

yeah but the argument was usually 'we got fucked because of all the profiteering jews'.

at what point do smug westerners realise that resorting to "logic" - and i use the word advisedly given some of the arguments on offer here - is pissing in the wind when you're dealing with religious fanatics?

So hold on, which is it? Do we use logical refutations on the nazi nutters, but that's not good enough for the muslim ones?

I couldn't agree more that the Shoah is a "holocaust apart." Arguing otherwise seems like a waste of compassion to me, at best.

That doesn't mean that other examples of modern liberal democracies' treatment of fascists--specifically, the ideological heirs of racist mass murderers--don't have something to say on this issue. Nobody claimed that the Klan enslaved anyone, or that the KKK or Segregationists are anything like equivalents to Nazi Germany. (Neither is anyone saying that today's living-and-breathing Nazis perpetrated the Holocaust, but that's another derailing point.) Still, I doubt you'd seriously instruct a black person who lived through Jim Crow that the Klan is not a living symbol of lynch mobs and (yes) slave masters. The relative tolerance for Klan speech here is extremely painful for some people. I'm not sure that even most Americans realize just how totalitarian the rural South was right up through the 1960s.

About a month before 9/11, I attended a counter-demonstration (of about 1,200) surrounding a joint Nazi-Klan demonstration (of 46) on the capitol steps in St. Paul. Both were protected speech, and in the end, the fascists just looked kind of pathetic. Last month, a cross was burned in front of a St. Paul church where the congregation is mostly black. That's not protected speech, but neither does St. Paul have a hate-speech ordinance: You have a right to express any demonstrably wrong or evil view you like so long as it doesn't extend to threatening, intimidating, or criminal conduct.

There are plenty of reasons why this situation stands. I could be wrong, but I think one of them is the legacy of the very people whom the Klan most terrorized after WWII: participants in the Civil Rights movement (including, among a white minority, many Jewish activists). For that generation, free speech was too hard-won a right to compromise on any front. Speech wasn't just one issue among many, it was the issue. Which is why Civil Rights birthed the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, which was more or less the beginning of the New Left. Not that everyone's pro-free-speech these days, but despite hype about "P.C." and the post-terror political atmosphere, you can see the influence these ideas still have, and see how that influence has been good for the country.

no. it's very simple. nazism isn't a religion. islam is. refuting someone's political beliefs isn't quite the same as refuting their core religious beliefs. i'd have thought this was, umm, logical.

and incidentally: fuck you too, enrique. i've enjoyed several debates with you about politics and society on ILE, many of which have been substantially more heated than this one; i don't see what warranted that little outburst of unnecesary abuse.

still, as a great philosopher once wrote: be like that. see if i care :p

Neo-Nazis and Irving killed 6,000,000 people? you idiot.

even when the core religious beliefs in question are supremacist?

When you criticise someone on the basis of their religious beliefs you're criticising them on the basis of their beliefs and actions which result from those beliefs. This is no different than criticising a political ideology. Or any other cultural difference which involves different beliefs and different conduct resulting from those beliefs.

And it is fundamentally different than critising someone on the basis of such arbitrary factors as what colour their skin happens to be or which country they happened to have been born in.

The latter is bigotry, the former is just about the most essential freedom there is, whether it applies to religion or politics or culture in general.

Neo-Nazis and Irving killed 6,000,000 people?
Well, not Irving personally, but he's in his 70s, yes? So people of his generation sure did. And what do you think happened to all of them? They didn't just sort of disappear at the end of the movie, and I'm sure one or two of them have links to these "neo" chaps.

so irving is jailed for being "wrong"? wow. i was wrong about something the other day; i'd better go and turn myself in.

The latter is bigotry, the former is just about the most essential freedom there is, whether it applies to religion or politics or culture in general.

the point i'm making is that, in a world increasingly polarised between - well, islam and non-islam - we need to tread very carefully indeed. very carefully.

however, i'm trying to be pragmatic here; my entire opposition to the jailing of irving is based on pragmatism. given that almost everyone else is now caught up in, cough, soi-disant philosophical arguments, i'll leave you all to it.

my overreaction re the klan i'm afraid was also misplaced; on another thread ethan had said the kkk had done far worse than the nazis -- the actual nazis, not the neo-nazis -- had ever done. the klan has killed, beaten and terrorized more people than the neo-nazis ever have, but at the same time the klan has at no point been in spitting distance of real power, and since the '60s it's had less connection with mainstream political discourse than the neo-nazis have had in austria.

i think i took a fundamentalist free-speecher line on denmark because a) it was more complicated than 'omg offensive cartoon' -- there was a backstory and b) people threatening another 7/7 deserve to be offended and c) hi dere muslim media's depiction of jews.

but the cartoons were shitty, and just the wrong side of the racist line (i have no problem whatsoever with depicting the prophet, but the whole 'bomb turban' thing stank).

irving is more dangerous than those cartoons because he has some of the trappings of the professional historian, access to all kinds of archives. refuting him really won't get rid of the neo-nazis, though. i don't know why i'm looking for some kind of stable, consistent ethical framework when there isn't one to find, really.

As a sub-editor, do you think this zero-tolerance approach should be applied to reporters in Britain's newsrooms?

Buddy, you got some newspapers and history books to read.

and on this thread ethan said that if a slavery-denier lectured to the kkk, they'd have their asses kicked so that would be ok.

and kind of: yeah, that's great; but really i'd rather see the slavery-denier jailed for slavery-denial than the ass-kicking dudes jailed for, you know, assault. and similarly you can't legislate on assholery, you can't nail it down.

where did i say the klan was worse than the nazis?

-- ,,,,,,,, (,,,...), February 23rd, 2006.

last few months -- it was a us politics thread but can't remember.

I did smack GF with a dictionary one time

warren g harding was allegedly a member of the KKK (and woodrow wilson was such a vicious racist that he might as well have been a member - e.g. his comments on "birth of a nation"). while looking it up, i found this:

Though revived only in 1915, by the mid-'20s the Klan was already a powerful force in American politics – and I don't mean just Southern politics, as the Klan of the 1870s and the 1960s was. The Klan had its headquarters in Indianapolis; the governor of Indiana was a Klansman. Oklahoma was placed under martial law as the governor tried to stamp out the Klan. Public bodies dominated by the Klan included the state government of Oregon and the city council of Anaheim, California. At the 1924 Democratic National Convention, the delegates voted down a plank condemning the Klan. It's estimated that more than one in eight Americans was a member of the Klan at its height.

(from http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mhardingkkk.html)

klan mostly survived as a powerful legend in the south, a legend purposely revived when new klans were organized in the 1910s.

this is not to deny that by the late 1870s blacks had been effectively disenfranchised in most former confederate states, and that most of those states were largely governed by reactionaries and confederate apologists. but the klan's role in that reaction --the power structure of southern reaction--was almost nonexistent.

klan mostly survived as a powerful legend in the south, a legend purposely revived when new klans were organized in the 1910s.

this is not to deny that by the late 1870s blacks had been effectively disenfranchised in most former confederate states, and that most of those states were largely governed by reactionaries and confederate apologists. but the klan's role in that reaction --the power structure of southern reaction--was almost nonexistent.

sorry to be pedantic. i studied the reconstruction period in school so my ears perk up whenever someone makes a claim about that era.

"In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy. At least one tenth of the black members of the 1867-68 constitutional convention became victims of violence during Reconstruction, including seven actually murdered...Klansmen murdered three scalawag members of the Georgia legislature and drove ten others from their homes... In October 1870 a group of armed whites broke up a Republican campaign rally at Eutaw, the county seat of Greene County, Alabama, killing four blacks and wounding fifty-four. In the same month, on the day after Republicans carried Laurens County, in South Carolina's Piedmont cotton belt, a racial altercation..degenerated into a "negro chase" in which bands of whites scoured the countryside, driving 150 freedmen from their homes and committing thirteen murders...In York County, nearly the entire white male population joined the Klan and committed at least eleven murders and hundreds of whippings; by February 1871 thousands of blacks had taken theto the woods each night to avoid assault... Much Klan activity took place in those Democratic counties where local officials either belonged to the organization or refused to take action against it."

Also note that anti-klan laws were repealed after "redemption" and generalized violence against blacks became commonplace. by the naacp's conservative estimates of documented lynchings, 3,500ish between 1892 and 1922. one could add in race riots, etc. etc. but you get the idea.

point being, for a period, the klan got what it wanted and the forces that fostered the klan were running the show. true, it didn't get what it wanted by violence alone, but then neither did hitler (remember the govt was turned over to him, much as the south was just turned back over to the former slaveowners)

the myth of the klan also far predated the revival of the klan -- but it was a southern myth -- the revival of the klan was striking in its reach throughout the north.

faultless logic!

http://i36.tinypic.com/2u4sl1h.jpg

oooooooooooooooooooouch

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/the-world-is-full-of-holocaust-deniers/370870/

yeesh

depressing, scary story.