Communist china locks up dissenters, as did its former brethren in the USSR. The Islamic dictatorships in Iran and Syria do it every day. Nazi Germany did it. Saddam Hussein did it. The Monarchs of medieval kingdoms did it. We like to distance ourselves from those repressive countries, and cherish our right to dissent as one of the hallmarks of our superior, more civilised and democratic culture.
And yet yesterday David Irving was jailed in Austria for 3 years for Holocaust Denial. This is a travesty and belies everything we claim to stand for as a civilisation.
Now, I can’t stand Irving. He’s a sloppy, rabble-rousing pseudo-historian, glosses over any evidence that doesn’t suit his preordained conclusions, he’s compromised in personal politics and he’s an anti-semite. I’ve read one of his books, and am not interested in reading any more.
But it should not be a crime to question history. It should never be a crime, no matter how many people it upsets or offends. If what is recorded or accepted to have happened really did, we should be able to win any debate on the merits. These people should be shouted down from a position of academic rigour, clear-eyed analysis and moral high ground.
But no! We locked him up. And by “we”, I mean the entire western civilisation, which is more or less homogenous across all the modern European and post-British states. And I am truly ashamed by this.
In the aftermath of the Mohammed cartoons, who are we to speak out for free speech? In fact, I think we can make a very good case for roughly equating the two. Both Holocaust Denial (ie, questioning history) and publishing cartoons of Islam’s Prophet are actions of speech, actions which obviously upset and offend huge numbers of people, could be said to inflame inadvisable passions, and appeal to the basest elements of dangerous sections of society. By denying the Holocaust, we give ammunition to neo-nazis and anti-semites, by depicting the Prophet we hand ammunition to the radicals ever-keen to whip up anti-western sentiments in their delapidated hovels.
But we sanctimoniously publish the cartoons – or, worse, refrain from doing so but for all the wrong reasons – and yet we imprison the deniers. We publicly scoff in the face of one taboo, and then quietly embrace another. It’s hypocritical, it’s unconscionable, it is a crack in the foundations of our free society and we will all be worse off for it.
