Holocaust Denier Gets Jail Time
Too bad for David Irving that he isn’t Iranian – the mullahs might have made him president. Instead, the Austrian government is giving him a three-year sentence.
“I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz,” Irving told the court before his sentencing.
Not that I am at all sympathetic to the cause of holocaust denial – there is nothing more anti-semitic in my opinion – but there are a few things about this that trouble me.
First, as an American raised with reverence for the secular icon of the First Amendment, the idea of jailing someone for ideas, even deeply erroneous ideas, seems far worse than what the punishment purports to prevent. The way to combat odious ideas is with the truth and debate about the truth – not jail time. This article mentions that David Irving already gets fan mail – now the guy is a stinkin’ martyr, also.
Second, I read Irving’s book ‘Hitler’s War’ and I didn’t think it was all that controversial. It has been a while since I read it, but I recall that nowhere in the book did he claim the Holocaust did not happen. He claimed that Hitler didn’t authorize it or know about it. That is actually quite possible, since by the time the Holocaust got into full swing, Hitler had already begun his descent into clinical insanity, and spent all his time in the Wolfschanze pretending to be a great general, ordering divisions here and there, and paying zero attention to anything else that was going on in Germany. The impression I got was that Himmler was the main motivating force behind the Holocaust, and that while certainly Hitler could have cared less one way or the other how the Jews were treated, I see it as completely plausible that he could have been in the dark about it. And it makes Hitler no less responsible for the Holocaust.
If I am off-base on this, someone please correct me.
