Holocaust denier David Irving jailed for 3 years in Austria


Austria is showing the world the limits of free speech in the West with the conviction of David Irving for violating an Austrian law which bans any denial of the Holocaust. See reports in the Guardian , the Independent , the Times . Irving was arrested on charges dating back to 1989 when he gave speeches outside a pub to right wing groups. Although he built a reputation on his strong denial that Hitler knew about the Holocaust, or that Germany had any policy to liquidate the Jews of Europe, he now conveniently claims that he has changed his mind since giving those speeches 17 years ago. Apparently he has read some new sources that were not available to him then but were available to other historians at the time. In 2000 he spectacularly failed in a libel suit in London against an American historian Deborah Lipstadt who accused him in a book published by Penguin (one I used in course on the Holocaust I used to teach in Australia) of being a Holocaust denier. Irving lost the case and was forced into bankruptcy in order to pay the legal fees against him. Irving was an independent scholar who in his earliest books, most notably on the allied bombing of Dresden, used sources other historians had not bothered to look at and so wrote a pretty good book. His other works were very patchy, using some hitherto unexamined sources but largely ignoring the work of other historians. This eventually led him down the garden path towards Holocaust denial. Some of his supporters in Adelaide tried to force their way into the lecture theatres when I was teaching a course on the Holocaust to insist on giving them equal time. They would quote the work of Irving to justify their actions. The Times quotes Anthony Beevor, the military historian, who said: “However nauseating, these people should be confronted in debate rather than chucked into jail and turned into martyrs.”

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Posted: Mon - February 20, 2006 at 08:56 PM        

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