Those Who Fight Monsters...

The crank historian David Irving has been detained in Austria, happy home of Jörg Haider and Kurt Waldheim, under Austrian laws which criminalise Holocaust denial.

Anti-Nazi groups in the UK have congratulated the Austrian government, the chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust stating that he hoped Irving's arrest would "lead to a successful prosecution" which could result in a twenty-year jail sentence. The head of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust apparently said that Holocaust denial, unlike every other historiographic position, is "not a matter of opinion". Assuming the BBC has not reported his words out of context, a more succinct denial of the principle of free speech (viz. anti-fascism) can hardly be imagined.

"Austrian law demands incisive action to protect its citizens from a repeat of the past," he added. Quite how the suppression of noxious viewpoints is supposed to protect Austria from participating enthusiastically in another Anschluß and/or another Holocaust escapes me. It is no doubt repulsive and appalling that some people deny that the Holocaust took place, or try to minimise its effects; but such people's opinions are unlikely to be changed by forbidding their expression. I doubt if many people who were locked up by the Nazis ever came round to their opponents' point of view, either.