Posted on 11/17/2005 9:13:50 AM PST by oldleft
VIENNA, Austria - British historian David Irving was arrested last week in southern Austria on a warrant accusing him of denying the Holocaust, the Interior Ministry said Thursday. Irving was arrested Nov. 11 in Styria province, said police Maj. Rudolf Golia, an Interior Ministry spokesman. He was transferred to a prison in Graz.
Irving was detained on a warrant issued in 1989 under Austrian laws that make Holocaust denial a crime, Golia said. The accusation stemmed from speeches Irving delivered that year in Vienna and in the southern town of Leoben.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I denied the Easter Bunny....are there any legal ramifications?
Dang.
That is dangerously close to "thought crime" territory.
If you were to suddenly start getting mail about a free trip to Austria - I'd turn it down...it may be a sting.
Ain't Free Speech a wonderful thing? It's such a pity that the PC crowd have killed it.
Are you saying that denial of the Holocaust and denial of the Easter Bunny are equal? That's disgusting.
I am just wondering, when did it start getting called the Holocaust? It was not during the event. I just had a personal question on when did it gets its name.
Oh please, it's so obvious that that's not what was said that you're looking foolish.
If you don't like the law, try and change it. Otherwise, observe it.
Holocaust; a Hebrew word (olah) meaning "burnt offering.
In the Septuagint version (translated Hebrew Bible into Greek during
the reign of Ptolemy II, 3rd century B.C.), the word, olah, is
consistently translated by the Greek word, holokauston, "an offering
consumed by fire."
I'm not sure when it was first used in specific reference to the genocide of WWII.
you send YOUR kids to his history classes. societies are supposed to govern themselves. when they lose the moral clarity to distinguish between free speech and vicious hateful attempts to stir the coals of anti jewism or other such known viruses "do gooders" will intervene. in europe unlike the US the virus of anti jewism has reached epidemic proportions too many times resulting in multiple periods where people forget what humanity is. they are far more sensitive to this phenomenon.
How about some people directly or indirectly affected by the Nazi genocide of Jews may be a little sensitive about the subject.
that was rhetorical. i detect a similar background source.
I'm not sure I'd want to live in a country where you can be arrested for making stupid statements. After all, I'd be risking prosecution.
OK, but then pay the consequences provided by the law. Exactly what happened in this case.
It was a question. It seems some people are a little sensitive to the disdain heaped on Holocaust deniers.
That being said, it is still amazing that anyone has the gall to take these positions and give ammunition to the Jihadists and other anti-semitics.
Your commie is showing.
we should all just keep our mouths shut about it?
Did I say that? Or should I keep my mouth shut about it.
Hansard - the "Congressional Record" of the House of Lords from 23 March 1943 - quotes one peer as proclaiming in a speech to the House: "The Nazis go on killing. If the rule [immigration statutes] could be relaxed, some hundreds, and possibly a few thousands, might be enabled to escape from this holocaust."
The word was used more and more frequently in newspapers during the following two years and is used as a blanket term without comment in 1945 in official papers filed as legal claims against Germany.
See post 23.
The double standard on the part of European and other governments with respect to Nazi crimes vs. those of the Communists is obvious and repulsive.
But that's why I don't live in Austria.
And just as a BTW, some at FR aren't known for being free speech supporters, especially for anyting they view as immoral.
All I was trying to say is that existing laws should be abided by. Some people might deem deporting illegals to be unjust, but don't you wish legal system worked in this particular case. In a democratic country, law making process can be affected by people and unjust laws changed or repealed, but as long as they are is effect, they should be enforced and observed. The alternative is anarchy.
no. please see my first post on this. there is no "political" history of Jew killing as a policy of any government in the US. I would strongly oppose any such law here. The American political tradition has fostered this debate to its great credit and we understand that the free market of ideas is a powerful one. this tradition is not shared in Europe, ie the old world.
Firstly, the evidence that has been provided to me throughout my life regarding Hitler and what he did during WWII is so strong that whenever I run into someone who pretends that all of that never happened I have a difficult time thinking of them as anything beyond a child's development emotionally. I come from a family of German/Irish, and even I can see the hand in front of my face. So I guess you could put me in the group of people who would heap disdain on holocaust deniers.
But at the same time, I'm here at FR to discuss conservative values. And I do believe that Puppage was pointing out the disturbing precedent of making it illegal to not believe in something, regardless of what that something is.
Elie Weisel used that exact definition and term to describe the event in one of his books and it stuck as the English name for the event of the Nazi Genocide of European Jewry.
The TV mini series Holocaust further etched it as the name commonly used.
David Irving v. Big Brother?
You know, it IS possible to loathe them both.
I would tend to agree with you but I believe in Europe they see it as a "clear and present danger" exception to free speech.
Like shouting fire in a crowded theater- not protected as free speech.
Not just believing it, but attempting to cause harm by "selling" it.
Broke the law, could it be?
Such a thing might make me question a person's sanity, but suggesting that any harm comes from this opinion is pretty ridiculous.
If no harm was intended, anti Semites would not be so interested in furthering an entire denial industry.
There's a good discussion of it here:
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/docs/HolocaustUsage.html
The gist of it is that, while it was being used before, during, and immediately after the Nazi period, it was really in the late 50s/early 60s that it acquired the capital "H" and attained it's current status as the accepted term for the genocide.
There was an interested piece I heard on NPR a few years ago about a box of recordings that were recently discovered. A Chicago psychiatrist (who had been born in Russia as a Jew and had converted to Christianity but was basically a secular person) had visited the Displaced Persons camps in Europe right after the war interviewing Jewish survivors of the camps. What was fascinating was that they hadn't yet formulated the experience into a larger context, like "The Holocaust." It was simply "that bad stuff that just happened." It really took about ten years before it was processed into something coherent, after people had re-established their lives and could begin to think about it. The Eichmann trial was a big stepping stone in the process.
The Deniers' Real Goal...Jeff Jacoby
"DAVID IRVING suffered a humiliating defeat in a London court last week, but the judge who pronounced him "an active Holocaust denier" and "pro-Nazi polemicist" who "deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence" said nothing about him that others hadn't already said.
In 1989, the British House of Commons branded the writer "a Nazi propagandist and longtime Hitler apologist." The Times of London condemned him as "a man for whom Hitler is something of a hero and almost … an innocent and for whom Auschwitz is a Jewish deception." The renowned historian Hugh Trevor-Roper described him as a willful distorter of facts, one who "seizes on a small and dubious particle of 'evidence' " in order to brush aside much more significant evidence that disproves his claims.
Irving himself, in speeches to Holocaust-denial groups, had described Hitler as "the biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich." The gas chambers of Auschwitz, he wrote in the foreword to a book denying their existence, were a figment of wartime PR, a hoax concocted by the Allies.
So it is hard to fathom how Irving thought he was going to prevail in his libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt, the Emory University scholar whose 1993 book "Denying the Holocaust" called him "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial." That book, he said in court on the trial's opening day, had generated "waves of hatred" against him, causing publishers to shun him. And then the man who claimed it was a lie to label him a falsifier of history told the judge this:
"I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend.… There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very odd to say the least. I'm going to form an association of Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars, or ASSHOLS."
It is tempting to say that anyone who would deny that the Nazis planned and carried out the murder of six million European Jews—the most exhaustively researched, documented, and attested-to genocide in history—must be deranged or diseased. But the Holocaust-deniers are neither crazy nor sick. They know what they are doing.
Holocaust denial is above all an assault on modern Jewish history. "The central assertion for the deniers," Lipstadt writes, "is that Jews are not victims but victimizers. They 'stole' billions in reparations, destroyed Germany's good name by spreading the 'myth' of the Holocaust, and won international sympathy because of what they claimed had been done to them."
The deniers' objective is to strip the survivors of the Holocaust—not only the emaciated skeletons still alive in the death camps in the spring of 1945, but the surviving remnant of the Jewish people—of their moral authority. If the Holocaust was nothing but Allied propaganda—or, as some deniers have it, a Zionist confection—then far from deserving sympathy or the safety of their own homeland, the Jews deserve only resentment and scorn.
In short, Holocaust-denial offers a rationale for anti-Semitism. That explains why the deniers and the anti-Semites are usually one. Aryan Nation, Liberty Lobby, the Institute for Historical Review, and neo-Nazis like David Duke all traffic both in Jew-hatred and denial of the Holocaust. And because devictimizing the Jews helps delegitimize Israel, Holocaust-denial has flourished among the Arabs.
In a 1999 survey of Arab public opinion, Hilal Khashan of the American University of Beirut asked 1,600 respondents whether they empathized with Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Of the 82 percent that answered no, 53 percent said the Holocaust never occurred. Another 32 percent said the Jews had plotted against Germany. Arab newspapers and television regularly label the Holocaust a Jewish hoax. The extent to which this is taken is almost comical. In a crossword puzzle in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, the official daily of the Palestinian Authority, one answer was "Yad Vashem." The clue? "Jewish center for eternalizing the Holocaust and the lies."
What makes Holocaust-denial truly insidious, though, is not its popularity with bigots and haters, but the effect it can produce on people who are simply uninformed. Lipstadt writes in her book about one TV talk show that decided to take up the issue. "When the show aired in April 1992, deniers were given the bulk of the time to speak their piece," she relates. "Then Holocaust survivors were brought on to try to 'refute' their comments. Before the commercial break, the host, Montel Williams, urged viewers to stay tuned so that they could learn whether the Holocaust is a 'myth or is it truth.' " Time and again, Lipstadt says, her refusal to debate Holocaust-deniers drew the same objection: Shouldn't we hear their point of view? What's wrong with airing the other side of the issue?
That is what the deniers are aiming at: Acceptance of the idea that their hateful falsehoods are a legitimate "other side" of Holocaust history. The more they repeat that the Final Solution never happened, the more some people wonder: Well, did it? Each new seed of doubt grants Adolf Hitler a posthumous victory, and makes the destruction of the Six Million a little more complete."
As Mark Steyn pointed out in a recent column about the dominant European mindset, many left-wing political parties these countries support laws against Holocaust denial but have no problem pretending that the Commmunist factions they've idealized in the past never committed the same atrocities against their fellow citizens.
thanks for posting this veronica
If harm is intended it makes it a "clear and present danger".
True.
However, criminalizing their idiocy only gives it credibility.
It allows them to claim that such extreme methods are used to suppress their message only because their message is so powerfully persuasive.
OTOH, when allowed to present their views, its weak foundation becomes immediately apparent, refuting itself.
You cannot defeat an idea by suppressing it.
No, it doesn't. Once you've raised "denial of facts" to the same level as "incitement to commit crimes," you've basically consigned the political process in almost every democratic country to the criminal courtroom.
I see your point. I admit to having been unaware of much of that for a large part of my life. I grew up a German/Irish kid who went to Catholic school, and lived on USMC bases wherever dad was stationed. It probably wasn't until I was around 20 years old in 1979 that it even dawned on me that *anyone* pretended that Hitler didn't cause the murder of millions of Jews in Europe.
I am still a strong believer in, and advocate of, "freedom from thought-crimes", because it is most assuredly the strongest weapon our enemies will wield against us in the future.
It speaks for itself.
Why are anti Semites so interested in denying facts?
"OTOH, when allowed to present their views, its weak foundation becomes immediately apparent, refuting itself.
You cannot defeat an idea by suppressing it."
i have to disagree with you on principle. anti jewism is never, never, never self refuting. rather it is the opposite. ideas or philosophies can be refuted. anti jewism is deep rooted and its foundations sprout in political thought, religious thought, social/class warfare emotionalism and probably others i am unable to identify. it is not a liberal/conservative issue, not even a "nazi" or "commie" issue being that it pre-dates the modern "isms" that we like to criticize here (see poster Wallace T.'s comments on the double standard of communism and nazism #27).
as to suppression, we suppress certain thoughts every day and this of course is the method that religions (all of them to the best of my knowledge) teach adherents to avoid sin. sinful thoughts lead to sinful words lead to sinful deeds. if we consider anti jewism in a theocracy sense and not a political one, suppression makes perfect sense.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.