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Fascism Lives!
(February, 20 2006) Even in a
free society, be careful what you say, it could land you in jail. Take the
case of David Irving. On February 20th, an Austrian court sentenced the
infamous British historian to three years in prison for denying that certain
aspects of the Holocaust happened while giving a lecture there in 1989.
Immediately before the sentencing however, Irving rescinded the remarks. Had
he not, the sentence could have been grave—up to ten years. Irving’s actual
transgression was to suggest that the gas chambers were more fairytale than
fact and that most Jews died of disease and starvation. Silly and incendiary?
Absolutely, even veering towards anti-Semitism, but not a hate crime. Had
this had been Beirut or Tehran and Irving had carried on his person leaflets
with the notorious Danish cartoon of the Prophet Mohamed with bomb in his
turban, he’d have been publicly drawn-and-quartered (and the self-aggrandized
xenophobe would deserve it for being the thumb-in-your-eye polemic he is),
but this is Austria, a member of Europe and the Western Civilization where
pursuit of freedom and the ability to express one’s opinion openly and
without reprisal is a heralded privilege. Believe it or not, nine
European countries, and of course Israel, have laws that make it a crime to
deny or diminish the actuality of the Holocaust. Irving however is only
guilty of ignorance, the real crime here is the fact that a governing body
would legally challenge Irving’s rhetoric—his very thoughts—and constitute
them a punishable offense. To do so is to invoke something far worse than
censorship; it’s selective fascism. Imagine for a moment that
someone unearthed irrefutable evidence (pictures, a log, a diary, etc.) that
would alter the way the Holocaust has been recorded. If we extrapolate from
the Irving scenario, that person might be thrown in jail for heresy. And if
that happens, doesn’t that effectively truncate the possibility for any
further revelation about, or interpretation of history? Revisionism is a
means of getting at the truth. Such a decree essentially denies the pursuit
of truth. The irony here is that a
person of Irving’s ill formed ideology only servers to underscore and
validate the atrocities of the Holocaust by triggering reflection and healthy
debate. By stifling him, and others like him; those that do so, only take on
the fascist visage of those whose evil atrocities they seek to excoriate. - TBM |
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