David Irving is a British historian who has spent his professional career first denying that the Holocaust took place, then saying that it had been grossly exaggerated. He is a deeply unsympathetic character. His message is as spiritually vile as it is intellectually corrupt. Nevertheless, his sentence to three years’ imprisonment in Austria after pleading guilty to violating that nation’s law, which makes it a crime to deny the Holocaust, is no cause for rejoicing. Irving may be despicable, but Austria’s law is ill-advised. Democracies should not be in the business of jailing those who hold unpopular, mistaken, or — in the case of Irving — hateful opinions.
Irving likes to style himself as irreverent and counterintuitive, a scholar who goes against the grain. He is none of those things. He is an apostle of hate, a man whose very pretense to scholarship dishonors generations of his distinguished predecessors. He is a racist and an anti-Semite, as this poem — written on the occasion of his daughter’s birthday — amply demonstrates:
I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian
Why even shrug at the imprisonment of such a man? Because democracy is about protecting speech, even bad speech, and about punishing bad deeds. What, then, about the case of the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza, recently sentenced in England to seven years in prison for racial hate crimes and who faces extradition to the US on charges of terrorism? A jury has found Hamza guilty of crossing the line — fine, but distinct — that distinguishes speech that is free from speech that is criminal. He was found guilty of trying to incite murder and mayhem, of calling upon his congregation to become terrorists — something of which the despicable Irving has never been accused.
Austria and Germany are among a half-dozen or so European nations that, together with Israel, have laws against denying the Holocaust. And while those laws have the noble purpose of trying to ensure that such a horror never again occurs — at least within their borders — the protection they offer is at odds with the very nature of democracy. Regulating free expression is a slippery slope: today speech, tomorrow thought. George Orwell’s novel 1984 is perhaps the ultimate artistic expression of what happens when thought becomes a crime. The totalitarian regimes of Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Mao’s China are brutal testimony to the truth of Orwell’s bleak vision.
So in an often nasty and sometimes brutish world, what protection do decent people enjoy? Those who are lucky enough to live in democracies enjoy the greater security that comes from living in vibrant and contentious societies, communities that emerge stronger from the public revulsion that results when the Ku Klux Klan marches, or a cross is burned, or a neo-Nazi group gathers. Societies that understand that speech laws and so-called hate laws only drive repellent opinion into the darker recesses of the collective soul, where it festers. It may be uncomfortable, but it is far better to confront distasteful — even hateful — opinion in the open light of an open society where it can wither and expire under the light of common scrutiny.
