David Irving Released
Holocaust denier David Irving has been released from prison in Austria. Irving was imprisoned in February this year and sentenced to three years for saying that the gas chambers at Auschwitz didn’t exist. (He later recanted.)
At the time, a number of people showed their true illiberal colours:
We must learn the lessons of the past to built a decent society for the future. Irving’s conviction, especially in Austria which was a former Nazi country, is important and appropriate. - Lord Janner, chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust
Today’s sentencing confirms David Irving as a bigot and an anti-Semite and also serves a direct challenge to the Iranian regime’s embrace of Holocaust denial. - Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center
However, others had a much better attitude:
“This is a silly law by silly people for silly people,” [Lothar Hobelt, associate professor of history at the University of Vienna] said.
“In fact, having a law that says you mustn’t question a particular historical instance, if anything, creates doubt about it, because if an argument has to be protected by the force of law, it means it’s a weak argument.”
Hobelt has it exactly right. If bad ideas are going to be defeated it must be with better ideas. Imprisoning a person for the ideas they express does nothing to defeat the idea. It is by evidence and debate that we must come to the truth. See for example chapters 12 to 14 of Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things, which deal with pseudo-history in general and holocaust denial in particular.
U.S. Supreme Court judge and American Zionist leader Louis “Sunshine is the best disinfectant” Brandeis would have agreed.
Hat tip: Foreign Policy.
December 21st, 2006 at 1:00 pm
“Why People Believe Wierd Things”
According to Amazon it has a section on Randian Positivism. Presumably he takes a pop at such beliefs (given I haven’t read the book). Do you know what he says about it?
December 21st, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Chapter 8 is called “The Unlikeliest Cult: Ayn Rand, Objectivism, and the Cult of Personality”.
It investigates how the Objectivist movement came to operate as an Ayn Rand personality cult, asking the question
Shermer doesn’t dissect Rand’s ideas other than some commentary on moral absolutism - as somebody debunking pseudo-science and superstition he is understandably sympathetic to her ideas about objective reality and her epistemology of reason. Instead, he discusses what makes a cult, how closely Ayn Rand’s circle fitted that description, and the errors in thinking that led to that odd state of affairs.
January 16th, 2007 at 8:59 am
[…] As I’ve said before, the best way to deal with holocaust denial is to discuss it openly: If bad ideas are going to be defeated it must be with better ideas. Imprisoning a person for the ideas they express does nothing to defeat the idea. It is by evidence and debate that we must come to the truth. […]
January 19th, 2007 at 9:44 am
[…] I/S also makes an “obvious” comparison to the David Irving case. I don’t think the comparison is as obvious as I/S makes out and it downplays Sheik Mohammed’s evil. Irving promotes a demostrably false version of history that many, particularly Jews, find offensive. As noted above, “giving offence is not harm”. Sheik Mohammed, while causing no direct harm himself, calls for others to do just that: “Teach them this: there is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid. Put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of jihad and a love of martyrdom.” […]