How do you kill a poisonous idea? Do you lock it away, silence it and hope that somehow the venom will evaporate in the dark? Or do you let the evil out, expose it to argument and ridicule, and then watch it shrivel in the light?
I was glad to see David Irving walk free from an Austrian jail, podgier than when he went in, but no less pompous and pernicious. The British author and “historian” served 13 months of a three-year sentence for denying the Holocaust. Irving’s ideas are repulsive and wrong. A warrant for his arrest was originally issued in 1989 after he told an Austrian audience that the Nazi gas chambers were a “fairytale”; he also claimed that Hitler had sought to protect Jews, rather than systematically murder them.
Irving’s skewed version of history was already widely discredited before his arrest. In 2001, after his failed libel action against an American academic, a judge declared that he had “persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence”. That should have been his cultural epitaph. Instead, by silencing him in solitary confinement, Irving was allowed to become a grotesque poster-boy for freedom of speech.
It is far better that Irving should be at liberty to spout his vile nonsense, and derided for it. Let him traipse back to Britain, demanding an academic boycott of Austria and Germany, which everyone will ignore. Then his ideas can slide back into the intellectual mud where they belong. We need to hear the poisonous ideas to realise how wrong they are.
The Tehran conference of Holocaust deniers last week provoked waves of outrage around the world, but it may inadvertently have done more for the cause of honest history than any number of learned and objective monographs. The list of speakers alone demonstrated just how intellectually impoverished is the cause of Holocaust denial: David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, the usual suspects such as Frederick Töben and Robert Faurisson, and a group of photogenic anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox rabbis. The works of Irving were displayed in glass cases, like the fossils they are.
Sacha Baron Cohen perfectly captured the intellectual tenor of the conference by sending an apology note from the anti-Semitic Borat to the Golden Globes Award organisers, saying he was otherwise engaged as guest of honour at the Tehran knees-up.
So far from lending scholarly weight to Holocaust denial, the entire episode has revealed the crude anti-Semitic grandstanding of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President. Iran’s Foreign Minister described the conference as “scientific and scholarly”, but when the anti-Israel rabbis went off-message and declared that the mass murder of European Jews had been “confirmed by innumerable eye-witnesses and fully documented”, every one of the Iranian government-controlled newspapers somehow missed the news.
The conference was always pure propaganda, underpinned by the hoary conspiracy theory that the history of the genocide has been falsified to justify the foundation of Israel. The fragility of the deniers’ argument was laid bare. The conference probably did not persuade a single person that the Holocaust really is a “myth”, but it convinced many millions that Israel’s enemies are prepared to hijack history.
Racists prefer to operate in the half-light, preaching to the converted, the blinkered and the paranoid. Himmler himself argued in 1943 that the Final Solution was best kept secret. By shining a spotlight on the sad creatures that make up the Holocaust denial lobby, Mr Ahmadinejad may have done them a huge disservice.
The Iranian President’s target audience was not the West, nor even Iranians, but radicalised Muslims in other parts of the Middle East. He is seeking a wider constituency in the region by fomenting anti-Semitism and fostering the falsehood that Jews invented their own tragedy. From there, it is a short step to his demand that Israel be “wiped off the map”.
The reaction of Iran’s neighbours to the conference, or lack of it, is equally telling. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch MP born in Somalia, wrote last week: “Why is there no counter-conference in Riyadh, Cairo, Lahore, Khartoum or Jakarta condemning Ahmadinejad? Why is the Organisation of the Islamic Conference silent on this?” The Tehran conference has not advanced historical learning one jot, but we have learnt a little more about the uncertainties and antipathies of the Middle East.
The proper reaction to Mr Ahmadinejad’s provocation is not to demand that such events be outlawed, and still less to try to silence or imprison cranks such as Irving. Instead, the global community should hold its own conference, inviting history scholars and witnesses to the Holocaust, but also the intellectual pariahs of Tehran.
Would it dignify the deniers to be permitted to share a platform with genuine historians? I doubt it. There is nothing dignified in seeing your arguments demolished. Imagine Irving’s paltry manipulations alongside, say, the moral authority of Elie Wiesel, the writer and Auschwitz survivor.
When lies are dragged into the light, common sense can usually see them for what they are. I defy any sensible person to read Mein Kampf and not immediately recognise it as semi-literate, barbaric and illogical. Hitler’s manifesto has lost its emotive power precisely because we can buy it openly, read it freely, and reject it utterly.
The same is true of the Holocaust deniers. Hidden, banned and imprisoned, they achieve a cachet and a credibility that they do not deserve. Let them speak, and with every word, they condemn themselves.
I can see both the pros and cons of criminalising Holocaust denial. But what I can also see are a number of snide posters on this thread using this topic to pretty much state their disbelief in the scale or even existance of the Holocaust with Dr Fredrick Toben (a Holocaust revisionist who runs The Adelaide Institute) injecting his own little portion of predictable venom shortly after his attendance at Ahmadinejad´s nasty little conference.
Dan, Hampton, UK
Anti-Semitism is a very real threat today. Hitler wiped-out millions of Jews in the Holocaust but those who 'deny' the Holocaust today would like to have a second-chance to kill more Jews. Israel is vastly-outnumbered in the United Nations (there are more than 50 Muslim states) and without the leadership of the United States, I fear Israel will be destroyed - and millions more will be murdered in cold blood. I am very afraid of the future because of the nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
Richard Ramsey, Salt Spring Island, BC, CANADA
In total about 62 milion people died in WW2. One third of the deaths (21m) occurred inside Hitlers Camps, not to mention the 3.5 million POW dead in nazi prisons.
There certainly was a global holocaust, but one quarter of all Nazi deaths in captivity were Jewish losses. Considering they were the one nation not represented militarily their losses have to be considered in a different light to all the others, i.e., it was a deliberate genocide and the magnitude of the murder makes it a holocaust by any standard.
Ian, London, United Kingdom