Tuesday, February 21, 2006

David Irving

I basically agree with everything Idiot/Savant says on No Right Turn about David Irving.

There is one other important point I'd like to make. Over at Cthulhu is Coming Eleanor challenged other left-wing blogs to reprint the cartoons in solidarity. David Irving has been put in jail for three years for something he said in 1989. This is a much more clear cut case of censorship than the response the cartoonists have seen. Is Eleanor (or others who have made the same argument) going to make the same challenge, or republish David Irvings statements?

Now I wouldn't suggest that anyone should deny the holocaust because David Irving has been censored. I think it's stupid to say something that you disagree with because someone else is trying to stop people from saying that thing. And I'd judge anyone who published a holocaust denial harshly, whatever their excuses for doing so.

But I think exactly the same arguments apply.

5 comments:

  1. It's spelt "Cthulhu"; "Cluthu" sounds like a river in Southland.

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  2. And I had her blog open to copy down off and everything.

    Thanks for the correction.

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  3. Another problem is the double standard over what constitutes a Holocaust and what constitutes Holocaust denial. It shouldn't be illegal, but it's quite right that speaking or writing against the fact of the Jewish Holocaust is taboo. On the other hand, though, academics and media stars like Niall Ferguson and Victor Hanson Davis have their pockets filled with gold for excusing and in some cases denying other Holocausts (the genocidal parts of the history of British Empire, and the US's genocidal wars in Indochina).
    I posted a bit about this at:
    http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2006/01/herald-publishes-holocaust-deniers.html

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  4. Anonymous5:37 pm

    I've come to think that 'holocaust denial' is not the best description for what creeps like Irving are up to. They're inciting encouraging and providing a justification for race hatred, which is scientificaly wrong, socially disgusting and frequently leads to thuggish mob assults on innocent people and their property. I see the point you folks are making, but not withstanding the lend some hypocritical Zionists take of this,I have to say I'm glad the areshole's in jail and I hope the jailer is as hopeless at looking after keys as I am.

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  5. The cartoons were an attack on a religion, as was the South Park episode. Holocaust denial is an attack on a race.

    Two key differences:
    One, you choose your religion, you don't choose your race.
    Two, a religion is an ideology - one may disagree with the ideas that comprise that ideology. A race is just who your parents were.

    I'm not arguing that freedom of ideas doesn't deserve protection - for instance I don't think people should be jailed for being a fascist, or denied entry to the country for being a Communist/Anarchist/Islamacist or whatever.

    Of course, matters get complicated by the fact that there is a Jewish race, a Jewish religion and a Zionist ideology. Adherents of the second two conflate any attack on their ideas as an attack on the first.

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