Lipstadt
No, it’s not particularly astonishing that Deborah Lipstadt doesn’t think Iriving should go to prison. Yes she has every reason to find him extremely irritating, but that doesn’t straightforwardly necessarily translate to thinking he ought to be locked up – and it’s a bit stupid to think or pretend to think it does. Don’t we all find countless throngs of people extremely irritating without thinking (except for the odd passing whim) that they ought to be locked up? I know I do.
Lipstadt has spent years exposing the arguments of Nazi sympathisers. She warns historians must “remain ever vigilant” against those who say the Holocaust was a hoax, “so that the precious tools of our trade and our society – truth and reason – can prevail”. The showdown came in January 2000 when she stood accused of libel for describing Irving in a book as “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial”; he accused her of “vandalising” his legitimacy as an historian. The 32-day trial became a legal debate on the history of the Nazis – and the nature of truth itself.
Which is why truth matters. You can’t sort these disagreements out without figuring out – to the best of everyone’s ability – what the truth is. If truth and reason don’t prevail, you just get competing force. Whoever has the biggest fist wins.
Mr Justice Gray witheringly described Irving as anti-Semitic, racist and a Holocaust denier who had “deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence”.
Why does that ring a bell? Oh yes, Judge Jones – he said the Dover school board played silly games with the evidence too.
However, in the case of the Holocaust, Lipstadt says she recognises a case for laws in the lands that formed the heart of the Third Reich. “Germany and Austria are not so far past the Third Reich. So I can understand that the swastika symbol, Mein Kampf, Holocaust denial, being a neo-Nazi and all the rest have a certain potency there that they would not have in the United States,” she says…Lipstadt says the reason she is generally opposed to outlawing Holocaust denial is not because she fails to recognise how deeply offensive it is but because such laws tend to turn cranks into martyrs.
There’s that confusion again – in Brendan O’Neill, not in Lipstadt. The point is not, or not just, that Holocaust denial is offensive or even deeply offensive but that it is – possibly – dangerous. I think that’s why Lipstadt used the word ‘potency’. Being a neo-Nazi has a certain potency in Austria, surely, because it is seen as at least threatening as well as offensive. At least threatening, and possibly actually dangerous. Get the labels right.
Before you put your Note up I noted a different convergence of nonsenses in a different part of the report:
“I am not interested in debating with Holocaust deniers,” she says. “You wouldn’t ask a scientist to debate with someone who thinks the Earth is flat. They are not historians, they are liars. Debating them would be nonsensical.”
But the President of the USA still thinks ID should be given equal time…
Has he gone on the record about that since the ruling?
I don’t know, but his brother has. Just last week. Said he thought evolution shouldn’t be in the curriculum. He ‘accepts’ it or ‘believes’ it or some such word, but he nevertheless thinks it shouldn’t be in the curriculum. Good thinking. Who needs biology, after all?
Presiden (sp?) Ahmendijad of “Iran” is a holocaust-denier, looking for nukes ….
Scary, non?
Don’t worry, if he or his mates ever go to war with Israel, and a taken-over Saudi, they’ll find ou the hard way, because I would lay money that if anyone is stupid enough to nuke Tel Aviv (not Jerusalem for obvious reasons) then Mecca will be Cobalt-bombed (just to make sure)
Maybe we should worry, after all?
So let me get this straight. We’re supposed to accept the banning of speech because some find it “threatening” or because it’s “possibly dangerous”? What level of “threat” or “possible danger” would trigger the banning of speech?
If I’m constructing a straw man out of your position, please tell me how.
Orac, no, we’re not necessarily supposed to accept the banning of speech because it may be dangerous. What I’m arguing is that we at least need to take that aspect into account in thinking about and discussing the issue. We need to refrain from restricting the discussion to words like ‘offensive’ or ‘shocking’ and consider that there are worse possibilities. We need, for instance, to remember what happened in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia.
And a good deal closer to home. Local, virtually unregulated, radio stations and some web-sites contributed greatly to the Lozells riots. And, of course, in the recent Aussie beach riot.
‘Shock’ radio can slide into ‘hate’ radio and have a potent and immediate effect on a tense situation.
Oh, did they – I didn’t know that. And of course (thanks for the reminder) there was that radio station that helped stir up anger (and paranoia) in Birmingham recently – the alleged rape in the alleged hair salon by the alleged Asians. Radio can indeed be a very scary medium.
OB, generally I think you avoid straw man arguments, but I think you are pursuing one here. ACLU types — such as myself — have no doubt speech can be dangerous. Most of us have actually been raised around other humans, and so have experience from playground to office that speech can be dangerous. In fact, Orhan Pamuk’s speech act could be dangerous — in 1921, when Attaturk was battling an invasion by the Greeks and a British inspired plan to carve up Turkey, it could have been very dangerous.
However, suppressing speech can also be dangerous — and the argument for free speech is that, on balance, tyrannical or genocidal acts usually involve massive suppression of speech, and that freedom of speech leads to the advance of milder rather than more authoritarian uses of power.
Speech can lead to acts, no doubt about it. A wolf whistle can lead to a rape; a holocaust denial book can lead to the blowing up of a synogogue. And Tony Blair’s government is right — blasphemy can lead to hurt feelings. However, it is simplistic to think that a wolf whistle or a holocaust denial book or a blasphemy are equivalent to a rape, a blown up synogogue, or depressing the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Which you know. So, I am surprised that your notes about this are so uncharacteristically one dimensional.
Well how can it be a straw man argument, roger, when I’m citing specific quotations in specified (and linked) articles?
And where did I say or imply that a Holocaust denial book is equivalent to a blown up synogogue? That’s not my point at all, and I don’t think I’ve said anything like it.
I hate to say the obvious, but there were three different things mentioned above by Roger and I fail to see how it becomes helpful to ignore the fact that they are three very different things indeed. Lumping them together as three different expressions, all of which could lead to acts we would all condemn, seems to me to fail to take that difference into account.
A wolf whistle is a tasteless way for uncultured men to make their admiration for the externals of a woman vocal; Holocaust denial is (pardon the bleedin’ obvious again) the denial of the established fact that approximately 6 million people (all of whom had been categorised as Jewish) were killed as part of an uncompleted systematic extermination programme of which there are still living perpetrators who have never been brought to justice; and blasphemy means treating the completely unevidenced claims made by religions with the kind of ridicule that is completely acceptable when directed at all other unevidenced claims.
Free speech is important and it should never be denied anyone without extraordinary cause. That doesn’t alter my opinion that to list the above three cases in a way that emphasises their similarities more than their differences is misleading.
Not that I wish to be construed as speaking in defence of any house of worship, but my gut reaction is that conceiving of, writing and publishing a book of Holocaust denial can do more (and intenionally so) towards inspiring the blowing up a synagogue than an unpremeditated wolf whistle by a stupid yobbo can towards a rape. I don’t know the stats, but what are there more of: rapes that were preceded by wolf whistles or those that weren’t? I’ll go out on a limb and guess that there have been many more wolf whistles without rapes than with.
As for blasphemy – without any flippancy whatsoever – what’s wrong with it? At least political mudslinging can be based on something real, like differing arguable approaches to real problems. And beliefs that can offer no evidence of basis in fact should get more protection than any other kind? The fact that they do screams for more blasphemy, because whatever we’ve had so far obviously hasn’t opened enough eyes.
I don’t want to appear light on rape (or wolf whistles), so maybe just to sharpen one point: I can conceive of a wolf whistle being “perpetrated” in a spirit of pure fun, with the “perpetrator” meaning no malice towards the person being whistled at, even if that person feels harrassed by it. I can not conceive of a book of Holocaust denial appearing with no malice intended by those responsible.
And there’s such a thing as being too heavy on wolf whistles, too. It was either a wolf whistle or a ‘Hey, baby’ that got Emmett Till killed. This is all tricky territory. Wolf whistles can feel threatening – but then again…
Great stuff, Stewart.
Stewart, I gave three dangers which have three degrees — that was why I did it. Those three degrees are, as you should know, connected to the various justifications made to limit freedom of speech — from blasphemy laws to laws about sexual material to laws about the publication of racist material.
Now, what is the argument? When you throw in the idea that not only was the holocaust a great crime, but that perpetrators of genocide remain uncaught, I don’t think that you are saying that they remain uncaught because of Holocaust deniers — are you? Because that would certainly be a danger, but I would make an opposite claim — actually, the people who protected the genocidaires knew perfectly well what they did, as we know from the case of Barbie, of Gehlen, of the many, many war criminals shunted by the Roman Catholic church with the help of the OSS to Argentina, where they continued to do their work. Those countries — Germany and Austria in the fifties — which had the strictest rules against Nazi expression were also the countries where the perpetrators were most protected. The first chapter of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem has a scoriating history of that.
So, the danger of speech, here, and its banning doesn’t seem to eliminate the danger you associate with Holocaust denial. What this tells me, at least, is that perhaps the dangers of such things can be countered in other than legal ways.
Now, to the second point, which is that banning speech can itself be a danger. Do you, or OB, really doubt this? If you don’t, then surely the argument can be joined at a level that it doesn’t seem to reach in your response, or in OB’s, in my opinion. And, to go back to Pamuk, it is quite easy to frame cases in which a state has a reason to censor. In 1940, the British massively censored material published by Indian nationalists, and that material was largely true. Were they right to do that? And how is Brendan’s point typical of free speech absolutists for ignoring the dangers of speech when the whole argument is about costs and benefits that incline one to say the danger of banning is more than the danger of not?
Roger,
I claim no legal expertise here, which you may have; I am writing as nothing but a layman. I was expressing my genuinely-held opinion that free speech should not be restricted without, as I put it, “extraordinary cause.” I do agree that an argument can be made that banning some speech can be more dangerous than not, but I think many cases remain arguable because the issues at hand are tied so closely to the self-interests involved. I’m not sure I can phrase it more clearly than that and almost every example one might try to find as an illustration might also be countered by a very similar one in which the weight might also fall just on the other side.
The things I “threw in” were there simply to emphasise how different your examples were in their basic nature. Unless you want to make wolf whistles part of some millennia-long anti-female conspiracy by males, it’s a silly impulse that doesn’t lend itself to much investigation, other than maybe biological or cultural. Neither wolf whistles nor blasphemy has any connection to real crimes (as in murder) already committed, which in my mind puts them on a different plane to something like Holocaust denial. My reference to the “uncaught,” which I fully realise should not be central to an argument about free speech, is in there because it isn’t even an argument about ancient history; it’s fresh enough that one could argue it’s an interference in an ongoing judicial process. I’m not – directly – saying people remain uncaught because of Holocaust deniers. If Irving had won against Lipstadt, however, it would probably have been taken in many quarters as a discouragement of further searches for those elderly criminals who have evaded justice till now. And there seems little doubt that this would have been welcomed by Irving, given the finding that he permitted his prejudices to influence his work.
You may have listed the three “offenses” as representing degrees but they strike me as so fundamentally different (possibly you were much more focused on their effects on those who take offense, whereas I was trying to look at their nature, as objectively as I am capable) that this ought to be pointed out, rather than merely acquiescing to the possibility someone might see them as a list of “like” things upon which all manner of faulty arguments could be based.
Having already gone into some detail above, what I mean by fundamentally different in nature can be briefly expressed as: expression of preference in coarse manner (wolf whistle), denial of real crime (Holocaust denial) and disrespect for unevidenced beliefs (blasphemy). Looked at like that, are you surprised I ask what qualifies the three to be mentioned in the same breath? My argument here is not anti-free speech; I was making no statement or argument about how to treat the three. I was pointing out how different they are as a way of suggesting that one size doesn’t necessarily automatically fit all. Each one has its own complexities, none of which are to be sneezed at, which is precisely why they should be looked at separately, individually, to avoid wolf whistles, Holocaust denial or blasphemy being treated as if they were one of the other two. It’s fine to bring something else into an argument by way of comparison, but a lot less helpful when it’s something that doesn’t really bear comparison.
“than I am to OB’s notion that, after all, offensive speech is offensive. That’s all.”
My what? My what? What notion? Roger – you’re just not paying attention. That is the exact opposite of what I’m saying.
I know that you are saying that it isn’t that it is offensive, but that it is dangerous, OB. But I really can’t parse that distinction from anything else that you have said, for offensiveness and threateningness do not seem to me to be as distinct as you are making them out to be — as I have been trying to point out by showing that it is easy to frame cases of a speech act being dangerous in almost any instance of banning speech — and when one gets down to cases in the particular instance of banning pro-Nazi speech we don’t find that those times in which it was banned in Austria and Germany coincided with times in which Nazi collaborators were hunted out with a lot of energy. To the contrary (did anybody say Waldheim?)
Now, I am sure you know how these discussions go, traditionally, (the harm of a ban versus the harm of giving the state that kind of power), but you have only emphasized harm on one side. I really think that you don’t think that the Austrian government should ban Irving’s books. Or do you? But I am not sure what your objection is, then, to the civil liberties position that Brendan O’Neill takes.
ps — to make the problem of the distinction between offensiveness and dangerousness clearer, let’s take a particular aspect of Neo-nazidom. Your contention that the movement thrives on holocaust denial captures one aspect of it. But another aspect is the attempt to show Germany and Austria as victims. This attempt gains support from histories that show that, after WWII, German populations, expelled from numerous eastern european countries, suffered a horrendous death toll — I think Mazower puts it at 2 million.
So say a historian writes about this event, emphasizing only facts, but clearly couching the book to an audience of Neo-Nazis. (as has happened in Germany, as a matter of fact). This subject was discouraged in Adenauer’s germany for precisely the reason the Turkish government doesn’t like discussing the Armenian mass murders: fear of instability.
So, what do you do? Ban such books?
Well I would have thought I’d explained it clearly enough – though that was last month, to be sure. The current post is more shorthand, but it’s a continuation of disagreement with O’Neill from last month.
My objection to the position O’Neill takes is that he calls Holocaust denial ‘offensive’ and similar feeling-based adjectives, and I’m arguing that that’s not all there is to it – that he is oversimplifying and obfuscating.
I think OB is saying that, whatever your view on whether there should or shouldn’t be Holocaust denial laws, there is more to the question than simply that Holocaust denial causes offense. That is, Holocaust denial has political ramifications in Germany and Austria that go beyond offending people and encompass questions of the fragile social stability of these countries after the war. She is not arguing (necessarily) that these political ramifications therefore make laws against Holocaust denial the best move on balance, only that we shouldn’t concentrate only on the question of offence (i.e. that talking about these views as causing offence is a red-herring).
I’d agree that saying that there is a big difference between telling the truth — as Orhan Pamuk has done — and promoting a big lie to enable fascist movements. On the other hand, it is important to have a level view of the dangers that can be trusted to the normal mechanisms of civil society, and those that require state intervention. Thus my wariness about the “danger” talk — if Brendan’s term can lead to intellectual slackness in the face of extremist danger, OB’s term can lead to encroachment on the individual liberty to believe disgusting and dangerous things. In my opinion, at least, we face a lot more danger from government’s operating to snoop on us and limit our rights, at the moment, than we do from neo-Nazis. Although, admittedly, there are malign convergences of both dangers — Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Dawa and Sciri party the U.S. supports in Iraq, etc.
Yes. But it’s impossible to have a clear and coherent discussion of what the dangers are and are not if the whole subject is being euphemized.
The balance is important to keep in mind. While defending the unfettered right to utter the most loathsome opinions, it should never be forgotten that there will always be those whose real aim is to exploit freedom of speech while it exists for all in order to change the rules so that it will exist only for them. That crunch must be avoided, because when it comes it’s usually too late.
Can I admit (blushingly) that this whole debate brings to mind SOUTH PARK-the episode when Satan must choose between loving, touchy-feely, hippy-metrosexual “Chris” and Sadaam Hussein?
Will I be banished for admitting I love South Park? (LOL). Now we are talking “infantile.”
So, Brian, how do you feel about the Three Stooges?
haw!
Not my cup of tea. I like a little “content” in my humor-and I like cartoons (blush). I WANT badly the Invader Zim box set!
By the way, I promise no more tasteless religious rants (vis a vis the codemnation to eternal fire by the anonymous Muslim upstream. My apologies)