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Scrotis Lo Knows
Citizen
Username: Scrotisloknows
Post Number: 844
Registered: 10-2005
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 9:44 am: | 
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I am surprised no one is talking about Holocaust denier Irving's prison sentence in Austria...any thoughts?
http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2006/02/21/1140284067577.html |
MBJ
Citizen
Username: Mbj
Post Number: 164
Registered: 10-2005
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 9:46 am: |
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The guy's statements brand him as an idiot. But jail time?? |
Nohero
Supporter
Username: Nohero
Post Number: 5089
Registered: 10-1999
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 9:48 am: |
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He's an offensive idiot.
And, I can understand why Austria is sensitive about these things.
But, it shouldn't be illegal to simply believe something, or state something. |
Paris Hiltonberry
Supporter
Username: Strawberry
Post Number: 6833
Registered: 10-2001
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 9:57 am: |
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Is it true he said "I can't believe this has happened" after spending his first night in jail?  |
Elgato
Citizen
Username: Elgato
Post Number: 29
Registered: 2-2004
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 10:48 am: |
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Obviously it would never happen here.
Bush's Mysterious 'New Programs':
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/022106a.html |
Paris Hiltonberry
Supporter
Username: Strawberry
Post Number: 6834
Registered: 10-2001
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 10:58 am: |
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shut up already..Go somewhere else to bash Bush. This is about Austria
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Duncan
Supporter
Username: Duncanrogers
Post Number: 5776
Registered: 12-2001
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 11:02 am: |
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Y'all just wait till Paul Grellong's new play Power of Sail gets produced. Then come back to this thread. |
Scrotis Lo Knows
Citizen
Username: Scrotisloknows
Post Number: 845
Registered: 10-2005
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 3:44 pm: |
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Paris-
Are you really surprised? You can set your watch to it on these boards... 
I am with most of you on this....jailtime? Really disturbing...
Austria and Germany really need to find another way to get over their guilt.... |
Threeringale
Citizen
Username: Threeringale
Post Number: 57
Registered: 1-2006
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 7:41 pm: |
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I think it is absurd to put a 67 year old man in jail for writing a stupid book. One of my favorite writers has this to say:
I love the music of Mozart and respect Austria’s noble past, but I cannot imagine any decent American visiting that country except out of absolute necessity. What is to prevent an Austrian prosecutor from downloading an American’s blog and using it as evidence of a thought-crime? What is even more despicable is the hypocrisy of a country that was home to the most highly honored war criminal of WWII, Kurt Waldheim, a man who did not merely challenge orthodoxy but used his power to kill the innocent. Of course, it is remembered in some quarters that the current governor of California praised Waldheim after the revelations were made public—and, please, spare me the knee-jerk defense of Waldheim. Tito protected his record, but he is indefensible.
Irving may have had decent motives in the beginning—though I have my doubts even there—but in response to criticism he became what he was accused of being. But there is hardly anyone willing to stand up to propaganda who is not sick or crazy, and Irving’s sentence is a clear indication of why. A normal person with wife and family and career will not risk it all simply to correct the historical record on the thugs and goons who ran Nazi Germany or, for that matter, on the thugs and goons who ran the US in our own version of the Third Reich we call the New Deal.
I quote this as a teaser, not to conceal the rest of the article which I pretty much agree with. No need to Google, here it is:
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/hardright.cgi/2006/02/21/David_Irving
N.B. If you find forcefully stated opinions disturbing, you might want to skip it.
Cheers. |
Innisowen
Citizen
Username: Innisowen
Post Number: 1589
Registered: 3-2004
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 7:51 pm: |
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Scrotis has a point above (jesus god alive, am I really agreeing with him?). Austria needs to confront its historical sense of guilt in other ways.
Irving's "beliefs" and so-called "scholarship" are stupid enough to speak for themselves. Any of his "disciples" who read his treatises deserve both the boredom and misinformation they get.
But you don't throw people in jail for their beliefs, in Austria or in this country. |
Montagnard
Citizen
Username: Montagnard
Post Number: 1894
Registered: 6-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 8:20 pm: |
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It's not the belief that's the crime, although most of these "Holocaust deniers" secretly believe that (a) it really did happen and (b) it wasn't as thorough as they'd have liked it to be.
The action of denigrating others is the crime - same as libel, slander and related forms of abusive communication. |
Mustt_mustt
Citizen
Username: Mustt_mustt
Post Number: 555
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 8:49 pm: |
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Well said Montagnard. Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian psychoanalyst, has the same thing to say about creatures like Irving and his ilk. |
Scrotis Lo Knows
Citizen
Username: Scrotisloknows
Post Number: 850
Registered: 10-2005
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 8:50 pm: |
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MOntagnard-
Yeah, but I am not aware of anyone being incarcerated for libel/slander in this day and age. Maybe a lawsuit at best, but jailtime?
-SLK |
Scrotis Lo Knows
Citizen
Username: Scrotisloknows
Post Number: 852
Registered: 10-2005
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 8:57 pm: |
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WSJ REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Defending the Indefensible
Three years in prison is not the right punishment for Holocaust denier David Irving.
Friday, February 24, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
There are many reasons to regret the decision by Austrian authorities to prosecute, sentence and imprison for three years or more British pseudohistorian David Irving. Liberal democracies ought not to be in the business of criminalizing speech, except speech that incites violence. Prohibitions against specified types of speech, such as Holocaust denial, have a tendency to invite further prohibitions and risk rendering the concept of free speech a nonsense. Imprisoning people for their views alone has a way of turning louts into "martyrs." And just when the Danish government is under unprecedented attack for its refusal to intervene in the editorial decision-making of a private newspaper, it seems perverse to offer Muslim provocateurs an example of a European country catering to one set of sensitivities but not another.
But that's the least of it. By imprisoning Mr. Irving, Austria has now forced serious people to come to the principled defense of a detestable man.
Press accounts usually describe Mr. Irving as a Holocaust "revisionist" or denier. That he is, as a British court found in 2000, when it ruled against him in a defamation suit that he had brought against American scholar Deborah Lipstadt. But Mr. Irving is something worse, partly because he is something better: A man of learning and a certain kind of intellectual brilliance, he made dishonest use of both qualities in an attempt to restore the reputation of the Nazis and blacken those of their victims.
Sometimes this has been to noted effect: When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls the Holocaust a "myth," he is doing so in large part on the authority of Mr. Irving (whom the Iranian government recently invited to speak). But often Mr. Irving's influence has been felt in ways that we are only dimly aware of.
Consider his first book, on the February 1945 Allied bombing of Dresden, in which he put the civilian death toll at between 100,000 and 250,000. That estimate--grossly exaggerated, as later scholarship would show--became widely accepted and helped spark a now popular perception that Germany was as much a victim of World War II as it was the instigator. Or take "Hitler's War," Mr. Irving's attempt to rescue the Fuehrer's reputation by casting Winston Churchill as the real warmonger. Mr. Irving's Hitler revisionism never caught on among serious scholars, but the Churchill revisionism did.
Here lies Mr. Irving's real cunning. For decades he successfully presented himself as a serious historian of admittedly outré views, when in fact he was the opposite: a propagandist posing as a scholar. His methods were "controversy" and the "challenging of taboos," typically catchphrases of the left that he adapted to his own purposes. This tactic was ultimately far more insidious--and effective--than his forays into Holocaust denial, calibrated as those often were. Had Mr. Irving only restrained himself slightly, the damage he might have done to our collective historical perceptions could have been incalculably greater.
Fortunately, perhaps, anti-Semites almost inevitably out themselves: Their views flare like hives, often inadvertently and on inconvenient occasions. Ahead of the recent verdict, Mr. Irving had already been bankrupted, not only financially but reputationally, thanks to the efforts of Ms. Lipstadt and others. That's where he might have remained for the rest of his life had it not been for the ill-timed intervention of the Austrian police and judiciary. Now the rest of us have the unpleasant task of reminding ourselves of exactly who this man is--and extending a begrudging hand of rescue. |
Foj
Citizen
Username: Foger
Post Number: 986
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 10:44 pm: |
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Jail time is nuts. Thank heavens we have at least 1/2 a 1st ammendment left. |
Duncan
Supporter
Username: Duncanrogers
Post Number: 5780
Registered: 12-2001
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 11:51 pm: |
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Scrotis..take note that on 11:49pm of Feb. 24 we completely agreed on something. That is an excellent piece you copied up there.
Man I wish Paul would get his play produced. It is completely abou this very issue. A university faculty member invites a guy likely modelled on Irving to speak on campus and the trouble/debate that ensues. A really great play.
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Scrotis Lo Knows
Citizen
Username: Scrotisloknows
Post Number: 857
Registered: 10-2005
| | Posted on Saturday, February 25, 2006 - 9:08 am: |
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Duncan-
Cheers....  |
tjohn
Supporter
Username: Tjohn
Post Number: 4100
Registered: 12-2001
| | Posted on Saturday, February 25, 2006 - 9:16 am: |
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"Mr. Irving's Hitler revisionism never caught on among serious scholars, but the Churchill revisionism did. "
How could that possibly be? Churchill was a noisemaker on the side until after Hitler invaded France. How could a serious scholar accuse Churchill of warmongering. |
Scrotis Lo Knows
Citizen
Username: Scrotisloknows
Post Number: 860
Registered: 10-2005
| | Posted on Saturday, February 25, 2006 - 10:25 am: |
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tjohn-
because no one would touch Irving's viewpoints. There is no moral sacrifice in revising Churchhill...
-SLK |
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