Holocaust Denier Gets Three Years
Holocaust Denier Gets Three Years
Imagine that you lived in a country where simply by saying something that others didn't agree with you set yourself up to be put in prison. Imagine that it wasn't even the country you are from, perhaps you wrote something that the government of that country did not believe in, perhaps you even wrote your conjectures, your opinions, your ideas down in a book. Those opinions would earn you a first class trial and a three year prison term when you happened to travel through that country and were subsequently arrested by the gestapo of that country. Well, imagine no longer. It's completely true and the modern day country where thoughtcrime is reality is Austria.
Yes indeed, the British historian David Irving is just that man. He has written numerous books which have gone against the normal, the usual, the properly prescribed view of history. This made him a maverick, a person who examined and wrote views of World War II that for the vast majority of historians and scholars made David Irving a outcast. Good enough, the weight of good scholarship and logic and reasoning has made David Irving sort of a joke as a serious historian. I'm not arguing one way or the other about his research and scholarship. You can actually go to Amazon.com and look at some of the books he's written. I don't think they've been able to make it a crime to look at a book just yet.
The crime here is from Austria. To make having a point of view a crime. This puts them on a par with the bad days of the Soviet Union where dissenters were put in institutions for the insane. Of course, if you disagree then you are clearly insane so it makes perfect Owellian thinking. Austria has gone to another level of mental dictatorial control over people. Yes, it's shocking for someone to deny that the holocaust ever happened. But the answer to that is education and ridicule of those who do the denying. Not prison for saying something you disagee with. Welcome to the Austrian Gulag.
Imagine that you lived in a country where simply by saying something that others didn't agree with you set yourself up to be put in prison. Imagine that it wasn't even the country you are from, perhaps you wrote something that the government of that country did not believe in, perhaps you even wrote your conjectures, your opinions, your ideas down in a book. Those opinions would earn you a first class trial and a three year prison term when you happened to travel through that country and were subsequently arrested by the gestapo of that country. Well, imagine no longer. It's completely true and the modern day country where thoughtcrime is reality is Austria.
Yes indeed, the British historian David Irving is just that man. He has written numerous books which have gone against the normal, the usual, the properly prescribed view of history. This made him a maverick, a person who examined and wrote views of World War II that for the vast majority of historians and scholars made David Irving a outcast. Good enough, the weight of good scholarship and logic and reasoning has made David Irving sort of a joke as a serious historian. I'm not arguing one way or the other about his research and scholarship. You can actually go to Amazon.com and look at some of the books he's written. I don't think they've been able to make it a crime to look at a book just yet.
The crime here is from Austria. To make having a point of view a crime. This puts them on a par with the bad days of the Soviet Union where dissenters were put in institutions for the insane. Of course, if you disagree then you are clearly insane so it makes perfect Owellian thinking. Austria has gone to another level of mental dictatorial control over people. Yes, it's shocking for someone to deny that the holocaust ever happened. But the answer to that is education and ridicule of those who do the denying. Not prison for saying something you disagee with. Welcome to the Austrian Gulag.
posted by gadlaw at 1:25 PM
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