David Irving

No Right Turn had a good post yesterday on David Irving which shows what a nasty man he is. His statements have not just been holocaust denial but “poisonous, anti-semitic lies”.

Today he has been sentenced to three years jail. And as much as I detest Irving I am uncomfortable with people going to jail simply for their views.

In principle I oppose laws criminalising holocaust denial. The way to beat them is toi expose and ridicule them. But to be fair to Austria I can understand why in that country especially, the birthplace of Hitler, they felt a need to have such laws. Sometimes it is a bit too easy to criticise from afar. NZ didn’t suffer in the way Austria did from the Nazis.

But even if such laws were justified in the immediate decades after Hitler, it is time to get rid of them. Jailing Irving for statements he made in 1989 just makes him a martyr.