As the BBC reports, British historian David Irving has been found guilty in an Austrian court of denying that the Holocaust occured, and has been sentenced to three years in jail.
Surveying the Daou Report on Salon.com, this story is getting a lot of play on right wing blogs, probably because they don't want to discuss the failings of their "leader". Regardless of their reasoning, this is one time I actually agree with the nutjobs. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of only saying things that aren't stupid or offensive. That Irving is a bad historian and a total freakin' moron doesn't give Austria or any other country the right to throw him in jail (and apparently prosecutors are appealing to get the sentence tougher). I realize that Germany and it's neighbors believe that they bear a continual and perpetual guilt over the millions of deaths their countrymen either participated in or allowed to happen, but emulating Hitler by being fascist about allowed speech is exactly the wrong approach.
It's stories like this that make me glad, despite the myriad things I despise about some of the people in my government, that I'm an American. It's also a story that makes me sad that we don't all practice vigilence in protecting our rights, when so many other countries (even ones like Great Britain) don't share them. What we have, in principle, is rare, and is treated with disdain by the same voices on the right who are decrying the injustice in Austria.
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1 comment:
Thanks for that, Doc--on both ends. While stupidity should be painful--it should not be criminal, And I agree on what it says for safeguarding OUR rights.
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