[Vision2020] 02-25-06 LA Times: Trust the truth

[Phil Nisbet]

And what exactly is your commnet to this editorial Wayne?  Do you concur 
with its premise?

Phil Nisbet


>From: "Art Deco" <deco at moscow.com>
>To: "Vision 2020" <vision2020 at moscow.com>
>Subject: [Vision2020] 02-25-06 LA Times:  Trust the truth
>Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2006 08:58:23 -0800
>
>http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-irving25feb25,0,3704863.story?track=tothtml
>
> >From the Los Angeles Times
>LESSONS FROM LOSERS
>Trust the truth
>
>February 25, 2006
>
>DAVID IRVING IS THE KIND OF creep who will stand up in front of a crowd of 
>Holocaust deniers and brag, "This hand has shaken more hands that shook 
>Hitler's hand than anyone else in the world." As a once-respected World War 
>II historian, he has arguably done more than anyone else alive to add a 
>gloss of academic respectability to the grossly inaccurate notion that 
>there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
>
>Yet his sentencing this week in Austria to a three-year prison term for 
>denying the Holocaust back in 1989 is a much more hateful expression than 
>anything that has ever come out of Irving's mouth.
>
>Words don't kill millions of people; governments and their armies do. 
>Austria is hardly doing a convincing job of repudiating its own fascist 
>history by using the blunt force of its police power to lock up a 
>nonviolent, nonthreatening, noncitizen crank. And perversely (though 
>predictably), the publicity generated from the case has given fresh oxygen 
>to Irving's unspeakable views.
>
>And that's just the practical objection. Symbolically, jailing a historian 
>for his opinions is much more dire. Europe may have produced the two most 
>murderous ideologies of the 20th century, but both were eventually defeated 
>by the enduring product of the 18th: the Enlightenment. Thinkers such as 
>Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson understood that progress is best advanced not 
>through the edicts of rulers about what discourse is acceptable, but by the 
>freest and most skeptical inquiry from all levels of society.
>
>Ideas and scholarship should compete, and rise or fall on the strength of 
>how they survive open peer review. By declaring certain ideas off-limits, 
>many European governments, from France to Britain to nations of the former 
>communist East, are showing a lack of faith in the truth to win out. 
>British Prime Minister Tony Blair, for instance, recently pushed through a 
>law prohibiting the "glorification" of terrorism, an act that will surely 
>drive the country's violence-espousing Islamic extremists into the shadows, 
>where their conspiratorial worldviews will fester off the radar of both the 
>public and the police.
>
>At a time when Pakistani clerics are offering million-dollar rewards for 
>the heads of Danish cartoonists, and European citizens (if not their 
>governments) are making the most rousing defenses of free expression in a 
>generation, the contrast couldn't be more clear: Countries that tolerate 
>free speech thrive; those that don't, don't. That principle is worth 
>defending more than the "right" of people not to be offended or hear lies.
>
>Although he made an unpersuasive, last-ditch courtroom conversion to 
>accepting the Holocaust, Irving will now serve as a martyr to a movement 
>that doesn't deserve one - and a symbol of a weak governing class that has 
>lost faith in one of the Continent's greatest intellectual achievements. 
>Even hateful speech should be free.


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