Both Orac's Respectful Insolence and Deborah Lipstadt's History on Trial picked up on an album review in the NME which opened with the classic line
Aside from the deaf or those in a level of denial up there with David Irving's idiot pronouncements on the Holocaust, everyone's aware that we live in great times for music.
Not that we're trying to claim prescience or anything, but one of the tag-lines we played around with when scheming up this blog was:
Some countries lock up Holocaust deniers... but we believe in free speech. We prefer just to laugh at them.
Irving's recent mishap might have attracted a certain abstract sympathy from libertarians (among whom be us, let it be reiterated), but in his home country, such feelings have been strongly tempered by a sense that the old fool really has become little more than a figure of fun.
No, he doesn't deserve to be in jail. He should have been laughed out of polite society years ago.
How can one take this man seriously?
ReplyDeleteFar-right author David Irving's repudiation of his views on the Holocaust and Hitler's role in it has not lasted very long. In a prison interview just days after he told an Austrian court he had been wrong to deny the Holocaust, he reverted to insisting that the slaughter in Nazi death camps was exaggerated, and that Jews "bear blame for what happened".
It seems Mr Irving doesn't know what he thinks about Holocaust. Why does he enjoy making a clown of himself, once admitting he was wrong and then returning to his old views?
It seems his brother knows why
Even as a child, David had a horribly malicious sense of humour. He loved to play cruel pranks, particularly on those in authority, says Nicholas. "It has all been really distressing for me; we were always so very, very different. As children, he was always trying to drag me into his devilment. Like the time, when we were six, that he gave a 'Heil Hitler' salute when a German bomber destroyed a nearby house. I knew it was wrong, I wouldn't do it, but David went right ahead. Anything to outrage, anything for attention."
Jailing this pathetic fellow was very cruel of the Austrians. I can name several equally bad comedians, should they be jailed too?
If a prominent Leftist were imprisoned in a Western country merely for his views there would be endless weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The establishment pundits would be rending their garments at the horror of Austrian Fascism, or Stalinism, as the case may be.
ReplyDeleteThe irony is that the governments of these postwar mice-that-roar think that they are actually protecting democracy from itself.
Check this out!
ReplyDelete