The Holocaust denying ‘historian’ David Irving is back in the UK after having been jailed in Austria for 13 months, and was interviewed this morning on Today.
His views are quite clearly ludicrous, and manage to cause great offence to a large number of people. However, locking him up for espousing those views was wrong. We, and Austria, would do much better to leave his views to fester in the ignored backwaters that they deserve to languish in, or to tear them apart for the extreme right-wing rubbish that they are. Locking him up, and thereby turning him into the right-wing martyr role that I suspect he relishes, is counter-productive in the extreme.
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Interesting, not actually spoken by Voltaire, but a paraphrasing of his attitude. One which I share in this context.
Irving has every right to speak his opinions. He has a right to free speech. But he just shouldn’t expect to be listened to, only laughed at for the bumbling right-wing fool that he quite clearly is, and the sooner the media leave him to slip back into his squalid pool of opinions, the better.
The irony of this post drawing attention to the buffoon is not lost on me either. But I’ve enjoyed the vernacular foray, if not the subject matter itself…
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