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27. Feb 2006

David Irving - ytringsfrihed og akademisk integritet

 
Med hensyn til spørgsmålet om ytringsfrihed, kan der næppe være nogen tvivl om, at det er tåbeligt og formålsløst at smide holocaustbenægteren, den højreorienterede "historiker" David Irving i fængsel. David Irving er en uhæderlig mand, som til glæde for en lille menighed bevidst manipulerer med de historiske data for at stille Hitler og nazismen i et bedre lys.

Tror man, at denne lille menighed vil holde op med at eksistere, fordi han kommer i fængsel? Og så i Østrig af alle lande - det Østrig, som i årtier har kæmpet med næb og klør for at fralægge sig ethvert ansvar for Holocaust, det Østrig, som med åbne øjne valgte krigsforbryderen Kurt Waldheim til præsident?

Dette illustreres glimrende i en artikel fra Washington Post, som historikeren Deborah Lipstadt gengiver på sin weblog:
There are many reasons to regret the decision by Austrian authorities to prosecute, sentence and imprison for three years or more British pseudohistorian David Irving. Liberal democracies ought not to be in the business of criminalizing speech, except speech that incites violence.

Prohibitions against specified types of speech, such as Holocaust denial, have a tendency to invite further prohibitions and risk rendering the concept of free speech a nonsense. Imprisoning people for their views alone has a way of turning louts into "martyrs."
(...)
By imprisoning Mr. Irving, Austria has now forced serious people to come to the principled defense of a detestable man.

Press accounts usually describe Mr. Irving as a Holocaust revisionist" or denier. That he is, as a British court found in 2000, when it ruled against him in a defamation suit that he had brought against American scholar Deborah Lipstadt.

But Mr. Irving is something worse, partly because he is something better: A man of learning and a certain kind of intellectual brilliance, he made dishonest use of both qualities in an attempt to restore the reputation of the Nazis and blacken those of their victims.

Sometimes this has been to noted effect: When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls the Holocaust a "myth," he is doing so in large part on the authority of Mr. Irving (whom the Iranian government recently invited to speak).

But often Mr. Irving's influence has been felt in ways that we are only dimly aware of. Consider his first book, on the February 1945 Allied bombing of Dresden, in which he put the civilian death toll at between 100,000 and 250,000. That estimate -- grossly exaggerated, as later scholarship would show -- became widely accepted and helped spark a now popular perception that Germany was as much a victim of World War II as it was the instigator.

Or take "Hitler's War," Mr. Irving's attempt to rescue the Fuehrer's reputation by casting Winston Churchill as the real warmonger. Mr. Irving's Hitler revisionism never caught on among serious scholars, but the Churchill revisionism did.

Here lies Mr. Irving's real cunning. For decades he successfully presented himself as a serious historian of admittedly outre views, when in fact he was the opposite: a propagandist posing as a scholar.
Det pudsige er, at i dette minder David Irving til forveksling om flere danske højreorienterede "akademiske" Islam-kritikere som f.eks. Lars Hedegaard og Helle Merete Brix, der ligesom Irving (Hedegaard en enkelt gang i parløb med Daniel Pipes) synes parat til at forråde deres akademiske integritet ved at lyve og manipulere, hvis det kan hjælpe dem med at få en pointe igennem - det vil sige, hvis det kan hjælpe dem til at sværte og stemple muslimer og Islam.

Det er lærerigt således at se denne sammenhæng mellem den "nye antisemitisme" (anti-islamismen eller hadet mod muslimer) som repræsenteret ved f.eks. Hedegaard, og den "gamle", traditionelle - som repræsenteret ved Irving. Lærerigt og påfaldende ... måske vi denne gang vil vide at tage os i agt, før ulykkerne sker?

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