BB FANS

Its actually very scary how many souls perished during the war, the actual majority Russian, who were thrown virtually unarmed at the German crack troops on the Russian front. Yet in Russian history this is weakly reported.

And did you know that during WW1 the English army shot hundreds of its own men on cowardice charges to ensure that their cannon fodder would charge to their deaths across no mans land, the army still wont say so sorry for this and despite modem knowledge of shell shock and PTSD the shame of this still follows some families.

History isn’t a set book, its a series of individual reports, but in this guys case he’s fallen foul of laws long set in place by guilt ridden countries who overreacted under the cosh of accusations of cover-ups in their education of history... but can you really blame them wanting to cover such shame

EXTENDED JAIL THREAT FOR IRVING


DISGRACED historian David Irving could face even longer in jail for denying that the Holocaust happened.

Austrian prosecutors yesterday filed for the three-year sentence handed out to the 67-year-old Brit to be increased.

Maximum jail term for denying that the Nazis killed six million Jews is 10 years.

The writer's lawyers have also appealed to overturn the sentence.

Once Austria's supreme court of justice makes a decision, Irving, if not freed, can request to complete his sentence in a British prison.

He was convicted on Monday of denying the Holocaust and faces a tough regime behind bars.



Irving will have to rise at 6am, can shower only twice a week with five other men and must work for just 65p an hour.

Prison inspector Helmut Huber said: "He will probably get a job involving writing, such as doing the laundry lists." Mirror

Three years is not enough say Irving's accusers

David Cesarani: The sentence on David Irving shows where the line is drawn

'It sends out a message'






The Austrian courts have done the world a favour in exposing David Irving as a noxious opportunist and a coward

David Cesarani Wednesday February 22, 2006
The Guardian

The sentence handed down on David Irving by a Viennese court for denying that the Nazis used gas chambers to murder Jews at Auschwitz, and for declaring Hitler innocent of that crime, evidently left him stunned. It also stirred something of a "backlash" in this country, where sections of the media and the intelligentsia persist in seeing Irving as a harmless eccentric with a wayward, if despicable, interpretation of the past.


In the studios and editorial columns there were echoes of a bygone era when clubmen routinely harrumphed at news of damned continentals trampling the freedoms of an Englishman. But Irving is not an innocuous buffoon, and he is hardly a martyr to free speech. He courted disaster by revisiting a country in which he had previously been charged with a serious crime.

He went to Austria at the invitation of a far-right student group to peddle his lies and spread his neo-Nazi message. Under these circumstances, the Austrian authorities were not only right to act, they were almost under a compulsion to do so. Remember that just a few years ago Austria was boycotted by the EU after the far-right Freedom party, led by Jörg Haider, entered government.

Inaction would have left Austria looking like a neo-Nazi haven. And there must be a suspicion that, by advertising his visit, Irving courted arrest in the arrogant belief that he would be let off amid a blaze of publicity for his noxious views and his latest book. Instead of boosting his sales, Irving will now have time to work on a new volume - his threatened autobiography.

It is surely no coincidence that Irving's publication plans echo those of his idol, Adolf Hitler, who composed his autobiographical work Mein Kampf while incarcerated in Landsberg prison for treason. Hitler used his trial for staging the Munich putsch to propagate National Socialism and went to jail a martyr for the Nazi movement. Will Irving become a martyr to either the far right or the champions of free speech? Will he be celebrated as the victim of an archaic, repressive law framed in a country with a guilty conscience about its own past? Hardly.

Irving's credibility as a historian was shattered during the libel suit at the high court in London in 2000 when a phalanx of real scholars exposed the distortions and falsifications in his writing that could only be explained by a conscious desire to excuse Hitler of responsibility for genocide and rehabilitate the Third Reich.

At least then he went down with all guns blazing, the sort of military metaphor he liked to use during the trial, and won the grudging admiration of onlookers. In Vienna he went out with a whimper. His admission that there were, indeed, gas chambers at Auschwitz has crippled his standing with his neo-Nazi and Holocaust-denying supporters. Of course, it was utterly insincere.

His claim that he saw the light when he discovered new documents in 1998 made no sense given his trenchant defence of denial in 2000. The severity of the sentence may have reflected the court's contempt for this transparent strategy. It has certainly done the world a favour by exposing Irving as an opportunist and a coward. Who could manufacture martyrdom from this pathetic denouement?

Irving has not gone to prison for defending truth. There is not the slightest resemblance between him and the courageous journalists in China, genuine martyrs for free speech, imprisoned for criticising a totalitarian regime. He is no impartial seeker after knowledge. He writes what amounts to propaganda for the neo-Nazi cause. This cannot even be defended as slanted history with a claim on our indulgence. It is an incitement to hatred.

Holocaust denial is a particularly vicious form of anti-semitism. It is predicated on the absurd notion that after 1945 the Jews systematically fabricated evidence on the ground and in archives, and staged trials, to convince the world that millions of Jews had been murdered by the Nazis. Having forged this evidence, the Jews then ruthlessly squeezed the hapless Gentiles for every dollar and drop of sympathy they could. It reinforces the stereotype of Jews as powerful, merciless and conspiratorial.

At a time when anti-semitism is on the rise, tolerating Holocaust denial is like allowing a man to shout fire in a crowded theatre. Sadly, the sentence on Irving will not curb the hatemongers. Thanks to the internet it is virtually impossible to stop the dissemination of lies and propaganda. The classic arguments for freedom of speech drawn from Voltaire and Mill are redundant. They addressed small literate elites at a time when the means of reproduction were relatively few and easily controlled, when it was reasonable to contend that in a contest between truth and falsehood held among reasonable men, lies would be exposed and driven from the public sphere.

But the internet is awash with falsehood and bigotry. Good ideas and beautiful truths coexist with trash and outright evil. Amid this anarchy, all that decent people can do is agree to reasonable limits on what can be said and set down legal markers in an attempt to preserve a democratic, civilised and tolerant society. The sentence on David Irving shows where the line is drawn.

· David Cesarani is research professor in history at Royal Holloway, and author of Eichmann: His Life and Crimes
David.Cesarani@rhul.ac.uk guardian

Lies and lederhosen



Leader Wednesday February 22, 2006


So David Irving was "mistaken" to say that there were no gas chambers where millions of Jews were exterminated by the Nazis during the second world war. This was his grudging admission at the end of a hearing in the Vienna court which on Monday sentenced him to three years in prison for the crime of denying the Holocaust. Irving may well have been prompted by a last-minute urge to avoid being jailed, or he may - just - have meant it sincerely. It is impossible to say whether a man branded a liar by a high court judge - whom he addressed as "mein führer" - was telling the truth or seeking to save his own skin. The Austrian state prosecutor certainly wasn't convinced, yesterday appealing for a sentence up to the 10-year maximum. But what matters is that he has publicly made the admission.


By doing so, he undermines his entire body of work, which consistently sought to exonerate Hitler for the "final solution" and diminish the enormity of Nazi genocide. Irving's research had long been discredited by professional historians. Now he has done the job himself it is hard to see why he should be "a martyr" for those who share his (previous?) odious views, or why anyone should care if he does.

Mature democracies rightly place high value on freedom of expression - hence the ongoing controversy over publication of the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that have incensed Muslims across the world. But European laws criminalising Holocaust denial, most obviously in Austria and Germany, exist because of the need of these particular countries to confront their past, to deter those who seek to justify or glorify it and to undermine today's stable and tolerant democracies. That Germany has done so far more successfully than its southern neighbour - where the far-right Jörg Haider was in government until recently and several major war criminals have evaded prosecution - is not a reason to forget the extraordinary context in which they were drawn up. Still, serious consideration is now needed as to whether, 60 years after the terrible events that inspired them, these laws are obsolete. Having said that, amid charges of double standards from those seeking to criminalise Islamophobia, it is worth recalling that the Holocaust laws were intended to prevent the legitimation of mass murder, not to protect religious sensibilities from the scrutiny of secular societies.

It would have been deeply ironic if Irving had avoided punishment by turning his trial into a defence of his right to free speech. Serially litigious in defence of his own reputation, he amassed large amounts of money under the British libel laws until ruinously losing his landmark case against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt in 1999, when he was branded a Holocaust denier, a racist and an anti-semite.

It is curious that Irving's offence took place 16 years ago when he addressed admiring right-wingers in lederhosen, and that he ignored a warrant for his arrest in returning to Austria. Irving claimed to have changed his mind about the Holocaust in the interim after reading the papers of Adolf Eichmann, the SS bureaucrat who masterminded the machinery that led millions to their deaths at Auschwitz and Treblinka. But he did not tell anyone of his conversion when he was fighting the Lipstadt case. Ms Lipstadt herself, who incidentally opposes Holocaust denial prosecutions, bluntly branded his retraction "rubbish". Conviction and a symbolic fine after his retraction would have made the point. Still, had he not ended up behind bars in Vienna, Irving could have been flying to Iran, where President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is organising a conference questioning "the truthfulness of the version (of the Holocaust) that Europe and the Zionists have imposed on the world." Now he will have plenty of leisure to reflect on what his contribution might have been to this poisonous event. Neo-Nazis everywhere have lost an icon. That is good news. guardian

The legal limits of our freedoms


Almost without exception, commentators on the outcome of the David Irving trial are tut-tutting about what they see as a double standard about legislation banning Holocaust denial and the lack of legislation banning cartoons of the prophet Muhammad (Irving jailed for denying Holocaust, February 21).

There is no such double standard. Laws banning Holocaust denial do not exist to prevent Jews having their feelings hurt; they exist to try to make sure that the politics that wiped out most of the European Jewry in the 1930s and 40s does not happen again. By contrast, cartoons that depict Muhammad, however crass they may be, are not part of an evil scheme to destroy Muslims. To suggest an equivalence shows a wicked distortion of the truth - and it has to be challenged. If not, it plays into the hands of one group of ideologues who pretend that some kind of Muslim holocaust is already under way and another group of ideologues who pretend that no holocaust of Jews was ever under way - and, indeed, a third set of ideologues who believe that both are the case.
Stephen Games
London


David Irving's trial puts the status of the historian into sharp focus. Irving has been convicted of not being a historian but a "falsifier of history". The nature of the act of interpreting the past is thereby defined by law. Historians have duties under the law, it seems.

Historians arrive at their status much as artists do - public acclamation, or marketing skills. It seems now, however, that they are not artists, but professionals with a duty to maintain standards. Just who sets those standards? Should historians now combine professionally, as lawyers and physicians do, to supervise admission to their ranks and admonish the failures? Or is history, like war, too important to be left to professionals and best left to politicians and their ability to make the laws which define what shall be legitimate interpretations of the past?
Paul Anderton
Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffs

The three-year prison sentence passed on British historian David Irving raises more questions than it answers. Why do vast inequalities in what is lawful exist depending on which country you happen to be in? How can an individual challenge the majority-held view? Why do we have laws that only protect certain groups of people and not all? If Irving apologised and admitted he had made errors in his judgment, on what basis can the state prosecutor conclude that "Mr Irving might have said he has changed his views, but that has all been a show for you."?

Last, why is there no law to safeguard the sensitivities of followers of all the world faiths? We all concede that there needs to be a line drawn with freedom of speech and expression, we now just need to ensure that the line drawn is not a licence for "freedom to abuse".
Mubashar Ahmed
Southall, Middx

Although I have attacked David Irving's views, and have been attacked by him in turn, I deplore his imprisonment. Not only does it risk making him a martyr, it suggests that the case for the reality of the Holocaust is weak since it has to be sustained by law. As Milton says in Areopagitica - a tract for the times if ever there was one - truth is not established by prohibitions and punishments, but in "a free and open encounter" with falsehood.
Dr Piers Brendon
Cambridge

David Irving gets three years for denying the genocide of Jews during the second world war. In Turkey, Orhan Pamuk and others face imprisonment for admitting the genocide of Armenians during the first world war.
Philip Marsden
St Mawes, Cornwall

David Irving need not worry too much. I've researched the matter thoroughly and concluded that the prison in Vienna doesn't exist, never did exist and certainly no one was incarcerated there.
David Rosenberg
London


guardian

Prosecutors appeal to have Irving's jail term increased

timesonline

Irving barred from speaking to media


The jailed British Holocaust denier David Irving has been banned from talking to the press after he continued to question the Holocaust from his cell and claimed he was a victim of Jewish persecution.

The 67-year-old author was jailed for three years last week by a court in Vienna, but since his incarceration he has continued to spout his far-right ideology in a number of interviews with the local and international press.

The court ruled Irving had "reinforced his revisionist statements" and "concretely offended" the Republic of Austria and has now forbidden him from giving any more interviews from his cell.

The ruling means no domestic or foreign media, including the British press, radio and television, will be allowed to see the controversial historian. His family and friends will still be allowed access.

Irving has appealed against his sentence but could face more years behind bars as a result of his recent statements if his case goes back to court.

He originally told the court that convicted him that he had changed his mind since making statements in 1989 questioning the extent of the Holocaust.

But his unrepentant behaviour during the trial led the nine-person jury to convict him despite his assurances. Irving was sentenced to three years in prision, which could now be increased if prosecutors decide his statements since the trial constitute another breach of local laws.

As it considers filing new charges of Holocaust denial against Irving, the public prosecutor's office in Vienna is looking at interviews he gave to the Daily Mail, Independent on Sunday and the BBC after his conviction.

The public prosecution spokesman, Walter Geyer, said: "We know Mr Irving has made several interviews with the British press and are looking into statements we believe may contravene the same laws for which he has been jailed." guardian