Reluctantly defending the devil

David Irving is, to my mind, an appalling man – both a villain and an idiot. His denial of the best documented genocide in human history qualifies him for both labels. Holocaust denial is an affront to common sense and common decency, an intellectual travesty.

But ... putting him in court on criminal charges for his ridiculously delusional beliefs doesn't sit well with our much vaunted ideals of intellectual liberty and freedom of speech.

Across the West we have recently seen serious commentators and fruitcakes alike leaping to declare the important principle at stake when a newspaper decides to gratuitously insult Islam. Where are those same spokespersons when an elderly man is put on trial in Austria for expressing and arguing his beliefs – however bizarre and unpleasant those beliefs may be?

I shall always dispute and condemn Irving's views, and express the utter disgust which they arouse in me – but if I don't also defend his right to hold them, I am as bad as he. Quite apart from the issue of principle, if we allow this to pass without objection we are opening ourselves up to practical dangers.

There is a trend toward suppression stalking the west at the moment, a suggestion that anyone or anything which might be dangerous should be dealt with as if s/he or it inevitably is. If we stay silent while one idiot is prosecuted for claiming that twelve million Jews, trades unionists, gypsies, homosexuals, communists and Jehovah's witnesses just went off on holiday one day and forgot to come home ... what next? Prosecute flat earthers, whose position is equally untenable? The proponents of Intelligent Design? Where will it logically end? And when all the obvious screwballs have been prosecuted who (to quote Niemöller) will be left to speak when they come to prosecute me – for my minority views on diet, morality, or even David Irving?

Austria is not alone in having a specific offence in law of holocaust denial. Several countries in Europe have such an offence, and those without one are guilty of passive complicity if they do not protest.