I'm delighted to have just learned that on Thursday, October 19, the day I posted No Denial of Any Kind Should Be a Crime Anywhere, the contents of which I had sent who-knows-where back in January, Oxford's historian of post-war Europe, Timothy Garton Ash, made a case for scrapping Holocaust denial laws and got it published in the Guardian.

I had noted that "'The Holocaust' refers to many thousands of events over a dozen years. Some historical narratives that were once widely accepted as having a factual basis have lost that status. Only historical inquiry, not legal compulsion, can responsibly impute credibility to one account and deny it to another." But somehow it carries more weight when coming from an Oxonian historian:

"No one can legislate historical truth. In so far as historical truth can be established at all, it must be found by unfettered historical research, with historians arguing over the evidence and the facts, testing and disputing each other's claims without fear of prosecution or persecution."

I had noted that the "irony of punishing speech in the name of preventing a 'resurgence of Nazism' may be lost on the punishers, but not on their victims and their supporters. Those laws therefore become unintended liabilities in the fight against any such 'resurgence.'" As Ash put it more tersely:

"Those European countries that have them should repeal not only their blasphemy laws but also their laws on Holocaust denial. Otherwise the charge of double standards is impossible to refute. What's sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander."

The remarkable op-ed concludes:

"Today, if we want to defend free speech in our own countries and to encourage it in places where it is currently denied, we should be calling for David Irving to be released from his Austrian prison. . . . Only when we are prepared to allow our own most sacred cows to be poked in the eye can we credibly demand that Islamists, Turks and others do the same. This is a time not for erecting taboos but for dismantling them. We must practice what we preach."

Sometimes putting in one's own two cents means alerting others to the gold bar that was just invested in an urgent contemporary debate. If that is the only role courageous voices like Professor Ash's leaves me, and I am happy to play it.

Not only should the Iranian President not be prosecuted (by Germany!) for expressing views (in Iran!) that many find offensive, neither should anyone else. For several reasons, statutes criminalizing "denying the Holocaust" tend to discredit the legal systems that contain them:

(1) One group’s feelings may be protected, while another group of offended are treated to a lecture on the sanctity of free speech (e.g., those notorious Dutch cartoons).

(2) The laws do not define the event whose occurrence is allegedly being denied. They therefore blur the difference between universal and particular skepticism. In practice, Holocaust denial laws treat those who raise questions about particular events as lunatic doubters of a whole class of events. "The Holocaust" refers to many thousands of events over a dozen years. Some historical narratives that were once widely accepted as having a factual basis have lost that status. Only historical inquiry, not legal compulsion, can responsibly impute credibility to one account and deny it to another.

(3) The irony of punishing speech in the name of preventing a “resurgence of Nazism” may be lost on the punishers, but not on their victims and their supporters. Those laws therefore become unintended liabilities in the fight against any such “resurgence.”