Holocaust Deniers and the Right to Our Own Mind

A Facebook friend of mine linked to this article on Friday.

Former KKK leader detained in Prague

PRAGUE (AP) — Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke was detained by police in the Czech Republic on Friday on suspicion of denying the Holocaust.

Police spokesman Jan Mikulovsky said the action was taken because Duke does that in his book "My Awakening," which is punishable by up to three years in Czech prisons.

Duke traveled to the republic to promote the book's Czech translation of the book at the invitation of neo-Nazis.

Mikulovsky declined to give any further details, citing an ongoing investigation.

Prague's Charles University also banned a Duke lecture scheduled there Friday for students taking a course on extremism.

Duke, a resident of Louisiana and a former Republican state legislator there, also was to have given lectures over the weekend in Prague and the country's second-largest city, Brno.

The KKK is a white supremacist group in the U.S. famous for its oppression of blacks, Jews and other minorities.

I wonder of some readers of this blog and the article are upset by this. David Duke is being charged with suspicion of denying the Holocaust. Yes, David Duke is a descpicable human being. Yes, he has radical views on a whole host of issues. Yes, it strains credulity that Louisianans would even consider electing him. Oh wait, they elected Edwin Edwards, whose motto was “Vote for the Crook,” twice.

But is Mr. Duke’s offense criminal? And should it be? I am aware that he was arrested in the Czech Republic and not in the United States, and other countries, even ostensibly progressive ones, do not have our first amendment guarantees.

The existence of such laws in European countries is ironic as well. Many European countries, either out of fear of Nazi intimidation and agression, or in an effort to maintain neutrality, said NOTHING while the Third Reich was extinguishing the Jews. So, in some way, enacting these laws allows them to wash their hands of complicity and guilt, right? They can now pretend as though they are doing something.

But I still don’t understand what Mr. Duke’s crime is here. Suspicion of denying the Holocaust is stupid. But we are now wading into that slippery slope that is “policing thought crimes.” Doesn’t Mr. Duke have a right to his own opinions? Doesn’t he have a right to his own mind? Freedom of conscience is one of the western world's most sacred values.

For similar reasons I am against “hate crime legislation.” Asking judges and juries to start delving into the pyschoanaysis of killers and criminals is difficult enough. Why confound the issue by seeing whether the criminal was motivated by “hate” versus something else? Why is it a hate-crime when a white person kills a black person, but black-on-black crime is not a hate crime?

I started thinking about this issue when I read an essay several years ago by Christopher Hitchens, a British journalist and contributing editor to Vanity Fair magazine. The essay was entitled “The Strange Case of David Irving.” David Irving is a British historian who has been an active Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer. Mr. Irving, too, was arrested in Austria for denying the Holocaust and “glorifying and identifying with the German Nazi Party.”
Give Mr. Irving credit for at least to make an academic case for denying the Holocaust, even though such case maybe be specious or non-existent.

Furthermore, while the Holocaust was indeed a grave crime against humanity, it certainly may not have been the largest or gravest. Mao Tse-Tung’s “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution” is said to have killed in between 20-30 million Chinese. Stalin’s forced famine in the 1920s killed over 10 million Russians. How about Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia? 25% of of the population was killed. And these WERE government policies.

Denying any of these events is not a crime. So why is it crime to deny the Holocaust? Should governments pick and choose what historical events can and cannot be denied? Should governments be in the business of criminalizing unpopular or radical views? What if a historian uncovers evidence that some aspects of these dark chapters of our history are, in fact, untrue?

Thoughts, please!