The StuSie

Irving, Pfarrad Get Their Wings Clipped

Freedom of expression in Osterreich was dealt two harsh blows in the past few days with the conviction of Holocaust denier and eyebrow farmer David Irving and the blatant censorship of Pfarrad's latest posting on The Stusie. I will address the latter first, and admit culpability. It was indeed none other than der Staubsauger himself who swooped in (it was a slow swoop) and materially altered the graphic depiction that embodied Pfarrad's sacred right to make us nauseous. The timing was poor, because I was about to post about Herr Irving anyway and the aggregate of the two events is going to make me seem like a book-burning asshole. C'est La Vie.

So Irving got the book thrown at him yesterday, not the whole book mind you, but a good few chapters - he got three years for a speech he gave back in '89 in which he argued that the Nazi's hadn't, actually, killed millions of Jews during WWII and that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were completely fictional. Now, as most of us know, there are laws against such speech in eleven countries including Austria. Mr. Irving was not unaware of these laws, he simply chose to disobey them. At his trial he argued that his views have changed since then, and he no longer denies that many Jews died at the hands of the Nazis or that there were gas chambers, but since he was arrested while in the country to speak to a right-wing conservative fraternity, he can't have changed his stripes too much.

The big question behind all of this then, is whether freedom of speech/expression exists in Europe in the way it supposedly exists in the U.S. The answer, at least with regard to reactionary perspectives, is no, and I don't think that's a bad thing. It's difficult to argue that it's okay to curtail basic freedoms with respect to certain topics while still opposing censorship and oppression, but I'm going to try. There are several important differences between say, the Bush administration throwing out the right to privacy in favor of unauthorized wiretapping and the Austrian statute that makes Holocaust denial a crime. First and foremost, the Austrian statute is legal, by which I mean it was proposed and adopted as legislation through the usual process, and the citizens affected are under fair notice of what the law means for them. By contrast, the NSA wiretapping has been conducted clandestinely, and although the administration defends them as being constitutional under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), when the record is more closely examined, as it has been by Professor Lawrence Tribe of Harvard Law, it can be seen that this is certainly not the case, and in fact they are clearly unconstitutional when considered in the light of the Foreign Intelligence surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.

Second, the Austrian statutory prohibition on Holocaust denial is a small exception to an otherwise free society based on the cultural scars of recent history. It is possible that such laws will, as Irving himself contends, fade away in the future, although I don't see it happening any time soon, especially in light of his conviction. In contrast, the NSA wiretapping program has been forced upon an unsuspecting American public based on classified intelligence that cannot be shared for risk of compromising it. That's all well and good, but wasn't it exactly this type of secret intelligence that this administration asked us to "just trust them" on when we began our WMD Easter egg hunt that transformed Iraq from a clusterfuck to a clusterfuck that we're responsible for.

In summary, Irving bad, Austria good, Bush bad, Professor Tribe good, tubgirl bad, Pfarrad good.

posted by Der Staubsauger @ 22:42