"So, Klaus, what are you in for?" "I murdered a man in Linz." "How about you, Herr David?" "I'm doing three years for Holocaust denial." "Sie machen wohl Witze!" "No, Klaus, I'm perfectly serious. But it's coolio. My books have skyrocketed on Amazon."

I have great confidence that the Holocaust did indeed take place much as the Inquisition, et cetera. Having said that, why should one be jailed for thinking otherwise, in other words that the Holocaust, or the Inquisition, did not take place? This would seem to have a chilling effect on freedom of thought, let alone freedom of speech. It appears that Europeans just don't share the same notions of freedom that we do. They demand a much more lock-step society.

Vee haf vays of makink you schutenzee upen!!

I denied the crimes of Communism and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. Oh, and tenure.

I'm waiting for everyone who got up in arms about how little free speech the Muslims have or the NY Times editorialists who complained about the Turk arrested for criticizing the government, to get up in arms.

Don't think can't happen here. The US has deported Ernest Zundel and other Holocaust revisionists/deniers on very questionable (i.e. bogus) terms knowing that they would be prosecuted in their own country. England, the origin of free speech has already arrested Nick Griffin for "inciting racial hatred" and has now even officially extradited (as opposed to our unofficial extraditions) people for breaking laws against holocaust denial that don't exist (YET!) in Britain.

Leftists are fond of saying "America is the only industrial country that doesn't have universal health care/gun control etc" How long is it until they start adding "holocaust denial" to that list.

Ah, a case where the far-right and far-left can lock arms! No doubt there will be a vacant seat of honor for him at the upcoming Holocaust-denying conference in Iran. I hope Noam Chomsky doesn't get his Christmas cards mixed up and send David Irving's card to Mumia Abu-Jamal and A-J's to Irving. But, wait - "Irving" - isn't that a Jewish name...?

Without the sarcasm: I'm perfectly OK with the law, the charge, and the conviction - since it's in a German-speaking country that enjoyed special status under the Third Reich. If his freedom of speech (and movement) were abridged in countries not responsible for the Holocaust, then I'd be disturbed.

Prefacing what I am about to say with the statement that I find this David Irving a thoroughly disgusting and foolish person, I cannot agree that locking him up for what he claims to believe is a good thing to do. This is just one more attempt at social engineering - the Orwellian attempt to control the mind.

He should be discredited - and that certainly should be easy. He should be disrespected in social circles - also not hard to accomplish. He should be exposed for the fraud he is - also simple.

But he should never be locked up for his beliefs unless he somehow uses them to incite riots or other forms of violence.

Any reasonable person willing to look at the evidence comes away with the undeniable conclusion that Hitler and his Nazis exterminated millions of "mongrels" in their quest for the "master race." Since Irving claims otherwise, the best thing we could do is totally ignore him. Instead, we make him a martyr - a hero to his cause. And in so doing promote his ideas. We're supposed to be smarter than that.

Free speech is a central tenet of a free and open society. We should encourage free speech confident that in a free marketplace of ideas the truth will prevail. Sadly this was not possible in the police state Germany became, and they apparently still have not gotten the hang of it.

Jerimiah: According to popular wisdom we are all responsible for the Holocaust. Not just Hitler's Willing Executioners in Austria and Germany, not just the Poles who personally killed all the jews, and of course those evil French collaborators. No, America didn't accept enough Jewish Refugees, and in fact the 1924 immigration act, authored while Hitler was languishing in a Weimar Republic caused the Holocaust (I overheard Ben Wattenberg say that his primary reason for supporting open boders.) The British Appeasers at Munich are at blame, but if Chamberlain was bad, we didn't get in until 2 years later because of our evil isolationist impulse that was largely driven by anti-Semitism.

So lets have some consistency. No free speech for anyone.

What do they think, this is Harvard University or something?!

Marcus,
Yes, among of the awfulness of the Shoah is that most of the rest of the world turned a blind eye. That's it's own kind of crime - of omission. Different from the one of commission, which the Wehrmacht carried out.

I think you may have overlooked my sarcasm.