Why Historians Have a Responsibility to Condemn the Jailing of David Irving
Irving's doctrines and his history are obnoxious. I suppose it's premature to reach a conclusion about yesterday's event this soon, but my first reaction is that it is simply horrifying to see a historian locked up for a bad, wrong, dishonest or evil interpretation or misuse of sources, and that this should be opposed. The AHA has painted itself into a corner on this kind of issue. As I noted in AHA Perspectives (September 2005) and on HNN, "Historian Sees Contradiction between AHA's Stand on Holocaust Denial and Its Stand on Armenian Genocide," the AHA President at the time, Jim Sheehan, wrote: "Needless to say, the Association does not have a position on the fate of the Armenians." I pointed out that in 1991 the AHA Council had put out a statement deploring Holocaust denial. The AHA condemns Holocaust denial while presenting itself as agnostic on the Armenian Genocide. All of this seems to me to add up to a privileged position for the Holocaust, and an inconsistency which is at bottom political -- another chapter in the AHA's long record of taking political stands while denying that it has politics. An organization that defines certain historical interpretations as unacceptable is on a slippery slope.
Of course the AHA is in no direct sense responsible for an Austrian court's jailing of Irving. But by privileging the Holocaust, the AHA has contributed to an atmosphere in which the "wrong" view of the Holocaust has been criminalized, which of course brings us pretty close to the jailhouse door. Historians have a special responsibility in this situation. We, and our organizations, will be complicit in a bad episode if we can't bring ourselves to speak up.
As a kind of a First Amendment absolutist, I have long been puzzled as to where I stand on restrictions on expression in Europe after the Holocaust, but I have thought, well, they have a special history, it's understandable. But now, seeing such restrictions take concrete form in imprisonment of a (bad) historian, I feel professionally obliged to oppose this, to see what other historians think about it, and whether they are willing to take a stand.
It should be noted, without suggesting facile connections, that this takes place at a time of debate about the defense of obnoxious expression in Europe. On this side of the water, if a historian presented slavery as less bad than we know it to have been, would we want that historian jailed? Of course not.
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