Holocaust denial

Germany wants to use its current presidency of the EU to outlaw Holocaust denial and the public display of Nazi insignia across Europe. Britain should take the lead in opposing this direct attack on freedom of expression, as it did when similar proposals were successfully blocked in 2005. But any response to the ideas of Brigitte Zypries, the German Justice minister pushing for an EU-wide ban, has to be more than an automatic dismissal, however tempting a simple assertion of a supposedly quintessential British value might be. Undoubted harm is caused by so-called ‘revisionists’ spinning dangerous lies which feed modern anti-Semitism and its associated conspiracy theories, and if we are to oppose the criminalisation of Holocaust denial we have to show that free expression is the greater good. This challenge is to be welcomed, for confidence in our values can only be strengthened when we rise to their defence.

As it happens, such a claim is one important aspect of John Stuart Mill’s seminal championing of freedom of speech and deed, On Liberty. Mill contends that:

“the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error”.

How do Mill’s precepts relate to Holocaust denial? Scholars, survivors and witnesses are certain that the Holocaust was a very real, and very terrible, historical event. Why risk exchanging fact for dangerous error by allowing a free debate on the subject? Mill would argue that unless a case against the Holocaust is made, our belief in it will be a “dead dogma, not a living truth.”

“Unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds”.

But do these passages from On Liberty really ring true in the case of Holocaust denial? Pace Mill, allowing extremists and their apologists to set forth their poisonous arguments clouds rather than enhances society’s understanding of the Holocaust by implying unwarranted doubt. A sounder defence of freedom of speech in this instance is more prosaic than Mill’s idealism. It is that denying free speech only gives those who challenge society’s sacred beliefs needless publicity and an artificial moral high ground. In an interesting piece for yesterday’s Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash argues that “well-intentioned bans actually feed the flames they are meant to quench".

“Nine EU member states currently have laws against Holocaust denial: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. That happens to be a list of countries with some of the strongest rightwing xenophobic parties in the EU, from France's National Front and the Vlaams Belang in Belgium to the NPD in Germany and the Greater Romania party. Self-evidently those parties don't exist as a result of Holocaust denial laws. Indeed, the existence of such parties is one of the reasons given for having the laws, but the laws have obviously not prevented their vigorous and dangerous growth. If anything, the bans and resulting court cases have given them a nimbus of persecution, that far-right populists love to exploit.”

Holocaust denial is abhorrent, but that is all the more reason not to make martyrs of Holocaust deniers.

But don’t abandon John Stuart Mill just yet. If he is naïve on the dangers of unchecked prejudice, he is right to assert that free speech is the most effective mechanism for allowing truth to trump error. Europeans, even in the nine EU states where Holocaust denial is a crime, are truely blessed with a vast arena of free expression. Holocaust denial laws chip away only at the very edges of this space. But others elsewhere are less fortunate, and curtailing freedom of speech in Europe sends out the message that it is for the state to decide which version of history to trumpet and protect. A frank discussion of the past is the best hope people in places such as Iran, whose president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has described the Holocaust as a ‘myth’ will ever have of getting at the facts. Europe should demonstrate that the Holocaust is a living truth which doesn’t need to be propped up by law.