Problems with the Irvings of the world is they create false histories like this:
False History: Why people like Irving deseve custodial sentences
Anti-gay religious crusaders claim homosexuals helped mastermind the Holocaust. They're not telling the truth
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?sid=328
For decades now, "Holocaust revisionists" in the U.S. and Europe have published pseudo-scholarly papers and books claiming to prove that the Nazis never carried out a systematic extermination of Jews. In 1995, a book called The Pink Swastika made similar claims about the Nazis' treatment of homosexuals during the Holocaust.
Written by fundamentalist activists Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, The Pink Swastika says that rather than being victimized by the Nazis, gay men in Hitler's inner circle actually helped mastermind the Holocaust.
"While we cannot say that homosexuals caused the Holocaust, we must not ignore their central role in Nazism," write Lively and Abrams. "To the myth of the 'pink triangle' ý the notion that all homosexuals in Nazi Germany were persecuted ý we must respond with the reality of the 'pink swastika.'"
Historians agree that this "reality" is utterly false. But many anti-gay crusaders have used the "gay Nazi" myth as proof that gay people are immoral and destructive.
"When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany," Pat Robertson once warned viewers of his 700 Club. "Many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were satanists. Many of them were homosexuals. The two seem to go together."
The Pink Swastika has been promoted by anti-gay groups like the Family Research Council. The FRC's Dr. Howard Hurwitz called the book "a thoroughly researched, eminently readable, demolition of the 'gay' myth, symbolized by the pink triangle, that the Nazis were anti-homosexual."
In fact, while the number of homosexuals who died in the Holocaust does not approach the number of Jewish or Gypsy victims, the historical record shows that between 50,000 and 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality (or suspicion of it) under the Nazi regime. They were routinely sent to concentration camps and marked with a pink triangle on their prison garb.
They were not systematically exterminated. But huge numbers are believed to have died in the work camps, along with an untold number of homosexual Jews, Gypsies and other "defectives" who were sent to extermination camps.
The myth that Nazis condoned or promoted homosexuality sprang up as a slander against Nazi leaders by their socialist opponents in the 1930s. Only one of the half-dozen leaders in Hitler's inner circle, Ernest Rohm, is believed by credible historians to have been gay.
The "gay Nazi" slander stuck, though, partly because German laws against homosexuals remained in place for a quarter of a century after World War II ended. That effectively silenced many homosexual victims of the Holocaust from telling their stories. A landmark survivor's memoir, The Men With the Pink Triangle, began to break that silence in 1972.
There is no question that the Nazis saw homosexuality as one aspect of the "degeneracy" they were determined to extinguish. When it came to power in 1933, the Nazi Party moved quickly to strengthen Germany's existing penalties against homosexuality. On Oct. 11, 1936, Hitler's security chief, Heinrich Himmler, went further, announcing that homosexuality was to be "eliminated" in Germany, along with miscegenation between the races.
In 1942, the death penalty was instituted for homosexuality. Offenders in the German military were routinely shot. "That wasn't a punishment," Himmler explained, "but simply the extinguishing of abnormal life. It had to be got rid of, just as we pull out weeds, throw them on a heap, and burn them."
Well, from what I know, there were many homosexuals in teh Nazi party. Much like any group concerned with it's image, it denounces it publically, while practicing it privately. That is by no means to say that many Nazis generally knew who was and was not gay, nor is that to say that they secretly condoned it. And Ernst Rohm was gay, but that isn't why he was executed. He was executed because as head of the SA, he was a threat to Hitler and the SS.
I have never once seen that been used as an argument and any normal historian is able to prove them wrong.
however that still doesn't mean that the people who claim that should go to jail. I don't see people sending Bush to jail for not allowing homosexuals to get married, or a lot of other people for that matter. Opinions no matter how stupid are just that opinions and should not be punished, unless they act upon them
He was jailed under a 1947 Law, We were all misinformed!
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article346741.ece
It was 16 years too late, however, to stop him being jailedfor three years under Austria's 1947 law banning Nazi revivalism and criminalising the "public denial, belittling or justification of National Socialist crimes".
Originally posted by Sir Whirlysplat
He was jailed under a 1947 Law, We were all misinformed!http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article346741.ece
It was 16 years too late, however, to stop him being jailedfor three years under Austria's 1947 law banning Nazi revivalism and criminalising the "public denial, belittling or justification of National Socialist crimes".
Makes more sense- the other explanation was implausible. I can't say I bothered to check its accuracy though.
Originally posted by Sir Whirlysplat
But that doesn't make them Nazis and hate speak, they realise hurts themselves and is not "free speech".
Who cares if it hurts people, everything we say can hurt people. Just being here can hurt people... We can't stop people from being hurt, and as long as he isn't starting any violent actions are asking people to start violent actions or trying to get them to start violent actions he shouldn't be breaking any laws.
In some recess of David Irving's reptile brain, he knows that his indefensible imprisonment is helping his side. His side consists of all the enemies of open societies.
Irving, born in England in 1938, was a prodigy of perversity, asking for a copy of "Mein Kampf" as a school prize. He grew up to be a "moderate fascist" -- his description -- historian who has made a career of arguing, in many books and incessant speeches, that although many Jews died of disease and hardship during World War II, nothing like the Holocaust -- 6 million victims of industrialized murder -- occurred.
Holocaust deniers, from crackpots to the president of Iran, argue that the "so-called" gas chambers were only for showers or fumigation; that Zyklon B gas was too weak to produce mass deaths; that it was too strong to be used -- it would have killed those emptying the chambers; that Poles built the crematoria after the war as a macabre tourist attraction or by Jews to extort compensation; and that Germans concocted "evidence" of "genocide" to please their conquerors.
Holocaust denial, which is anti-Semitism tarted up with the trappings of historiography, is a crime in Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Switzerland. And in Austria, which criminalizes speech that "denies, grossly trivializes, approves or seeks to justify" Nazi atrocities.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/24/AR2006022401800.html
Irving should not have been imprisoned, but he should not have said what he said either. Free speech without common sense is foolish! Free speech that is meant to hurt others is incitement - incitement is illegal in most countries.
So if I would call you an *******, which is meant to hurt you I should be arrested or thrown in jail or get a fine or whatever?
What if I say I do not believe in god near a church, that could hurt people. OR would say that god rules in front of a meeting of atheists? that could hurt people there feelings...
hurting people will always happen trying to prevent it is foolish if its done by words. Violence can be stopped or at least people should try, but to stop words from being said and punishing people from saying things like that, it is nothing short of foolish and it makes all those nations as bad as those they hate for not having freedom of speech.