Cult of Dan Brown: David Irving

There's no question that Irving is a piece of work, but even his academic detractors don't want to see him behind bars in this case. They would much rather see his scholarship properly refuted to undermine his credibility and set the record straight than to have laws enacted that restrict what one can and can't write about.

In a larger sense, this encompasses every form of "hate crimes" legislation. The trouble is that if you make it illegal to write materials that incite hatred against another race/religion/sex/etc., then you make it impossible to examine your own cultural biases and bigotry. What starts out sounding reasonable ends up on a slippery slope when you begin to realize that most of the world's religious texts advocate mistrust, hatred, and even violence toward those of other religions. The Bible is a classic candidate for banning under hate crimes laws, for instance, as is the Koran. The "intolerance" most religious texts preach is such that if you were to write those same words today and tried to get them published, you'd land yourself in prison.

Unfortunately, banning (or criminalizing) anything only makes it more appealing on the subversive market. If some government censor tells you you can't see/read/hear something, doesn't that just make you more interested in the material? You might not have cared about the material before, but now that it's being denied to you it's got the allure of the forbidden. I'm quite sure that Irving's book sales shot up as a result of his being thrown in jail--quite the opposite of what his detractors would want. The same thing happens when you make it illegal to deny the holocaust--it makes people wonder whether there might be something to all these arguments that the holocaust never happened. It's human nature.

In my opinion, hate crimes legislation is just as offensive as the hate crimes themselves. If you take the blanket wording of such laws, at their core the crime is the incitement to commit a crime. A book or a speech or a video might inspire someone to go out and cause harm to someone else. How many stories does that encompass, if you cast the net wide enough? Telling the story of a great injustice perpetrated against People X by People Y is bound to stir in the reader an antipathy toward the villains of the piece (People Y), and some of those readers may be moved to the point of violence. Does that mean the story should be banned from ever being told?

At what point does our personal responsibility as readers/listeners kick in? There are similar arguments being made about violence in films, television programs, and video games, after all. And there are always a few people (usually with some pre-existing mental illness) who take these "inspirations" too far, leading to reactionary calls for widespread censorship. If I commit a crime as a result of an inspiration I received from a book, a movie, a video game, or a speech, the responsibility for committing that crime still lies with me. I always had the power of choice, and nothing "compelled" me to do the deed. Blaming the authors, directors, and speakers in this case is a cop-out, an attempt to escape the ultimate personal responsibility that comes with being a human being.

The way to combat the literature of hatred is, as most of Irving's critics seem to agree, to take it on its own merits and subject it to the same kind of peer review that any other work of non-fiction should face. If he's made factual errors, point them out. If he's made unsubstantiated claims, highlight them. If he's made logical errors, shine a spotlight on them. If his scholarship is revealed to be weak, he'll gain a reputation for being a crackpot and his book sales will drop off to the levels of the other cranks who subsist on a fringe following.

In sum, the issue of censorship is much bigger than David Irving, and whatever you think of him or what he believes, understand that imprisoning him sets a very dangerous precedent. "First they came for the holocaust deniers, but I was not a holocaust denier, so I remained silent..." If this is allowed to stand, it won't be long before "dissident thinkers" of other stripes end up on the wrong side of the law. Freedom of speech (and implicitly of thought) must extend to those we disagree with, or it's worth nothing at all.

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