Free Speech Rules OK!

"He's a free speech martyr," sneered my close relative across the table. He said it in the same way he might have said 'flat-earther' or 'water diviner'. We were discussing David Irving's imprisonment in Austria, for planning to make a speech questioning the historicity of the holocaust.

I do not agree with David Irving, and I believe that the holocaust did happen. However, I was recently engaged in an email debate by a former colleague, who asserted that the evidence for the mass murder of six million people is extremely thin. I was quite indignant at first; unable to comprehend how an educated, well-read, former headteacher could earnestly make such a bold and ridiculous claim. I spent some time surfing relevant websites on both sides of the debate. I learned a great deal. Assumptions which I'd previously regarded as historical facts suddenly appeared differently. The points made by holocaust deniers deserved to be taken seriously, and rebutted with eloquent, corroborated clarity. I had previously carried a vague mental picture of fields full of buried bodies discovered by the Allies as they liberated Europe. This never happened, and there was much speculation in the immediate aftermath of the war regarding the whereabouts of the millions of murder victims. I must reiterate that I am not a holocaust denier, and my former colleague and I emerged from our robust yet civilized debate, both convinced that the holocaust is indeed reliable historical fact. However, exposure to counter-arguments gave me cause to unearth relevant evidence and to learn much of which I had been unaware.

That, I think, is a powerful argument in favour of free speech. Let the nutcases state their views, and let them give us pause. Let them question our comfortable, long-held prejudices. Let them set us surfing and clicking, reading and thinking. Let them impel us to examine critically and thoroughly that which we believe simply because we have been told repeatedly that it is true. Rigorously tested by healthy scepticism, history is reinforced and we gain a clearer, truer picture of what really happened. By simply assuming and never doubting, we become complacent, and find it difficult to expound the basis of our standpoint.

Making scepticism illegal is a very dangerous game indeed. It grants unwarranted respectability to the nutbar views of the deranged extremist. It diminishes truth, suggesting that truth cannot stand up for itself and needs the protection of law. It makes nauseating trash-speak like "free speech martyr" admissible at the dinner table. It creates a climate in which free speech martyrs can exist, and flourish. It is a myopic, backward step.

I am soon to read Nick Cohen's new book on censorship, You Can't Read This Book. I'm stimulated by commentaries I've read on the book, including a blog post published today by the author himself. However, I can't help tending slightly toward the stance of Devil's Advocate when reading his assertion that successful censorship must, by definition, go unreported and unrecorded. Nay, the censors who silenced David Irving advanced their cause, promulgating after-dinner air pollution of the type described above. Visibly successful censorship brings out the ovine liberal in otherwise intelligent adults. Complicity of sovereign governments in the suppression of scepticism buttresses people's innately perverse desire to gainsay the obvious and thereby score points in conversation. Legally condoned censorship changes the landscape subtly, and makes all censorship that bit more acceptable; that bit harder to argue against. Thus creeps the pernicious, contagious, darker side of the zeitgeist.