Search Results

Holocaust denial laws are among the most controversial restrictions on freedom of expression because, in their strongest form, they forbid people to contest the past. The pace of limiting racist speech has been much faster in Holocaust denial laws than in any other realm. These provisions have spread quickly and have been significantly broadened since the mid-1980s. They have also been enforced with increasing penalties. Because the connection between Holocaust denial and hatred, discrimination, and violence is often less immediate than with other forms of malicious racist statements, this chapter takes a close look at these provisions. It examines the passage and expansion of laws since the 1980s, and uses the case of notorious denier David Irving as a window into how they have been enforced in a number of countries.

This chapter looks at the significance of metahistory in combating Holocaust Denial, and takes as its case study the Irving/Lipstadt Libel Case from 2000. After describing the metahistorical commitments of denial, the chapter outlines a postmodern understanding of historical writing as a genre, developing the ideas of Jean-François Lyotard in The Differend, with generic rules, including conventions about evidence, context, and reasonable argument. It then argues that the trial showed that David Irving did not follow these conventions, and that, as the Judge made clear — it was this that showed Irving to be no historian. This analysis of the trial is then used to illuminate problems in empiricist defences of history, and to defend postmodern thought against the charge that it allows Holocaust denial.

Witnessing can assume many different forms including religious, literary, and legal versions. This chapter begins by focusing on examples of textual witnessing such as the sourcebooks of Tcherikower and Dubnow mentioned in Chapter 2 in which the compilers assembled troves of documents as a form of historical proof. The focus then shifts from the first to the second half of the twentieth century by discussing instances in which historians are called upon to take the stand in legal cases. The chapter explores a range of cases related to the Holocaust in which historians played important roles as witnesses, particularly the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 in which historian Salo W. Baron was a key witness. The chapter concludes by discussing the libel trial brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt in London in 2000 in which a “dream team” of historians, including Richard Evans and Christopher Browning, served as defense witnesses. The victory of Lipstadt’s side proved to be a vindication for memory, as well as history, and, as such, an indication of the somewhat porous boundary between them.

This chapter argues that “bare” Holocaust denial—the denial of the gas chambers, the six-million figure, and the Nazi policy of extermination—is, in those parts of Europe with direct experience with Nazi rule, a form of hate speech. It falls into this category for a number of reasons. First, there is a well-organized movement on the extreme Right that uses Holocaust denial to rehabilitate Hitler and the Nazis. Second, in countries where descendants of the victims and perpetrators live together, denial—and state toleration of it—suggests that the agreement to treat May 1945 as “Ground Zero” is open to revision. This helps explain how even an advocate of free speech such as Deborah Lipstadt can hesitate when it comes to Germany and Austria. Finally, by ignoring the deaths of thousands of people, deniers separate the survivors from the rest of society, a separation that imposes the type of “aloneness” that is characteristic of traditional hate speech.

This chapter discusses the application of the empathic method to the study of causality. The empathic method refers to the nonscience form of knowing and is also known as history, narrative, story, and chronicle. The chapter considers the central features of the narrative method of knowing, along with its advantages and the similarities between the empathic and empirical methods. It also scrutinizes the methods of the historian and illustrates the limitations and strengths of the narrative methods by revisiting the libel case filed by author David Irving in an English court in 2000 against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt, who wrote a book entitled Denying the Holocaust in which she accused Irving of falsifying documents to bolster his claim that the Holocaust did not happen. Finally, the chapter looks at the success behind the Wright Brothers's invention of the airplane, the many different interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and the role of the narrative in causal reasoning.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of Holocaust denial and the legal response to such denialism: the promulgation of national laws in Europe that make it a crime to deny the Holocaust or glorify the Nazi era. Seventeen European countries have promulgated such criminal statutes, with Germany in 1960 being the first and Italy in 2016 being the most recent. Seven additional states criminalize denial of genocides in general. And a few have prosecuted Holocaust deniers under their hate speech statutes. This chapter examines Holocaust denial legislation in Germany, Austria and France, and the prosecution of Holocaust deniers in those countries. The chapter also sets out arguments for and against criminalization of Holocaust denial. The chapter concludes with a discussion of efforts in Europe to criminalize denial of other genocides. It examines recent cases from the European Court of Human Rights on the subject, including a Swiss law that criminalized denial of the Armenian genocide.