08.10.2008
Thought police pursue Nazi apologist
Jim Moody advocates free speech - even for the extreme right
There are nastier pieces of work than Adelaide resident Dr Gerald Fredrick Töben, but they are of the kind that will slice you up as soon as look at you. Töben’s forte is to batter your mind, a là Goebbels, until you succumb to his excusal of Nazi crimes against Jews, Roma, Slavs and humanity in general. For him, these things just did not happen. Or they are exaggerated. Or whatever.
Töben was stopped by UK authorities as he passed through Heathrow on October 1 en route from the USA to Dubai. He is about to be extradited to Germany to face charges of holocaust denial. Since websites are accessible everywhere (with a few exceptions like China), so too can internet offences be deemed to have been committed on territory other than that of the prosecuting country.
Like a few other such rightists, where Töben has come unstuck is that he has fallen foul of the post-war bourgeois consensus of official anti-Nazism and anti-fascism, backed up by anti-free speech powers. In several European countries this has been concretised in law. Germany has heavy penalties for those found guilty of ‘holocaust denial’, with the legislation written in broad-brush, catch-all terms that are the envy of the über-legislators of New Labour.
After Germany’s defeat in World War II, history was rewritten, largely obliterating the fact that a sizable minority of bourgeois sentiment in, for example, Britain and France was strongly pro-Hitler. Indeed, the 1930s Daily Mail was as near as damn it the house journal for rabble-rousing Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. So for assorted bourgeoisies to come the old soldier post-war is a bit rich.
In 2006, UK historian David Irving was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment under Austrian federal laws prohibiting National Socialist activities (Verbotsgesetz), for denying the existence of gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps in several lectures he gave in Austria back in 1989. He served four months and was then deported to the UK.
Not surprisingly, Irving has jumped to the defence of Töben: “It’s the job of us, the revisionist historians, to ask questions, even if they’re awkward questions, questions that governments don’t like.” Even so, he does not approve of Töben making it up as he goes along: “As a historian I do a lot of work in the archives and I write what I find in the documents. He writes what he finds in his brain” (Australia’s AM Radio transcript, October 4).
Töben has already served jail time for promulgating his views, having been arrested in Germany in 1999 and found guilty at Mannheim district court on charges of incitement to racial hatred, insulting the memory of the dead and public denial of genocide. He was convicted on evidence that he had written to persons in Germany disputing holocaust claims. Presiding judge Klaus Kern imposed a 10 months’ prison sentence specifically because there was no sign that Töben was about to change his views and activities.
This time, Töben’s arrest was executed by the Metropolitan Police extradition unit, using a European Union arrest warrant. Although the warrant was issued by the German authorities, his primary alleged offence would not be illegal in most of the EU’s constituent countries, including the UK. Indeed, the warrant alleges that a website under Töben’s control contained material that “denies, approves of or plays down above all the mass murder of the Jews, planned and implemented by the National Socialist rulers”.
Nasty and lying though this is, it would be perfectly legal in Britain. However, Töben could certainly fall foul of English law for publishing material “of an anti-semitic ... nature”, which is also alleged in the warrant. Though it is a moot point whether it would currently be seen as in the public interest for there to be a prosecution over material on a website run from outside the UK.
There has been a lengthy campaign against Töben by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), whose former president, Jeremy Jones, started a civil action in 2006. At that time, Jones alleged repeated violations of an Australian Federal Court order made in 2002 ordering Töben to remove holocaust denial material from his Adelaide Institute website (www.adelaideinstitute.org) and not to post new material of this kind.
At the 2002 hearing, Justice Catherine Branson ruled that the material posted was likely to “offend, humiliate and intimidate” Australia’s Jewish community. Following whatever the German courts decide, the ECAJ hopes for Töben to be dealt with subsequently by the Australian courts for this longstanding matter, with the prospect of more jail time under contempt proceedings.
In fact, Töben has been even more in the firing line for the anti-holocaust deniers after visiting Tehran in 2006. He was among a group of holocaust ‘specialist historians’ who attended that year’s notorious, two-day ‘Review of the holocaust: global vision’ conference organised by Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Is the prosecution of those who promote such ideas as Irving and Töben a method that communists support? Certainly not - and notwithstanding that we abhor their ideas more, with very good reason, than their bourgeois detractors would have you believe that they do. After all, communists know what to expect at the hands of fascists. Our comrades experienced it, from the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler, amongst others. Fascism spells ruin for the working class and literal death to communists. Apologists for one of the 20th century’s most barbarous regimes and excusers of its crimes are as far from our political sympathies as it is possible to be.
Even US academic Deborah Lipstadt, whom Irving sued unsuccessfully in 2000 for calling him a holocaust denier in her book Denying the holocaust, has opposed the use of legal means to counter holocaust denial. (Lipstadt is director of the Rabbi Donald A Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and Dorot professor of modern Jewish and holocaust studies at the prestigious Emory University, Atlanta.)
She is clear and forthright in her opposition to dealing with those such as Irving through the law: “Generally, I don’t think holocaust denial should be a crime. I am a free speech person; I am against censorship. I don’t find these laws efficacious. We don’t have laws against other kinds of spoken craziness. If you’re a medical quack and you hurt someone, there’s a law against that. But if you’re a medical quack and you stand on the street corner preaching that you have an elixir that cures cancer and saves lives, no-one throws you in jail” (news.bbc.co.uk, January 4 2006).
As consistent democrats communists oppose all forms of censorship as well as state bans on so-called extremist organisations. We are the strongest advocates of democratic rights and free speech. Obviously, by opposing laws that infringe free speech we are opposing something that is inevitably going to be turned against us.
Marx and Engels argued in the Communist manifesto that in order to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class we have to win the battle for democracy. That is why communists continuously struggle to extend democracy in every sphere of life. We know that the working class can only become a universal ruling class by mastering politics and all aspects of society. This in turn means that we access the most advanced theory available. Without the fullest, open clash of different and contending ideas, the theory necessary for our self-liberation can never truly emerge.
This contrasts with the left as it (just about) exists at present. Socialist Worker has argued, in what its editor doubtless thought was a revolutionary way, that, “Holocaust-deniers should be confronted whenever they raise their heads, and Irving’s books should be banned from every public, college and school library” (January 22 1999). As this illustrates, some socialists have been amongst those calling for censorship or greater state powers to curb democratic rights. They want an elitist bureaucratic socialism. Never forget that the SWP openly supported the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, its paper uncritically reporting Muslim calls for the banning of insults to Islam.
Demands from sections of the left that the state adopt and implement anti-democratic measures are a disgrace. This censorial approach is underpinned by the assumption that the working class consists of ignorant sheep. That is apparently why we need the omniscient SWP central committee to guard against improper thoughts.
No, this cannot be. No-one can imagine that we have any sympathy for the wretched Töben’s views. That is not why we take a stand against bans on ‘improper’ speech and writing. Nor why we oppose his jailing under holocaust-denial legislation.
What motivates communists is the knowledge that for the blood-soaked ruling class, the improper ideas that it dreads are those that will lead the working class to taking power and to communism. We are the real enemy that they will have to face.
