I read an article in "el Pais" yesterday. The Israeli embassador in Spain was seriously arguing in favour of the possibility that a law that prohibits denial of the holocaust is imposed throughout the European Union. I 've been reading a lot about such issues recenlty, mostly because of a growing intetrest in prohibition in general during the last year or two. First David Irving, a British self-taught historian that is questioning some aspects of the Shoa (that is the mass murders of Jews by the Nazis) gets arrested in Austria and charged for this exact questioning, then some Danish cartoonists gets into serious trouble for depicting the prophet Mohamed in their sketches and a performance of Mozart's "Idomeneo" is sensored in Berlin because of presenting the decapitated heads of Jesus, Budha and Mohamed. Then again, two days ago, Alen Jason an unfortunate 55-year old passenger of the Australian Quantas airlines was not allowed to board the plane for wearing a T-shirt that was mocking the president of the USA and only yesterday the Esthonian government introduced a law according to which there is penalty of imprisonment for using "symbols of opression" such as the swastika and the communist hammer & sickle....
It seems we are living in interesting times...
This whole prohibition thing is actually more rediculous than it sounds. Mostly because it is useless. Irving's views on the holocaust are un-historic in themselves, the danish sketches were seriously lacking taste, Idomeneo's performance was only meant to provoke and by the uproar it caused, its un-talented director got the publicity he wanted. I am not even going to comment about the poor guy's cancelled trip and as regarding to the Esthonian government my apologees for the picture I post here, which is actually a 1907 US postcard!!!
But jokes aside, there is a serious problem with all this rhetoric, which is slowly becoming a dangerous prospect. Millions of people died in the Nazi concentration camps (a significant part of them homosexuals, crippled, communists and gypsies, for whom somehow the term holocaust cannot be applied, since it is something like a propaganda trademark), but what their death mostly signifies is the ultimate proof of the virtues of democracy and freedom of expression, noble causes for which humanity has mourned an even greater number of martyrs throughout its history. And I really do not see how threatening any wirdo who wishes to deny historical facts with imprisonment or fines will make the truth tru-er or protect our democratic and ethical values in any manner.
All over the world there are individuals that keep denying the holocaust, as there are people that believe that slavery actually benefited the Africans and that the physical extermination of american Indians was an inescepable consequence of civilization. I bet there are people out there that consider bloody dictators like Pinochet and Videla as saviours of their countries while I personally know a few people that think that Franco's rule in Spain was the best thing that happened to this country and claim the Spanish Civil War with its 600.000 dead to have been worth it! What about all these nutbags? I say we lock them all up in the same cell with Irving!
Evenmore, I think we should keep one step ahead and prohibit NOW before it's too late, the denial of all physical laws. Assure our societies once and for all that they are safeguarded against deniers of the gravitational force, the lunatics that think there scooters may be faster than light and all the dangerous subversives that dare to object to the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics! And what about going even further in truth-abusing prevention and classify as an utter crime of sacriledge the statement that Maradona's goal against England in '86 was indeed scored by God himself! I mean, what graver example of historical distortion of facts!
I will agree with most of you that comparing Maradona's handed revenge with the death of millions in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen may even be offending, but that is not what is at stake here. What the real point is, is one of our societies main difference with the Nazi, Weimar society of the late 1930s. And that is the freedom of thought and expression. In our societies -at least until now- history is written by historians and not politicians, it is shaped by the collective memory of the people and not some propaganda-pushing lobbies and there are NO historical truths imposed by law! This is a right our grand-fathers earned by fighting fascism, our fathers preserved by fighting military dictators and we have the responsibility to safeguard with our word.
As for the Israeli embassador in Spain -whose name I am glad to be forgetting- I just hope he keeps in mind that "universal lawfull truths" are very likely to eventually demand "final solutions". And if he is so un-historical to be willing to allow this, we surely aren't.
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