Holocaust denier
Austria's Der Standard praises a court decision to hand down a suspended one-year prison term to a former politician for playing down the Holocaust.
The paper argues that these two remarks are "cynical and humiliating and show contempt for the Verbotsgesetz", Austria's Holocaust denial law.
"He has rightly been convicted for this," it says.
The paper adds, however, that comparisons with Holocaust denier David Irving, who was jailed for three years by an Austrian court in February, are not warranted.
It feels that while David Irving has caused "great ideological damage", John Gudenus is more of a marginal figure who has "learned absolutely nothing from history".
Austria's Die Presse agrees that the two cases are different.
The paper observes that David Irving has written books and "is admired as an icon" in neo-Nazi circles.
John Gudenus, on the other hand, is regarded as an "eccentric", it adds.
The paper believes that, as a result, the jurors did not take him seriously, and "this helped Gudenus in court".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4949254.stm
Published: 2006/04/27 03:09:12 GMT
© BBC MMVI
2 comments:
At least Mr. Gudenus is not in jail like David Irving, Ernst Zuendel, and Germar Rudolf. It's still a disgrace the way some of these European governments deal with those who dispute some of the finer points of the Holocaust. No responsible person denies that Jews, amongst others, were the victims of mass murder during World War II. What's in dispute is the precise methods and numbers. And when Soviet archives were opened up, new information came to light.
Galileo was similarly persecuted during the Inquisition for challenging then-conventional notions regarding astronomy.
"What's in dispute is the precise methods and numbers."
When one scholar says that 5 million Jews died, while another says 6 million, many of them in the gas chambers - that's not really a dispute. When someone says that 1 million died, and there were no gas chambers (or maybe there were a couple, and maybe several thousands were gassed - but not millions) - he's out there, and he is not even a part of the dispute. He is a crank, pure and simple.
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