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Professor Arthur Butz on David Irving
Hello Professor Butz
My name is Andre Francisco - franz@northwestern.edu - and I'm doing and article for a Medill class about David Irving being arrested and sentenced to three years in prison for denying the holocaust. I was wondering if you would have any time today to answer one or two brief questions about Irving. I know you must get many requests for interviews or comments, but I was wondering if you could just spare a few moments today. If you have time I could interview you over the phone or if it was easier I could email you the questions and you could answer them that way. I know this is very short notice and I apologize. If you have any time today please email me back. Thank you so much.
Andre Francisco, 215
Original message text
On Thu, 23 Feb 2006, 12:38:39 pm CST
butz@leeward.ece.northwestern.edu wrote:
You may e-mail me a few questions if you wish.
A.R. Butz
Andre Francisco: Thank you so much for being willing to answer these questions.
Q: What is your opinion on the laws in many European countries that forbid giving alternate histories concerning the Holocaust?
Butz: I think they constitute a rejection, at a fundamental level, of what we have supposedly been about for about the last two hundred years. If the history of the recent, politically sensitive, past can't be freely investigated and discussed, then the most important component of any principle of freedom of expression is abandoned and, with it, any worthy version of "democracy".
Q: Do you think the United States will ever adopt such laws? Do you think unspoken codes of the same kind already exist in the United States?
Butz: I doubt that the US will ever adopt the same sorts of laws. However the "unspoken codes" or "taboos" (as I referred to them in my Feb. 14 Daily Northwestern piece) are alive and well. Moreover, I don't rule out new laws in the US that might sound somewhat different but have effects similar to those of the European laws. The formulations would be likely to be tricky so I can't be specific.
Q: How do you think countries reconcile these laws or codes with the idea of free speech? Are they hypocritical or is this an exception?
Butz: They are being hypocritical and this has become starkly obvious in the still raging controversy over the offensive cartoons of Muhammad. If you want to know how they "reconcile these laws or codes with the idea of free speech", my answer is that they don't. You should ask them.
Q: Have you ever read anything by David Irving? If so, what?
Butz: Long ago I read Hitler's War, his Rommel book, On the Trail of the Fox?, and The Destruction of Dresden. I may have read others. This is despite the fact that such books are only remotely related my interests.
I consider Irving a military historian, not a "Holocaust" revisionist or denier. On the "Holocaust", his statements have been confused and contradictory, sometimes sounding revisionist, other times not. At the time of the Lipstadt trial, in 2000, Don Guttenplan published an article in some magazine and he remarked that it is impossible to determine Irving's position on issues. Well, that's right as far as the "Holocaust" goes.
Austria has jailed him for some of the times he sounded revisionist. There were plenty of nearly coincident times when he didn't sound revisionist. It is not true that he changed his position only when faced with prison. The truth is that he didn't have a position.
Nevertheless, his imprisonment should be viewed as both a scandal and danger by any person of intellectual integrity.
Best regards,
Arthur R. Butz
Andre Francisco: Thank you again for your time.
©-free 2006 Adelaide Institute