From the Independent’s Bojan Pancevski and Steve Bloomfield.
Far-right author David Irving’s repudiation of his views on the Holocaust and Hitler’s role in it has not lasted very long. In a prison interview just days after he told an Austrian court he had been wrong to deny the Holocaust, he reverted to insisting that the slaughter in Nazi death camps was exaggerated, and that Jews “bear blame for what happened”.
His latest statements, made just two days after he was convicted of Holocaust denial, could see him end up back in court. Prosecutors are demanding an increase in his jail sentence, and the Austrian supreme court must now decide whether he goes down for the full 10 years.
The author was jailed on Monday for three years for denying the Holocaust during two lectures and in a newspaper interview in Austria nearly 17 years ago. But despite the conviction, the 67-year-old did not shy away from the subject. Irving complained that the Jews held far too much power and predicted their disproportionate control in the US would see a second Holocaust “in 20 to 30 years”.
Just days after he told the Viennese court “I’ve changed my views”, he said it was part of the human condition to dislike Jews and that they were at least in part to blame for the 3,000 years of hatred they had had to endure.
Irving is locked up for 23 hours a day and is taking medication for a heart condition. He gets one hour’s exercise a day – “in a yard half the size of my drawing room in Queen Anne’s Gate, walking around with 70 other men who are robbers, rapists, swindlers, murderers and cocaine dealers”.
It all seems very cruel and unusual….to the 70 robbers, rapists, swindlers, murders and cocaine dealers who are forced to coexist with David Irving.
The guy’s vermin (and obviously a craven for changing his line to try and wiggle out of his sentence) but somehow I don’t see the point of imprisoning him for what is basically a thoughtcrime. It only makes him more notorious…
that, my friend, is why you should cherish your rights as an American to think and express as many terrible things as you wish.
Until you’re not allowed to anymore, of course.