The Courts Can Lie By Nigel Jackson

     History past and present shows that judges can be corrupted and judicial proceedings enacted falsely. One can say or write it in Australia with impunity, but not in Germany: the current understanding of the Holocaust may be in serious and extensive error. This week, it appears, the Constitutional Court (Germany’s highest court) ruled that the principle of the freedom of speech does not cover “Holocaust denial”. The court’s declaration is completely false and unprincipled, a disgrace to the judges responsible and to other Germans who have allowed this travesty of justice to occur. The Court’s pronouncement was made as part of its rejection of an appeal by 89 year-old Ursula Haverbeck against previous judicial decisions that led to her recent imprisonment. She had argued that Nazi Germany’s alleged mass murder of millions of Jews and others is “only a belief” and that Auschwitz has “not been historically proven” to have been a death camp.

     The Court ruled that “punishment for denying the National Socialist genocide is fundamentally compatible with Article 5(1) of the Basic Law, which guarantees freedom of speech.” It asserted that “the dissemination of claims that are proven to be untrue and of deliberately false assertions” is not covered by free speech. Those claims referred to have not been proven to be untrue and the Court has no excuse for not knowing that. The publications of a host of historical revisionists from Paul Rassinier and Robert Faurisson to Germar Rudolf and Carlo Mattogno have cast enormous doubt on the central assertions of what may be justly called “the Holocaust myth”; and the nature and tenor of their writings cannot be dismissed validly in any honourable way other than by intellectual debate. It is laughable to suggest that such commentators have engaged in “deliberate falsehoods”.

The fact that governments and courts claim otherwise does not alter the reality an iota; but it does raise the profound question concerning political orders in many nations as to what kind of pressure is being exerted behind the scenes, by whom and why. Perhaps the same influences are involved that have succeeded in preventing an English translation of Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitysn’s Two Hundred Years of Living Together (a study of Russian-Jewish relations over two centuries).

     It does not matter how much the German government or the Court are convinced that “the Holocaust is fact”. Others are not so persuaded; and not letting them explain why is a fundamental departure from the principle of free speech. There is no argument that can rebut this and there is no hiding from the moral enormity of what is happening.. Taking its error to a new point of absurdity, the Court also stated that “Holocaust denial” (the term itself is hotly disputed by many revisionists as being seriously misleading) wrongfully “breaches the limits of peaceful public debate and represents a disruption of the public peace.” The expression of controversial views on any topic, religious, scientific, philosophical, political or artistic can never in itself disrupt the public peace. Only violent physical action can, and in the present context this has tended to come not from the revisionists but from elements that wish to terrorise them and their supporters into silence.

     We can counter the Court’s meretricious argument by adding that the ongoing suppression of open debate on the history of Nazi Germany sets a very bad example of unjustified repression of controversial theses that in principle threatens political freedom and the integrity of public debate in the nations and communities concerned. That courts can be unjust in their proceedings and declarations has been noted by many great writers, including Alexander Pope and Charles Dickens. And how disgusting it is to see a woman of 89 treated in this manner! Chivalry and common humanity have become new victims of this lamentable assault on free discourse in public forums.

  Nigel Jackson is a Melbourne writer whose latest book is The Seed That Falls, a study of the eleven novels of Charles Morgan (1894-1958) who was a notable defender in his time of intellectual freedom as well as being a strong opponent of the Nazi government.