TO SPEAK OR NOT TO SPEAK

For...

We Irish have believed so fundamentally that that which is not spoken of, that which is not named, that which remains covered up, will wither and die. No, not even die. Worse. Will never have been. Child abuse could not even have been contemplated in not-so-long-ago Dark Ages Ireland. Rape? who ever heard of it? Unmarried mothers? No, we didn't have them. Abortion? The word wasn't mentioned. The claws of that terrible Ireland have withered… temporarily. The land of the lethal crosier is fading… for now.

In the last decade or so, we have progressed towards something approaching a genuine democracy. Today, most of us feel that freedom of speech belongs as much to each one of us, as it does to a Taoiseach, Minister For Justice, Priest or Pope. Ok, most of us still proclaim to be Catholics, and the Catholic Church is proud to state that it is not a democracy. But, come on, who really takes that bunch of despots seriously anymore? (Let the person who has never enjoyed masturbation send the first reply.)

Twenty years ago, I wouldn't have been able to call the Catholic Church a bunch of despots. Twenty years ago I wouldn't have been able to call the Pope a sleazy, greedy, fundamentalist cave-minded gobshite. I would have been censored and I would have probably got the shite kicked out of me for good measure by his RC gurriers. Today I can. And that's a change and a freedom I cherish.

To the complacent, fascism can seem like a German, French or British problem. Now, one of its intellectual bootboys is on his way over here. And that's a good thing. Because the devil you know is better than the one you don't. And because fascism isn't a German or a French disease; it's a human disease.

Remember the Blueshirts? Remember the Magdalen Laundries? (They still exist. What were they but concentration camps without the gas chambers.) So, in no way has Ireland been immune to the fascist plague. No, Ireland - to this day - is a society which thrives on secrecy and where the Government motto is: 'Keep them ignorant.'

Look at the way we're still doing the ostrich to Section 31. What is Section 31? Section 31 is contempt for a people's ability to make up their own minds. But we accept Section 31. We accept it because basically we don't give a fuck about the North. Section 31 allows us cosy Southerners to feel so liberal and unconnected and untainted by what goes on 'up there.' Without Section 31 we might actually be forced to think more about the Northern Conflict, and by jaysus, we wouldn't want that, would we?

What is fascism? Strictly speaking - as far as the Chambers

Dictionary goes - it is, "the authoritarian form of Government in Italy from 1922-1943, characterised by extreme nationalism, militarism, anti-communism and restrictions on individual freedom." But is that it? No. We've got to look at the root of the word to find its true meaning. And the root of the word is the Italian 'fascio', meaning bundle or group.

Extreme groupism is at the core of fascism. Believing in the

inherent superiority of one group over another is fascism. Believing that the superiority of your group allows you to discriminate against and ultimately exterminate another group is fascism. Nazism is fascism. Imperialism is fascism. Apartheid is fascism. Extreme nationalism is fascism.

Nationalism per se is not fascism. To be proud of being Irish or German or French is not fascism. But the thing is that under certain circumstances a nationalist can become a fascist. Unemployment, desperation, despair are the food on which fascism feeds.

Add to the list, ignorance. Because ignorance is darkness and dark things thrive on darkness. Dark things thrive on ignorance and fear and censorship. The very fact of David Irving coming here exposes his twisted ideology to the light of reason and civilisation. His presence challenges us to face up to fascism. His proposed visit encourages debate. He makes us think.

However, some would say that allowing him speak here gives him publicity and even lends to his ideology a certain legitimacy. To acknowledge the existence of something is not to legitimise it. To acknowledge sickness is the first and vital step in the search for a cure. Because it is absolutely vital that we first acknowledge if we wish to overcome.

Just because Irving has been invited to Irish universities in no way legitimises his ideology. Because universities have no special hold on morality or civilisation. It was in the universities of South Africa that apartheid was fashioned. Where were the academics of Germany when Hitler was on the rise? (Many of them - scientists and doctors too - were with him all the way.) I mean, you only have to look at the appalling record of the universities of Northern Ireland in relation to both religious and gender discrimination, to see that Third Level education is often a higher rung of racism/sexism/fascism. Because bootboys come with pens as well as penknives, and the ones with the pens are often immeasurably more dangerous.

Irving should be let speak because Ireland is a democracy. I believe that if the vast majority of Irish people heard Irving's words, their stomachs would turn in disgust. And I believe that the debate his proposed visit has aroused is a very healthy thing. Because he has made us look, listen and hopefully learn.

I'm going to put that belief to a test, because I'm going to

leave the last words to him: "The Jews are very foolish not to abandon the gas chamber theory while they still have time;" "The kind of evidence against [Hitler] would not have been sufficient to convict a Gypsy in an English magistrates court of stealing a bicycle;" "The infamous gas chambers at Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek did not exist - ever - except as the brainchild of Britain's wartime Psychological Warfare Executive;" "Women are intellectually inferior. Procreation is their role. Their job is having us."

• Gerry McGovern

Against...

FREEDOM OF speech is not an absolute principle. Would you advocate freedom of speech for a party of men which wanted women raped in the streets?

Then you shouldn't advocate freedom of speech for David Irving. He wants that, and more, done to women and men from races, religions or ethnic groups that he disapproves of.

He's been billed for the engagements here that he shouldn't be allowed to fulfil as a "historian." But this is not his public role, and it is not the role in which he is going to attempt to speak in Ireland. He's a Nazi. His stock-in-trade is Holocaust denial. And what people who say that the Holocaust didn't happen really mean is that as far as they are concerned it doesn't matter that it happened.

Irving systematically downplays the scale of the killing of Jews and others by the Hitler regime, and he totally denies the Holocaust, the fact that genocide was Hitlerite policy. He does this in order the "clear" Nazism of genocide and thus make Nazi ideology and Nazi organisations respectable.

His is a disgusting line of argument which could be held only by disgusting sort of people and a middling case could be made on this basis alone for shutting him up. But it's not the core of the case for denying Irving a platform. What's at issue is not that he lies about the horrors of the past but that he is planning for horror in the future. He is an important cog in the Nazi machine which is now cranking back into life across Europe. The speeches which I and many others intend to prevent him from making in Ireland this month are part of the process of getting the Nazi murder-machine ready for action again.

This is not a particular analysis or interpretation of what Irving is up to. It is the plainly-observable fact of the matter. People who refuse to see this as they prattle on about free speech are in exactly the same position as those who tut-tutted their commitment to "liberal values" as they argued against direct confrontation with Hitlerism in the '30s.

Irving craves the opportunity to speak in universities, but he is more regularly to be found in the company of other guttersnipes, at the conferences and rallies of the new Nazis. His regular audiences come from the likes of the Republikaner Party in Germany, the National Front in France, the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and so on. In the last eighteen months he has spoken at fifty Nazi gatherings in Germany alone. For the most part the new Nazi groups still operate on the margins. But they are growing apace, and we ignore them at our peril.

In 1989 the RP in Germany won two million votes. In France, Jean Marie Le Pen's National Front claims more than 100,000 members and has polled four million. Nazi parties are now taken seriously also in Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Italy and in parts of what used to be the Soviet Union. And last month the British National Party gained its first election victory, in the Isle of Dogs in East London.

We know what these votes mean in action. In Germany, squads of Nazis are confident enough to fire-bomb refugee hostels in broad daylight. In France, North African immigrants are being hunted and murdered through city streets and Jewish cemeteries have been desecrated. In Britain in the last three years there have been a dozen murders which everyone, including the police, agrees were racially motivated. There have been racist marches and murder attacks in virtually every European country.

People who say of the Holocaust that it couldn't happen again should wise up. At this time, before our very eyes, men, women and children are being murdered in major European cities because of the colour of their skin or their ethnic origin, and there are parties with growing support who proclaim that this is perfectly OK. And David Irving is a key element in sustaining these parties.

The fact of the Holocaust has been a major obstacle in the path of the new Nazi parties. They know that they must operate in the shadow of darkness and death for as long as memory persists of the gas ovens and of mass slaughter at the killing pits. They must dispose of the Holocaust if they are to come in from the margins and enter the mainstream.

Over the past decade the Nazis have created a small industry devoted exclusively to denying that the Holocaust ever happened. To do this they argue that all of the records of the existence of extermination camps has been faked, that all of the judges at War Crimes Tribunals were Jews or Communists or dupes of Jews or Communists and that the Nazis who gave detailed confessions of their own roles in the mass murder did so as a result of either torture or bribery. All of the new Nazi parties eagerly promote books and pamphlets like The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Did Six Million Really Die?, The Six Million Swindle, The Myth of the Six Million and Debunking the Genocide Myth. David Irving is the most "prestigious" of the liars involved in this industry.

Irving says:

"The Jews are very foolish not to abandon the gas chamber theory while they still have time.

"I think ordinary Jews are enraged with me because I've detracted from the romance of the Holocaust.

"The infamous gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek did not exist, ever,. except as the brainchild of Britain's wartime Psychological Warfare Executive.

"I think the eyewitnesses (to the gas chambers) are an interesting problem for psychiatrists.

"I visited Hitler's eyrie in Berchtesgarden. I regard it as a shrine."

What is being covered up here in order to boost the re-growth of Nazism is the murder of more than a million people by the Einsatzgruppen killing squads in the first month of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Poland, the Soviet Union and the Baltic States. (Documents being released now in the former Soviet Union suggest that this figure may have been a serious under-estimate.)

At Auschwitz in just a few months 430,000 Jews were slaughtered.

Auschwitz was a slave camp as well as a killing centre. Other camps - Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka - were built for no purpose other than killing people in droves.

The slaughter started in the east in the summer of 1941 and continued in a frenzy of murder until the end of the war. Majdanek, complete with its gas chamber which Irving says didn't exist was captured intact when the Red Army over-ran it in 1944.

David Irving is prominently involved in trying to re-build the movement which did this most monstrous thing. In the frightening chaos and economic desperation which is now threatening to engulf great swathes of Europe it would be profoundly foolish to assume that he and his fellow Nazis cannot succeed.

If they succeed there will be no free speech for anyone.

Irving should be stopped. I appeal to readers of Hot Press to support the activities of the Anti-Nazi League this month. Hear first-hand what the Holocaust meant, from two of the few who survived it and are still alive to tell us.

Leon Greenman, along with Kathleen Lynch of the Democratic Left and Brid Smith of the ANL will speak at UCC on October 7th.

Ester Brunstein, a survivor of Auschwitz, Des Geraghty MEP, of the Democratic Left, Joe Costello TD of Labour and Brid Smith will speak at an Anti-Nazi rally in Liberty Hall in Dublin on Tuesday October 19th.

Irving is scheduled to speak at UCC this Saturday, October 9th, and at UCD on October 21st. He can be stopped non-violently, by sheer weight of numbers, if enough turn up. Be there.

• Eamonn McCann

VOICES OF THE SURVIVORS

Since you've all probably got the innate good taste to boycott David Irving anyway, there are much better ways of spending your time in the week he is in Ireland - such as by choosing to hear to truth about the holocaust from those who were actually there.

On October 7th in UCC, two days before Irving's visit, Leon Greenam, a survivor of Auschwitz will be speaking. And on October 19th, Esther Brunstein, a survivor of the Lodz ghetto and the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps will be speaking at Liberty Hall, along with Joe Costello TD and Des Geraghty, MEP.