The charges stemmed from two lectures and a press interview Irving gave in Austria in 1989. He was charged with saying that the Nazis did not annihilate 6 million Jews during World War II. At the time, Irving peddled the lie that most of those who died at camps like Auschwitz were not executed, but succumbed to diseases like typhus.

The governments of Austria, Germany, France, and other European countries have all passed laws making it a crime to question the existence of the Holocaust. The 1992 Austrian law, under which Irving was convicted, says that “whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media” can be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison.

The United Kingdom, which does not have a Holocaust denial law, is home to a large number of similar thought-control measures. The conviction of Irving, for example, came within days of a British government agency ordering the suspension of London mayor Kenneth Livingstone for making “unnecessarily insensitive and offensive” remarks (see article on page 11). On February 6 Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri was found guilty by a British court of “using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred.”

Irving, 67, was arrested November 11 and held without bail after visiting Austria’s southern province of Styria to address a right-wing student group. At the trial in Vienna, Irving pleaded guilty to denying genocide against Jews during World War II in his 1989 appearance in Austria. He also told the court that he changed his mind about the Holocaust in 1991 after studying the personal papers of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann.

Presiding judge Peter Liebertrue didn’t agree. “The court did not consider the defendant to have genuinely changed his mind,” the judge stated after announcing the sentence. Irving’s attorney said that he would appeal the court ruling. Proposals by liberal forces and or their middle-class radical followers to “ban fascists” or other “extremists” are not new to Europe or the United States. Farrell Dobbs, a central leader of the drive to organize hundreds of thousands of truckers and others in the Midwest in the 1930s, who later became national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, described how Teamsters in Minneapolis refused to be drawn into efforts to ban rightist groups, such as the Silver Shirts or the German-American Bund.

Dobbs says in “Counter-mobilization: A Strategy to Fight Racist and Fascist Attacks,” published by Pathfinder, that he and other labor militants “concentrated on explaining to the workers why they couldn’t rely on any arm of the state apparatus to protect them against the fascists and why they should rely only on themselves to do so.” Relying on the courts and cops, Dobbs explained, disarms working people in understanding the nature of the capitalist state and what the source of any fascist movement is—capitalism itself—and how to fight it.

Teamsters Local 544 instead organized a defense guard to countermobilize against the rightists with the forces of labor and its allies. When the Roosevelt administration imposed a loyalty oath on workers on public works projects, Local 544 explained that “even if the government does something in passing to curb the rights of the fascists, all that happens in the last analysis is that the rulers get a new pretext for attacking the anticapitalist forces.”
 
 
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London mayor suspended for ‘offensive remarks’  
 
 
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