---

December 15, 1997

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

When freedoms become blurred

A week (from) tomorrow a commissioner of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, sitting in Sydney, is due to begin hearing a case that cuts deep into the vexed issue of freedom of expression. Broadly, the respondent - a former Victorian teacher now living in Adelaide - is accused of causing offence to the Australian Jewish community by publishing material questioning Nazi persecution of Jews during World War II.

There are, admittedly, other aspects to the complaint, brought under the Racial Discrimination Act, a section of which sweepingly enjoins against any behaviour "reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people".

But it is the revisionist issue, the challenging of central pillars of Holocaust history, that will symbolically hold centre stage. For years, it has been obvious that digging into once commonly accepted versions of World War II history is something that simply will not go away in Western culture and that the attraction the cause holds for various oddballs with anti-Semitic or other undesirable baggage does not wipe out the legitimacy of serious research.

New evidence, new questions, cannot be avoided. The downward adjustment of death rolls at Auschwitz following access to Soviet records after the collapse of communism is a case in point.

Yet the seeming pressure not to disturb original facts and figures relating to Nazi persecution of Jews seems unrelenting. In the words of Doug Collins, long-time Canadian writer-commentator who has himself fallen foul of the system, "to criticise in any way the version favored by Jewish organisations is to arouse anger and calumny. 'Revisionists' are called neo-Nazis, racists and anti-Semites."

In some cases, revisionists might deserve all they receive. In others, it can be far more complex.

There is a process familiar to many arenas: a controversial issue is raised or assertion made, a bitter response follows, the first party comes back with even greater personal abuse and so on until the true focus is lost in a sea of personal vitriol.

It is a context to test even the best of tribunals. Where is the defining line of misconduct to be drawn? The answer, doubtless, is wherever racial or vilification legislation, always awesome if not downright dangerous in scope, allows it to be drawn.

This notwithstanding, and irrespective of the outcome, the Sydney hearing offers the Equal Opportunity Commission an excellent opportunity to define publicly its views on intellectual freedom and historical revision - not just as it relates to the Holocaust but as a broad principle to embrace other signal events in history where questioning or denial might cause pain to specific sections of the community.

For instance, in Russia, A History, just published in Britain by Oxford University Press, a collection of international authors radically minimise the number of Soviet citizens killed under Stalin's purges and reduce the infamous mass-starving of Ukraine's anti-collective peasants to a mere accidental outcome of poor harvests.

I can not accept a word of it, any more than I can accept that, despite convincing and sometimes substantial changes to detail, there was anything other than a mass slaughter of Jews and other target groups under Hitler's Nazi machine.

The point, however, is what is to be expected if someone publishes details of the new Soviet "truth" in Australia, with gratuitous insults about Ukrainians? Do we then start a new cycle of complaints?

Then someone can have a new bash at the Brits over the fire-bombing of Dresden, replete with injudicious comments about Poms not washing even when the world's on fire; to be followed by insults to Australian Cambodians in a Pol Pot revisionist corner, and so on.

At the end of such a day, which is worse? Tolerating cranks that mature people should be able to laugh off (or, if individually defamed, take to the criminal courts)? Or perpetuating laws that appear capable not only of exacerbating social divisions they are intended to avert but which, through the very nature of the process, place pressure on the free flow of, or search for, information that might be deemed socially inflammatory?

One answer can be seen in some of the bizzare proceedings that have unfolded overseas, including adoption in Germany of a law under which, as Collins points out, "even scholarly, critical examination of the Holocaust is called denial and is therefore forbidden on pain of imprisonment."

Some of the items of "relief" sought by the complainant at the Sydney hearing might raise eyebrows.

One asks the Commission to order that any website on the Internet which is or might later be published by the respondent should permanently, repeat permanently, bear on its homepage not only an apology but a notation that the respondent had, in the past, been censured by the Equal Opportunity Commission - a sort of enduring penalty which, to some, might smack just a little of the Nazi yellow star treatment.

Another is a request that the Commission order the respondent, at his own expense, to undertake a course of counselling by a conciliation officer of the commission.

"Counselling" for deemed offenders is, of course, not new. But, oh dear, the symbolism. Roll over Winston Smith and bring on the rats. Or should that be, Roll over Beethoven and bring on Clockwork Orange."

Thought for the Day:

"You can not talk about intellectual freedom while making that freedom provisional upon arriving at a predetermined conclusion."

(A Giwer Gem)