Free Speech / by David Irving

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

-- 



This was written several months ago, but it is still relevant today. 
As a matter of fact, Attorney Sylvia Stolz, who defended Ernst 
Zundel, is now on trial herself for having dared to ask permission to 
submit forensic evidence that would have exonerated him!

  Ingrid Zundel

  =====

   On Mon, 3 Dec 2007 22:07:09 +1000, in soc.culture.canada = 
<onlytetruth at alltimes.yo> wrote:

  FREE SPEECH

  By David Irving

  The German Government has quietly admitted that over the last twelve 
months it prosecuted over 18,000 Germans for offences of "right-wing 
extremism," of which only a few hundred involved actual violence: 
i.e. they prosecuted over seventeen thousand thought-crimes -- people 
unwitting displaying the old swastika emblem, or even worse, National 
Socialist ideas, and perhaps even "denying the H."

  As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recently pointed out in a 
courageous editorial, most of these new criminal records have been 
sprung on ordinary citizens blissfully unaware of the criminality of 
their actions and thoughts, because the tame German media are too 
cowardly to report any of these cases--even the major trials like 
those involving the revisionists Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolf.

  These absurd laws themselves are protected by fresh layers of other, 
even more absurd, laws making it impossible even for court-appointed 
attorneys to provide an adequate and conscientious defence to those 
accused under the thought-crime laws. Any German or Austrian lawyer 
who does, can be-and frequently is-himself ordered arrested by the 
judge, for having associated himself with these criminal thoughts and 
deeds. Zundel's court-appointed defence attorney Sylvia Stolz  made 
herself unpopular with the prosecutor for "hampering the 
prosecution," and is now to be prosecuted for so hampering. Go 
figure, as the Americans say.

  More than once my chosen Austrian lawyer, Dr Herbert Schaller, 
arrived in the Vienna prison with fresh horror tales from Zundel's 
Mannheim courtroom--the judge Meinerzhagen had warned him that if he 
asked certain questions of the court, or made certain defence 
motions, he too would be arrested.

  I remember that in January 1993, when I was tried in Munich under 
Germany's laws for the suppression of free speech, one of my three 
lawyers turned up apologetically on the morning of the hearing 
apologizing that he could not continue to act for me, as the Munich 
Bar Association had threatened him with dismissal--i.e. the end of 
his career--if he did. He showed me their actual letter.

  I was fined thirty thousand deutschmarks, around twenty thousand 
dollars, for uttering a single sentence which the Polish authorities 
now belatedly admit was true.

  I NOTICED when I was in Viennese prison that the jailhouse, built to 
hold eight hundred malfeasors, currently held 1,400 inmates, a 
quarter of them Blacks. It was a tight fit but it was possible, 
provided we did not all breathe at the same time.

  This morning I have received a letter from Frau K., an elderly 
Viennese lady in her nineties. Exercising what is the constitutional 
right of every citizen in most other countries, on September 27 of 
last year she had written a personal letter to the President of 
Austria, one Herbert Fischer-a small, straw-haired gentleman of even 
smaller character and endowed with all the intellect and bearing of 
Lady Chatterley's gardener-to protest against my arrest, trial, and 
imprisonment. "What D. I. said was right," she wrote in one passage 
of this incriminating letter.

  She received no presidential reply? Right.--She heard no more? Wrong.

  On March 8 the Austrian criminal authorities sent her a letter 
fining her the sum of 200 euros under penalty of jail for having 
written these seditious words to their august president. No trial, no 
hearing, no defence--no lawyer would have dared to defend her anyway.

  This is the new Europe, coming soon to a jailhouse near us. I for 
one shall do my damndest to prevent it.