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Enemies of Free Speech origins of anti-semitism One face of fascism was certainly on display that evening — in the street.

More Intelligent Life Saturday, December 1, 2007 FREE SPEECH AND FASCISM IN OXFORD By Stephen Hugh-Jones Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE Shocked by demonstrations at an Oxford Union debate this week, Stephen Hugh-Jones argues that free speech is too precious to be trampled down, however repugnant the speakers If they wanted to see fascism in embryo, Britons didn’t have to go far this week: not to Caracas, say, or Moscow, just Oxford.

David Irving comments: VERY interesting; I do not recall writing to The Isis as a twenty-year-old and it seems improbable that the writer would recall the name either after fifty years.

I had no links with the League of Empire Loyalists, though I did once in the 1960s drop into its Westminster Bridge Street basement office (where I bumped into the late John Tyndall ); I believe I corresponded with their magnificent author A K Chesterton , who shared a grandfather with his famous cousin, G K Chesterton , and I certainly cherished his writings. I must check my recently-returned archives and see if there is an early 1960s letter to The Isis in them.

It does seem like the kind of thing I might have done. If editors had heeded the views of people like me, however young, instead of indulging in easy sophomoric mockery, Britain would not be in the immigrant mess it’s in now. It is home to the Oxford Union, a student debating society, much fancied — and with some reason — by 21-year-old would-be politicians, and much ignored, with equal reason, by most other people, Oxford undergraduates included.

The Union had had a bright idea: a debate on free speech, whose main guest speakers would be David Irving , a not-quite neo-Nazi British historian, and Nick Griffin , leader of the British National Party. Both are controversial figures, Irving a well-known one. Generally labelled a Holocaust-denier, he is not in fact entirely so: he by now accepts that very many Jews were indeed murdered by the Nazis, though with sundry ifs, buts and quibbles about the methods and numbers.

He used to argue that Hitler personally did not order the massacre. Even that view, I believe, he has since modified. But his writings and sympathies are on record, and for years he has been active in extreme-right gatherings.

Only last December did he emerge from prison in Austria, where expressing views such as his is a criminal offence. [ Website note: Mr Irving was given a three-year jail sentence for a lecture he had delivered eighteen years ago, in 1989, under the Stalin-era Banning Law of 1945 which prohibits “the reactivation” of National Socialism. The Vienna court of appeal ordered his release after 400 days held in solitary confinement .]

I doubt it was his historical studies of Hitler’s Germany that first shaped those views. The other way about, I suspect, recalling an incident from 50 years ago. At the time, I was editor of The Isis , a student weekly at Oxford. Into our office, and no doubt others like it, came a curious letter.

Claiming support from various then-familiar bits of the loony right such as the League of Empire Loyalists, it informed us floridly that a new wave was about to sweep through British universities, flushing them clean of communism and kindred ills. The letter was signed D.J.Irving. I fear we first binned it, then retrieved it, trimmed its crumpled edges a bit, and published a half-tone of it, in mockery.

Not till decades later did I recall the letter and guess who its signatory — not yet 20 the time — must surely have been. GRIFFIN, by comparison, is small fry. His party dislikes immigrants in general, and non-whites, whether immigrant or British-born. Its brand of national-populism certainly has appeal beyond its small membership, and it wins a few local-council seats, mainly where racial tensions are high.

Incitement to race hate is a crime in British law, and Griffin in 1998 got a nine-month jail sentence for that. Here, then, were two men who might have something to say about free and unfree speech, and notorious enough to ensure that the event drew a crowd. It did, but not the one the Oxford Union was hoping for: a parade of baying demonstrators waving placards supplied by Unite Against Fascism, a Troskyite front , declaring Stop the fascist BNP.

Most seemed as intent on stopping the two men being able to speak at all. Some, denouncing “Nazi scum”, blocked people hoping to attend the debate. Others burst into the hall and caused uproar inside. Eventually, the event went belatedly ahead, in farcical form, with the two principals speaking in separate rooms. The far left, of course, was at the demo in abundance.

I detest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it has never figured in Trotskyite ideology except as a length of bourgeois-liberal rope to hang the bourgeoisie with. Not that anyone knew what Irving or Griffin did plan to say: why bother, when it’s the man you object to? There too was the student Islamic society; understandably, given Griffin’s racist views and the tenuous link between Islam and free speech.

Also there was the student Jewish society, it too understandably but even less creditably: had they forgotten the very solid link between the silencing of unwelcome views and the rise of howling anti-semitic mobs in Hitler’s Germany and Austria?

One co-president of this society was reported as rebutting “the accusation that we want to deny people free speech” with “we just don’t want to give them any more platforms to air their views” — like those in the 1930s who “had nothing against Jews, I just dislike their yarmulkes, synagogues, bar-mitzvahs and kosher kitchens. And money”. One may suppose that his studies include neither democratic politics nor logic.

Whether fascism is the word for either Griffin or Irving, I don’t know; maybe, if you accept its extension by the far left to mean no more than far right. That either man proposed to display its principles in the debate I doubt, let alone to call for the gassing of Jews or expulsion of Muslims. But one face of fascism was certainly on display that evening — in the street. If speech were free as air, this wouldn’t much matter. It isn’t.

Our ancestors spent centuries, till very recently, and even now in not many countries, establishing the principle. Nothing, not even the American Constitution, guarantees that it will endure. It has limits; rightly, but there are plenty of people eager to tighten them. The protestors’ placards bore another slogan, a familiar one, albeit not in their politically corrected wording: For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is that good people do nothing .

There’s a still easier way: do the evil yourself. Links: http://flickr.com/photos/marianovsky/ YouTube video of David Irving speaking at the Oxford Union (furtively filmed, 8 mins: poor sound: note the two Lefties silently flouncing out at 4:50) |with links to more video Those nice folks next door: Nixon Papers recall Concerns on Israel’s Weapons : Kissinger said, This is one program on which the Israelis have persistently deceived us and may even have stolen from us Lefty Peter Hitchens

(brother of the admirable Christopher H.) equivocates in the Daily Mail about Mr Irving — a good historian, but” Free speech is for nasty people, not nice ones ” David Irving, a Radical’s Diary: After thirty years, I finally speak at the Oxford Union.

Not everybody is happy about it The debate at the Oxford Union: a student’s full eyewitness account | and Mr Irving’s mild rebuke to Luke Tryl | Cherwell (the Oxford student newspaper) posts a video of street interviews taken outside MORE STORIES ON OUR SPECIAL INDEX: DAVID IRVING AND THE OXFORD UNION