There is the ideal of free speech, and then there is reality: censorship, persecution, and prosecution of dissidents.
By Jürgen Graf ∙ October 1, 1998
Prosecutor Threatens Defense Witness A court in Switzerland has punished 47-year-old teacher Jürgen Graf and 78-year-old retired engineer Gerhard Förster with fines and prison terms for writing or publishing allegedly anti-Jewish books. A district court in the northern Swiss town of Baden on July 21 sentenced Graf, a leading Holocaust revisionist, to 15 months imprisonment…
By Mark Weber ∙ October 1, 1998
Jürgen Graf and Gerhard Förster are by no means the first persons in Switzerland to be attacked or punished for their revisionist views. They certainly won't be the last. Indeed, it appears that during the past year Swiss authorities have been cracking down on dissidents with noticeably greater severity. In 1986 a teacher in Lausanne,…
By Mark Weber ∙ October 1, 1998
Auschwitz State Museum authorities have banned a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television team and British historian David Irving from visiting the site of the wartime German concentration camp. In a July 15 letter to Irving, Museum official Krystyna Oleksy wrote: “We must advise you that permission will not be given for you to have any…
By Mark Weber ∙ October 1, 1998
Since October 1997, German historian Udo Walendy has been serving a prison sentence for publishing dissident historical writings on the Holocaust issue. Two German courts have found him guilty of the crime of “popular incitement” for items that had appeared in several issues of the “Historical Facts” booklet series he edits and publishes. On May…
By Mark Weber ∙ October 1, 1998
For many years Swiss law has prohibited discrimination on the basis of race or national origin, similar to provisions of the 1964 and 1968 federal “civil rights” laws in the United States. But Switzerland's new “anti-racism” law, which is a revision of Article (Section) 261 of the criminal code (Strafgesetzbuch), goes far beyond this. It…
By Mark Weber ∙ June 1, 1998
A major advance for historical revisionism in Europe is the appearance of a new German-language scholarly journal, Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung. Now in its second year of publication, this “Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Research” offers first-rate writing and editing, and a high level of scholarship, presented in an attractively laid out and well-illustrated large-size…
By Douglas Collins ∙ September 15, 1996
Doug Collins, an award-winning journalist, has worked for several Canadian daily newspapers, and is the author of several books. He served with the British army during the Second World War, and then with the British control commission in postwar occupied Germany. In September 1997 he retired as a columnist for the North Shore News of…
By aaargh ∙ June 1, 1998
Everybody knows revisionism is an abomination. But it not only exists – it persists. Moral censure and penal convictions, vigilance committees, even the laws of the state – nothing works. For the past 20 years, revisionism has not stopped growing. A recent poll shows that 30 percent of the people in France are ready to…
By Mark Weber ∙ March 1, 1998
In 1789 the French National Assembly enacted the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” a guiding document of the French Revolution that solemnly proclaims as “inalienable” the rights of free speech and of the press. Today French citizens are, by and large, able to express their views freely on nearly any topic….
By Mark Weber ∙ January 1, 1998
In a major victory in Japan for freedom of speech and research on the Holocaust issue, a Tokyo District Court has declined to give judicial validation to claims of mass extermination gas chambers in wartime German concentration camps. The case began in April 1997 when Japanese revisionist author Aiji Kimura brought a lawsuit against three…
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