Free Speech Even If It Hurts
Michael Shermer · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020
This essay was originally published as an Opinion Editorial in the Los Angeles Times as “Free Speech, Even if it Hurts” on February 22, 2006. It was in response to the news that Holocaust denier David Irving, whom I wrote about in my co-authored 2000 book (with Alex Grobman) Denying History (2nd edition 2009), had been sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in Austria for violating one of their “hate crime” laws, a misguided, impractical and, in my opinion, immoral attempt to combat hate speech with censorship (and punishment) rather than with free speech. Unbidden and unbeknownst to him, before Irving’s sentencing, I wrote a letter to the judge along the lines of what I argue here, asking not just for leniency in his sentencing but for Irving’s freedom. I have no idea if the judge ever read my letter, and unfortunately I no longer seem to have a copy of it in my archives. That Irving was arrested at the airport in Austria well before he was scheduled to deliver his speech means that this was worse than an assault on free speech; it was an assault on free thought – literally a thought crime. How Orwellian.