Monday, February 20, 2006

Free David Irving

British "historian" David Irving has been sentenced to three years in jail in Austria for Holocaust denial. The perverse belief that governmental force is the appropriate way to challenge bad or wrong ideas is as silly as Irving's "history", which he has since amended, after seeing Adolf Eichmann's personal files in 1991.

The appropriate way to combat ideas is with better ideas. The worse an idea is, the more the light of day will destroy it. Read Steven Levitt's chapter about the Ku Klux Klan in Freakonomics: the Klan's 1920's revival was mortally wounded by a cartoonist who put the secretive rituals of the Klan in the morning papers and revealed the silliness and corruption at the core of the organization.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"Convictions are worse enemies of truth than lies."