Some further reflections upon the disgraceful imprisonment by the Austrian authorities of the virtually friendless historian David Irving. The 24 hours which have elapsed since my last column on the subject have given me the chance to get angrier still.
To be sure, Irving might well be a thoroughly nasty piece of goods, with vile neo-Nazi views; but he is entitled to be unpleasant and to hold whatever unacceptable views he likes, not least because the definition of what is nasty, unpleasant and unacceptable today might not necessarily hold tomorrow, when any of us might find ourselves being so defined.
In 1989, Irving declared that Auschwitz concentration camp and its gas chambers were the holiest shrines of the new 20th-century religion. I'm not quite sure by what he meant by this, but inadvertently or otherwise, he was right. Piety about Auschwitz is the great secular unifier of European culture. Before France and the Netherlands went to the polls to vote on the EU Constitution, both the Dutch Prime Minister, Jan-Peter Balkenende, and Sweden's EU Commissioner, Margot Walstrom, declared that the consequence of not endorsing the constitution would be another Auschwitz. Yes, I know.
In the secular theology of the modern EU religion of Europhilia, no argument is free of its Auschwitz trump card, even if the electorates aren't necessarily buying it (as, happily, the Dutch and the French didn't). Auschwitz is invoked at every turn as a symbol of the evil past that we have left behind: never again, comes the querulous cry, never again.
Investing a single place with potent symbolism of being the embodiment of an extinct evil and present virtue is what a shrine is all about; and just as pilgrims go to Glendalough and Rome, so too do they go to Auschwitz.
Thus this on the internet. "Visit Krakow and Auschwitz in March from £129 per person. Price includes: 2 nights in 3-star hotel with breakfast, - return flight from London to Krakow. Auschwitz Tour Hotel - we offer you accommodation in one of the three-star hotels situated in Kazimierz - the former Jewish district, only a few minutes walk from Krakow's Old Town (four- or five- star hotels are also available)." Being able to stay in the former Jewish district adds a certain piquancy to genocide-chic that no satirist could devise. You get to see where they lived and where they died - and what more could you want? Well, a five-star hotel, actually. OK. You can have that too. The Final Solution, with room service.
So we pray at the shrine of Auschwitz, and swear that the EU will prevent any repetition. Never again, we intone. Yet since Auschwitz was liberated, at least a million people have been killed in programmed massacres in each of the following countries: the Soviet Union, Kampuchea, Communist China on three occasions, the Congo also on perhaps three occasions and Rwanda. Massacres in the hundreds of thousands have occurred in Yugoslavia, Algeria, Sudan, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Lebanon, Sierre Leone, Burundi, Vietnam, Korea. The EU, the home of the "Never Again" antiphon, actually stood by for years and dithered while the Muslims of Bosnia were being dispatched. So much for "never again".
The invocation of "Auschwitz" is merely a secular and inverse form of the medieval invocation of the Holy Name, and to sacrifice a palpable heretic in its name is the greatest act of public piety possible. Never mind that Irving's supposed act of holocaust denial was 17 years ago; never that he recanted his heresy; never mind that the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was lifted after 10 years; never mind that Irving's three year sentence is far longer than that given to those guilty of assault and robbery; never mind (as I was saying yesterday) that the EU subsidises far worse acts of anti-Semitism by the Palestinian Authority than anything Irving is guilty of. Our secular religion of Europhilia simply demands a sacrificial scapegoat, and he is it; and as bad and unjust as the sentence has been the palpable gloating in the media at seeing the unbeliever bite the dust.
That he is a deeply unpleasant man with appalling views and disgusting associates is irrelevant. What if he is - only in part - speaking the truth? What, say, if only 2 million Jews were killed by Hitler's goons? Is it good news that 4 million Jews were not murdered? Nazis, of course, would say it was bad news: but what about you? What would you prefer? Do you actually want 6 million Jews to have been butchered by the Nazis? For surely, the fewer Jews who died the better in Hitler's genocide, the better.
Yet, grotesquely, we are stuck with the moral converse: to have had a holocaust of 6 million Jews is now the dogmatic piety at the heart of the political and legal culture of Europe. And the cathedral to this holy number of 6 million, the St Peter's Basilica of the Holocaust, is Auschwitz. One cannot question or doubt the number, any more than one could have safely challenged the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Our Lord 500 years ago.
We have replaced the death of one Jew with the deaths of 6 million, and laid their sacrifice down as the altar-stone of a post-Christian Eurofaith. They died that the great idea of Europe might live. And whoever publicly declares otherwise, goes to jail. Torquemada would have understood perfectly.