David Irving gets three years for decades-old allegations

Wait, is this what I wanted? A three-year prison sentence because this crackpot denied the Holocaust? It does make him look somewhat ridiculous, after stuttering a retraction of the controversy he previously championed. But what exactly has been done here?

Every country has its skeletons in the closet, that it is working fiercely to forget about. With America, it's race. Our anti-racism [posturing] is so over the top, it's a caricature, a grotesque of actual discussion. And that is because we are trying to forget that, little more than 100 years ago, black people were rich white people's slaves. And less than 50 years ago, whites and blacks didn't live in the same society.

With Austrians (and Germans), the issue is the Third Reich. And the overcompensation is banning books, dogmatic anti-fascism, and self-righteously jailing violators like Irving. One act does not erase another. And the zeal to erase what they once said about us makes us more ridiculous in the end.

Check out some of the comments on this response to the verdict, which refers this free speech issue to the same bin as the Danish cartoons. They pull a total reverse Spiegel on Austria.