Some of this is due to purely technical difficulties writing the damn thing but mostly I’ve been feeling the weight of the memory of the dead and the reputations of the living.

I’ve talked about David Irving before, but I’ll bring him up again in order to recommend D. D. Guttenplan’s excellent book on Irving’s libel suit against Penguin (who you might remember as the defendant in the Lady Chatterly trial) and Deborah Lipstadt. It’s called The Holocaust on Trial, and is not to be confused with the Holocaust denial tract of the same name. It’s not just an introduction to Irving and denial issues - it’s a fascinating and thoughtful book.

A couple of bits relating to Irving’s credibility stick in my head. When Richard Evans, who had been comparing Irving’s whole body of work to its sources, took the stand and Irving, who acted for himself, was examining him, it went something like this:

IRVING: Professor Evans, you expressed the opinion in your report that my diaries may have been written for some ulterior motive.

EVANS: Could you point to the page in my report where I said that, please?

IRVING: That sounded to me as though it was a rehearsed remark. Is it true that it is your opinion that I may have written the diaries for some reason other than one would normally write a diary? What are your suspicions about why I wrote that?

EVANS: Would you like to point me to the page where I - you see, I have a problem, Mr Irving, which is that, having been through your work, I cannot really accept your version of any document, including passages in my own report, without actually having it in front of me, so I think this may be a problem for us.

...closed with my new slogan Wahrheit Macht Frei. The lefty journalists got the allusions.

But until this point in the trial, Irving has managed to avoid getting caught actually lying to the judge.

More recently, I’ve finally started looking at the case “for”: evidence that the Holocaust occurred. I had assumed that the deniers’ primarily tactics were distortion of particular points, playing on gaps in the record and fallacious argument. Actually, the main basis of the denial case is old-fashioned lies.

The core claims, the beliefs you need to support any denial arguments, are negative. That there is “no credible evidence” that Hitler knew about the persecution of the Jews. That there is “no proof” that gas chambers were used for killing at Auschwitz. Or anywhere.

These are just not true, and anyone who claims to be familiar with the breadth of the evidence should know it. There’s lots of evidence. Piles of it. Pits of it. Quite apart from the simply fact that in order to deny the organised killing of Jews (and Slavs, and Gypsies, and more) by the Nazis you have say that thousands of people have lied, lied in unison, lied in agreement with documents that weren’t even available at the time, lied without even a fraction of them recanting, for more than fifty years.

I’ve been feeling more and more sympathy for the comparison between Holocaust denial and the belief that the earth is flat. This does sum up the intellectual problem but it doesn’t really convey the crushing, callous moral obscenity of it all. I was reading Holocaust information site Nizkor’s point-by-point rebuttal of an Institute for Historical Review denial pamphlet, and I didn’t get far before the juxtaposition of historical human suffering and the denier’s wilful deception about it got to be too much. I mean, I already knew IHR were liars, and I still felt betrayed.

You may have gathered that I will defend Mr Irving's right to speak, defend it even to the point of mild personal inconvenience. But I wish, oh how I wish, that he would just shut up.

I'm not sure who's responsible for attributing a hierarchical business model to my Lower Hutt abode. If it wasn't a technical or administrative error at the University of Otago (who sent the letter) it may have been something my parents did when, no doubt tiring of being sent my copy of the Otago Graduate magazine, told my alma mater what my actual address is.

At any rate, the actual letter was sent to me in my capacity as an Alumnus and Graduate in Philosophy*, rather than as Senior Vice-President in Charge of Communications and Journalism. The Department is conducting a planning review, and the letter asked among other things the interesting question of whether my course has any use to me.

Since one of my first PHIL papers was beginner's Epistemology (the study of knowledge per se) it's tempting to just assert that I don't know.

Some of you may have detected the philosophical influence in some of my previous posts. Though I can't say that "writing more elitist weblogs" was a top priority during my undergraduate years.

A Philosophy major constitutes evidence that I'm in favour of rational thought, but it's difficult for me to say how much of my logical and analytical habits are due to training and how much is down to being a smart bastard to begin with. If, for example, I find that it gobsmacking that some New Zealand juries don't seem to understand what constitutes murder despite having it clearly explained to them, is it because I'm trained in observing fine conceptual distinctions, or is it because I'm a natural pedant?

I don't think I'm heading for a sensible answer here. Which allows me to cite arch-cynic Ambrose Bierce. You may recall that quoting The Devil's Dictionary was what lecturers and similar used to do before The Far Side was invented. Actually, I was thinking yesterday of including Bierce on my any-three-people-ever dinner party list. But then I though he probably wouldn't be very good company. Anyway:

Truth, n. An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing activity to the end of time.

Speaking as someone who's tried both, the Radler® is quite nice - a sort of lemon-lime flavoured beer. If someone offered me one, I'd drink it, though probably not in the half-litre or litre quantities one gets in a Munich beer garden.

I imagine that the Dom Post's beer columnist was reading off the company's publicity when he described a Bavarian Radler as being lemon flavoured, quite low in alcohol and named for its cyclist-refreshing properties (pronounced rahd-luh, the word means "cyclist").

What they're not telling you is that the reason a Radler is low in alcohol and tastes of lemon has nothing to do with brewing. It's because it's half beer and half lemonade. Something that, in the English-speaking world, we a call a "shandy".

Duh look at me I'm David Irving

I'll admit a failure in that I can't be bothered digging through his website to determine the actual extent of his current Holocaust denial, but on the basis of the research I've done, I'm concluding that David Irving is a cast-iron tit with a chip on his shoulder. And wrong. Most notably, when Irving sued Penguin Books and author Deborah Lipstadt over the claims in Denying the Holocaust that he knowingly distorted or suppressed evidence, denied the holocaust and was an anti-semitic racist, he lost.

Which leads me to wonder what the (so-called) Press Club were thinking. If they wanted a discussion of the problems of writing history they might have done better to invite somebody without a reputation (if only on this one issue) for selectively ignoring bits of the kind of evidence that he is, admittedly, very good at digging up.

Linda Clark interviewed him this morning. I had thought that talking to Irving was unlikely advance the cause of balance, or of fairness, or of accuracy. Judging by the first batch of email responses, most people thought he was a cast-iron tit, so maybe I was wrong. I'm guessing he was restricting his opinions, as we all would, to what he thought his audience would find reasonable. That didn't stop him saying that when he put up a reward for information on the cemetary-wreckers it was in the hope of finding them to be mentally disordered Jews or Israeli agents.

I am entirely (or at least very broadly) in favour of free speech. But that doesn't mean we should give everybody a slot on National Radio. Actually, I think even debating Irving is a strategic error. My wife's family has a saying: "Never argue with an idiot - people might not know who's who". Similarly, to vilify him or, worse, to suppress him is to give him too much importance. David Irving should be debunked for those who are interested and, more generally, mocked.

Apparently he still expects to come to New Zealand. When he is prevented from getting on the plane, he intends to take legal action. When he loses, he won't (as is his way) accept the verdict.

Incidentally, National Radio didn't seem to be prepared to draw conculsions on Irving. It said he was "described as 'the holocaust denier'" and didn't say why he was deported from Canada. Fair enough. It would take a braver man than me to fight through the bald assertions on this one.

But ultimately the problem is that most people, legislators inculded, prefer not being offended to having a really open debate. But the reason we have laws supporting freedom of speech is precisely so that people can say offensive things. We wouldn't need the laws otherwise; nobody ever tries to ban inoffensive speech. This is one of those priciples that people are happier with in general terms than when it gets down to cases.

I can understand why senior public servants need to agree to keep quiet on principle - they must be able to work with the government of the day. But more than one government department instructed all its employees not to join the Hikoi (that's why so many people happened to be taking 'coffee breaks' on balconies along the Terrace). Surely there's a limit.

I happen to think that society as a whole can't progress unless people are free to question and argue, even if it's questioning the obvious and arguing the unthinkable. And as with any human right, freedom of expression is an incitement to radicalism. Just what constitutes "Shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre" anyway? And is even that really so bad? If it is such a problem, then surely that's more of a health and safety issue?

Sure, people can say some really whacked-out stuff. But the great thing is, rather than muffling these ideas because they're so terrible, you can just make it clear how wrong they are. Or even better, how silly they are. My parents have oddly fond memories of Patricia Bartlett: it seems the Society for the Preservation of Community Standards was a lot less threatening when the ex-nun was telling the TV about how the media was corrupting us and we could all laugh at her.

Of course that is just by way of wishing that my enemies would confine themsaelves to open, informed public debate rather than doing what achieves their goals (although SPCS's recent appeal court submissions do have some excellent gag lines). There is a kind of obligation that comes as a corollary to freedom of expression. The government and the media, and most of all the people, in allowing "open" debate, need to foster the "informed" part. One of several memorable moments in Control Room charmingly showed Al-Jazeera broadcasting Donald Rumsfeld saying that Al-Jazeera made stuff up (he thought it was sad when people lie but they get found out eventually).

It seems what I'm saying is that the dominant paradigm, if it's got any validity, actually gets stronger for allowing questions. So what's everyone worried about?

This isn't supposed to be the whole case for free speech. It's just some stuff I've been thinking. Naturally, you are free to disagree with me. And I'm free to ignore you.

* One thing the debate on flag-burning has shown up is ACT's odd habit of demanding rights and freedom except where this conflicts with conservative social values. Property yes, drugs no. And burning flags "isn't speech".

Personally I wouldn't burn a flag - I have yet to find an issue or a flag important enough - but it's been noted that the Hopkinson judgement left open the question of what exactly would constitute showing disrespect for the flag. Having nothing better to do, I'll gladly make myself the subject of a new test case. In that spirit, I declare that the flag's rhymes are whack and its mother is a ho.