A lightweight and an unconfident Germany

While we are on the subject of the worst crime in the world, I was saddened to hear that former Bishop Richard Williamson, who believes that only 2 or 300,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis during the second World War, and none of them in gas chambers, has been fined €10,000 by a German court for unburdening himself of these views in an interview to a Swedish newspaper while on German soil.

I knew Williamson slightly, years ago, when he taught at my old school. He was a fairly popular eccentric, and a good teacher, but a man to whom God had not granted the gift of being able to shut up. In retrospect I can quite imagine him falling for this guff.

Now, as it happens I disagree with him on this. Of course neither he nor I was there, and I couldn’t say if it was 5,999,999 or 6,000,001 Jews wiped out but I believe that the evidence indicates something like this number of exterminations and that for some of them Zyklon B was used. Williamson obviously does not believe that and that’s OK with me.

The reason I am saddened is not for Williamson but for Germany. Nothing could more closely reveal its threadbare historic consensus, and therefore the raison d’être of the modern country, more clearly than its not allowing people to express their views, however wrong they may seem to be.

Almost nobody still alive in Germany had anything to do with this. The Germans should have the confidence to let a lightweight like Williamson shoot his mouth off without becoming some sort of martyr to free speech.

Lighten up, is what I say.