Gerd Honsik, 1941-2018
Posted by admin978 on April 11, 2018 · Leave a Comment
Poet and historical revisionist Gerd Honsik died on Saturday 7th April at his home in Sopron, Hungary, just across the border from his native Austria.
A political activist since the 1960s, Honsik had been a federal executive member of Austria’s National Democratic Party, which was banned in 1988 under increasingly draconian anti-democratic laws designed to protect the political establishment.
That same year Honsik wrote a book titled Freisprüch für Hitler? (Acquittal for Hitler?), questioning the historical orthodoxies that are now backed by the full force of criminal law in much of Europe. This began thirty years of legal persecution. In 1992 he was given an 18-month prison sentence by a Vienna court, having already been convicted in Munich: both the Austrian and German legal systems ruled that historical revisionism amounted to “incitement” and that, as under British race laws (which do not yet criminalise revisionism), the truth is no defence.
Honsik fled to Spain to escape this persecution, and while in Spain published further revisionist article in the magazine Halt. He remained in exile until Spanish law was changed to permit his arrest and extradition to Austria in 2007, then began serving the 18-month sentence from fifteen years earlier, and in 2009 was convicted of additional offences and given a further five year prison sentence. This was reduced on appeal to four years, but an extra two year sentence was added in 2010.
Gerd Honsik (left) with Spanish patriot, author and publisher Pedro Varela in 2012
The famous 2006 Tehran Conference on the Holocaust was partly at Honsik’s instigation, after he had asked Iran’s Ambassador to Germany in December 2005 whether the Islamic Republic could provide legal or diplomatic assistance for the Canadian-German revisionist publisher Ernst Zündel. Honsik was forbidden to travel to Iran, but the Tehran Conference was addressed by his attorney Dr Herbert Schaller. In 2011 Dr Schaller won his client an early release from prison, but nevertheless Honsik had served four years merely for the normal pursuit of historical enquiry.
Gerd Honsik took refuge in Hungary last year, as the Austrian authorities were threatening further legal moves against him. His death marks another heroic milestone in the pursuit of historical truth and justice. Within the last eight months we have lost Ernst Zündel, his widow Ingrid Rimland Zündel, Don Salvador Borrego, Dr Herbert Schaller, and now Gerd Honsik. They lit a flame that younger generations must now carry forward.
