Nazi supporter is getting some nonsensical praise upon his death.
By Tom Hawthorn, in The Tyee.ca (March 13)
Doug Christie is dead. Good riddance.
The Victoria lawyer earned national notoriety for his ardent defence of a motley collection of scoundrels. He represented a rogue’s gallery of losers – old-time Nazis such as John Ross Taylor, neo-Nazis such as Wolfgang Droege, a couple of Jew-hating school teachers, assorted mixed nuts of white supremacists and Ku Klux Klansmen, and Ernst Zundel, a comic-book Nazi lunatic whose stated disbelief in the Holocaust was matched with a belief the Nazis had UFO bases hidden in Antarctica from which they would complete their quest for global domination. (Zundel wrote books on both subjects.)
On his website, Christie grandiloquently declared himself to be “Canada’s greatest free speech defender.” What nonsense. When did Christie ever defend speech with which he did not agree? He gained a national platform defending clients against hate-crimes laws and human-rights tribunals, but less well remembered was his own frequent use of the courts to stifle the speech of opponents.
In the late 1990s, Christie represented clients who sued newspaper cartoonist Josh Beutel, the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association, the author Warren Kinsella, a college professor in B.C., and a television station in Kelowna. (The latter was a case in which I was to become an unwilling figure. More about that later.) “I do believe this is a concerted effort on the part of members of the extreme right to stifle those who are dealing with hate-mongers,” Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress said at the time.
In 1984, Christie sued Edmonton Sun columnist John Geiger for describing Christie’s Western separatist movement as “just an Alberta version of the Ku Klux Klan.” The lawyer was awarded $30,000 in damages, a decision upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada.
The following year, Vancouver radio hotline host Gary Bannerman delivered an editorial in which he said, “Doug Christie has aligned himself so many times with these perverted monsters that he has to be viewed as one himself, in my view.”
No publication was too small, no comment too innocuous. In 1997, Christie threatened the Martlet student newspaper at the University of Victoria with a lawsuit for publishing an editorial describing members of his Canadian Free Speech League as “extremist thugs.” The students consulted a lawyer and refused Christie’s demand of a retraction. Who defended free speech in that round?
In an interview with the CBC’s As It Happens, Christie let slip an honest glimpse into his thinking. “I know of no people more persecuted than people in the position of James Keegstra, or Malcolm Ross, or Ernst Zundel,” he said. So let’s be clear about Christie’s worldview. In the long, troubled history of humankind, or even only of this nation, no one was more persecuted than Keegstra, an Alberta school teacher who taught the pupils in his Eckville classroom that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by the Jews, who, not incidentally, were evil conspirators responsible for fomenting wars and revolution. The students who echoed his views got better marks than those who did not. For this, Keegstra lost his job and was found guilty of promoting hatred, the penalty for which was a one-year suspended sentence, a year of probation, and an order to perform 200 hours of community service. In the annals of punishment, this is weak tea, though it did not prevent Christie and his client from luxuriating in a faux martyrdom.
In an adversarial legal system such as ours, every defendant is deserving of an ardent defence. Nor should a lawyer’s legal arguments ever be mistaken for an endorsement of a client or their views. Christie certainly delivered for his clients, proving himself to be a frustrating, demanding and belittling presence in the courtroom, as he eschewed even basic dignities when afforded the opportunity to badger Holocaust survivors on the witness stand. Hate-crime laws and human-rights tribunals suppress speech. Prosecutions provide a platform for the obnoxious views of a parade of odious characters. Among them I would include Christie himself.
In 1993, the disciplinary committee of the Law Society of Upper Canada investigated the lawyer’s conduct in the Finta and Zundel trials. The three-person panel rejected three complaints about his actions, doing so in language that offered little solace for the lawyer. Christie’s behaviour “crossed the line separating counsel from client: he has made common cause with a small, lunatic anti-Semitic fringe element in our society,” wrote Harvey Strosberg of the law society. The ruling went on to state, “We know who Mr. Christie is. In the depths of his imagery he has not lied. Suffering Mr. Christie’s words and opinions is part of the price one pays for upholding and cherishing freedom of speech in a free and democratic society.”
Yes, Christie was a nasty man doing a job that had to be done, that few others would have taken on. How far does one go in defending freedom of speech, even if it means defending the right of anyone to express profoundly outrageous and abhorrent thoughts? Quite far, although I have my own bad experience in this realm. Ernst Zundel was a guest on a program I hosted at CBC. In retrospect, had I to do it over again, I would not have given him a platform, nor elevated the idiotic garbage he spewed by giving him the CBC cloak of respectability to hide behind. I would, however, passionately defend his right to publish - where he could - his odious beliefs. Let the reader or listener judge him from the evidence of his words. Silencing hate drives it underground and intensifies it. Exposing it brings forth the public reactions which will snuff it out.
Could Eric or David elaborate about what the Government of Germany said and did about Zundel.
Zündel was released on March 1, 2010, five years after his deportation to Germany.[41] Following the end of his prison term, Canadian Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews re-iterated that Zündel will not be permitted to return to Canada. “In 2005, a Federal Court judge confirmed that Zündel is inadmissible on security grounds for being a danger to the security of Canada,” Mr. Toews said in a written statement adding that, “The decision reinforced the government of Canada’s position that this country will not be a safe haven for individuals who pose a risk to Canada’s national security.”[42]
Zündel indicated that he intended to return to his family home in the Black Forest in order to recuperate from his prison experience.[42]
[Wikipedia]
Thanks Eric,
But could you share with your readers what Zundel was convicted of in Germany and served how many years in prison for?
I did a story on Keegstra for The Journal and saw Christie close up. A creep. End of story.
That the issue commented on by David is well illustrated by the standard medieval work on witches, published in 1846 with the authorization of Pope Innocent VIII, by two Dominicans, Jacobus Sprenger and Henricus Institutoris, the “Malleus Maleficarum” (The Hammer of Witches). The accused “witch” was not permitted to select defence counsel and the one provided was limited in the conduct of the defence because he otherwise be punished for abetting heresy.
A recent (2009) complete translation of the book by Professor Christopher S. MacKay of The U of Alberta makes difficult but fascinating reading.
I guess Mr. Hawthorne may freely say those things about Mr. Christie for two reasons. First, Mr. Christie and others far more personally attractive have nurtured a community in which the limitations on freedom of speech are minimal — one might say demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. Second, Mr. Christie is dead, which eliminates the danger of a justified suit in defamation.
Henry, here’s the answer to your question, from Wikipedia:
Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel (born April 24, 2026) is a German Holocaust denier and pamphleteer. He has been jailed several times: in Canada for publishing literature “likely to incite hatred against an identifiable group”, and for being a threat to national security; in the United States for overstaying his visa; and in Germany for charges of “inciting racial hatred”. He lived in Canada from 1958 to 2000.
In 1977, Zündel founded a small press publishing house called Samisdat Publishers which issued such pamphlets as “The Hitler We Loved and Why” and “Did Six Million Really Die?”, both prominent documents of the Holocaust denial movement.
On February 5, 2003, Ernst Zündel was detained by local police in the US and deported to Canada, where he was detained for two years on a Security Certificate for being a foreign national alleged to be a threat to national security pending a court decision on the validity of the certificate. Once the certificate was upheld and Zündel was determined to be a national security risk he was deported to Germany and tried in the state court of Mannheim on outstanding charges of incitement for Holocaust denial dating from the early 1990s. On February 15, 2007, he was convicted and sentenced to the maximum term of five years in prison.He was released on March 1, 2010.
David,
Thanks. What I wanted to bring out was that “incitement for Holocaust denial” landed him 5 years in prison in Germany. For years that he was spewing hate in Canada claiming free speech, I recall Germans - both in public and private life - were mumbling about what German justice would do if they could get their hands on him. German Justice should be remembered for its role here, and as an example of the success of the core of the EU in social justice and human rights.
Wonder what they are muttering about the Hungarian anti-Semites today?