David Irving
David Irving is a "historian and a neutral observer" most famous for participating in the Holocaust denial movement. A "historian and a neutral observer" who believes that the Jews asked for it:
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[edit] Interview
... and made up the Holocaust to cover up their money-grubbing schemes:
- PRESENTER: At times in your speech to these groups you speak at, you ask if the Jews have ever looked at themselves.
- IRVING: Yes.
- PRESENTER: To find a reason for the pogroms and the presentation and the extermination. In other words you’re asking “did they bring it on themselves?”
- IRVING: Yes.
- PRESENTER: Thereby excusing the Germans, the Nazis.
- IRVING: Why… well, let us ask that simple question, why does it always happen to the Jews?
- PRESENTER: But isn’t that an ugly, racist sentiment?
... that Jews control the world:
- IRVING: It is an ugly, of course it’s an ugly, racist sentiment, of course it is, you’re absolutely right but we can’t just say therefore let's not discuss it, therefore let's not open that can of worms in case we find something inside there which we’re not going to like looking at. [1]
- INTERVIEWER: When one reads your speeches, one had the impression that Churchill was paid by the Jews, that the Jews dragged Britain into the war, that many of the Communist regimes have been dominated by Jews subsequently, and that a great deal of control over the world is exercised by Jews.
- IRVING: Right, these are four separate facts, to each of which I would be willing to put my signature. They are four separate and unrelated facts. When you string them together like that, you might be entitled then to say: “Question five, David Irving, are you therefore an antisemite?” This may well have been –
- INTERVIEWER: No, this wasn’t my question.
- IRVING: But the answer is this, these are in fact four separate facts which happen to be true, in my considered opinion as a historian. And I think we can find the historical evidence for it. [2]
- And that’s what it is all about. The big lie is designed not only to distract attention from even bigger crimes than what the Nazis did, the big lie is designed to justify, both in arrears and in advance, the bigger crimes in the financial world and elsewhere that are being committed by the survivors of the Holocaust. [2]
- The whole rabble, all the scum of humanity stand outside. The homosexuals, the gypsies, the lesbians, the Jews, the criminals, the communists, the left-wing extremists, the whole commune stands there and has to be held back behind steel barricades for two days. [3]
- INTERVIEWER:...you were quoted on, Mr Irving, you were quoted on radio in Australia yesterday saying it makes you queasy seeing black men playing cricket for England. Can you explain to us what you mean by that?
- IRVING: Well I think probably if you spoke to a lot of English people they’d, they’d find the same thing but not many of them are prepared to say it in public. You see there’s so much intimidation in our so-called liberal free democratic society that that people are forced to live an almost schizophrenic existence. They make statements in public which they consider to be safe but privately at the back of their heads they think differently and I say what I think. And, I’m queasy when I see, now you see I was born in England in 1938 and people will know what I’m saying now, 1938 England was a different country from the way England is now and I’m unhappy to see what we have done to England. We’ve abdicated, we’ve committed a kind of international hari kari, we’ve inflicted great misery on ourselves with coloured immigration and we’ve inflicted, let’s be frank, we’ve inflicted misery on the coloured immigrants as well. It’s a kind of 20th century slave trade. I don’t like it and I’m queasy about it and I’m frank enough to say it and no-one’s going to prevent me from speaking my mind about it. [4]
- So I said “before I answer your questions, would you tell me what you believe in, as a journalist, an Australian journalist? Do you believe in mixing up all God’s races into one super, kind of mixed up race? Are you in favour of racial inter-marriage and racial mixing? And he said: “well, I believe in multiculturalism”, of course that’s the buzzword, it will come here sooner or later.’ [4]
[edit] The Lipstadt Affair
(Note: Much of the information in this section is drawn from Richard J. Evans's account of the trial and its context. Evans was an expert witness for the defence and is an internationally respected historian of the Nazi period. Irving, as can be imagined, has a rather different opinion of what happened.)
In 1993, Penguin Books published Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, a somewhat strenuous work documenting neo-fascist and Holocaust denial thought, by an American historian named Deborah Lipstadt. This book pulled no punches in its treatment of what Lipstadt considered her target's primary representatives, including Irving, who was described as a "decredited" historian with "neofascist" and "denial connections" and was "an ardent admirer of the Nazi leader". Irving, she maintained, was guilty of "distorting evidence and manipulating documents to serve his own purposes... of skewing documents and misrepresenting data in order to [...] exonerate Hitler". In response, Irving waited until her book was published in the United Kingdom, where libel laws favour the plaintiff, and demanded a retraction from Penguin. Penguin and Lipstadt refused, and in 1996 Irving issued a writ for defamation. Signalling the speed of the British justice system, the case was eventually heard in the High Court in April 2000.[5]
In the United States, the claimant has to prove that what the defendant has said about them is libellous - that is, that it would cause a right-thinking person to form a negative opinion of the claimant, and in no way could it be said to be in the public interest. In the United Kingdom, the burden of proof rests on the defendant, as British law assumes that the litigant is entitled to a good reputation until proven guilty - in other words, the defendant must prove that what they said was not libellous. The notorious slant of British libel laws towards the plaintiff has made Britain the libel equivalent of a tax haven, attracting defamation suits because the majority of defendants will not even try to defend themselves. This was what Irving blatantly hoped would happen - that Penguin and Lipstadt would see the case as too much bother and simply retract the statements, thus giving him effective victory. Unfortunately, Lipstadt had no intention of backing down, and Penguin decided that its commercial interests lay in making sure its authors were not sued for airing their opinions in print (which could send a message that Penguin would not publish "dangerous" books).
In the case that followed, Irving made three crucial blunders that led to his downfall. Firstly, he didn't immediately drop the suit and slink back into obscurity. It could be argued that this would have meant that he was tacitly accepting the charge, and the degraded reputation that accompanied it. This might seem a small loss to Irving, but at the time he did have some standing to lose among real historians, including Donald Cameron Watt and Sir John Keegan, who were Irving's expert witnesses for the plaintiff (though, embarrassingly, they had to be subpoena'd to attend) and who spoke highly of Irving's early work Hitler's War.[6] Despite this, the level of public ignorance of the case meant that Irving could probably have got away with dropping it and hoping no one noticed. His second blunder was the inconvenient truth that he was a Holocaust denier (he once declared openly that he was in the business of a "refutation of the Holocaust story")[7] with "neofascist" and "denial connections", and the expert witnesses for the defence found systematic efforts on Irving's part to misrepresent and distort documents in a quite shameless manner.[8] Proving that this distortion was deliberate was another matter, but, as Prof. Richard J. Evans put it to Irving while in the witness box: "All the mistakes are in the same direction in support of a particular thesis [...] I do not think that is mere negligence. I think that is a deliberate manipulation and deception."[9] Libel is not libel if it is true, and Irving had said and done far too much to claim that the charges Lipstadt had made were false.
Irving's final blunder was to represent himself in court. Any possible small victories a professional lawyer might have wrung from the proceedings by tripping up witnesses and expertly playing to the courtroom were lost in a comically inept performance that varied between pompous ("we are going to go on a joint journey of discovery over the next day or two", he said to the historian Christopher Browning, an expert witness for the defence, in an attempt to evoke collegiality)[10] and pedantic (spending five minutes arguing over which of Irving or Evans was an "expert in pit-digging" being a low-light)[11], climaxing with Irving inadvertently addressing the judge as "mein Fuhrer" in front of the entire court.[12]
Unsurprisingly, given all this, the judge ruled in Penguin and Lipstadt's favour, finding Irving to be exactly what they had said he was and liable for all legal expense. Irving attempted to avoid this by claiming to be bankrupt.
Throughout the case, and afterward, media commentary managed to be almost entirely wrong about the facts of the case. The most basic error committed was the almost universal misconception that it was Irving who was on trial. Perhaps this was simply a misunderstanding of British libel laws (understandable, given the predominance of the United States culturally), but it led to many self-serving opinion pieces in which journalists and historians competed with each other to see who could be the most "right on" on the issue. The pseudonymous and appropriately named "Peter Simple", writing in the Daily Telegraph, said mock-innocently that it was "a strange sort of country" in which Irving could be "consigned to the outer darkness" and yet the (at least formerly) pro-Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm would be given the Order of Merit (or made a Companion of Honour, depending whether we're living in the real world or Simple's right-wing parody).[13] ("Simple" had early covered the trial, mentioning that he felt "uncomfortable" watching Irving berating Auschwitz survivors - something had not occurred, nor anything like it, effectively demonstrating that Simple pulled his "coverage" right out of his arse.) Even some genuine historians, including John Keegan, one of Irving's unwilling witnesses, and John Erickson, leapt into print to "defend" Irving and prove how passionate they were in defence of free speech. Keegan couldn't resist ranting about "political correctness",[14] and Erickson didn't appear to know what he was talking about at all.[15] Ultimately, the trial was a victory for free speech - that is, Lipstadt's freedom to call Irving by what he was.
Commentators even tip-toed into extreme unpleasantness by attacking Deborah Lipstadt, with the Irish Times correspondent Brenden Glacken opining that Lipstadt was "odious" for "her smugness, her dullness and her self-righteous political correctness".[16] In all, only two journalists really stuck it to Irving in the aftermath. The first was the psychologist Oliver James, who interviewed Irving on BBC Radio 4. When Irving "admitted" to be "self-confident to the point of arrogance", James cheerfully suggested that really Irving was "actually very short of self-esteem" and suffered "feelings of inferiority", leading him to "make a big fuss and [be] the centre of attention".[17] No more annihilating response could be conceived. The second was Jeremy Paxman, who had evidently prepared and easily spotted Irving's attempts to twist the truth ("typical of your methods", he noted) and so successfully demolished Irving's claim not to be an anti-semite and a racist that Irving let his mask slip for a moment, asking of Paxman: "You're not a Jew, are you?"[18]
[edit] Racist poetry
This was written apparently in or before the 1990‘s, at least in big cities prejudice against mixed race people is far less noticeable today.
(...) And more scurrilously, when half-breed children are wheeled past:[19]
I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry-an
Ape or Rastafarian
[edit] see also
[edit] Footnotes
- David Irving: A Political Self-Portrait: Electronic Edition, Holocaust Denial on Trial
- ↑ Jewish responsibility for anti-Semitism/ pogroms/ Holocaust
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Holocaust "myth" as Jewish extortion
- ↑ Money, attention seeking etc.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Racism
- ↑ Evans, Richard J., Telling Lies About Hitler - The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial (London: Verso, 2002), p.12.
- ↑ Evans, p.15.
- ↑ Evans, p.153.
- ↑ Evans, pp.45-101. Yes all of it.
- ↑ Evans, quoting himself, p.212.
- ↑ Evans, p.213.
- ↑ Evans, p.219-220.
- ↑ Evans, p.231.
- ↑ Evans, p.246
- ↑ Evans, p.250
- ↑ Evans, pp.247-48
- ↑ Glacken, Brenden, "It's Never That Simple", Irish Times, 17 April 2000.
- ↑ Evans, p.200
- ↑ Evans, p.242.
- ↑ Viewpoint: What it's like to be mixed-race in Britain What conditions were and are like for mixed race people in the uk