I don’t see how anyone who denies the Holocaust can be called a “historian.”
On top of his other problems, what was this guy thinking in going to Austria?
You know…this practice of locking people up for what they say…that’s how Nazi Germany got started.
Well one might understand that, by way of compensation, they’d try awful damn hard to make it clear that they were not EVER going to condone denying the awfulness of their own past. Not that Austria is Germany, but still.
Also to point out that, while one could wish otherwise, America is pretty unique in the absoluteness of its right to freedom of speech; most other countries–even Western democracies–have more restrictions on speech than America does. Nonetheless, the Nazi party isn’t springing up willy nilly every damn where but the USA. Just saying there are ideals, and there are extremes, but there are also areas that bridge the gap between the two. “Any restrictions on speech” = “a quick trip to Naziism” is a vast oversimplification.
The study of history is usually the pursuit of facts and interpretation of these. Some historians, however, interpret facts into the patterns they want to see, rather than what is actually there. I see Irving as one of these.
I never realised that holocaust denying was illegal anywhere, however. Interesting.
The Wikipedia article on the fellow is pretty interesting, even though it adds a disclaimer about “the neutrality of this article is disputed.”
The United States does not have an absolute right to free speech, either, unless you’re denying the existence of laws against various sorts of obscenity and pornography. I’d agree the USA probably has fewer restrictions than any other country I can think of, but it’s not absolute.
I was only making a joke, but you have to admit there is some irony there.
I know that Germany doesn’t have a 1st Amendment, but philosophically speaking, I don’t think it’s ever wise for the state to lock people up for political speech, no matter how repugnant that speech may be. The proper response of the German government should be to state unequivocally that Irving is a liar and a fraud and to offer some information pointing people to all the hard evidence for the holocaust.
I know that. Perhaps I spoke imprecisely; I was talking about the degree to which America’s freedoms approach absolute is unique.
I agree. I just said I understand their impulse, but it’s not the strategy I would choose either.
Up until recently, when his reputation was thouroughly trashed by an American reporter and academic in a libel case, David Irving was considered to be an intellectual, he still is to an extent but he has been pretty much sidelined.
His work was on the Holocaust was only part of his output, much of which was of very high quality and this is what gave him so much credibility such that he was always able to defend his disreputable position on the Holocaust.
Other academics were often intimidated from taking him on, or doing so would involve so much research for no real kudos.
His work on the Holocaust has been widely cited and used on racist material, and hate groups in general, and has been used to provide an authoratative source.
David Irving goes beyond mere Holocaust denial, because his reputation and authority made it easier and legitimised others using his material for their own purposes, many of which Irving supports.
Eventually Deborah Lipstadt took him on in her book and he sued, he had plenty of backers and it took a combined intellectual effort of quite a number of Oxbridge professors to support her to finally and completely debunk his lies and his revisionist interpretation of history.
Its the fact that it took the combined forces of many academics to expose Irving that allowed him to operate for so long, no one wanted all the hassle of doing this previously and for little gain.
Irving is at the very apex of Holocaust denial, he is a special case whose work enables others to build their nasty little propaganda, it almost not just that he is a holocaust denier and much more that he is the holocaust denier.
In the UK he hadn’t been persued, our freedom of speech is such that nailing him down would have been impossible, and he took full advantage of this, using the civil courts to intimidate opponents where libel case costs can cripple defendants and plaintiffs.
There have been some thoughts put about that his work amounts to race hate literature which could have been persued in our criminal courts, but until his work had been academicaly recognised as such then this was not realistiically prosecutable, and it has taken a number of civil cases to debunk his reputation.
We are now in the position in the UK of having a potential to be able to quote academics and experts to bring race hate charges against him, or at least it is more possible, because it can now be established that his Holocaust denial has a non-academic aim.
We still don’t have Holocaust denial laws here, but there are now other avenues.
The next hurdle is for our prosecution service to determine wether it would be in the public interest to take Irving before the criminal courts, my guess is that it would probably not.
As an example of how he operates, his work on the allied bombing campaign, particularly Dresden, is instructive. He first demonstrates the inneffectiveness of the bombing for the most part, then he shows how allied leaders knew this, then he uses his own logic to then state that the allies themselves were guilty of a form of genocide or holocaust, and he also grossly over estimates the casualties(which were horrifying enough anyway) to justify his claim of allied holocaust.
Using this case, in which he is careful to select and quote material from real documents and meeting minutes he then claims that either the allies use and exaggerate German atricities to hide their own guilt, or that somehow we should simply say to ourselves that war is a terrible thing, all sides did terrible deeds and all sides are therefore equivalent, therefore there is a gross hipocracy in persuing Nazi war criminals.
He does not deny there were labour camps, or that many people died there, only that the numbers of killings were’ technicly impossible’ and that awful as those camps were, they do not amount to a formal program of genocide, just that the conditions were such that these deaths were inevitable, but that the Nazi leadership were only as guilty of these crimes as the Allies were for theirs.
David Irving has built this case up for decades, carefully crafting and selecting his lies and distortions, accepting funds from Neo-Nazi groups around the world including the US, intimidating anyone who disagreed and selectively skirting around matters relating to the Holocaust to do so.
He really is a very special case, and deserves to rot in prison for the rest of his life, the problem is that he and his associates would try to protray him as a matryr for freedom of speech, along the lines of being imprisoned for speaking ‘the truth they don’t want you to know’.
This is that danger of incarcerating or criminalising anyone for freedom of speech issues.
His message doesn’t change the fact that he’s being jailed for an opinion, whatever its verity. If the authorities had any evidence that his work had fueled racist violence and had thrown him in jail for that it’d be a pretty clearly-cut case and no one would hear a complaint from me. But this - this law - is the justice system cutting corners. I doubt he causes much damage at all if he’s just a lone nut running around pushing his agenda.
And someone please educate me (I say this without irony or sarcasm; I grew up in Asia, where little attention is paid to this kind of thing, save the two pages on WWII in my tenth-grade history textbook) - what’s so thoroughly rotten about the version he’s pushing (other than that he knowingly used forged documents, which though dishonest, doesn’t make him anything but a fraud)?
casdave – thanks for an outstanding summary of who the guy is and what he’s been up to!
One percieved obstacle for the extreme right wing National Socialists, is the beleif that if they could somehow potray Hitler as a great man with a vision, that his evil views were somehow justified and that he was not the evil person we know, then their ability to organise and gain power would be enhanced.
Imagine the way that WWII is completely changed, Hitler is now a person who is admired, and worthy of it, that our Capitalist society if in fact the dangerous and evil worldview.
You have to remember that racists and Neo-Nazi groups spread disinformation, provoke and promote racial inequality, that threre is a race of masters and a corresponding race of servants(which soon becomes slaves when you look at Nazi labour camps)
This is a view that David Irving supports and seeks to promote even though it is a lie, it is a grave disrespect to all the millions who died in WWII, from persons of particular races, religion, sexual orientation, or even disability, as Hitler had signiicant programs to exterminate such groups.
It is not trivial, in Germany and France there have been a series of arson attacks on migrant worker hostels resulting in many very serious injuries and death, Austria itself voted in as president a person who has a questionable past with regard to Nazism.
Its not just that his historical revisionism is inaccurate, its why it is innaccurate, it is inaccurate for a specific purpose, and one which could ultimately lead to mass murder and genocide if left unchallenged.
Support for Neo-Nazi ideals can and does lead directly to murder, imagine what it would be like if they ever took power in any country.
Austria was Germany from 1938 to 1945…when Hitler was in power!
That’s kind of what I was thinking of when I said I could understand where they were coming from.
Well, that would be true if this had happened in America. But Austria has its own laws, and this is in accord with those laws.
The David Irving-Deborah Lipstadt libel trial that casdave refers to is documented on the Holocaust Denial on Trial website.