eh I read through the whole court transcript last night and I dont really make too much of it. It became a battle over Holocaust denial which is not the case that Irving was bringing. But the defence turned it into that. The standards of scrutiny Evans was suggesting that Irving should have applied to his sources would render any historiographical enterprise impotent. But yeah, I think Irving cant be trusted, im not sure that everthing he says is even in good faith, he's kind of a shock junkie. But he himself has said many times that he is not a Holocaust expert and that his opinion on it is amateur speculation. I think what he's doing is demanding that Western historiography prove their case. Which as far as I can see, they havent. But yeah hhes not a holocause historian and doent clam to be, he's a leading expert on WW2, and I dont think that has much to do with him waxing speculative on the Holocaust. I am keen to to read Evans now that I've read he has a book lampooning postmodernism heh j/k.

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Good summary:

The trial of David Irving - and my part in his downfall

The trial of David Irving -- and my part in his downfall

By John Keegan,
Defence Editor

[Picture added by Website: Sir John Keegan is knighted on May 3, 2000]

THE news that David Irving has lost his libel case will send a tremor through the community of 20th-century historians.

For more than a year now, the gossip between them has been about whether he would lose or not, a subject on which all hedged bets. "It depends whether the judge goes for Holocaust denial or slurs on his reputation", was the general view. "If the first he'll lose, if the second he might get away with it."

What this insider talk meant was that Mr Irving might well persuade the judge of the unfairness of Professor Lipstadt's accusations of his bad historical method. That was what he cared about and he would no doubt argue his case well. If, however, her accusation that Irving's version of the Holocaust was so untruthful as to outweigh his merits as an otherwise objective historian, then he would get no damages and have to pay enormous costs.

As the trial date drew nearer, talk turned to the question of who had been asked to give evidence. Eventually I was. I -- like others I knew -- declined. Earlier experiences had persuaded me that nothing but trouble comes of taking sides over Irving. Decide against him, and his associates accuse one of prejudice. On this occasion I was accused of cowardice. Decide for him, and the smears start. I have written complimentary reviews of Irving's work as a military historian to find myself posted on the internet as a Nazi sympathiser.

Refusal did not get me off the hook. Last autumn, Mr Irving told me he intended to subpoena me and in January the summons appeared. To it was attached a cheque for £50, thus making it an enforceable court instrument. I had to appear, like it or not.

In practice, the appearance was painless. Mr Irving very decently gave me the chance at the outset to state that I was not present willingly. He allowed me to explain why, without interruption. There was no jury to unsettle one, the parties having agreed to leave it all to the judge, a distinguished former libel QC, Charles Gray (who represented Lord Aldington in the famous Tolstoy case).
The judge was relaxed but a master of the material. All I had to do was answer Mr Irving's questions. They were about my opinion of him as a historian. He had quotations from favourable reviews of his work I had written. Could such opinions, he asked, in effect, be consistent with the contrary opinions of other historians?

In a sense this was the central question, which would recur throughout the hearing. Prof Lipstadt's case was that the bad in Irving was so bad that it robbed all he wrote of value. Irving's case was that, if some historians of reputation praised parts of his work, the praise extended to all his work. Both positions are, of course, highly artificial.

Fortunately, I did not have to give my opinion of Prof Lipstadt's work. It was easy, however, to say that a reviewer is at liberty to pick and choose. I had praised, and would praise again, I said, Irving's extraordinary ability to describe and analyse Hitler's conduct of military operations, which was his main occupation during the Second World War. That did not imply endorsement of Irving's view that Hitler did not "know" about the Holocaust until October 1943. That view was "perverse", I said.

What did I mean? I meant, I said, that it defied reason, or common sense. Would it not, however, be the most extraordinary historical revelation of the war, Irving asked, if it could be shown that he did not know about the Holocaust? This was a very curious moment. I suddenly recognised that Irving believed that Hitler's ignorance could be demonstrated.

I stepped down but stayed to watch the rest of the morning's proceedings. Mr Irving's performance was very impressive. He is a large, strong, handsome man, excellently dressed, with the appearance of a leading QC. He performs as well as a QC also, asking, in a firm but courteous voice, precise questions which demonstrate his detailed knowledge of an enormous body of material.
There it was all around us, hundreds of box files holding thousands of pages telling in millions of words what had been done and suffered in Hitler's Europe. Irving knows the material paragraph by paragraph. His skill as an archivist cannot be contested.

Unfortunately for him, the judge has now decided that all-consuming knowledge of a vast body of material does not excuse faults in interpreting it. Irving, the judge said, "repeatedly makes assertions about the Holocaust which are unsupported by or contrary to the historical record".

This is the part of the judgment that will hurt. Mr Irving, perhaps because he left London University without taking a degree, is acutely concerned to be recognised as an academic historian among others. It is not enough for him to receive compliments from professors about his skill in uncovering lost documents or finding forgotten survivors of Hitler's court. Those are the sort of things journalists do. He wants to be praised for his source notes, for his exegesis, for his bibliographies, for what historians call "the apparatus".

As a result, his books positively clank and groan under the weight of apparatus. Very good it is too. Irving, never confident enough to believe what he reads about himself, really is admired by some of those whose approval he seeks. Unfortunately for him, he is admired only when he writes sense. When he writes nonsense, a small but disabling element in his work, he sacrifices all admiration and incurs blame mixed with incredulity. How can anyone so good at history be so bad?

There is an answer. It is that there are really two Irvings. There is Irving the researcher and most of Irving the writer, who sticks to the facts and makes eloquent sense of them. Then there is Irving the thinker, who lets insecurities, imagined slights and youthful resentments bubble up from within him to cloud his mind. It is as if he becomes possessed by the desire to shock and confound the respectable ranks of academe, to write the unprintable and to speak the unutterable. Like many who seek to shock, he may not really believe what he says and probably feels astounded when taken seriously.

He has, in short, many of the qualities of the most creative historians. He is certainly never dull. Prof Lipstadt, by contrast, seems as dull as only the self-righteously politically correct can be. Few other historians had ever heard of her before this case. Most will not want to hear from her again. Mr Irving, if he will only learn from this case, still has much that is interesting to tell us.

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yeah i agree with you on the scrutiny thing, i think i said earlier that most historians work wouldnt stand upto the analysis that irving was given. but the stuff he was caught out on was pretty damning. which is why i never really understood why he brought the case in the first place because it came close to ruining him, and destroyed the reputation he had. he mustve had some idea that this stuff would surface if he brought attention to himself. it's been awhile since i looked at it, but wasn't he suing on the basis that she'd called him a holocaust denier in some random book?

and i think you would like evans, historians are the most touchy people on the planet about postmodernism.

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You mean mischlinge? It means half-breed. In their law they had racial categories of Jewishness ... 1st degree Mischling was half-Jewish, and 2nd degree Mischling was one quarter Jewish ... It got complicated. They needed birth, baptismal, marriage, death certificates. One grandparent meant 2nd degree...

The 2nd degrees would be around ... the 1st degrees were in bigger trouble ...

Hey ... it got duplicated

Well you can be a revisionist in other matters. In fact ... now I don't know the details, but somebody decided to play a trick on Irving, and deny ... the potato famine of Ireland, or ... revise the history of it, and they contacted Irving for help, and he called them crazy and wanted nothing to do with it.

When I first heard about people like Irving they were referred to as Holocaust revisionists. Even Skeptic magazine in the early 90's used the term revisionism to describe people like Irving. Skeptic: The Magazine: Back Issue: Volume 2, Number 4


How was Irving slandered?

You have a funny view of what a moral victory is. Irving is still vilified, rightfully so, and he even spent some time in prison. Not to mention a whole list of countries he isn't allowed into.

Fuck that shit: HOW DO I STOP SNORING? I NEED TO KNOW.

Well the way people & the media throw words around and the resultant generalised meaning they derive is probably not the best way to extract your definitions if your aim is some sort of educated opinion. But from what I observe that is not your aim; your style is to discredit historiography that questions the orthodox interpretation of the Holocaust by equivicating on a dirty word ('denier'). This is the pooly concealed tactics used by the media, too, as far as I can see.

The fact that some Historians might differ on what exactly took place inside a concentration camp is not the same thing as "denying" there was such a thing as a concentration camp. Asking for proof and evidence for some of the claims as to what actually happened does not constitute "Holocaust Denial". Discussing what physically could have happened based on forensic technology does not constitute "Holocaust Denial".

It might be your personal opinion that Irving is rightly vilified, but as far as I can discern, this view is not based on much besides his spurious reputation in the media as a 'holocaust denier' and his legal defeats. If those are sufficient to make up your mind for you fine. But I dont consider that well thought out.

I admit I had no understanding of his case until I started reading when prompted by this thread. But from what I've read nothing tells me he denies the Holocaust. I read through the court transcript thoroughly, and he was convicted in his court case after a team of paid researchers, lead by a grudgebearing Marxist (Peter Evans [Not that who he is has any ipso facto bearing on the validity of his claims, but it gives us a clue]) went through 20 years of his work, examining, testing every footnote looking for bias renderings. From all that they found 19 incidences, which was reduced down to 12 by the court. I don’t know if you are a scholar or not but can you imagine having 20+ years worth of footnotes scrutinised? Nor does the fact that Irving was jailed by the Austrian courts by a preposterous crime like “denying the Holocaust” mean anything to me. Putting someone in jail for their opinion is a crime, even if it wasn’t a junk PC charge, which I suspect it was. There's a lot of politics involved here.

To quote Irving again:

"I wonder if any UK publisher will dare to publish her next book: we are eagerly awaiting her next arrival in the UK. As her lawyers remarked in private correspondence with other lawyers, which I have seen, "David Irving is more active than ever before," writing books, travelling the USA, lecturing, organising lectures and international conferences and the rest.

As for who won: since Lipstadt's team wasted some 13 million dollars which they could not recover, it must seem a Pyrrhic victory at best. What kind of victory is it that costs so much, and takes a team the size of theirs, with payments the size they are found to have made to their witnesses, to accomplish against a lone and unskilled plaintiff, arguing without legal aid, and unaided in Court?

I certainly do not feel defeated."

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I don't really get into it deeply right now, just to say there's a difference between a death camp and a concentration camp. A denier denies the death camps. And to deny that and say, not the rest, is still to deny the Holocaust, because it was the death camps that made the plan to exterminate a whole race of people a reality .....

Well a lot of people question the 'functional' role of the 'death camp' in Eastern Europe. That is not controversial in historiography, just the media. Out of the movies, there is little agreement on wheather Auchwits was functionally a death camp or improvised and ad hoc, etc. See the works of Professor Christopher Browning.
Im not really into Holocaust history myself. I find questions like 'how many jews were killed?' and 'why and how were they killed?' to be of little intrest and demeaning to the tragic dimensions of the advent. But there is a 'Holocaust industry' that wields a lot of power. At the level of history, it deserves to be tested. The moral argument that 'it hurts the feelings of those who mourn it as a reality' to question it should not be worth of adult attention.

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That's what caught my eye too!

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actualy [sic] I have quite a blessed life if I'm honest. I have many people to love, hate few and have few money problem's [sic].... What more does a person need? Oh yeah and I have some kind of humbleness unlike you of course ^_^ ~ CarefulCarpenter

Well ya, I didn't just accept it all cuz that's the right thing to do, I have spent alotta time researching the evidence, and I recommend other people do also.

Well as far as Auschwitz goes, it was a very big place. And there were three main camps, couple of em labor camps. The death camp is located uhm, I dunno some kilometers from the labor camps, and it was known as Auschwitz-Birkenau, or just Birkenau (cuz birches were planted there). There are pictures of it in operation taken from the air by bombers passing over ... its gas chambers were dynamited by the Nazis when they left, but the ruins are still there and can be matched with the satellite photos and other photos.

Though I agree about the industry ... the guilt factor can be used to score political gains ... and gather money, some of that money going who knows where. No doubt about that.

Ya I don't mind it debated, only often people that question it are not honest about it. Like, one of the standard tactics of the deniers is to ignore the gas chambers at Birkenau completely and talk about the gas chambers used in the nearby labor camps to delouse clothes. If people aren't well read up on it, they fall for this...

The black knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail got his legs and arms chopped off and still didn't think he lost his fight with Arthur.