Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day027.17 Last-Modified: 2000/07/25 MR IRVING: Professor Funke, would you look at paragraph 2.2.5, please? MR JUSTICE GRAY: If I may say so, Mr Irving, whilst I am interrupting again and apologies for doing so. MR IRVING: Slow progress? MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is all very -- not much, I am bound to say. Again we are spending a lot of time on what we might call the preliminaries, whereas I read this report when he really is getting down to make the case he seeks to make against you and your connections with these various right-wing extremists, that really comes a good deal further on and ---- MR IRVING: Well, he is throwing in names the whole time. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I know he is and we have had this sort of . P-150 problem before, but what I would find helpful is if you could cross-examine about the specific instances that are relied on of your being associated with individuals who he treats as right-wing extremists or with organizations, and that comes really from my reading as from about 38 onwards. MR IRVING: Well, I would say it comes from 19 onwards, my Lord, which is the right-wing extremist DVU. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think I can stop you because all of this material is there. MR IRVING: At 3.1.1 you say that Mr Irving had spoken to bodies and organizations like banks, bookshops, student fraternities, the US Army Corps and so on. You are aware that I also spoke at universities like Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and Bonn and Geeson and Marburg, are you? A. I recall Bonn, yes. Q. At 3.1.2 you criticise publishers that I deal with as publishing former NS, in other words National Socialist figures, and suggest that makes them right-wing extremists. Are you not familiar with the publishers who publish the memoirs of Albert Spear, who is another top Nazi? Does that make them right wing extremists? What is the special chemical element that turns a publisher into a right-wing extremist? A. Good question. It is again that they did it by a special purpose, to present the right-wing extremist cause, as the . P-151 GFP, the Society for Free Communication. That is part of the network after 45, after the ban of the clear cut neo-national Socialist party of Remer. Then this networking was a kind of replacement in the early 60s with Gert Sudholt and the Deutsche Kulturwerk and all this groupings Dietmar Munier of the Arndt-Verlag. So they tried to make the cause, although the whole political scenery is not fostering these kinds of groupings. Q. Would they not have been prosecuted if they had been publishing politically incorrect materials or illegal materials? A. Yes, and this is the case for some of them at least. I value it. It is the case, if the things are very, very intense, repeatedly, and going to the direction of hardcore right-wing extremist or neo-Nazi extremism or are related to violence, and of course the Holocaust denial, you know, groupings. These are the four dimensions in which official institutions intervene more than in other cases. Q. The Germans clamp down quite a bit on publishing, do they not? They burn a lot of books in Germany even now, do they not? A. Say it again. Q. The Germans burn a lot of books in Germany even now, do they not? A. I cannot answer this question. You allude to the burning . P-152 of the books in 33. Q. You have an index, do you not, of banned books in Germany? MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well Mr Irving ----. MR IRVING: The follow up question was, to your knowledge, have any of my books ever been banned in Germany on any of the indexes or lists? The answer is no, right? A. I do not know. Q. Yes. At paragraph 3.2.1 you now bring in the Socialist Reich Party. Do you allege that I had any contacts with this Socialist Reich Party? A. No. Q. Then why do you mention it? A. No. If I may say so, you misread it. I just wanted to give an overview for the court that there was something, as I did now to the court verbatim, that there are groups in the early 50s of a special importance. Then it went down to a degree and it came in the mid or late 80s more to the fore and even was perceived as the danger for some liberal democracy basics. So this was an overview, and it does not mean, and I did not say, that you are related to these groups. You are were 14 years old when the group was banned, so there is no way. Q. This is a report on my extremist activities so-called. A. This is a misreading. If it is mistaken, then I have to say, no, you as a 14 years old boy was not interacting with the then banned SRP. . P-153 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, we must get on. We are really make no progress at all. MR IRVING: Am going to ask a general question. In other words, you do mention an awful lot of names in this report without my having had any contact with them whatsoever, is that right? It is a total kaleidoscope of German politics of the last half century and I have had no contact with any of those names. A. I need not defend my report. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think the answer to that is yes. When I read it, which was a long time ago now, I got the impression that there was an awful lot of initials and names of organisations that I am not in the end going to have to be concerned with. Is that fair? A. I disagree. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I was hoping you would agree. Q. But to make a point. MR RAMPTON: Your Lordship might like to look at it, or think about looking at it, in the way that I do. I am principally concerned obviously with Mr Irving's immediate and intimate contacts, who organizes the meeting, what is said at those meetings in particular by Mr Irving and those immediate contacts. However, those immediate contacts do have a genealogy, and that, it seems to me, having read the report again, is how the names, what I might call the outer circle of names, come into the . P-154 picture. Whether they matter very much at the end of it all is a separate question. A. Your Lordship, can I say something to you both? MR RAMPTON: Include me as well. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. Please do. A. I thought I did a favour to the court and to the debate to try to bring this genealogy, to get a sense of this different political culture after 45. They have to renew a democracy, then they have to fight those who tried to go back. So I have to at least mention them, and especially then these persons often are the same that came to the fore in the late 80s, in the case of the SNP with respect to the founder Remer. Then I thought, OK, it is too many names for all of you, for all three of you, so to speak, and I did a short paper of 22 pages. I delivered it the other week to the solicitors, and I hope you will get it and you have it. MR JUSTICE GRAY: As a matter of fact, I have not got it. MR RAMPTON: Sorry, I did mention it. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, you did. MR RAMPTON: I have got it. If, when this evidence is finished, your Lordship would like it, it is a convenient summary, but we frankly took the view that your Lordship is so already burdened with paper that, if we gave another 23 pages summarizing what is already in the report, it might not go down all that well. . P-155 MR JUSTICE GRAY: Shall we see when the evidence is finished? A. Your Lordship I tried to minimize the names to a degree that I, from my social science perspective, said it is unbearable, just to make the point. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. A. So it is a kind of ---- MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let us try and be practical about it. Mr Irving, I think what Professor Funke is saying is that he is a social scientist. He therefore felt that he had an obligation in a way to explain really the political pressures and counter pressures that have been operating in Germany really ever since the end of the war. MR IRVING: It is frightfully interesting, and I read it with great interest. MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is all very interesting and it is extremely scholarly, but in the end what I am concerned with, and he is not really implicating you specifically in that, save to the extent that the background of the organizations may have some bearing on your willingness to associate with them, but in the end what I am concerned with is your contacts with this quite limited number of organisations. MR IRVING: I agree. MR JUSTICE GRAY: What I was saying to you a while back is that I think you should concentrate on that, not get, if I may say so, bogged down in the social science aspects of . P-156 Professor Funke's report. MR IRVING: I agree. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do not think you lose anything by taking that course. MR IRVING: The risk we have, my Lord, is that we spoke yesterday of the rogues gallery that we were going to enter. We find ourselves in the rogues gallery with thousands of little photographs and now we are being told, well, ignore all these photographs, just pay attention to the six down in the bottom right hand corner. I am quite happy to do that as long as Mr Rampton does not later on say that Mr Irving has ignored all these other gangsters. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I am going to take the Defendants' case as really in the end coming down to maybe a dozen individuals. MR IRVING: Six. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Who have been identified by Mr Rampton this morning. MR RAMPTON: It may be rather more than six. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I said a dozen. It may be more but they have been identified and their organizations have been identified, and I think, with due respect of course to Professor Funke, that that is what I am concerned with and that is all I am concerned with. MR RAMPTON: To be fair, it is actually what the guts of the report is concerned with. It is a chronological account . P-157 of Mr Irving's neo-fascist contacts in Germany. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. I am not criticising Professor Funke at all, or indeed Mr Irving, but I just think that we all need to focus on what matters, and not get sidetracked. MR IRVING: Of course, the serious problem there for me is that I do not know what dozen names Mr Rampton is thinking about. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I do. We heard them this morning. Indeed overnight, if it would help, I suspect it would take five minutes for Mr Rampton or Miss Rogers to write them out on a piece of paper. MR IRVING: That would be extremely helpful. MR RAMPTON: I do not know whether Mr Irving is still getting the daily transcript. If he is, they will be in there. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Whether he is or he is not, I think it is something that would not be unreasonable to invite you to do. MR RAMPTON: I will do, but I will have to see the transcript myself first because my memory is fallible. MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have actually been highlighting the ones that I think have been mentioned. MR IRVING: Some are obvious but some are less obvious, if I can put it like that. MR RAMPTON: Most of them are in the index to the two bundles apart from Rami and Verala that I mentioned. MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are not relying on all the ones in the . P-158 index. There are an awful lot who have not been featured at all. MR RAMPTON: I do not know about that. Is that right? MR IRVING: If we can strike out all but a dozen, then I am sure that your Lordship would be very happy and so would I. I am prepared to carry on with what I am doing at present, if your Lordship would indicate where I should resume the cross-examination from. MR RAMPTON: Would Mr Irving just restrain his youthful enthusiasm for a moment. MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why do we not do it now? Can I tell you what my impression is? Tell me if I have it wrong, Mr Rampton. If we start at the appendix, page 140? MR RAMPTON: I am probably in the wrong page.
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