Copyright 2000 News World Communications, Inc. The Washington Times, April 20, 2000, p. A17 "Blocking Holocaust Revisionism," by Jeffrey Hart In a decision last week, a British court rejected a libel suit by British historian David Irving against an American academic critic of his work, professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University. There were many levels of importance in this suit. In its largest sense, it involved the duty of historians to approach as closely as possible to historical fact - that is, to guard "memory" as a vital part of our history of who we are. This may come as news to the reader here, but a recent and influential theory of the writing of history holds that there is no such thing as history. There are only various "narratives" about historical events. That is, a history of the wars between Rome and Carthage would be very different if told from the point of view of Hannibal as opposed to that of Scipio Africanus. Different events would be stressed, different meanings assessed and so on. Down this road, skepticism begins to erode the possibility of writing history at all. One "narrative" is as good as another. Yet, after all, when you get serious, no one really doubts that Rome defeated and destroyed Carthage, that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, that Japan surrendered on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri in 1945 and so on. There are established facts. History does not dissolve into a fog of skepticism. Into all of this now entered David Irving, whom Deborah Lipstadt denounced in her book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." She called Mr. Irving a dangerous manipulator and shoddy historian who manipulated history to downplay the slaughter of the Jews and Adolf Hitler's role in it. Mr. Irving sued for libel, alleging that Ms. Lipstadt had damaged his career and misrepresented him as a historian. He had a much better chance of winning under British libel law than under U.S. libel law. He is undoubtedly a public figure and, under the relevant Supreme Court decision, New York Times vs. Sullivan, a public figure must demonstrate "malice" in order to win a libel suit. In other words, it is almost impossible for a "public figure" to win such a suit. Under British law, the burden was on Ms. Lipstadt to provide proof for her allegation that Mr. Irving was a dangerous Holocaust denier. Mr. Irving undoubtedly thought, correctly, that British law favored his suit. He could plead mistakes in his research, possible misinterpretations and so on. It is good that Mr. Irving lost the suit, for the sake of writing history at all. Judge John Gray ruled that Mr. Irving had no case, that his writing of history has been "perverse and egregious," and that he had "persistently misrepresented and manipulated evidence." He concluded that Mr. Irving is an "active Holocaust denier." Under British law, the individual who initiates a libel suit and loses owes the legal costs to the defendant. Mr. Irving owes Ms. Lipstadt approximately $3 million. There is an element of tragedy here, though not much. So distinguished a historian as Gordon Wood has written that Mr. Irving is an excellent researcher, has uncovered new material about the Nazi era and found new sources. He has shed important new light on the period. And, in my opinion, Mr. Irving is not quite a "Holocaust denier" as he is a "Holocaust minimizer." And here he has been driven into fantasy land. The Nazi campaign to eliminate European Jewry is about as well documented as anything in history. The Nazi bureaucracy kept meticulous records. There is no responsible figure of murdered Jews lower than 4.5 million. The conventional figure is 6 million - probably close to the truth. The bureaucracy could not keep up with the vast numbers consigned to mass graves as the German army swept into the Soviet Union and the death squads followed. Mr. Irving has committed various extravagances, such as that the gas chambers were post-World War II constructions, that no cyanide was found in their bricks, that the victims actually died of typhus, etc. And Mr. Irving holds that whatever happened was not Hitler's fault. In his biography of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, he holds Goebbels responsible for the murder campaign, conceding, at least, that there was a murder campaign. He makes much of the fact that no documentary evidence connects Hitler himself with the campaign against the Jews. This is all fantastic. The campaign against the Jews was part of a Hitler project to make Germany a "Volksgemeinschaft," a nation on the model of an extended family united by blood. When Heinrich Himmler announced the campaign very early in the war to Nazi higher-ups at the famous meeting in Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, no one was in doubt about the program. The architect Albert Speer, in attendance, got away with explaining that he left the meeting often and did not grasp its importance. That Himmler, head of the SS, could have held such a meeting without Hitler's approval is inconceivable. To be sure, the Nazi hierarchy usually communicated in euphemisms. German Jews and, as time went on, other Jews from occupied countries, were "relocated" to "the East." Hitler himself did order that Jews in the East were to be treated as guerrilla enemy fighters - that is to say, they were to be shot. All of this is documented photographically and by copious testimony. And the Holocaust amounted to an extraordinary moral black hole in 20th-century history - not least because it happened in Germany, in the heart of "civilized" Europe, as opposed to somewhere on the Russian steppes or around the Yangtze. So what is going on here? There is a crank element in democratic culture, people who enjoy "special knowledge," theories opposed to ordinary thought and not accessible to the mainstream. For example, there are people who believe that someone other than Shakespeare wrote his plays or that history is a Masonic conspiracy, or that Franklin Roosevelt plotted Pearl Harbor. If you wrote a book to the effect that Lincoln was poisoned by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton rather than shot in Ford's Theater, you would sell copies. The decision of the British court was cleansing and a service to honest history writing. Jeffrey Hart is a nationally syndicated columnist. ==
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