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Irving 'should not be deemed a historian'
http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/irving/article/0,2763,135468,00.html
The David Irving libel trial: special report

Friday February 11, 2000

David Irving did not deserve to be called a historian, a leading academic
told the high court yesterday.

Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge University, said
that he was not prepared for the "sheer depth of duplicity" which he
encountered in Mr Irving's treatment of historical sources relating to the
Holocaust.

Mr Irving, the 62-year-old author of Hitler's War, who is suing for libel
over claims that he is a "Holocaust denier", said that Professor Evans's
"sweeping and rather brutal" dismissal of his career stemmed from personal
animosity.

"I think you dislike what I write and stand for and what you perceive my
views to be," he told Prof Evans, who has been called as an expert for the
defence by author Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books.

Prof Evans, who has produced a 740-page report on Mr Irving's historical
method, said he had no personal feelings towards him and had tried to be as
objective as possible.

He said he previously had little knowledge of Mr Irving's work - although he
knew of his reputation as someone who was in many areas a sound historian -
and was "shocked" at what he found.

He said that the proceedings had reinforced his view in the report that Mr
Irving "has fallen so far short of the stan dards of scholarship customary
among historians that he doesn't deserve to be called a historian at all".

Mr Irving said that he was "scrupulously fair" in everything he did in
public life - "the total opposite of being unscrupulous and manipulative and
deceptive as you say in your report".

Prof Evans said he agreed that Mr Irving had a very wide knowledge of the
source material for the third reich and had discovered many new documents.

"The problem for me is what you do with them when you interpret them and
write them up."

Prof Evans said that Mr Irving's published writings and speeches contained
numerous statements which he regarded as "anti-Semitic" - to the extent that
he blamed the Jews for the Holocaust.

He dismissed the theory that there was a "worldwide Jewish conspiracy" to
suppress Mr Irving's works - or undermine Germany in the 1930s - as "a
fantastic belief which has no grounds in fact".

Prof Evans said that he had examined a sufficient selection of Mr Irving's
output to justify his view that he did not use acceptable methods of
historical research.

In his report, he said that Mr Irving had relied in the past, and continued
to do so, on the fact that readers, listeners and reviewers lacked "either
the time or the expertise" to probe deeply enough in the sources he used to
discover the "distortions and manipulations".

He accepted that people should be allowed to challenge the "general
consensus" of history but asserted that there was a duty to conform to
academic standards in the evaluation of evidence.

Mr Irving, who is representing himself, is claiming damages over the 1994
Book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which
he says has generated waves of hatred against him.

The defendants have accused him of being a liar and a falsifier of history.

The hearing continues.


INDEPENDENT

http://www.independent.co.uk/

News Irving's study of Holocaust `not factual'
Ian Burrell Home Affairs Correspondent 02/11/2000
(Copyright 2000 Newspaper Publishing PLC)

A CAMBRIDGE university professor told the High Court yesterday that the
right-wing author David Irving "doesn't deserve to be called a historian at
all".

Richard Evans, a professor of modern history, said that he was not prepared
for the "sheer depth of duplicity" which he encountered in Mr Irving's
treatment of historical sources relating to the Holocaust.

Mr Irving, the 62-year-old author of Hitler's War who is suing for libel
over claims that he is a "Holocaust denier", said that Professor Evans's
"sweeping and rather brutal" dismissal of his career stemmed from personal
animosity. "I think you dislike what I write and stand for and what you
perceive my views to be," he told Professor Evans, who has been called as an
expert witness for the defence by the author Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin
Books.

Professor Evans, who has produced a 740-page report on Mr Irving's
historical method, said he had no personal feelings towards him and had
tried to be as objective as possible. He said he previously had little
knowledge of Mr Irving's work - although he knew of his reputation as
someone who was in many areas a sound historian - and was "shocked" at what
he found.

The proceedings, Professor Evans said, had reinforced his view given in the
report that Mr Irving "has fallen so far short of the standards of
scholarship customary among historians that he doesn't deserve to be called
a historian at all".

Professor Evans agreed that Mr Irving had a very wide knowledge of the
source material for the Third Reich and had discovered many new documents,
but said his problem was "what you do with them when you interpret them and
write them up". He added that Mr Irving's published writings and speeches
contained numerous statements which he regarded as "anti-Semitic" - to the
extent that he blamed the Jews for the Holocaust.

Professor Evans dismissed the theory that there was a "worldwide Jewish
conspiracy" to suppress Mr Irving's works as "a fantastic belief which has
no grounds in fact".

Mr Irving said that he was "scrupulously fair" in everything he did in
public life - "the total opposite of being unscrupulous and manipulative and
deceptive as you say in your report".

Mr Irving, who is representing himself, is claiming damages over Ms Lipstadt
's 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and
Memory, which he says has generated "waves of hatred" against him.

The hearing was adjourned until Monday. Caption: David Irving: Describes
himself as extremely fair p

==

EVENING STANDARD, UK
http://www.thisislondon.com/
AUSCHWITZ COMES TO COURT NO 73 02/11/2000
Copyright (C) 2000 Evening Standard; Source: World Reporter (TM)

Hitler, the Holocaust and the minutiae of mass murder are being re-examined
daily in a libel action brought by controversial historian David Irving. CAL
McCRYSTAL reports

In the visitors' book at Auschwitz, the Jewish Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal
has written: 'Information ist Verteidigung' - 'Information is defence'.
According to his biographer Hella Pick, what he meant was that 'historical
truth becomes an essential deterrent to the practice of evil'.

Wiesenthal's words might aptly be chalked on the door of Court No 73 in the
Royal Courts of Justice, where, for the past four weeks, Auschwitz and other
Holocaust horrors have been revisited daily and where arguments about their
malevolent originators and expositions as to their motives fume and flare
discordantly.

Yet, for many of us squeezed into the court, there are times when the sheer
volume of information being exchanged seems almost a barrier to historical
truth, as the Hitler historian David Irving pursues his libel action against
American academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. Having claimed that
Irving is 'a liar and falsifier of history', they deny libel and plead
justification.

To settle the argument - without the help of jurors, it being thought the
intricacies would daunt them - Mr Justice Gray is obliged to graze upon the
communal pastures of recorded history and scraps of paper that are capable
of misleading as well as informing. He will look out for ideological
partisanship as much as for scientific errancy, and be reminded from time to
time that the continued influence of the past upon the present is inexorably
manifested in all our destinies. Irving, asserts Richard Rampton QC, for the
defendants, has made statements deliberately 'designed to feed the virulent
anti-Semitism still alive and kicking throughout the world'.

The judge may give thought to Heinrich von Treitschke's advice: 'The
historian must candidly explain the moral significance of the confused facts
with which he is dealing, and this is why the compelling force of a
historical work subsists ever in the strong personality of the narrator.'
And he will have to decide whether David Irving, 62, has been stigmatised as
a mere contrarian, or may be regarded as a panegyrist of Adolf Hitler.

So stupefying is the information overload that nerves occasionally fray, and
the usually unflappable judge vents his distress. 'Really, this is most
irritating,' he exclaims on failing to locate a document concerning an order
to liquidate Jews. And later: 'I am still trying to find this ...' Later
still: 'I have tracked down the document, and there appear to be two
versions in German. It is not for me to plough through these with my
inadequate German. What I'm looking for is an English translation, which I
think is not an unreasonable request for a document that is quite important.'

Rampton gazes pinkly around him and jiggles his knee. David Irving,
conducting his own case, drops his spectacles on the floor. The courtroom
lapses into a three-minute reverie.

'Well,' says the judge, breaking the silence and startling his
interlocutors. 'Am I going to be supplied with it or not?'

Irving: 'My lord, I will prepare a translation of that document overnight.'

Stacked in teak bookshelves around the walls are nearly 400 files of
information. Teak tables groan beneath the weight of further boxes, books
and laptops. A large number of Jews are in the public gallery - a veritable
yarmulka archipelago in a teak sea - listening intently to every word, many
of them Holocaust information repositories in their own right.

This trial is stuffed with the minutiae of mass murder: Zyklon B pellets,
racism, the operations of the Einsatzgruppe, the Nazi military mission in
the Ukraine and Crimea, and the geography of a war which for many of us
still seems recent, even though time has already consigned it to the last
century. Irving insists he never has claimed that the Holocaust did not
occur, but he questions the number of Jewish dead (usually estimated at six
million) and the manner of their destruction. He has suggested that British
intelligence spread the 'propaganda story' about Germans systematically
using gas chambers to kill millions of Jews and other 'undesirables'. And he
claims to be a victim of a 'global conspiracy', led by Jews, of which
Professor Lipstadt is, he says, a major part.

It is a case that should interest sociologists as much as it does
historians. One finds traces of the mind-set of Middle England as well as
Mittel Europe where, to this day, xenophobia determines caste and fuels
politics. During the giving of evidence and in cross-examination, I pick up
little sighs and gasps from the gallery and ominous pleasantries from the
well of the court as adversaries rake over the smouldering past for what
they call the 'smoking gun' - an order signed by Adolf Hitler himself for
the liquidation of the Jews. Since this has failed to turn up - and seems
unlikely to do so - the dispute revolves around 'circumstantial evidence',
'inference', 'context', 'atmosphere', Hitler's speeches, Himmler's diary,
Heydrich's communications, Eichmann's testimony, Britain's intercepts, and
so on.

Grotesqueries are matched by bizarreries. The words 'deny' and 'denier' are
uttered often. Irving says he intends to show that 'far from being a
Holocaust denier', he had repeatedly drawn attention to major aspects of the
Holocaust. Early in the proceedings, a line from Goethe spins into mind:

Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint - 'I am the spirit that ever denies' -
as Mephistopheles declares when Faust demands his name.

'The word 'denier' is particularly evil,' Irving says, 'because no person in
full command of his mental faculties, and with even the slightest
understanding of what happened in World War Two, can deny that the tragedy
actually happened, however much we dissident historians may wish to quibble
about the means, the scale, the dates and other minutiae ... It is a poison
to which there is virtually no antidote, less lethal than a hypodermic with
nerve gas jabbed in the neck, but deadly all the same; for the chosen
victim, it is like being called a wife-beater or a paedophile ... It is a
verbal Yellow Star.'

One morning Irving draws the judge's attention to a report that the German
government has asked for his extradition over a statement years ago that the
Auschwitz gas chambers were a fake. 'I mention this in case this end of the
bench should suddenly be empty.' Judicial eyebrows lift almost imperceptibly
as the historian says he has written to Jack Straw, warning him that if the
Home Office tried to serve a warrant on him he would prosecute the Home
Office for assault.

At one point, Irving calls an American witness, Kevin MacDonald, to give
evidence on his behalf. MacDonald, professor of psychology at California
State University and an author of books on Judaism and anti-Semitism, is
asked by Irving: 'Do you consider me to be an anti-Semite?'

MacDonald: 'I do not consider you to be an anti-Semite. I have had quite a
few discussions with you and you almost never mentioned Jews, never in the
general negative way.'

ext day, however, Rampton questions Irving on his 'utterances both in public
and private on the subject of Jews, blacks, etcetera', and reads out a ditty
which he says Irving sang to his nine-month-old daughter while walking past
mixed-race children in 1994. The QC reads out the lines, extracted from the
historian's diary:

'I am a baby Aryan,

ot Jewish or sectarian.

I have no plans to marry

an Ape or Rastafarian.'

Irving says he doesn't think it anti-Semitic or racist.

Rampton: 'The poor little child is being taught a racist ditty by her
perverted racist father?'

Irving: 'I am not a racist.'

Disclosure of the 'baby Aryan' ditty has an unexpected consequence. Four
days later, an emotional Irving complains to Mr Justice Gray that sections
of the media have declared open season on him. 'The principal of the school
attended by my little girl - the ballet school ...' He pauses, lowers his
head, does not finish the sentence. He refers to 'waves of hostility
affecting this court'.

The judge regards him sympathetically. 'As long as you can carry on ... The
newspapers don't have the last word.'

o one is likely to have the last word. As another American academic,
Professor Christopher Browning, observes under Irving's questioning: 'There
is no last chapter.'

Irving has a dry sense of humour, which sometimes serves him well and
sometimes not. In one exchange over the name of a German adjutant on a
document, Browning says: 'I am not as familiar as you are with the initials
of adjutants. I defer to you on the initials ...'

Irving throws an amused glance at the defence table. 'Professor, I don't
think Mr Rampton would wish you to defer to me on anything.' A ripple of
laughter runs through the gallery. But Irving's wit assumes a blunter edge
in a 1992 speech of which Rampton reminds him. In this, Irving declared:
'For the time being, for a transitional period, I'd be prepared to accept
that the BBC should have a dinner-jacketed gentleman reading the important
news to us, followed by a lady reading all the less important news, followed
by Trevor McDonald giving us all the latest news about the muggings and the
drug busts ... '

It was, Irving explains, the kind of speech a stand-up comic might give at
the end of Brighton pier. In court, however, it has lost its hilarity.

Similarly, one feels a chill in court as Rampton recalls a Canadian audience
in Calgary laughing when Irving told them in 1991 that 'more people died on
the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a
gas chamber in Auschwitz', and that he had referred to 'Auschwitz survivors,
survivors of the Holocaust and other liars' as 'A-S-S-H-O-L-S'. To this the
supplicant historian replies: 'I have the utmost sympathy for people who
genuinely suffered the torments and horrors of Auschwitz and the other camps
- But spurious survivors who tried to cash in and say they too were there -
I have the greatest contempt for these people trying to climb on the
Holocaust bandwagon.'

Irving clearly is endowed with extraordinary critical insight. His
contentious book, Hitler's War, shows a literary style that is often vivid,
attractive and lucid. But even those who decline to demonise him say he
lacks the power of an elementally great and continually growing
individuality. In interviews he has described himself as 'stubborn'. He
seems able to live with much of the obloquy surrounding him as a dissentient
chronicler.

In this, curiously enough, his experience resembles that of Simon Wiesenthal
who, according to his biographer, was to his detractors 'an egomaniac who
has lost sight of honesty and straightforward action', and whose writings
had been accepted only with great reluctance by academics as 'major
contributions to Holocaust literature'.

However, Wiesenthal's reputation was more than buoyed up by admirers, among
them an American ambassador to Austria who defined the Nazi-hunter as 'raw
goodness crushing raw evil'. From the tone of some of the High Court
exchanges, it is clear that the defence sees itself as embarked on defining
Irving as quite the reverse.

===

BBC NEWS 02.10.00

Irving 'unworthy of being called historian'

David Irving: Work regarded as 'anti-semitic'
http://news2.thls.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid%5F638000/638285.stm

Author David Irving is not worthy of the title "historian", a leading
academic has told the High Court.

Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge University, told the
libel trial brought by the writer that he was not prepared for the "sheer
depth of duplicity" he encountered in Mr Irving's analysis of
Holocaust-related historical sources.

Mr Irving, 62, the author of Hitler's War and Goebbels: Mastermind of the
Third Reich, is seeking damages against academic Deborah Lipstadt and
Penguin Books, over a claim that he is a "Holocaust denier".

Professor Evans made his comments after being called as an expert for the
defence.

The academic has produced a 740-page report on Mr Irving's historical
method, which he insisted was objective as he had no personal feelings
towards the author.

He said he had been "shocked" at what he found, adding that Mr Irving "has
fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary among
historians that he doesn't deserve to be called a historian at all".

'Brutal' assessment

But his comments were challenged by Mr Irving, who said that Professor
Evans' "sweeping and rather brutal" assessment of his career stemmed from
personal animosity.

"I think you dislike what I write and stand for and what you perceive my
views to be," he said.

Mr Irving said that he was "scrupulously fair " in everything he did in
public life - "the total opposite of being unscrupulous and manipulative and
deceptive as you say in your report".

Professor Evans said that he acknowledged Mr Irving's wide knowledge of
source material relating to the Third Reich, but questioned his interpretation.

He said the author's published writings and speeches contained numerous
statements which he regarded as "anti-Semitic" to the extent of blaming the
Jews for the Holocaust.

His report also concluded that Mr Irving relied on the fact his audience
lacked "either the time or the expertise" to check his sources for the
"distortions and manipulations" he allegedly perpetuated.

Professor Evans said he accepted that people were entitled to challenge the
"general consensus" of history, but asserted that there was a duty to
conform to academic standards when evaluating evidence.

Mr Irving, who is representing himself, refutes the defendants' claims that
he was a liar and that he falsified history.

The hearing, expected to last several months, was adjourned until Monday.

==

SKEPTIC MAGAZINE  02.11.00

http://www.skeptic.com/

Giving the Devil His Due

The Holocaust Denial Trial Tests the Limits of Free Speech

By Michael Shermer

This week (17 January 2000) begins what could be one of the most important
trials ever in the ongoing debate about the limits of free speech. British
author David Irving is suing American author Deborah Lipstadt for libel.
Specifically, Irving is suing Lipstadt for comments about him and his work
in a book she wrote on Holocaust denial. As an Englishman Irving is taking
advantage of British libel law that puts the burden on authors to prove that
their statements are not libelous. The stakes are made even higher because
in England loser pays, including all court and legal costs for both parties.

Irving claims, among other things, that Lipstadt has damaged his reputation
and thus attenuated his opportunities as an independent scholar to obtain
book contracts and other income-generating activities such as lectures.
Irving told me and others at a conference sponsored by the Institute for
Historical Review--a group who calls themselves "Holocaust
revisionists"--that Lipstadt is part of a worldwide conspiracy of censorship
to silence him. The conspiracy is being orchestrated, Irving says, by "the
traditional enemy"--code phrase for "the Jews."

Irving's claims that only one million Jews died in the war, that gas
chambers and crematoria were not used for mass extermination, and that the
Nazis never intended to exterminate European Jewry, are easily refuted.
Indeed, I do so in my forthcoming book Denying History (co-authored with
Alex Grobman), in which we address all of their challenges as well as
demonstrate that these "revisionists" are really "deniers," because they
deny these three key components that are generally accepted as defining the
Holocaust. But the real controversy in this trial, for my money, is whether
Irving and his ilk should be allowed to proffer their views without restraint.

In America, the First Amendment protects the right of all citizens to
question the existence of anything they like, including the theory of
evolution, the death of Elvis, and even the Apollo moon landing. No matter
how much one may dislike someone else's opinion--even if it is something as
shocking as denying that the Holocaust happened--it is protected by the
First Amendment. In fact, the First Amendment was written to protect the
speech of the very people we dislike the most.

In most countries of the world, however, this is not the case. In Canada
there are "anti-hate" statutes and laws against spreading "false news" that
have been applied to Holocaust deniers. In Austria it is a crime if a person
"denies, grossly trivializes, approves or seeks to justify the national
socialist genocide or other national socialist crimes against humanity." In
France it is illegal to challenge the existence of the "crimes against
humanity" as they were defined by the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

In Germany, where the legal precedence began, the Auschwitzluge, or
"Auschwitz-Lie" Law, makes it a crime to "defame the memory of the dead."
This was the result of a judgment by the Federal German Supreme Court on
September 18, 1979, when a student whose Jewish grandfather was killed in
Auschwitz sued for an injunction against an individual who had posted signs
on the fence of his house proclaiming that the Holocaust was a "Zionist
swindle." The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff: "In calling the
racist murders by the Nazis an invention, the statements complained of deny
the Jews the inhuman fate which they have suffered on account of their
origin. This means an attack on the personality of the people who have been
singled out by the anti-Jewish persecutions in the Third Reich. Whoever
tried to deny the truth of past events, denies to every Jew the respect to
which he is entitled."

Switzerland, Belgium, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, and Australia have
similar laws and statutes on the books. These laws are all ambiguous enough
to allow courts to interpret various Holocaust deniers' activities as
illegal. Irving, for example, has been banned from numerous countries around
the world. And while he cannot be legally prohibited from speaking in
America, he can be so loudly shouted down that he is, essentially, banned.
On Friday, February 3, 1995, for example, Irving was invited by the Berkeley
Coalition for Free Speech to lecture at the University of California. The
university allowed it but the students did not. More than 300 protesters
surrounded Latimer Hall to prevent Irving, and 113 ticket holders, to enter
the campus building. The police were unable to control the crowd, fistfights
broke out, and Irving was forced to leave before he could speak.

There are three reasons why this reaction was practically and morally
problematic:

1. The Holocaust deniers have used this event as a rallying point for their
claim that the establishment is censoring the truth. The last thing they
want is to be ignored or debunked.

2. Lies and falsehoods are most effectively exposed when illuminated by the
light of truth. Ignore or debunk David Irving, but don't censor him.

3. Let us pretend for a moment that the majority of people deny the
Holocaust and that they are in positions of power. If a mechanism or
precedence for censorship exists, then the believer in the Holocaust may now
be censored. Would we tolerate this? Of course not. The human mind, no
matter what ideas it may generate, must never be quashed. Sir Thomas More
said it best in his exchange with William Roper in Robert Bolt's play A Man
for All Seasons:

Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law.

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after
the Devil?

Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that.

More: Oh? And when the law was down--and the Devil turned round on
you--where would you hide? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my
own safety's sake.

###







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