1

That’s the thing i’m suffering now. The charactheristic movement in these situations must be eating a piece of old bread and with the hard digestion of it, we may forget the sickness. You can apply this formula into any part of the life that needs cure. or depeche mode:) deniz k. istanbul!

2

I live in a small market town in Staffordshire,which is a north midlands county in England.A couple of weeks ago our saturday market was disturbed by supporters of the British National Party.The BNP as it prefers to be called is the old National Front which was a neo-Nazi organisation.The threat is still amongst us and Irvings disturbed writing fuels the emotions of the half-wits that want to believe him.

3

Other than a couple of articles and interviews, I don’t claim to know much about David Irving. I understand he has written several authoritative and well-received books on history. Perhaps you are right and he is a flake. What struck me about his general argument was this; 1) Almost 60 years after the end of WW2, people in Europe (including academic researchers) are still heavily fined and thrown into prison for questioning any aspect of the holocaust. There is no other historical event that is barred from academic scrutiny. 2) As the Jewish writer Norman Finkelstein noted, the ‘holocaust industry’ is used as a cash cow for ongoing and apparently endless reparations and assistance to Jews and Israel, as well as a tacit green light to Israel’s own brutal apartheid regime and treatment of the Palestinians. 3) David Irving himself would have been far better off if he simply conformed to the orthodox view on the matter, instead of facing years of harrassment, death threats, and financial ruin. In other words, what was his motive for destroying his own mainstream reputation, knowing in advance it would hurt him?

4

Hi Ian - in response to your comments (brace yourself - I have very strong opinions on the matter!):

I don’t think David Irving’s a "flake" - I do believe he’s an intelligent man, but he also happens to be a flaming anti-Semite and racist (unfortunately, intelligence and bigotry are not mutually exclusive - it would be so much easier if they were). "Flake" is far too mild a word to describe what I think of David Irving.

A "well-received" book is not necessarily a good book, or a "true" book. "Mein Kampf" was pretty well-received as well…

You seem to imply that it’s unreasonable for an event that happened 60 years ago to still be so politically charged today. But we’re not talking ancient history here. 60 years is nothing. Though their numbers are dwindling rapidly, survivors of the Holocaust and perpetrators of the genocide are still with us today. And it’s not as if the anti-defamation laws that exist in some European countries have been around since WWII and have now become irrelevant; in fact, most of the existing laws were introduced fairly recently. Heck, academic inquiry into the Holocaust is actually fairly recent - in the immediate aftermath of WWII, nobody could or would talk about it.

Regarding those laws: it’s simply not true that people are "thrown into prison for questioning any aspect of the Holocaust". The Holocaust is wide open to legitimate academic scrutiny (as witnessed by the mountain of books published every year on the subject). What is not tolerated in several European countries is a blanket denial of the Holocaust, because it is (rightly, I believe) equated with inciting discrimination and hatred. As far as I’m aware, no one has ever denied the Holocaust for reasons that were not associated in some way with anti-Semitism.

"Ongoing and apparently endless reparations"? Which ones would those be, exactly? To whom? From whom? How much? When? No one should labor under the impression that all the guilty parties have paid up and all the victims have been comfortably compensated and any continuing talk of reparations is just fueled by greed. People are still fighting for compensation - or even just some acknowledgment of wrongdoing - that has never been offered freely, and thousands of people have died in the past decades without ever having received any sort of compensation. It is only now - 60 years after the fact, as you’ve pointed out - that German companies like Volkswagen are getting around to admitting that they used Jewish slave labor during the war, and they’re only now offering some sort of compensation - mainly as a public relations gesture, since most of the victims are, conveniently, already dead.

I haven’t read anything by Norman Finkelstein so I can’t comment on anything he has to say. I do want to say, though, that "Israel" is not the same thing as "the Jewish people". Israel is a state pursuing policies that it feels will further its political goals, and Israelis are the citizens of that state; Jews are adherents of Judaism, a religion with followers all around the globe, not all of whom support the policies of the state of Israel. This is an obvious fact, perhaps, but one that bears repeating. It should also be noted that the state of Israel receives assistance from the United States (amongst other countries) not because of some great Jewish conspiracy, some all-powerful Jewish lobby, or some lingering feeling that the Israelis can do whatever they want to the Palestinians because the Germans did such terrible things to the Jews, but rather because of the political benefits of having a powerful, "Western"-friendly ally smack-dab in the middle of the rather more unfriendly Middle East. The Holocaust has nothing to do with this.

And finally: there is no "orthodox" or unorthodox view of the Holocaust, and there’s no "conforming" involved here. This isn’t a matter of dogma or opinion or faith, it’s a matter of looking at the pictures of the piles of corpses at Auschwitz, listening to the stories of the survivors (and perpetrators!!), reading the official documents, walking through the crematoria at Dachau, and facing reality. You either accept the reality of the event, or you follow an agenda of Holocaust denial in order to further the only goal that such a denial can serve: racial and religious discrimination.

But arguing this is like arguing about evolution with a creationist. If someone doesn’t want to believe something, they will convince themself that it’s not true, and no amount of blindingly obvious proof will change their mind. To be honest, I’m not sure David Irving does *truly* believe that the Holocaust didn’t take place. As I said, he’s an intelligent man, and anyone with half a brain should be able to look at the incontrovertible proof of the reality of the Holocaust and say, "Yes, the Holocaust really happened". But what he really believes deep down is irrelevant. He vehemently denies that it took place, and that’s all that ultimately matters. As for the reason he has put up with so much opprobrium - well, as I said, he’s a flaming anti-Semite. For whatever reason, his contempt for the Jews is so great that he is willing to accept the scorn of legitimate scholars and the general public just as long as he can spout his racist views.

And truth be told, he hasn’t really been hurt - if anything, his radical opinions have brought him fame. He still publishes books, he still does the lecture circuit, he still takes part in debates at respected universities, and he still gets to be on television, both as an apparently respected WWII historian in documentaries on the Discovery channel (I’ve seen him there myself) and as a representative of the deeply anti-Semitic historical revisionism movement. That’s not too shabby for someone who can blithely refer to Auschwitz as "Disneyland".

Phew. Rant over.