What you won't find mentioned in the mainstream press coverage of David Irving's release is that this dark and univiting figure has tussled with actual Holocaust deniers. I say "actual" because, if you absorb some of the argot of the paranoid subfield of what I suppose should be called Shoah epistemology, you find that people of Irving's type fall into two categories: "Deniers" and "revisionists." Deniers believe that Hitler never endeavored to create a Judenrein (Jew-free) Europe, let alone came quite close to actually achieving it. Revisionists counter that, well, the Nazis have been given a raw deal this past half century but did indeed engage in some summary executions of Jews. No gas chambers were used, though, and most of the deaths were caused by camp epidemics, condemning the Third Reich to, at worst, the crime of malignant neglect (the initial crime of corralling an entire ethnic population into fenced-off areas is typically elided in these discussions).
Irving is a revisionist. He's a liar and a slippery customer on a number of questions, mostly pertaining to his own rhetoric about his continuing legal troubles (which began with Deborah Lipstadt). But he has provided evidence against his own pro-Nazi "side." For instance, his scholarship has revealed that Joseph Goebbels suborned the homegrown Fascist movement in Great Britain led by Oswald Mosley, putting paid to a small but significant lie propagated for decades by the British right that Mosley's cheques were not signed in Berlin. Irving also comes right out and grants that the SS killed thousands of Eastern European Jews in an "experimental" gas chamber in the Polish town of Chelmo, demonstrating that the intention of genocide was never far from the Fuhrer's mind. (In a contradictory vein, Irving's argued that Hitler personally never knew about Kristallnacht.)
However, in perhaps the most interesting twist of this weird tale, Irving's visibly tusseled with full-blown Holocaust deniers like the Frenchman Robert Faurisson, lately of the Ahmadinejad-sponsored meeting of the minds in Tehran. That Iranian Jew-haters have taken up Irving's free speech martyrdom is only slightly deserving, then, of being termed ironic.
For what it's worth, I think it's a scandal that Irving's books have been unavailable in this country for mass purchase except through recondite and inconvenient channels. You can easily walk into any Barnes & Noble and pull Mein Kampf off the shelf. And Manhattan boasts a handful of "radical" bookshops that sell everything from the farcically doctored Soviet encyclopedias (from whose successive editions more and more Old Bolsheviks were wiped clean from history) to Stalin's writings on nationality. There's more legitimacy in what Irving has printed on the German military campaigns of World War II than in much of the more morally comforting scholarship on the same subject.
It's revealing just how unsure our culture is of its own rush to censorship. The editor of St. Martin's Press, which was set to distribute Irving's 1996 biography of Goebbels, once described to Christopher Hitchens the firm's zero-hour cancellation of the project as "Profiles in Prudence." (Irving eventually self-published the book, a decision that has had him strapped for cash and probably in no better shape for that unenviable defense counsel's bill from Austria.)
Locking people up for nasty opinions has a way of becoming a form of self-punishment. Irving's release coincides with a news cycle in which David Duke and a gaggle of pea-brained anti-Semites have been given too much ink on their second thoughts about not-so-recent tragic events. Perfect. They'll think their cause has had an effect on international capitulation to Jewish sensitivity.
What kind of "message" would have been sent had Irving been allowed to continue his eccentric and marginal work unmolested?
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