David Irving plans to end career with Himmler biography

[Mark Alinsky]

This will undoubtedly be the most controversial and exhaustive work Mr. Irving has ever produced.

From DI's website:

"With my left hand, so to speak, I am cranking up the research for the Heinrich Himmler biography with which I intend to conclude my career. It is noteworthy how much data there is on him in the British archives: the CSDIC interrogation series, the diplomatic reports, and of course the Bletchley Park intercepts of millions of SS and German Police messages. But much of his personal material is scattered in private hands across the United States, in the possession of the relatives of GIs who looted his various homes in Bavaria."

[Karl]

Good grief and good riddance!

[heinz kling]

Padfield's books are major ripoffs.

[Lobscouse]

Poor Karl, sounds like you are not feeling too good.

Get better soon.

[Karl]

I am doing quite well. Thank you!

(Unlike poor Irving who seems to have added yet another book to give away! )

[Scott Smith]

I am doing quite well. Thank you!

(Unlike poor Irving who seems to have added yet another book to give away! )

What's wrong with any of Irving's books? Yes, he will probably end up giving it away as well so that his legal creditors will not make a dime off of it. That is both bad and good. It is good in the sense that real history should not be determined by being paid for by established interests, and Irving can say what he wants, not just what his publishers and their litigants say that he has to. It is bad since he won't be able to profit from his work. Say what you will about his views, but bucking the system takes a certain amount of intellectual courage.

[Psycho Mike]

wish I knew how to delete an error message. So I write this instead

[Psycho Mike]

This book is already on the internet, I think in adobe format. You can find it with a search on google.
I think if I sue someone and win,I fully expect to get the money and I don't care if it's OJ or Irving. Losing a lawsuit is not "bucking the system".

You know, he could have published in the middle east, or with a false name (as the communists writers did in Hollywood in the 1950's and sixties, as seen in The Front). But the far right isn't made up of Mensa members........

[Scott Smith]

This book is already on the internet, I think in adobe format. You can find it with a search on google.
I think if I sue someone and win,I fully expect to get the money and I don't care if it's OJ or Irving. Losing a lawsuit is not "bucking the system".

You know, he could have published in the middle east, or with a false name (as the communists writers did in Hollywood in the 1950's and sixties, as seen in The Front). But the far right isn't made up of Mensa members........

Well, anonymous historians don't carry much credibility, and aside from his website Irving is not a pamphleteer. Besides, if he had really wanted to make money it would be writing politically-correct action-novels instead of History. The whole lawsuit, which was not a particularly astute move, resulted from attempts by mainstream publishers to blacklist Irving because of what certain shills have said about him while keeping mum when he challenged them to open debate. I wouldn't give them a dime to pay for their legal expenses either. Irving acted as his own attorney.

[Roberto]

Besides, if he had really wanted to make money it would be writing politically-correct action-novels instead of History.

What is it that Smith calls "politically-correct action-novels"?

Works of historiography that don't fit into his ideologicial bubble, perhaps?

And what is it that he calls "History"?

The distortions of the historical record in support of an ideological agenda that Irving ruined his reputation as a historian with, perhaps?

It's not necessary to be "politically correct", whatever that means, in order to be a respected historian.

All it takes is sticking to the facts and discovering evidence and producing arguments that stand up to critical peer review.

Something that one as talented as Irving could easily accomplish - if his obsessive bias didn't keep inducing him into making assertions that are at odds with the evidence.

The whole lawsuit, which was not a particularly astute move, resulted from attempts by mainstream publishers to blacklist Irving because of what certain shills have said about him while keeping mum when he challenged them to open debate.

Says Smith.

Is that only his personal opinion, is he parroting some "Revisionist" comic book, or can he show us any evidence from a reliable source that supports his contentions?

Irving acted as his own attorney.

So what?

First of all, that was his own choice.

Second, he wasn't at a disadvantage thereby because under English procedural law the judge must make allowance for a party's lack of familiarity with legal rules and principles if that party is not represented by a lawyer.

And third, the burden of proof was on the defendants, and they managed to prove the overwhelming majority of their contentions to the satisfaction of the court.

They repeated that feat before the Court of Appeal, where Irving had chosen to let himself be represented by an attorney.

Judge Sedley refused Irving's request for appeal with the following words:

REASONS

I much regret the length of time that it has taken me to come to this decision, not least in view of the pressure that I put on the parties to submit their representations expeditiously. Reaching a conclusion on the application has been the work of days, not of hours.

I am prepared to enlarge time on the basis of Mr. Adams' affidavit of 16 May 2000 and to permit amendment of the notice of appeal as asked.

What follow are my essential reasons for refusing permission to appeal. They do not cover every element advanced and contested although I have read and re-read both the submissions and the judgment. They address what I consider to be the key issues. I bear in mind, as Gray J very clearly did, that when a professional historian claims, correctly, that he has been defamed as a falsifier and a bigot, a defence of justification places a heavy burden on the defendant who advances it. There is much about which two people can legitimately differ, and differ angrily, without either of them meriting such a description. But by bringing this action on the pleaded meanings the applicant offered a challenge, and in Gray J's judgment the defendants met it.

I accept that this court is probably as well placed as Gray J to evaluate the documents and the expert evidence, What it cannot do, and is not asked to do, is to ignore or modify the judge's appraisal of the applicant himself. This is not, as the grounds suggest, peripheral. As Gray J in Chapter XIII shows with clarity, the applicant's disposition is the cement between the bricks. What might in another historian have been casual misreadings of evidence emerge in the applicant's case as sedulous misinterpretations all going in the direction of his racial and ideological leanings. Hence the verdict for the defendants. "Holocaust denial" may be a comprehensible phrase, but it has a particular register about which the judge was entitled to hear expert evidence. With or without such evidence the meaning he assigned to the phrase at J 8.3-4 was plainly right. Holocaust denial means not necessarily a blank refusal to acknowledge a Nazi policy of mass murder of Jews and other minorities but a systematic endeavour, by marginalising and excusing what happened, to accuse those who insist upon it of being Zionist propagandists. This is not the law's concern so long as it stops short of incitement to racial hatred: in the UK there is no law against Holocaust denial, and it is a fundamental liberty not only to be contentious but to be wrong. I bear in mind too that anti-Zionism and anti-semitism are not necessarily the same thing.

Here, however, the applicant has invoked the law by suing hisantagonists. In justifying their libel, the defendants have focused upon two particular forms of Holocaust denial in his work: what I will call the aberration theory, predicated on Hitler's ignorance of and/or opposition to mass extermination of Jews, and the exaggeration theory, predicated on deliberate inflation of the numbers killed at Auschwitz. The first, they say, seeks to excuse what happened; the second to marginalise it.

The Schlegelberger memorandum is the applicant's preferred evidence for the aberration theory. The memorandum by itself (see J 5.151-169) might have stood simply as an example of a controversial document about which honest historians could differ - indeed the judge said so (J 13.36). But the applicant's adherence to it as a "diamond document" came in the context of a damning and justifiable finding (J 13.26-31) that he had repeatedly misrepresented documentary evidence in order to absolve Hitler of anti-semitism; and it is against the backdrop of this ubiquitous handling of Third Reich material that the applicant's use of the document emerges as part of a predetermined misreading of evidence which could not, as the judge found, be objectively justified.

The Auschwitz materials are central to the exaggeration theory. Here too the historical record is inevitably incomplete and in places unreliable; but here too the applicant has been betrayed by his own method, notably his reliance on the discredited Leuchter report. The judgment (J 8.17) sets out the solidity of the applicant's denial of mass homicide at Auschwitz, and sets in that context his recent focus on the "holes in the roof" issue (J 13.81-3). I accept readily that the latter argument may be none the worse for coming late in the day; but the evidence that there were no holes for the admission of cyanide pellets is at best inconclusive against the potent evidence that people were gassed there in tens of thousands. The controversy about methods and numbers may legitimately remain; but what the applicant has done is demonstrate once again his willingness to sacrifice objectivity in favour of anything which will support his chosen form of Holocaust denial.

Van Pelt's evidence enters into this aspect of the judgment. Van Pelt was heard as a cultural historian with a special knowledge of Auschwitz and its architecture (J 4.17(ii). G 30). What he said (J 7.123-4) about the use of Zyklon-B was in part arithmetic and in part comment: probably it was not necessary to have an expert of any kind to put this forward, but its acceptance by Gray J was a matter of logic and did not depend on any expertise professed by Van Pelt.

In these circumstances the applicability of s.5 of the Defamation Act I 952 was in essence a jury question: were the false allegations that the applicant had agreed to share a platform with terrorists, had a self-portrait of Hitler above his desk and had misappropriated archive material sufficient to damage the reputation which was now his? The negative answer given by Gray J was entirely open to him, and that, I apprehend, is enough. If, however, this court were to take the decision for itself, I see no realistic prospect of its arriving at a different answer. The claimant had played for high stakes on the central issue of his entitlement to be regarded as a genuine historian and had lost on grounds so damaging that they left no real room for discrete damage by the unfounded allegations.

The experts' fees may be thought high - depending on how much work they did - but the suggestion that they were paid to testify as they did is without visible foundation.

If a newspaper comments impermissibly on a current trial the Attorney General has power to bring contempt proceedings against it. But where the trial is by judge alone it takes cogent evidence to establish a sufficient risk that he has been influenced -- especially when the suggestion is that he has been driven by a fear of adverse press comment. I know of nothing in the present case which comes near this threshold.

The stay on enforcement of the costs order will remain in place until the expiry of the time for renewal of this application. If within that time it is renewed, any application for further prolongation of the stay is to be made on notice.

Sedley L J
18 xii 2000

Source of quote:

http://www.holocaust-history.org/irving ... edley.html

My suggestion to good old Dave would be that he avoid the topics regarding which he can't be objective and finish his career with a good book on, say, the War of the Triple Alliance.

[Scott Smith]

My suggestion to good old Dave would be that he avoid the topics regarding which he can't be objective and finish his career with a good book on, say, the War of the Triple Alliance.

What, and neglect the "Jewish Question"?


Seriously though, what is there about Goebbels that was not "objective"? (keeping in mind that all historians are more or less subjective).

[Roberto]

My suggestion to good old Dave would be that he avoid the topics regarding which he can't be objective and finish his career with a good book on, say, the War of the Triple Alliance.

What, and neglect the "Jewish Question"?

Which is also Smith's first and foremost concern, right?

Seriously though, what is there about Goebbels that was not "objective"? (keeping in mind that all historians are more or less subjective).

To find that out, I may have to read the screed, because it's unlikely that Irving will stage a re-run of his lawsuit against Lipstadt where the book would be taken apart like some of its predecessors.

Maybe I'll do that one day, though I would be more interested in the collection of Goebbels' diary entries that Irving, IIRC, has also put together.

[Scott Smith]

My suggestion to good old Dave would be that he avoid the topics regarding which he can't be objective and finish his career with a good book on, say, the War of the Triple Alliance.

What, and neglect the "Jewish Question"?

Which is also Smith's first and foremost concern, right?

Not really, except that I believe in the widest-possible separation of Church and State and that the USA should not make entangling alliances with theocracies or apartheid regimes.

[Ovidius]

Not really, except that I believe in the widest-possible separation of Church and State and that the USA should not make entangling alliances with theocracies or apartheid regimes.

Not all Jews are of Judaic religion, and not religion is what defines them.

~Ovidius

[witness]

Not all Jews are of Judaic religion, and not religion is what defines them.

~Ovidius

What then defines them ? Corrupt genes ?

Die Religion ist einerlei. In der Rasse liegt die Scweinerei.

?
Do I get you right ?