This is the conclusion of the Guttenplan interview. I am repeating the intro information I posted yesterday.
On Tuesday, February 8, between 7:05 and 7:25 host Mary Lou Finlay of the CBC Radio program As It Happens <aih@toronto.cbc.ca> interviewed journalist D. D. Guttenplan <letters@theatlantic.com> about the British historian David Irving's libel suit against the American professor, Deborah Lipstadt.
The transcipt follows; the interviewing host is AIH, the interviewee DDG.
AIH: Tell us a little bit about Deborah Lipstadt, the defendant in this trial.
DDG: She's an American historian, born in New York. Her first book was called Beyond Belief, and it was an account of the press accounts of the Holocaust as it was going on. In other words, why was so little reported and who reported and what was said and why was it not believed. She's now the Dora Professor of Jewish Studies (I think it is) at Emory University. She has made a speciality of "Holocaust denial," as she calls it, and wrote a book about it in the mid-90s.
AIH: But lots of people have attacked, over the years, David Irving for his views. The question of whether he's a Holocaust denier is, as we've been talking about, in one sense, is just indisputable. He wouldn't quibble with it himself although... He quibbles with the term, doesn't he?
DDG: The whole trial is about "quibbling" about it.
AIH: Yeah, yeah. But he's almost made a career out of defending people who were called Holocaust deniers and what not.
DDG: I think that's reasonable.
AIH: So. Why has he picked on her? And why?... Her book came out in 1994?
DDG: Yes.
AIH: Why her, and why now?
DDG: That's a very good question. You have to go back to 1996, which is two years after her book came out, when there was an uproar in the United States because David Irving was under contract to St. Martin's Press in New York to publish a book called Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. And, shortly, before the book was about to be published, the publishers came under a large pressure campaign, basically, saying, "What you doing publishing this guy?" And they dropped the book. And as a result of that campaign, and their dropping the book, and Irving's response to the campaign, he has essentially become a pariah to respectable publishers. So he says... In a sense, this is true, that he had no choice but to try and vindicate himself. The problem is that his means of vindicating himself is basically to continue to dig himself deeper into the same hole.
AIH: What do you mean?
DDG: Well, in other words, he's not saying, "Oh, it's terrible to say that I'm a Holocaust denier -- I never said any such thing." He's saying, "You can't call me a Holocaust denier just... just because I say nobody was gassed at Auschwitz, because nobody was gassed at Auschwitz."
AIH: "...because I'm telling the truth."
DDG: Exactly.
AIH: Yeah.
DDG: And of course because of the fact the burden of proof is on the defendant, it's a kind of legal jujitsu, in which she has to prove he is wrong. He doesn't have to prove that he's right.
AIH: So this, in a sense, really is the Holocaust on trial.
DDG: Yes, it is.
AIH: Tell me about ... what you can about the other characters in the case. Her lawyer... David Irving is representing himself.
DDG: David Irving is representing himself. He's what they call a litigant in person. On the other side of the courtoom is rather more crowded because there's Deborah Lipstadt's solicitors, and the most notable of those is Anthony Julius, who may be known to some of your listeners as Princess Diana's divorce lawyer. He's also the author of a scholarly book on T.S. Eliot and anti-Semitism. And then there are lawyers for Penguin Books, who are the publisher. And then there's a QC, who does the actual cross-examination -- Richard Rampton, who's a very colourful man.
AIH: And their job is to prove the Holocaust and the details...
DDG: Well, they keep saying that isn't their job.
AIH: No?
DDG: They keep saying their only job is to show that Irving suppressed, twisted or distorted evidence. But then you have to ask yourself, "Oh?, evidence about what?" And if he hadn't suppressed, twisted or distorted it, "What would it tell us?"
AIH: OK.
DDG: So. There's a way in which both sides are kind of, to my mind, colluding in this kind of illusion that history has nothing to do with this trial; that it's only about what happened in David Irving's study. But, in fact, as everyone seems to agree, they have to show... if they want to show that he's ... that he's wrong, they have to show that it happened, that he had evidence that it happened and ignored it.
AIH: And, they have to have convincing evidence...
DDG: That's right.
AIH: Yeah. So what are they?...
DDG: Which they have amassed; they have amassed an enormous amount of evidence. I mean, in addition to Prof. Van Pelt, who, by the way, didn't only give testimony, he also submitted a report of several hundred pages, specifically, about the evidence for Auschwitz. Today there's Prof. Browning, who's submitted a very lengthy report on the evidence for the systematic nature of the Final Solution. They'll also hear evidence from Peter Longren (sp?), who's a historian at the University College in London, about the organization of the Final Solution and the Nazi hierarchy and also about Hitler's involvement in the Final Solution. So there's a parade of world-class historians as expert witnesses.
AIH: The judge -- 'cause this is not a jury trial...
DDG: That's right.
AIH: Who is the judge who has to make this decision?
DDG: His name is Charles Gray, Mr. Justice Gray. He's only been a judge for 18 months. But before that he was one of the most eminent libel lawyers in Britain. He runs a very tight trial. In other words, if he feels that witnesses are straying he will bring them back to the point. It does provide a distorted picture, though, from the press box, because most of the press won't have seen any of these reports; nobody who's sitting in the public gallery will have seen any of these reports. The judge will see a report; for example, the judge will have read Browning's report. Browning will come into court, he'll be sworn in, and then Irving will start cross-examining him. In other words, Rampton won't lead him through his report. So all you'll see if you're sitting in the public gallery or if you're sitting in the press box, is, whether or not, Irving is able to attack the witness' credibility. You don't get what the witness' actual testimony is because it's in these written reports.
AIH: And, and... How is he doing, as you watch it?
DDG: Well. That kind of grows out of what I just said because I think Irving is operating on two tracks. One track is... he's trying to prosecute a libel case -- and, clearly, you know -- if he wins this case, it will be a huge victory for him and for revisionists. And even if he wins it on a technicality, they will make a great deal of it. On the other hand, if he loses it, he will probably have to go bankrupt to pay the other side's cost. But it's also true that he will carry on and he will say what he's saying, but his mainstream credibility will be destroyed. In other words, he will no longer be able to face in both directions. He will only face in the direction of Nazi revisionists or the fans of Adolf Hitler, the kind of people who collect Nazi memorabilia -- things like that. He will not have a mainstream audience anymore. So. That's the trial track. But the other track, which Irving is conducting as well, is this kind of... he's got this captive audience of the world's press, and he's making the most of it. He's conducting a big public teach-in on revisionism. I would say that on that track he's not doing badly. I don't mean that he's persuading me, but I mean that he's making the most of his opportunities. He is not an idiot; he's an intelligent man; he's not a clown; and his arguments are serious and they come across, on the surface, as plausible. The defence will obviously try and probe below the surface -- and, certainly, with the judge, I think, they're doing that with great effect. But in terms of the public and the press, I think it's much more of a mixed bag.
AIH: Which is, of course, the risk in these trials. I remember when Ernst Zuundel was prosecuted in Canada, there was a huge debate, even in the Jewish community, about whether it was... it made any sense to pursue this trial because it gave a platform to the views of people who they thought were dangerous.
DDG: That's right! I've read part of the transcript of the Zundel trial and Irving... this is much less of a circus. The judge has a much tighter control on the trial and, in an odd way, even though Irving isn't the defendant -- I mean, that's the other main difference -- he's not the defendant.
AIH: They had no choice in this one.
DDG: Right! They had no choice. So they have to defend themselves. But they're doing it in a much more well-organized way. There's... I wasn't at the Zundel trial, but if you read the transcripts, there's a kind of chaotic quality -- you can't believe this is being allowed to happen ... in the way that some of the witnesses were treated, in the abusive nature of some of the questioning. Irving is not like that. He is not an abusive questioner. He has not been... He's very politely accused witnesses of lying and faking evidence, but it;s been very polite.
AIH: You've actually met him outside the courtroom, too, haven't you?
DDG: Yes. I've interviewed him a couple of times. A couple of times in person and a couple of times by phone.
AIH: What was that like?
DDG: Uh. Bizarre. He's, as I've said before, intelligent. He makes an effort to be -- at least with me -- personable. Uh... He likes to shock you, or try and shock you, but you get the sense that partways, at least, when he's not in court, it's a kind of game for him. It is also true that there's an almost hypnotic quality to the way that he has an explanation for everything. You know, if you say to him, "Well, what happened?" In other words, one of the big piles of evidence for the Final Solution is the fact that we know that there were all these people sent by train to places like Auschwitz and Belzec and Sobibor -- and then we never heard from them again.
AIH: Yeah...
DDG: So, You know, you say, "Well, what happened? Where did the Jews go - if they were exterminated?" And he'll give you this rap about how some of them went to Israel and some of them went to the United States. And, you're listening and you're thinking, "Well... I dunno...could be..." And it's only afterwards you realize that it's... it;s insane, that it, you know, basically, implies that Jews are not like other people; they wouldn't seek out their families after the war, you know...
AIH: ...Wouldn't get in touch with anybody.
DDG: Exactly. But, while he's telling you it, it definitely has a kind of surface plausibility.
AIH: Yeah... From the very beginning, there have been disputes about things like The Numbers. In part, that's one of the issues at dispute here. How important is it-- whether there were 6 million or 5.1 million or many hundreds of thousands?
DDG: Well, that depends on... Well, the difference between 6 million and many hundreds of thousands is an order of magnitude, so that's pretty important. And again, you have to look at The Why -- not on the sort of "on what grounds?" -- but The Why. The point of minimizing the numbers for revisionists -- if you take them at their own label -- is to, and Irving is very explicit about this, is to say that, "Well, all wars are dirty; and there were lost of crimes in World War Two; there are lots of innocents killed; and that the Germans killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, but the Americans killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese, the British killed, you know, tens, hundreds of thousands of Germans in fire-bombing Dresden and Hamburg and Pforzheim. So, really, you know, nobody's worse than anybody else. It;s this kind of what Deborah Lipstadt called "false equivalency." And that's really their goal. Whether it matters that 5.1 million or 6 million were killed, I think it matters a great deal because I think facts always matter.
AIH: Thank you very much, Mr. Guttenplan.
DDG: Thank you.
AIH: I hope we'll talk again.
DDG: OK. Bye-bye.
AIH: Bye-bye.
D.D. Guttenplan is writing a book about the Irving libel trial. His feature-length article on the subject appears in the February issue of Atlantic Monthly. Mr. Guttenplan spoke to us from London.
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Thought for the Day:
Hi Ingrid!
I thought your readers would like to know that they can send letters to Ms. Lipstadt. David Irving has graciously volunteered to act as postmaster in London.
DAVID IRVING has sent the following message to this journal:
"I thought it was a great idea that your readers send messages of encouragement to Deborah Lipstadt, who found herself sucked into this trial, having accepted the advice of Yehuda Bauer, who was paying her, that she shoehorn me into her manuscript (in which I previously did not figure, it seems: we do not know, as she has refused to go into the witness box and testify).
If your readers send me emails addressed to her, I guarantee to carry them into the courtroom each morning and hand them to her unread"
His e-mail address is: <info@fpp.co.uk>"
(Letter to the Zundelsite from a Revisionist website webmaster)