I have only skimmed all the reports, articles, developments, planned re-enactments etc. of the Irving trial, but I am telling you, this trial was not a loss for the movement - in spite of some of the strange concessions made by David Irving in the heat of the moment.
Here are two cyber commentators:
* " Just think, if Irving had won, all the attention would have been nil. All we would have gotten would be page 23 and we wouldn't have had the onslaught of all the articles touted on the front pages, no flaming editorials, and no letters to the editors. As for getting the word out - losing was a winner."
And in response:
* " Very true. And you didn't even mention the opportunity for a ***second*** trial that apparently is going to take place! Nevertheless one feels infuriated by the result. It's not the Lipstadts or the stupid functionaries of this world, but the complete impunity of the true perpetrators (read: things like the Board of Jewish Deputies etc).
"I've just read Irving's new diary entries on his site and there (are) lots of interesting comments in there. It seems that he has been in a good number of British TV and radio shows. Also in surprisingly good spirits. A British TV channel will soon have a "docudrama" (they don't wait!) on the trial. Irving seems to relish the idea."
And then there are the editorials that question much more than condemn. Here's one by Professor Ralph Raico, titled "Does This Amount to "Holocaust Denial"? The person who sent it to me claimed that it appeared on WorldNetDaily, though I haven't had time to check.
(Personal sidebar: WorldNetDaily had interviewed me at length some time ago but then decided, apparently, that the topic of Holocaust Denial was too hot. I note happily that they seemed to have changed their mind!)
Here is Raico's article, starting with quotes by the (to us) well-known Jewish writer Arno J. Mayer of Princeton: (Source: "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The 'Final Solution' in History", pp. 362-65.)
"Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable....No written orders for the gassing have turned up so far....Most of what is known is based on the depositions of Nazi officials and executioners at postwar trials and on the memory of survivors and bystanders. This testimony must be screened carefully, since it can be influenced by subjective factors of great complexity....
"In the meantime, there is no denying the many contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing sources....Much the same is true of for the conflicting estimates and extrapolations of the number of victims, since there are no reliable statistics to work with....Both radical skepticism and rigid dogmatism about the exact processes of extermination and the exact number of victims are the bane of sound historical interpretation....
"...the whole of Auschwitz was intermittently in the grip of a devastating typhus epidemic. The result was an unspeakable death rate...
"There is a distinction between dying from 'natural' or 'normal' causes and being killed by shooting, hanging, phenol injection, or gassing...from 1942 to 1945, certainly at Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by so-called 'natural' causes than by 'unnatural' ones."
(Raico's comments):
The author insists that gassings did occur at Auschwitz, that the Nazis fully planned the mass killings of the Jews, one way or another, and that, despite his distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" deaths, the Nazis were completely responsible for whatever deaths from disease, etc., occurred at Auschwitz and other camps. This last is obviously true on the face of it, since neither Jews nor others were dying en masse of typhus in Amsterdam and Salonika.
Nonetheless, his sketch of what occurred in this terrible ordeal is not the usual one. Who nowadays ever mentions the typhus epidemic? Who questions any survivors' reports, or the accounts given by defendants at political trials? Where in this version is the conventional picture of over a million Jews being gassed, largely immediately on arrival, at Auschwitz?
My question is, does this amount to the dread crime of Holocaust Denial? Is Mayer a Holocaust revisionist?
The same issue of the New York Times that carried the story of David Irving's defeat on the front page had a small item in the inside pages on a Swiss national who has been fined and sentenced to prison for denying that homicidal gas chambers existed at Auschwitz. This is only the latest instance of the hounding of Holocaust revisionists by the police, in Switzerland, France, Germany, Canada, and other of our sister democracies. The Germans are particularly fervent in their crusade against historical heresy, believing that the best way to fight "neo-Nazism" is through the suppression of dissent.
I say, God Bless America and our Bill of Rights, which is dismissed as "legalistic" by John Gray and other short-sighted foreigners.
David Irving was wrong and foolish to bring a suit in court.
But the larger question is why this, of all possible historical issues, has become a matter of political decision, with prison terms and fines for heretics?
April 14, 2000
(Ralph Raico teaches history at the Buffalo State. His Classical Liberalism: Historical Essays in Political Economy is forthcoming from Routledge.)
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Thought for the Day:
"The Irving/Lipstadt struggle resembles the John F. Kennedy investigation; only simple minds can believe the official version and ignore the amount of questions that have been raised."
(Sent to the Zundelsite)