This past weekend I heard David Irving speak at the International Revisionist Conference put on by the Institute for Historical Review about his trials and tribulations. I bring you good tidings: This Brit is not cowed.
Already, I saw one good rabbi oy-veying in next morning's LA Times, and I quote:
"Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre said Irving would likely become 'the darling of the Arab and Muslim world' on the conference circuit. . . . 'He is a propagandist, an anti-Semite and a racist. We can expect him to be trotted out to many other addresses like these and I guess that's where he belongs'."
I am awaiting additional evaluations of his speech by conference participants, but in the meantime, the essay below pretty much captures the Essence of Irving: He knows how to speak - and, ever so subtly, he knows how to shock.
While most of the speech, aptly described as "rollicking", was a fast-paced account of what happened in London and what he intends to do about it with all the Irving tenacity and doggedness the world has come to expect, there was, in his speech, a moment or two of what is captured in the essay below, sent to the Zundelsite a week or two ago:
When Aristotle says "Man is a political animal," I wonder where the accent falls: on the word "political" or the word "animal."
When libertarians refer to a "marketplace of ideas" I tend to assume the accent falls on the word "ideas."
But considering the media coverage of the Irving-Lipstadt libel trial, I'm starting to think that the accent might more properly belong on the word "marketplace." Moreover, this marketplace is anything but metaphorical; it's a real competitive arena, as noisy and sweaty as an Oriental bazaar.
Judge Gray conceded that Irving was a fine military historian, and historian John Keegan said much the same thing. Which pales, of course, alongside some of labels the judge stuck Irving with -- "anti-Semite," "Nazi sympathizer," and so on. In short, all the *worst* names you could end up being called in this age of strenuous political correctness.
On April 11, when the verdict came down, I was conscious of a sort of mist that seemed to envelop Irving that day and the next. I thought, How is he feeling? Will he survive this? Will he rise to fight another day? Or disappear into a kind of Bermuda Triangle of shame and dejection?
Now it is very clear that the man to emerge from the April 11 mist was Irving, the marketeer of a new persona. In fact, that very day, hours after the verdict was read, Irving the self-promoter went into high gear. There was "rage," he said, in "the enemy camp," who assumed he would fall silent, speechless and reeling from the ignominy of defeat. But not so! Instead he cranked out back to back interviews, very much at home and well-adapted to this *marketplace* of ideas.
When Madonna or Michael Jackson belts out a pop tune and does a crotch-grab in the middle of a song, it's a calculated obscenity, something to make the guys 'n gals in the bleachers exclaim, "Did you see THAT?!" - anxious to run home after the concert to relate what happened to their school chums.
It's why . . . Calvin Klein went with the "heroin chic" fashion one season and why Benetton displayed an ad of a priest getting it on with a nun. "Did you see THAT?!" It's all simply an attention-grabbing ploy.
In the case of David Irving, it's the ear rather than the eye that is shocked. "More women died on the back seat of Teddy Kennedy's car than died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz during the war." Reaction: "Did you *hear* THAT?!" (...)
When Barbara Walters interviewed Anthony Hopkins following the success of his film Silence of the Lambs in which he played Hannibal the Cannibal, she asked at one point whether he could bristle for her the way he had in his role as the wily sociopath. I don't recall that Hopkins obliged her, but I'm certain that most of the audience-members sat up at that point, thinking, "Wait for it...wait for it...HERE IT COMES..."
And I would guess there's that same dynamic with Irving. There's the sober man of letters who comes on the set in a dark pinstripe and the interview gets going. The first couple questions are mundane ones, allowing audience-members to get settled in. But of course what everyone's waiting for is the moment when he will "bristle" with "anti-Semitic" venom or "Nazi" zealotry or "racist" passion.
Suddenly, on cue, the program host throws the word "Jew" into mix and folks at home perk up and slide to the edge of their seats, thinking, "Wait for it...wait for it...HERE IT COMES..." And Irving delivers a whopper of a soundbite. So that Pop looks over at Mum, and exclaims, "Did you hear THAT?!" All very properly shocked and indignant, but also a little pleased; so secretly, mind you, that he'd hardly be aware of it, that Irving has broken old taboos with complete impunity and with the visceral calm of a burglar. Doing so again and again.
Meanwhile, on the TV screen, the host is looking a mite flushed by this vintage Irving-ism even as Irving himself looks contained, and calmly anticipating the next question ("Next question, please"...), and Mum thinks, "How does Irving do it? ...manage to remain so cool and collected?" Then, a stray thought: "...Must have been quite a good-looking man in his younger days."
The "marketplace of ideas" has also a virtual reality, existing in the eyes of the beholder and in the ears of the listener . . . and often has an anarchic dynamic, driven by a thirst for novelty or recalcitrance, perhaps, or some other urge or bent -- erotic, inquisitive, or greedy. Into this vast wilderness, Irving the canny publicist has gone trekking, at times very ably assisted by Irving the historian.
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Thought for the Day:
"Hands up all those who think this programme would be aired if he had won the case?"
(Comment by a Zundelsite reader regarding the UK nationwide David Irving program on Channel 4, aired on April 29, 2000)