Now that Australia is ostensibly loosening the reins on Freedom of Speech, controversy still surrounds Europe's best-known Revisionist, David Irving. Irving, as you may recall, became a "convert" to Revisionism after he saw the evidence of the dramatic Leuchter Report in the 1988 Zundel trial. He has become persona non grata ever since and has been banned from several countries: Here is an update on what is going on:
"Why I should be free to speak in Australia - David Irving : published in The Age, Melbourne, Australia, 27 September 1996. - Controversial British historian David Irving challenges John Howard to show his commitment to free speech by allowing him to enter the country - Winston Churchill said that a historian's job is to find out what happened and why. What happened was that the Labor Government's Immigration Minister, Gerry Hand, wrote to me on 9 February 1993 announcing that he had banned my third visit to Australia (he had revealed this to Jewish community leaders a week earlier). His successor, Nick Bolkus, upheld the ban, and despite four court actions at considerable expense to taxpayers - one of which I won - I was not able to overturn it because the outgoing Labor Government moved the goalposts, amending the Immigration Act in February 1995. Some legal experts believe the Government changed the law specifically to keep me out. I still cannot really see why I have been prohibited from entering Australia, but I do now know how , since almost four years of litigation has opened up a score of former secret files kept on me by Canberra and various government agencies. We now know that the Labor Government made its controversial decision to ban my third lecture tour at the request of various bodies representing the interests of Australian and foreign Jews. The ruling came from the Prime Minister's personal office, despite recommendations from the ministry staff and intelligence agencies to the contrary. I have published some 30 books since 1961. What the objectors took exception to were some of my opinions as a historian - for example, I have stated in public lectures that the "gas chamber" shown to visitors at the former Auschwitz concentration camp is a fake built after the war. I was fined $30,000 in 1993 for stating this in one lecture in Munich. In modern Germany, there is an artificial offence, unknown to criminal law elsewhere in the free world, of "defaming the memory of the dead". Ironically, in January 1995, the Polish authorities admitted that the "gas chamber" building on show to visitors was indeed built in 1948. The reputable French news magazine L'Express reported this admission on 26 January 1995 but reputable historians have known it all along. The $30,000 German fine, however, still stands. Of course, it gives me a criminal record, about which Isi Leibler and other Australian critics never tire of gloating to the media. In the United States, where freedom of speech is protected by law - as it should be in every country of the world - my foes use different methods. In 1993, hackers dumped on the Immigration Service computer " a yard and a half of garbage" about me, as a senior immigration officer at Washington's airport told me. They had hoped to get me excluded from the United States. I was held for three hours while the US authorities investigated. They soon detected the forgery, and their embassy in London apologized to me. Last March, the same foes started a terror campaign against my US publisher, St. Martin's Press, that was about to launch my biography of Dr. Joseph Goebbels - I alone have been able to make use of all the Nazi minister's diaries in Moscow - and against Doubleday, which had made it its Book of the Month Club selection for May. Production of the book, the result of eight years work, was cancelled. But miracles do still happen. Although the Goebbels book is not even available to US readers, their biggest literary journal, the New York Review of Books, has just devoted six tabloid pages to a glowing review written by a leading modern historian, Professor Gordon Craig of Stanford University, who is perhaps coincidentally not a Jew. Perhaps John Howard, in deciding my new application, should read it. Craig writes: 'Silencing Mr. Irving would be a high price to pay for freedom from the annoyance that he causes us. The fact is that he knows more about National Socialism than most professional scholars in his field, and students of the years 1933-45 owe more than they are always willing to admit to his energy as a researcher and to the scope and vigor of his publications.' He continues: 'It is always difficult for the non-historian to remember that there is nothing absolute about historical truth. What we consider as such is only an estimation, based upon what the best available evidence tells us. It must constantly be tested against new information and new interpretations that appear, however implausible they may be, or it will lose its vitality and degenerate into dogma or shibboleth. Such people as David Irving, then, have an indispensable part in the historical enterprise, and we dare not disregard their views.' On 4 October, I shall lodge a fresh application for permission to visit Australia. I trust John Howard to keep his word to encourage true debate. He might even instruct the Government's solicitors to withdraw the $50,000 bill that they presented to me yesterday for the Government's legal costs in defeating my second visa application in the courts. Restoring freedom of speech to Australia has been a costly exercise."
Now it is almost a month later. I haven't heard anything yet about additional developments. Ingrid
Thought for the Day: "Where people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other." (Eric Hoffer)