Who is David Irving?
My nephew wrote an essay on the fire-bombing of Dresden by British forces during World War II and he cited David Irving as one of his sources. The name rang a bell, so I did quick search on the Internet. Sure enough–
David Irving believes that the Anne Frank Diary might be a forgery. He believes that the ovens at Auschwitz were built by the Poles after the war as a tourist attraction. His web site is filled with articles on “How Many Jews were in the KGB” and “How I Single-handedly Discovered the Goebbels Diaries”. He believes that Hitler didn’t know about the extermination of the Jews until 1943 (though he recently admitted he might have to revise that estimate in the light of Goebbels’ diaries).
Irving has been criticized for many people for holding rather extreme Holocaust revisionist views. Whenever these people try to prevent or discourage publication of his articles or books, he screams hysterically about free speech and how people are trying to destroy him politically rather than address “the truth”. Then he turns around and sues people who claim that he stinks as a historian.
It reminds me of people who say that tolerant people are just as intolerant as intolerant people because they are intolerant of intolerance. Seriously. I’ve heard Christians say this about liberals and libertarians.
The argument, of course, is sophistry at it’s lowest. It’s semantics. Actually, it’s just plain stupid. It perfectly consistent for a liberal to be intolerant of intolerance because that’s exactly the point. If you believe in tolerance, of course you’re going to oppose those who wish to advocate political or social actions that have the effect of persecuting people for their religious, moral, or political beliefs.
It reminds me of when people used to argue that you couldn’t fight for justice for the poor unless you personally renounced all your possessions. No, that’s not the point. The point is to fight for an economic system that distributes wealth more fairly, not for a system that distributes poverty more fairly.
The point is not to make everyone poor, but to make everyone moderately rich.
Anyway, David Irving is a strange bird. He does have a reputation for good basic historical research, but he holds some of the most absurd beliefs about history you can imagine. Reading his website, on the holocaust, is like entering an altered consciousness.
You have to be somewhat fearless about coming back out and reclaiming your own common sense. In terms of historical judgment, it doesn’t really matter a great deal if Hitler killed 5 million, 6 million, or 3 million. Why does Irving think the important thing is to “balance” our views of Nazi Germany. Does he think there are some redemptive elements there?
The point is that exterminating people is at the heart of Nazism and all evil ideologies, and the important thing about David Irving is that he has dedicated the latter part of his life to trying to persuade you and I to think more kindly of Adolph Hitler. Why? Because, I suspect, he believes that the real evil is communism and moral relativism.
