Irving and others

After his disastrous libel suit again Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books six years ago, the historical writer David Irving was the beneficiary of some bizarre excuses by genuine historians who ought to have known better. Donald Cameron Watt wrote in The Standard: "Show me one historian who has not broken into a cold sweat at the thought of undergoing similar treatment." Sir John Keegan wrote in The Telegraph that Mr Justice Gray, presiding, had "decided that an all consuming knowledge of a vast body of material does not excuse faults in interpreting it". (Quotations are from Professor Lipstadt's History on Trial, 2005, p. xiii.) These scholars had apparently not only failed to follow the evidence - which demonstrated that Irving's "faults of interpretation" were systematic and ideologically driven rather than accidental - but also overlooked who was the defendant and who the plaintiff in the case.

But in the case being heard today in Vienna, Irving is the defendant. I agree with Richard Evans, who was expert witness for the defence in the libel trial, that Irving ought not to be there:

Richard J Evans, the Cambridge history professor whose forensic demolition of Mr Irving's research was key to that defeat, also criticised Austria's decision to charge Mr Irving, which he said risked making him a martyr to freedom of speech.

"I think the media circus that we see in operation now, with hundreds of reporters and TV and radio crews crowding around the courtroom, shows how counter-productive it all is," Professor Evans told Times Online.

"Irving was virtually forgotten before this trial came up and it's simply drawing unjustified attention to a discredited figure."

The issue for public policymaking is not that Holocaust denial is offensive (though it certainly is that) but that it is false: malevolently, systematically so. The proper policy with regard to malevolent falsehood is to expose it rather than suppress it. That is the task of historians rather than legislators or the judiciary.

But there are three other aspects of the pre-trial report in The Times that are worth commenting on. First, recall that during the Lipstadt/Penguin trial, "Irving radically modified his position: he accepted that the killing by shooting had been on a massive scale of between 500,000 and 1,500,000 and that the programme of executions had been carried out in a systematic way and in accordance with orders from Berlin" (The Irving Judgment, 2000, p. 116). That is, Irving was a Holocaust denier even though he accepted that the Nazis followed a deliberate programme of mass murder. The fact that he now accepts the historical fact of gas chambers at Auschwitz does not necessarily mean he has renounced his past as a Holocaust denier.

Secondly, while there's always a danger of being excessively sensitive about a choice of words, The Times's list of "Death-Camp Challengers" (scroll down the page) is an unfortunate headline. To challenge findings is an integral part of scholarly practice. Men such as Robert Faurisson don't challenge history; they deny it. In a liberal society they have freedom of expression, but the corollary is that a liberal society makes no attempt to rein in criticism of bogus and bigoted manipulations of the truth. Derision, denunication and (in my view, and for reasons that are explained in the next link in this post) removal of Faurisson from his academic post are entirely legitimate forms of counterattack.

Thirdly, note The Times's contention:

In 1979 Noam Chomsky, the linguist and intellectual, courted controversy by supporting M Faurisson’s right to express his views on the ground of free speech.

That is, of course, not an adequate description of the stance that Chomsky took in the Faurisson affair. If it had been, I should have supported him. Chomsky is not himself a Holocaust denier, but he defended the political legitimacy of Faurisson's claims, even if not their factual accuracy. It was a tawdry and discreditable way to behave, and Chomsky's reputation has rightly never recovered. If you seriously believe Chomsky's stance on the issue was an unexceptionable defence of the right to freedom of speech, then I would modestly recommend my own brief account of the case here.