Shilling for Hitler

Any honest person who talks about David Irving and the censoring of history has to acknowledge that the censoring has been attempted by David Irving himself. This is what the libel trial was about -- Irving's attempts to censor Lipstadt's "Denying the Holocaust" -- though, as the trial showed, the claims Lipstadt made against Irving are demonstrably true. This is not the only piece of litigation Irving has attempted or threatened. His lawsuit threats delayed for years the British publication of historian John Lukacs' "The Hitler of History." When it did appear in Britain, it was published in an edition that bowdlerized Lukacs' case against Irving. These very real attempts to quash the work of historians are never mentioned by Irving's defenders. But somehow, the work of historians who set out to prove the deceptions in Irving's work is depicted as an attempt at censorship, or a way of inhibiting historical examination.

It might be worth pointing out here that Lipstadt, who is Jewish, makes a point in "History on Trial" of speaking against censoring Holocaust deniers, not just from a freedom-of-speech standpoint but from the standpoint that censorship gives work the allure of the forbidden. And she is harsh and direct on the use of the Holocaust to strengthen Jewish identity. "Jews," she writes, "have survived despite antisemitism not because of it."

But even pointing those things out feels somewhat shameful to me. It's almost as if Lipstadt has to be proven "not too Jewish" before her case against Irving can be taken seriously. The only thing that makes her Jewishness relevant is that the reaction against Lipstadt (especially some of the initial British press reaction, which Evans wrote of in "Lying About Hitler") seems to me to be of a piece with the chiding given Jews for being too sensitive or fearful or paranoid about anti-Semitism.

But to paraphrase the old ad for Levy's Real Jewish Rye, you don't have to be Jewish to be alarmed at David Irving. Considered solely as a historian, how could Deborah Lipstadt be privy to knowledge about Irving's long history of lying, deliberately misquoting documents, and baiting Jews in his speeches and not be appalled and disgusted at the persistent myth of David Irving as a misguided chap who is nonetheless a reliable researcher? If the practice of history means taking into account verifiable facts, how could Lipstadt not be alarmed by the failure of two eminent historians, John Keegan and Donald Cameron Watt, to alter their view of Irving after the trial proved his work worthless? Irving did not lose, as Keegan claimed he did, for "faults" of interpreting "an all consuming knowledge of a vast body of material." He lost for a consistent pattern of deceit. Keegan's claim that Lipstadt was a member of the "self-righteously politically correct" when she had not testified, and when he, by his own admission, had not read her work, raises the question of what political correctness possibly has to do with an assertion that the Holocaust actually happened.

Lipstadt is probably right in suspecting that Keegan and Watt were annoyed by what they saw as the impertinence of a woman and a Jew who did not know her place. What seems to bother Irving's defenders is the very notion of professional and intellectual accountability. Running into Lipstadt after the trial, Watt said to her, "None of us could have withstood that kind of scrutiny." In a column for the Evening Standard, he said, "Show me one historian who has not broken out into a cold sweat at the thought of undergoing similar treatment." What Lipstadt was perhaps too polite to say to Watt was that any historian who wishes to be worthy of the title had damn well better be able to withstand that kind of scrutiny.

On the other hand, the case made against Irving has consistently been made to sound like intellectual tyranny. And that risks obscuring one of the most important lessons to be gleaned from Irving's unsuccessful libel case against Lipstadt, namely that intellectual accountability entails moral accountability. The work of Keegan and Watt, and of other historians who have more tentatively applauded Irving's "scholarship," should not be dismissed because of that praise. But now that Irving's mendacity has been revealed, and his research proven thoroughly and irrevocably worthless, those who have praised him have a choice to make. If they choose to stand by their view of Irving, they must, in this at least, be judged as having abandoned the very concept of historical fact, which Richard Evans defined as "something that happened in history and can be verified as such through the traces history has left behind." It is not a simplification but the essence of this case to ask how you can trust any historian who defends a Holocaust denier.

When my piece on the Evans and Guttenplan books ran in Salon in May 2001, I received an e-mail from David Irving that ended, "You appear not to know that June 20, 2001 sees the start of our appeal in the London courts, and after that a lot of journalists, not just you, may well be quaking in their evil smelling boots."

The next month, Irving's attempt to appeal Judge Gray's decision was unequivocally turned down for the third and final time. I won't speak for the odor of my shoes. But, to paraphrase something said to her during the trial, I do know that Deborah Lipstadt has managed to scrape a major piece of shit off the boots of history.

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