Bill Stewart writes:
> On the other hand, today's papers report that David Irving, the
> Holocaust-denying history-reviser, lost his libel lawsuit against
> some people who wrote about him and the inaccuracy of his propaganda.
I read the judge's findings of fact, and some background on the case.
Apparently Irving was an historian, who never even advertised himself as
any sort of expert on the Holocaust, who made the mistake of testifying on
behalf of Canadian revisionist Ernst Zundel, who was sentenced to jail,
but later freed when the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that the law under
which he was convicted violated his rights.
It was during this trial, that Irving's views on the Holocaust underwent
some sort of evolution, and he re-examined the evidence which existed to
support various claims made by both sides in the debate.
Irving was flamed by a female Jewish history professor in a book called
"Denying the Holocaust." This seriously damaged his reputation as an
historian, and smeared him.
After getting called all sorts of foul names by Jewish interests, Irving
fought back and related anecdotes about the more unbelievable and clearly
false eyewitness testimony told by some survivors. He never called the
Holocaust a "hoax", but characterized certain aspects of the historical
record as "legend."
Irving sued for libel, and tried to recover his damaged reputation. He
defended himself, and had no access to an attorney.
The other side had deep pockets, and spared no expense trying to paint him
as a Nazi.
Very little of the trial revolved around Irving's scholarly works. The
state of Israel released Eichman's memoirs to the defense for the specific
purpose of demonstating small innacuracies in Irving's scholarship, many
of which Irving admitted to. But since neither Irving nor any other
historian had had access to Eichman's memoirs before, one can hardly argue
that this constituted deliberate falsification.
Much of the "evidence" used to paint Irving as a "Nazi" consisted of
meticulous documentation of virtually every word he uttered since being
targeted for deconstruction after the Zundel trial, the fact that after
being attacked for his views, he had some associations with others holding
right wing and neo-Nazi beliefs, and his ridicule of the more nonsensical
aspects of some Holocaust eyewitness testimony.
As an example of the latter, he tells of an elementary school ordered to
"teach the Holocaust" where a tatooed survivor terrorized a bunch of small
children with graphic tales of Nazi violence. When one of the children
asked "But how did you escape?," the woman replied without missing a
beat, "I cut a hole in the back of the gas chamber, and snuck out."
Yeah, right. :)
In any case, Irving's experiences at the hands of the British court
system demonstrates a few basic and (obvious to most of us) facts.
1. Any man who represents himself has a fool for an attorney.
2. When a minor history professor spends over 3 million defending
herself in a lawsuit, she isn't writing her own checks to the
lawyers.
3. If a Jew calls a gentile a baby-raping murdering Nazi pig
and the gentile calls the Jew an asshole, the press account
of the altercation will read "Gentile Makes anti-Semitic Remark"
or "Jew Victim of Hate Crime."
This metaphor isn't specific to Jews and Gentiles, and applies when a
white male has an argument with any minority deemed "oppressed."
I know lots of Jews were deliberately killed by the Nazis during WWII,
as part of a deliberate plan to exterminate them, which wiped out almost
all of certain segments of European Jewish society.
For those parts of the historical record for which no documentary or
archeological evidence exists, and eyewitness accounts are many and
mutually contradictory, I have no magic method of determining which
version of events constitutes indisputable historical fact, much less
historical fact that would withstand $3 million dollars worth of
microscopic scrutiny by vested political interests.
I don't know whether German gas technology stopped with the "gasmobiles"
used in the euthanasia program, evolved to gymnasium-sized mass-gasing
chambers allegedly installed at all major concentration camps, or existed
in some form in between those two extremes.
I certainly can't answer any questions about "What did Hitler know, and
when did he know it?"
I can't cite a number of Jews killed which is accurate to 7 decimal
places, nor can I divide those Jews into neat little columns labeled
"Shot", "Gassed", "Typhus", "Worked to Death", and "Told Joke About
Fuhrer."
Does that make me a Racist, a Revisionist, or in the immortal words of
Bill Stewart, "a lying Nazi scum?"
Gosh I hope not.
--
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
