[Photo by David Gamble, for The Independent on Sunday]

David Irving: Speaking at Washington State University on April 13, 1998

• Article published in the Moscow-Pullman (Wa.) Daily News on April 7, 1998. [© Moscow-Pullman Daily News 1998]
• Article published in the Moscow-Pullman (Wa.) Daily News on April 9, 1998. [© Moscow-Pullman Daily News 1998]
• David Irving's Personal Diary, recording his Visit to Washington State University, April 13, 1998
• Partial transcript of video recording of this speech, April 13, 1998
• From The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Washington, USA) April 14, 1998, front page: a grotesque distortion of the evening's lecture
• Comments of Michael Hoffmann on the above article

This article was published in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News on April 7, 1998. MR. Irving was not interviewed for the article, nor was he consulted.

April 7, 1998

'Mild fascist' booked to speak at WSU; 'Hitler apologist' to visit following week against hate

Ted McDonough

 

THIS WEEK Washington State University celebrates a "week against hate" with a series of presentations, lectures and discussion groups. 
Next week, on Monday evening, the university will be the venue to one of the most bitter foes of groups dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism. 
Referred to in the English press as a "Hitler apologist," English author David Irving is touring the West Coast. Scheduled to appear Sunday in Seattle,and in Portland on April 19, Irving is squeezing WSU into his schedule under the sponsorship of a WSU senior who scraped together $440 to rent the student union auditorium for Irving's appearance Monday at 6 p.m.
Called "the propagandists' poster boy" by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith because some of his books have been published by the mainstream press, Irving has referred to himself as "a mild fascist." 
He is referred to by the ADL as being among a group of Holocaust revisionists, groups and individuals dedicated to rewriting the history of the death of Jews at the hands of HitleR. 
Banned from Canada in 1992 and Australia in 1993, Irving has made frequent appearances before far-right groups. His most famous book is "Hitler's War," which, according to the ADL, argues Hitler did not order the killing of Europe's Jews. 
According to the ADL, Irving was fined by a Munich court in 1992 for violating Germany's hate crime laws by asserting that Auschwitz gas chambers were constructed after the war as a tourist attraction. 
The director of WSU's Compton Union Building was not familiar with Irving's scheduled appearance. As a rule,said Tim McCarty, the union building would arrange for any event provided that appropriate arrangements were made for security and safety. "We don't rule on content," he said. 
Larry Fox, a member of a recently-formed Pullman anti-hate group, said he had "mixed emotions" about the scheduled talk by Irving, with whom Fox was not familiaR. Fox sees the potential for "fomenting hatred" in the event, but said he wouldn't want to promote censorship. "Who censors the censor?" Fox asks. 
Bringing Irving to WSU is Justin R., a senior who has spent much of his time at WSU maintaining a site on the university's Web server dedicated to denying the Holocaust. [The Student Revisionists Resource Site].
A psychology major, R. said he has dedicated a large portion of his WSU career to a fringe historical study and spent money from his own pocket to bring Irving to campus in order to fight academic censorship and promote the free flow of ideas. 
But R. has another reason for his dedication. "I've seen Jewish political aims furthered by this tragedy of history that we see, and I don't think that is fair," he said.
R. describes himself as fighting a global battle against Jewish political groups while reviving the tarnished reputation of Germans who lived during Hitler's Third Reich. 
Few WSU students openly embrace his cause, R. said, but R. said he finds a community of like-minded students on the Internet who participate in his "Student Revisionists' Resource Site" from the University of Washington, the University of Puget Sound and Central Washington University. 
"What kind of stokes the fire in me ... is when I publish on the Web page ... suddenly I get these e-mails from Jewish professors," said R., who contacted the ACLU when WSU faculty attempted to assemble Web-page guidelines following publicity over R.'s web page. "It makes me think this is a much bigger deal than just relaying to me and my friends what's going on," he said. 
"It's as though vested national interests here and abroad have a stake in the general population believing a specific version of history. If suddenly it came out that the numbers dead at Auschwitz or at any of the other large camps were too large by 500 percent, there would be tremendous political ramifications. And I see those ramifications as being almost necessary because the benefits that are being reaped by the Jewish state of Israel and other political Jewish interests ... B'nai Brith or the Simon Wiesenthal Center ... are essentially an injustice." 

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Copyright 1998,Moscow-Pullman Daily News

This article was published in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News on April 9, 1998. Again MR. Irving was not interviewed for the article, nor was he consulted.

April 9, 1998

"MILD FASCIST" TO LECTURE AT CUB 

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by Baku Bross, The Daily Evergreen

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SOME HAIL him as a thorough researcheR. Others call him a Hitler apologist and an anti-Semitic. Regardless, he is coming to campus to lecture in the CUB auditorium on Monday.
David Irving was invited to speak at WSU by Justin R., a senior who maintains a revisionist Web page that some say denies the Holocaust ever happened.
The lecture will be focused around the "validity of German war crimes"-- the so-called "Holocaust," R. said.
He said the media have portrayed Irving as having denied the occurrence of the Holocaust and various Jewish communities have called Irving anti-Semitic. But R. said Irving is a thorough researcher and historian who has done his homework.
Irving, especially before he published his book 'Hitler's War' in 97, was considered to be a leading researcher of Nazi Germany.
Irving has argued the gas chambers at Auschwitz are a myth, and only 600,000 to 1 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
St. Martin's Press withdrew the publication of one of his books about Joseph Goebbels after St. Martin's Chairman Thomas McCormack read it and said it was "inescapably anti-Semitic," according to an article published by the University of Chicago Free Press.
According to the article, Irving is reported to have said: 'People ask me if I am anti-Semitic. I say, 'Not yet.' But it is a mighty and manful struggle not to become anti-Semitic. I have to remind myself every day to turn the other cheek."
Irving also is reported to have said, "You can call me a mild fascist if you like," and to have declared that he had "visited Hitler's Eerie at Berchtesgaden. I regard it as a shrine."
R. said he invited Irving to the Pullman community can hear the arguments of revisionists without it being filtered by the media.
"It is to allow the Pullman community to hear about revisionism straight from the horse's mouth," he said.
Given the controversial nature of the topic Irving is addressing,R. said security has been arranged but he expects the event to go smoothly.
"People tend to be a little more liberal and tolerant of new ideas here," R. said. "I have faith people will be civil."

Copyright 1998,Moscow-Pullman Daily News

 

For thirty five years author David Irving has written a detailed daily diary. This is an edited extract.

David Irving's Personal Diary, April 13-14, 1998

April 13, 1998 (Monday)
Cle Elum -- Pullman, Washington (USA)

P AT EIGHT A.M. I spend the morning on paperwork, thank-you letters, DIFF mail, etc. Snow flakes drifting round the car when I loaded it. Worked some more, and left around 11:30 a.m. for Pullman, a 250-mile onward drive. The countryside levels out in a way I had not expected, until finally we are driving across open, windswept desert, with tumbling, two-foot balls of vegetation blowing across the freeway. Aislinn drives for an hour, while I bury myself in the Web page manual. Her driving is improving. The road map shows a connection before Sprague between I 90 and Route 230 which does not exist, which costs us a 30 mile detouR. So I take over, as we are running out of time and cover the last ninety miles in around an hour along totally, but totally, deserted desert highway. Pullman is a valley city, with several broad streets and fine buildings. Its main industry is the Washington State University campus (WSU) together with the attached stadium.
J. and M. are waiting, and we park the car safely away. The boxes are transloaded, and taken to the Union Building where I have rented the main hall. It is 6:30 p.m. before we begin. The hall is packed, with hardly an empty place, around 600 students and several academics are there. The newspapers have been baying and braying for several days, which has of course added to the tension. As I begin speaking, I see about twenty people in the front two rows rise to their feet and stand with their backs turned to me. A gesture of disrespect, which earns the comment from me: "I do not mind. So far as I know these people, they have their ears right next to their assholes." (A leftover morsel from Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1984 or so, when the Communists and Leftists who had seized my auditorium used exactly the same tactic and got the same response: with the result that the police colonel whose men had manned the barricade rushed onto the stage and said, "Herr Irving -- if you use language like that again I shall close this lecture down!" Oi!) They then solemnly file out, to the general betterment of the rest of the proceedings.
I speak for an hour on the broad scope of revisionist history, not just the Holocaust (as I remind everybody at the end: everybody who survived WW2 is a Holocaust survivor; the real war crime was Innocenticide, not Genocide, which is only a part of it; and I am not a Holocaust historian, I leave that to the others.) The audience was aloof at first, being largely "normal people."

Within ten minutes however they have livened up, as I warm to the theme, and after half an hour they are lively, reactive, and listening with closest attention. Almost nobody leaves during the two hours the evening lasts; most stay on during the ten-minute break that I announce.

Panoramic view of the audience, from official videtotape: note lone protester standing at far right

The questions are the best part, as usual. A German girl student, a quiet, well spoken twenty-year old, the Federal Republic's equivalent, no doubt, of a Rhodes Scholar: she finds it highly desirable that I should be imprisoned, fined, excluded, and prevented from speaking; and even more praiseworthy that her country's government is suppressing Free Speech where it is used for ideas which she and they agree are unacceptable. I listen patiently, praise her command of the English language, and suggest with the utmost respect that in Germany this century so far Nothing Has Changed. There is little that the rest of the world can or should learn from Germany about Free Speech.
Several coloured students are there, mostly training to become teachers. They are bright and friendly; one tall, doleful man who identifies himself as a Jew takes over the floor microphone and tries to berate me, using a handbill issued by an ADL-front organisation. He calls me "racist, anti-Semitic," and all the other tired old clichés. I correct him on these and other points, but it seems clear that nobody believes him anyway. A law professor objects that while I discount the evidence given by Holocaust survivors as "eyewitness" testimony, I use the "eyewitness testimony" of General Walter Bruns. I point out to him that, as he surely knows, the courts attach far greater weight to evidence given against ones own interest (Bruns) than to self-serving testimony (Holocaust survivors); I forget the Latin tag attached to this, and the law professor does not volunteer it eitheR.

One questioner addresses the issue that I had raised in discussing the Daniel Goldhagen thesis -- that if I were a Jew I would want to see an answer to the vital question: why the Jews are so hated within only a few years of their arrival in each host country; he points out that the Jews have now been in the United States in strength for fifty years, yet "they are not hated". I reply that on the contrary, my own perception is that they are moving into the same positions of predominance and influence (media, banking, business, entertainment, and the more lucrative professions like law, medical and dentistry) that they held in Weimar Germany, which gave rise to the hatreds and the resulting pogroms; and that this being so, twenty or thirty more years might see in the USA the same dire consequences as happened in Nazi Germany. I sense that this is not a popular prediction.
For this evening only I have marked the books down to half-price for the impoverished student population, since I know they are even poorer than I. A. is cool, efficient, and very popular with the students. She works very hard unpacking, arranging, pricing, and then repacking the books. The book table is thronged, and I give several books away. She tells me however that we did not cover the $420 which the university administrator extracted from her in cash before the function began, as rent for the hall! Oi. Minus the petrol for the seven-hundred mile drive here and back yesterday and today. Minus her wages, minus the car-hire, minus, minus, minus. We have not expected to make any cash surplus on the day, however, and I told her as we drove over here that what matters is a far larger principle: establishing, or reestablishing channels of communication to the thinking student population, despite every effort of the Traditional Enemies of Free Speech to abrogate them. What a wonderful audience university students make. Still eager to learn, and curious about alternative opinions and interpretations (particularly those they are being "protected" from). Which in turn makes me very conscious of the need to lecture to them with the utmost restraint.

Afterwards M. and J. take us to a restaurant, just closing down for the night, where we have a snack (it is already ten p.m.) I am exhausted. We set off toward Oregon, and stop at Colfax to look for a hotel but the only one is darkened, dead, and lifeless, so we turn back to Pullman and check into rooms at --. A wasted forty-mile round trip. The hotel gives me a special rate, as I have spoken at WSU. I then work on the Website until 2 a.m., and send off several e-mails.

April 14, 1998 (Tuesday)

Pullman, Washington (USA)

Up at 7:30 a.m. This morning's Spokesman-Review, the Spokane newspaper, has the improbable (and less than accurate) headline: WSU SHOUTS DOWN HOLOCAUST REVISIONIST. Yes, the Journaille: they have a lot to answer foR. I guess that some journalist wrote that headline yesterday afternoon, before the actual lecture.

From The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Washington, USA) April 14, 1998, front page

Washington State University (WSU) shouts down Holocaust revisionist

Appearance by 'Hitler apologist' David Irving countered by vocal critics, awareness presentation

PULLMAN, WASHINGTON--As 150 people watched a Holocaust survivor weep through her wartime stories Monday night, revisionist David Irving stood at a podium across campus discouraging another crowd from believing such eyewitness accounts.
Pullman (Washington) residents' attendance may have been divided between the two events, but most were united in condemning Irving's attempt to downplay the Holocaust.
Pullman city officials and human rights activists decided Friday to schedule a Holocaust-awareness presentation at the same time a controversial British revisionist was scheduled to appear at WSU.
"We cannot forget," Pullman Mayor Mitch Chandler told the crowd gathered to observe Holocaust awareness. "We cannot keep silent when asked to forget or deny the Holocaust."
Simultaneously, approximately 330 people attended a presentation by Irving, dubbed "a Hitler apologist" in the British press.
Irving's 1977 book, "Hitler's War," was criticized worldwide for arguing that Hitler wasn't aware of a policy to exterminate Europe's Jews. Instead, he wrote, the killings were ordered and carR. out by members of the SS, a quasi-military unit of the Nazi party.
He also suggests fewer Jews died in the Holocaust than is commonly believed.
Irving was banned from Canada in 1992 and Australia in 1993, and was fined by the German government.
In Pullman, he was met with criticism and calls of "you're crazy" from a mostly student audience. His most impassioned critics included German exchange students and audience members who had lost relatives in the Holocaust -- including University of Idaho law professor Myron Schreck, who eventually prompted this from Irving:
"There is no good reason to be anti-Jewish," Irving said. "But each one of the people in this room has built into them a microchip of xenophobia which says I don't like the person because he's different."
Schreck, whose Jewish family fled Germany in 1936, said despite personal experiences with anti-Semitism and his family history, he agrees with Irving's defense of free speech on the topic.
Across town at the Holocaust-awareness presentation, WSU history professor Peter Utgaard blamed WSU's student newspaper for creating a forum for Holocaust denial when it printed a lengthy letter from Justin R..
R., a WSU psychology major who maintains a controversial Holocaust revisionist site on the WSU Internet server, spent nearly $500 of his own money to sponsor Irving's appearance.
"The First Amendment protects MR. R.'s right to believe what he wants, but where is it written that one has the right to a media spotlight?" Utgaard asked, urging audience members to demand better from the media.
"We need more of Edward R. Murrow and less of Geraldo and Jerry SpringeR."
Pullman resident Lilo Dumin, 72, recalled watching Hitler's rise to power from her family's Berlin apartment, before she was sent to a labor camp and several other members of her family to concentration campus.
"I saw the whole buildup," she said, wiping away tears. "It was the beginning that never ended."
Pullman High School social studies teacher Jerry Harm noted that he tells pupils how the Native Americans' plight and World War II treatment of Japanese Americans in this country are "a chilling reminder" of how close even this society can come to Nazi atrocities.
"True, we didn't exterminate people, but we certainly trampled their rights, and the historical moment certainly swept those people into relocation camps," Harms said.
"What I try to stress is attempts to limit anyone's freedoms or anyone's rights are a threat to all of us."

In his newswire, Michael A Hoffmann comments: There are actually three versions of the Spokesman-Review's coverage of David Irving's lecture , two slightly variant ones posted on their website and the version printed in hard copy on p. B-3 of the April 14 edition, with the more sensible headline, "Holocaust revisionist faces critics."
All three versions are attributed to reporter Andrea Vogt, who, it seems, cannot bring herself to call the author of more than 25 histories, many of them classics from major publishing houses, a historian. For several critiques of Spokesman-Review reporting cf. http://www.hoffman-info.com/whore.html
I am told the WSU student newspaper, The Daily Evergreen carR. a reasonably objective article. I have e-mailed them for a copy.
MR. Irving's behavior at WSU is a model of restraint and intelligence. He walked into a tinderbox and came out of it having doused the fire of media hysteria only to ignite that more primal fire, which the Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington calls, "the fire in the mind."
Congratulations to MR. Irving, the students who hosted him and the dead white males who brought us the U.S. Constitution which guaranteed his freedom of speech.
The fact that Irving spoke for hours before hundreds of students -- future leaders who will influence thousands of others -- is proof positive that there is hope for our future, if we will come out of our figurative and literal bunkers and go public on behalf of our convictions and do so with intelligence.

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