Real History and Churchill's War, vol. ii

Posted Thursday, May 17, 2001

Alphabetical index (text) Index to the Traditional Enemies of Free Speech

He thinks it pertinent to write that Churchill was of partly Jewish blood, although safely diluted. -- Andrew Sullivan

http://www.andrewsullivan.com

Andrew Sullivan calls Churchill book "repulsive"

[perhaps he should first read it]

THE ENGLISH GORE VIDAL: My nomination for this is the repulsive English historian David Irving, the Holocaust "minimizer" and loony rightist, who, like Vidal, is a brilliant man whose mind has warped into bile.

Like Vidal's hatred for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Irving's loathing for Winston Churchill is simply perverse. Irving has just produced the epic second volume of his biography of Churchill, a book he claims to have spent 27 years researching. According to this early review, the book is a mish-mash of tired old myths and sinister paranoia.

Irving at one point says that Churchill "invariably put the interests of the United States above those of his own country and its empire," as if, in the battle against Hitler, such conflicts were anything but distant irrelevances. He thinks it pertinent to write that Churchill was of "partly Jewish blood, although safely diluted." He also asserts that Churchill "was ambivalent about why he was really fighting this ruinous war."

As Andrew Roberts puts it, in this ludicrous statement, Irving "is deliberately ignoring the evidence of dozens of the finest speeches ever delivered in the English tongue, which explained to Britain and the world between 1939 and 1945 in utterly uncompromising language precisely why Nazism had to be extirpated for human civilization to survive and prosper."

David Irving comments:

IT IS common knowledge that millionaire-"historian" Andrew Roberts had not read the book either, only the two pages of selling points that were supplied with the uncorrected early proof copy. The quotes he quotes are no longer in the printed edition!