 - London, February 28, 2006
-
No
point arguing with deluded minds Gillian
Reynolds on radio  YOU
know when your mother made you a special dinner and
you didn't eat all of it? Remember how guilty you
felt. That was me on Sunday evening, listening to a
special programme put on by Radio 4 in response to
one of last week's big news stories.
The story was David Irving's
three-year jail sentence by an Austrian court for
holocaust denial. The
sentence was passed on Monday and the news
sequences and phone-ins that day and thereafter
gave it a lot of attention. Radio 5 Live buzzed
with it.  David
Irving comments: MISS Reynolds reports,
in her penultimate paragraph, "This
newspaper [The Daily Telegraph], I
seem to remember, took the decision not to
describe [David Irving] as a
"historian" some years ago."
Yes, so much for
objectivity. It was at the time of the
Rolf
Hochhuth controversy, in 1967.
(That dates ya, Gillian!).
Maurice Green,
their managing editor, had just assured me
in a private letter that they were
evenhanded as between the warring parties,
when Private Eye discovered and
gleefully reported that the newspaper's
house style-book instructed, "David
Irving, in the Hochhuth controversy, is
not to be referred to as 'the historian',
but as a writer."
I wrote at once to Green
that I cared not what term they used to
describe me, my books would speak for
themselves; they might call me a council
dustman if they liked. He made a very
clever reply, so clever that I have long
since forgotten it. |
The World at One carried a reactive
interview with Deborah
Lipstadt, the American author sued in 2000
by Irving for libel. In a book first published in
America and then in the UK, she had called him a
holocaust denier, a
falsifier of history. He had lost that case, too.
On The World at One last week, she said the
Austrian sentence risks turning Irving into a
martyr.Michael Cockerell made
a documentary after the Lipstadt trial, telling
its inside story, with rare testimony from those
involved, including the judge, the defence counsel,
Lipstadt, who did not take the stand, and Irving,
who represented himself. This updated version, from
the independent producer Bruce Hyman, who
also happens to be a practising barrister, went
back to its fascinatingly contrasted accounts of
what had happened back then. Lipstadt didn't think
it would go to trial. She had taken a harsh view of
Irving, she said, but not as strong as others
already in print. Irving said he thought it was
time to fight back, that there was "international
Jewish backing" for her "campaign", that it was
"part of an international conspiracy to destroy
him". Cockerell's narration said this trial was
about history, how it is written and what we can
believe. Astonishingly, Penguin, the British
publisher, had never read Lipstadt's book for libel
before bringing it out. When Irving brought his
suit, Lipstadt reckoned Irving didn't think she'd
fight it, but, she said, she couldn't not fight it.
Irving said he had to represent himself, partly
because he had written the book on his own and
chosen to mount this battle, partly because he
couldn't afford what it would cost, half a million
pounds for counsel, from £2 million to £6
million in all. Anthony Julius, the royal
solicitor, volunteered to take on Lipstadt's
representation for no fee. It took two years for the case to
come to court. The defence prepared by bringing in
an expert team to read Irving's work, line by line,
for evidence of falsification. Lipstadt's barrister
taught himself German
to read the Nazi documents in the original. The judge, having put in six weeks of
solid reading beforehand, said Irving handled his
case "with great skill and ability" and took a
month to reach a verdict in which he called Irving
an anti-Semite and a racist. Irving called the
expert witness[es] ignorant, said the judge
had a thick skull and that defence counsel was
"operating in the pay of a foreign power". There was much here I didn't know or
hadn't remembered. So why, if the material was
gripping enough for me to make four pages of notes,
and given that I am an admirer of both Cockerell's
and Hyman's work, did I feel this programme seemed
out of place? Perhaps if it had happened on Monday
or Tuesday night, I wouldn't have. By Sunday, the
story had had a lot of coverage and analysis.
People, from Monday onwards, were saying that for
an Austrian court to bring to trial an offence
committed 17 years ago was dubious. This is not an
argument I, personally, accept. If a law is broken,
the culprit should be tried and, if guilty,
sentenced. My big reservation is about something
different from timing. This was a good programme,
dispassionately presented, but could anyone listen
to it and be convinced that Irving was anything
other than deluded? This
newspaper, I seem to remember, took the decision
not to describe him as a "historian" some years
ago. But if there really are political
parties or religious activists who take him
seriously and, like him, deny the existence or the
record of the Nazi death camps, would they be
persuaded otherwise by Cockerell's account of his
humiliation in court six years ago? I doubt their
response would be the one Radio 4 was
seeking.  Donate
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