Capital And Class

Real History and the Great Campaign against its Enemies Posted Monday, May 19, 2003 Evans had two research assistants and at one point 40 people were employed by the legal team to nail Irving. Evans is critical of those who did not have the historical scholarship, expertise and knowledge to see through him.

Hero of the Proletariat: Professor Richard “Skunky” Evans at ease for a newspaper interview [images and caption added by this website] Capital & Class, Spring 2003. The journal is published by the Conference of Socialist Economists: [ In which one of Prof “Skunky” Evans’s soulmates reviews his book ] Telling Lies about Hitler — The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial. Evans, RJ.

Verso Press, 2002 ISBN 1-85984-417-0 (pbk) £14.00 pp 326 by Andrew McCulloch. [ homepage ] Andrew McCulloch teaches sociology at Northumbria University. I DEVOURED this book guiltily one weekend when I was a rather rude houseguest. Fortunately, my friends seem to have tolerated my bad behaviour in creeping off to read in secret. Perhaps I was not missed that much and therefore not found out.

The Hitler devotee David Irving , however, definitely has been exposed in this book as a cheat, charlatan and indefatigable liar by the patient detective work of Richard J. Evans and his team. Irving would not be much missed either, although I doubt that he will easily go away. Guilt and shame are not part of his character. Most people will believe that they know about the circumstances that occasioned this book. Evans chides those sections of the media that misunderstood the situation.

It was Irving, contrary to many accounts, who instigated the libel action against the publishers of Deborah Lipstadt’s (1994) Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and Memory. To their great credit, Penguin did not capitulate before his libel action threats.

They engaged a legal team to defend Lipstadt’s claims in her book that Irving was one of those, and a very prominent and poisonous one, who had falsified and manipulated the historical record about the Holocaust to serve his ideological commitment to fascism, antisemitism and Hitler’s memory. It was not, therefore, Irving who was the victim of those out to get him — but this did not stop him constantly presenting the case publicly in that light. Evan’s book is an account of the case.

It includes his devastating investigations of Irving’s work as a popularising ficto-historian and some comments on the nature of historical investigation. Those claiming to have been libelled — that is defamed, lowered in the esteem in the eyes of that legal fiction, the reasonable man — are in a strong position in English law.

To make defamatory statements in good faith is not a defence as everyone rich enough to use the law courts is deemed to have a good reputation until proven otherwise. At the end of the book, Evans calls for a long overdue change in the English libel laws. The only defence open to Penguin Books was to prove the overall accuracy of Lipstadt’s claim and thereby discredit Irving as a historian. Lipstadt was not asked to appear in court by the defence and Irving did not subpoena her.

The central issue was Irving’s claim to be a historian of integrity. RICHARD Evans, Professor of Modem History at Cambridge University, was engaged by the defence as the expert witness who could put Irving’s historical work to the test. Irving’s central claims are that the number of those killed in the Endlosung has been vastly exaggerated and that Hitler did not know about the extermination of the Jews and other groups. Indeed, there was no Nazi industrial process of extermination.

Irving also claims that the fire bombing of Dresden by the allies was a similar crime, if not worse, when compared to those unfortunately committed by the Germans in the heat and chaos of warfare. In order to do this Irving has consistently falsified the death toll in Dresden. For those who do want to wedge the door open that Hitler did not know, there are some chinks or openings.

Bauman accepts in Modernity and the Holocaust (1991: 15), for instance, that the functional logic of the Nazi system of ‘polycratic’ government led inexorably in the direction of genocide and that therefore there was no d ocument which Hitler needed to sign to achieve his terrible aims. Another chink is suggested by Inga Clendinnen : ‘There are many difficulties in the way of understanding a Hitler, not least because we know that had there been no Hitler there would have been no Holocaust.

This fact is at once obviously true, and so grossly incommensurate with our notions of adequacy regarding historical cause and effect that we recoil from it’ (Clendinnen, 1999: 95). Evans concludes that ‘It was only when…I followed Irving’s claims and statements about Hitler