Real History and the Cincinnati festival

Posted Sunday, June 9, 2002

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

Michael Hoffman

Real History Conference a Real Success

CINCINNATI'S Real History Conference 2001, mounted by David Irving -- his third since 1999 -- in Ohio, USA over the Labor Day weekend, was a smashing success: informative, edifying lectures, debates and Q&A from top scholars, in a resort-like setting of peace, camaraderie and comfort.

Highlights included Irving's Saturday lecture on the Final Solution, accompanied by photocopies of original Nazi documents that are his trademark. On Monday, (Labor Day), Irving outlined the denouement of his court appeal. Two news items in particular stand out.

Irving is not finished as an historian as a result of the trial, the verdict of jurist Charles Gray, or the libelous books written in the aftermath.

Case in point: Irving's detractor, historian Gitta Sereny has been singing an Irving-influenced tune of late. From a recent interview with her, published in the Times of London: Sereny "Her ruthless desire to stick to the facts -- that, say, Auschwitz was not a 'death camp' -- has not always won her friends. She is particularly scathing about the identification of Hitler's evil with the death of the Jews and only the Jews. She deplores the use of the word 'holocaust,' she says...'If one wants to be disgustingly numerical, one would have to say that Hitler killed more Christians than Jews.'

"Untruth always matters," she writes, 'and not just because it is unnecessary to lie when so much terrible truth is available. Every falsification, every error, every slick rewrite job is an advantage to the neo-Nazis.' She is puzzled, too, by what she perceives as a reluctance to confront the truth by those who seem to have the most interest in it: 'Why on earth have all these people...made Auschwitz into a sacred cow..."

Sereny is not a lightweight. She's no Deborah Lipstadt, for example, whom real historians such as John Keegan know for a religious enthusiast, not a chronicler of the ebb and flow of documentary history. In the wake of Irving's libel case against Lipstadt, we see how pyrrhic was her and her financier Spielberg's victory, and of all the coat-tail draggers who have attached themselves to Lipstadt's gilded train ever since.

The doubts, the skepticism, the analysis of the size, scope and magnitude of the persecution of the Jews -- the details which these zealous grandees refuse and abhor, and everything dissident historians such as Irving have made their World War Two stock-in-trade, are swelling like a tide and coming out of the mouths of people such as Sereny, fixtures of the elite firmament of establishment historiography.

The other welcome news is that Mr. Irving is not going to be a bankrupt. That's not to say he's flush with cash or does not still need the support of all who value the historical struggle which, in its British manifestation, he heads. The glad details are on the videotape of his Labor Day lecture. It appears as though the libel judgement is not going to put him out of business.

The Conference was studded with stars of history and journalism --Joseph Sobran, offering a controversial take on "King" Abraham Lincoln, Mark Weber burying the Six Million figure six feet under; Brian Renk debating Charles Provan on the supposed holes in the roof of Krema II; college professors Supina and Kirstein detailing Nazi policy on the environment, and American war crimes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively.

Aboard Mike Fink's floating restaurant the tall, gaunt, Lincolnesque Doug Christie held forth on the global struggle for free speech, with the same fire and conviction I witnessed cascading from him like lava during the 1985 Toronto trial of his client, Ernst Zundel.

Tony Martin (above, with Christie), professor of African History at Wellesley College and the subject of a recent call for his dismissal by Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, made a deep impression. His speech on the controversy surrounding the Jewish role in the Black slave trade was a model of scholarly insight and command of sometimes startling material. I was pleased by the fact that Martin is, to the best of my knowledge, the first speaker at a revisionist conference to make the crucial distinction between the Bible and the Talmud, in a witty investigation of the roots of the Talmudic "Curse of Ham," one of the rabbinic justifications for black enslavement.

Yours truly added a footnote to the events with a terminal talk on "Amalek," pointing out that this term, which Ms. Lipstadt has spaded out of the muck and mire of ancient vengeance, is an inducement to the assassination of Irving and by extension, to violence against revisionists and the collective punishment of Palestinians.

The audience was in some cases as distinguished as the speakers' roster, numbering in its ranks numerous professionals as well as lay historians and researchers.

Real History 2001 was the revisionist event of the year. Prof. Martin commented on the warmth of the proceedings, on his perception that we were a big "family." We came together in a resort-like setting suffused with a fraternal tenor of celebration, even as we prepared to delve deep into the thought-provoking great issues of our time.

In the past it has been easy to take Mr. Irving's talent for granted, or to resent him for his sometimes magisterial demeanor. As the auditorium emptied on the afternoon of Sept. 3, I lingered alone, beside his literature table. There stood his new book, "Churchill's War, Vol. II", 1000+ pages worthy of Gibbon, published using cutting-edge Adobe PDF electronic files (the 63-year-old Irving knows the latest Mac computer technology as well as a 20-year-old hacker). The volume fairly glowed in its four color cover, with the rear jacket devoted to a three-step, photographic demonstration of "Real History" in action.

What a riposte from a man who was supposed to be have been bowed and broken into a heap long ago by the hammer and anvil of the Money Power, yet who, during his own De Profundis, emerges jauntily with the second installment of an enormous anti-hagiography of one of the central icons of the West. Irving consistently exhibits bulldog courage and competence under fire, qualities which deserve a salute and our abiding support.