| Robert
Manne,
associate professor of politics at La Trobe
University, Victoria, and editor of the Jewish
quarterly Quadrant, published in 1993 a
little noticed pamphlet entitled
The Culture of
Forgetting. Helen Demidenko and the
Holocaust,
in which he already settled
a few scores
against David Irving--with whom he had
suffered a losing bout on television when Irving
last visited Australia--and other revisionists,
whom he roundly called "Holocaust deniers", the
only rude word that he has learned since bum and
fart, apparently. In
1998 he published a collection of essays titled
The
Way we Live Now,
including the 1993 chapter reproduced below, in
which he takes more cowardly swipes at Mr Irving,
comfortable in the knowledge that his victim is
12,000 miles away and unable to hit back--for the
present. | Robert
Manne: The
Way we Live Now. The
Controversies of the Nineties. ISBN
1 875847 70 7 | The
book is published by The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne,
Victoria, Australia. It was written in 1993 and published in 1998.Pages
188-192 | David
Irving IN
1993 A REPORTER from The Age telephoned. He
informed me that the federal government had banned
the British historian, David Irving, from
visiting Australia. What did I think? I
said that I opposed the ban. My opposition was not,
to put it mildly, based on admiration for the work
of David Irving. Nor was it based on a view that to
impose a political ban on a potential visitor to
Australia is always wrong. I would not, for
example, oppose the banning , in present Balkans
circumstances, of visits to Australia by pan-Serb
fanatics or pro-Ustasha Croats. My
opposition to the ban was not based on principle
but on practical considerations. Knowing a little
of Australia and of Irving's recent history I
assumed he and his supporters would be capable of
using the ban to make him a civil liberties
martyr. While
a visit from Irving would be a low-key affair -
perhaps providing aid and comfort to tiny bands of
young neo-Nazi thugs and to the ageing anti-Semites
still hovering around Eric Butler's League
of Rights - a non-visit would, by contrast, be a
sensation. | 189 The
media and the civil libertarians would, most
likely, take up his cause. Many Australians who
became interested in the case would see him as
merely a dissident historian, whose views on
Hitler, Churchill or the Jews deserved serious
consideration. If he was wrong, they would think,
why could he not be debated and refuted? Some would
see the ban as yet another example of the political
power of the Jewish lobby in Australia. For
all these reasons I thought the ban on Irving was
likely to do more harm than good, Others
disagreed. Who,
however, is this David Irving about whom
Australians have been arguing over the past months?
Until the mid-1970, he could still be regarded
merely as a prolific, non-academic usually
right-wing, military historian, with a specialty in
World War II. The
turning point for Irving came in 1977 when he
published his most substantial work thus far,
Hitler's
War.
In it he argued that Hitler - the most viciously
anti-Semitic political leader in the history of
Europe - had not ordered the mass extermination of
European Jewry, had not known of his SS
subordinates' enactment of his policy and had
indeed tried wherever possible to help the Jews.
The evidentiary basis for these astonishing claims
were one or two ambiguous scraps
of evidence
which were savagely distorted, and the well-known
lack of a written order from Hitler on the question
of the Final Solution. Following
Hitler's War Irving ceased to be taken
seriously
by fellow historians. He began to seek out, and to
be sought out by, altogether different company by
the neo-fascist fringe in Germany, France, Britain
and the United States, and in particular by those
devoted to exposing the 'myth' of the Jewish
Holocaust. At
the same time, Irving's historical views were
becoming increasingly ugly and bizarre. In 1980 he
published a book on the 1956 revolution in Hungary.
It portrayed the anti-Communist revolution as, in
essence, an anti-Semitic uprising of Hungarian
gentiles against their Jewish-Bolshevik
overlords. | 190 In
1987 Irving launched in Australia a new
biography
of Churchill which argued that in the l930s an
impoverished Churchill had sold his soul to a
shadowy group of Jewish businessmen who together
were responsible for plunging Europe into war,
vetoing the reasonable peace offers of Hitler and,
ultimately, destroying the British
Empire. In
1988 Irving took the final plunge into the
ultra-right sewer. He became the champion of a
report on Auschwitz
- authored by a
man
whose business was in execution equipment and whose
engineering qualifications turned out to be
fraudulent - which 'exposed' the 'myth' of the six
million dead. Irving now published his own glossy
version of the so-called Leuchter report, and
threatened that he would send it to every MP and
every school in Britain. Irving
had now become a priceless asset for the Holocaust
denial underground. Until Irving's conversion no
historian had been associated with this cause.
Irving also became the darling of the Austro-German
ultra-right. Last year, Australian television
showed film of Irving shedding crocodile tears,
before an audience of German skinheads, over the
British persecution of Hitler's great deputy,
Rudolf Hess. I
must admit that I had not realised, until seeing
the transcript of a videotape Irving dispatched to
Australia recently, how disreputable a scholar or
how dreadful a man he had become. Throughout the
tape Irving refers to Jews as "our traditional
enemies."[1]
Enemies of whom? Europe? Christianity? Humanity? He
refers to the Holocaust as a 'blood lie' against
the innocent German people. He treats it as nothing
but a conscious big-business swindle by Jewish
racketeers to extract vast amounts of money from
reparations payments and the entertainment
industry. Of
the Jewish eyewitness survivors who passed through
Auschwitz, Irving recommends psychiatric
investigation. Of the hundreds of Germans of the SS
who were tried after the war for their role in the
mass extermination, and whose testimony | 191 provides
thousands of pages of detailed knowledge of every
phase of the Nazi genocide, Irving remains silent.
Elsewhere he dismisses all this testimony as the
tainted fruit of a victor's justice. For Irving, it
must be assumed, the vast mountain of evidence
concerning the Nazi extermination of the Jews - one
of the most exhaustively documented events in
history - has all been faked. Curiously
enough, Irving knows little of the Holocaust. He
himself has written nothing and conducted no
research on the policy of Jewish mass
extermination. He boasts, moreover, of his refusal
even to read the books of fellow historians - all
of whom conclude that between four-and-a-half and
upwards of six million Jews were murdered by the
Nazis. He nevertheless comes up with a figure,
virtually plucked from the air, of 25,000 Jewish
murders.[2]
In these claims scholarly pretensions have
altogether collapsed. Irving defines the 'myth' of
the Holocaust thus: 'Adolf Hitler ordered
the killing of six million Jews in
Auschwitz.' Even
this formula is an Irving invention.
No
one claims six million Jews died in
Auschwitz. All
historians know that the figure of approximately
six million Jewish murders refers to the
combination of deaths in the labour camps and
ghettos of Poland (perhaps 500,000); the shootings
in occupied USSR by the SS's Einsatzgruppen
(perhaps 2.2 million); the gas veins [sic.
Vans?] of Chelmno (perhaps 55,000); the death
factories of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (perhaps
1.8 million) and the gas chambers of the
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp (perhaps 1.5
million). To
argue, as does Irving, that 25,000 Jews were
murdered in Auschwitz, and to imply that this
constitutes the total of Jewish deaths by murder
under Nazism, represents for those who experienced
the Holocaust and who survived, and even to those
who have reflected upon it, a moral and
intellectual scandal almost beyond
endurance. Most
people are not in this situation. What has been
particularly interesting to me in the controversy
thus far is the influence | 192 Irving
has been able to exert over a younger generation of
Australians, who have picked up at university a
half-baked and philosophically confused scepticism
regarding the very idea of truth, but who have
acquired there virtually no solid historical
knowledge. Take
a recent editorial in the Herald-Sun: 'The muzzling
of David Irving'. This editorial described Irving
as a 'controversial' historian who had become
'unpopular' merely because, after thirty years of
archival research, he had arrived at the
unfashionable view that tens of thousands rather
than millions of Jews had been murdered by the
Nazis. Such views, the editorialist believed, were
offensive to Jews not because they were shockingly
false but because of the great post-war Jewish
'article of faith', the Holocaust. Article of
faith, indeed! This
editorial is based on profound, but, I suspect, not
uncommon historical ignorance. It is also based on
breathtaking political naiveté. Irving's
opinions have nothing whatever to do with genuine
historical controversy or archival research. They
have everything to do with the attempt by the
ultra-right fringe in Europe and America to restore
racism and anti-Semitism to
respectability. For
the record I must point out that I have become a
supporter of a ban on I)avid Irving. An obscure
visit is now inconceivable. To
lift the ban would present Irving with a
heaven-sent opportunity for media-driven mischief
and propaganda. The initial ban on Irving was
probably, on balance, a mistake. To lift it now
would be a far greater one. In politics,
circumstances matter. -
1993 Return
to Index: |
Extracts from The
Way We Live Now © Robert Manne,
1998 |
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