 Tuesday, June 29, 1999
To the Editor: The headline on your June 26 Arts &
Ideas pages article about the writer
David Irving asks whether "a
Holocaust skeptic" is "fit to be a
historian." Who is to say? Unlike law or
medicine or architecture, the profession
of history-writing has no legally defined
qualifications for practice. What does disqualify Mr. Irving from
being taken seriously is his turning to
the law of libel in response to his critic
Deborah Lipstadt. History is a
field of discourse, not a contest of law.
I might feel contempt for Mr. Irving's
apparent project of writing a sympathetic
history of the Nazi era. But I would not seek to force silence
upon him. Those who claim to be serious
historians who believe in free inquiry
cannot be considered so if they turn to
the power of the state to silence their
critics. EDWARD COUNTRYMAN
Dallas, June 26, 1999 The writer is a professor of
history at Southern Methodist
University. Copyright
1999 The New York Times Company
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