David Irving is going to wear his blue pinstriped Savile Row suit to his trial in Vienna on Monday. Britain’s most manipulative historian, currently writing his memoirs in an Austrian prison cell, says the smartly cut three-piece cost him £2,700 and that it has brought him nothing but luck. He last wore it during his disastrous high court libel trial six years ago. Mr Justice Charles Gray, it may be remembered, said Irving was a racist, an anti-Semite and a deliberate distorter of historical evidence.
The lucky suit should have stayed mothballed at his flat in Mayfair, for the odds are that he will also lose this trial in Austria, where he stands accused of denying that the Nazis murdered six million Jews. Holocaust denial can bring ten years in jail under Austrian law. We may not be seeing Irving for quite a while.
Even so, a courtroom is as close as most Holocaust deniers come to heaven. A captive audience, those chilly metallic blondes from CNN, the right to rant. Judging by his website, Irving is relishing his moment in the spotlight: even a lost court case represents a triumph of publicity for his malign deceptions on Hitler and his crimes. Hitler used his stint in jail to write Mein Kampf; for Irving, too, imprisonment is a kind of state-financed sabbatical.
Advocates of the absolute right to free speech say that Irving’s obvious enthusiasm for courtroom confrontation is a powerful argument for letting him go. Take away the courtroom and you take away his theatrical props. Ignore him, and the netherworld of Irving and the unsavoury club of Holocaust deniers withers away, killed by our oppressive tolerance. He may be – no, he is – hopelessly and deliberately wrong but he has the right to proclaim his crazy views, just as we have the right to plug our ears with cotton wool.
This is a naive, even primitive understanding of the right to free expression. What counts – that much has become clear on the fringes of the cartoon war between Europe and Islam – is respect for the word. There is no case for the free propagation of lies designed to stir conflict and to humiliate individuals. The Austrians are right to want to punish a man who calls Auschwitz a fairy tale. If the evidence is strong enough, Irving should go straight to jail. Perhaps, after a year or two, he will cease to enjoy it.
The British in particular have turned a blind eye to Irving because they think they recognise a type: the eccentric who has gone a bit far, without the comic talent of P G Wodehouse, perhaps, but with a certain raffish charm. Irving began his historical career as a debunker, and we have always liked a bit of cheekiness in our narrative. There were certainly enough serious historians with reservations about Winston Churchill for Irving to have been treated with something approaching respect when he first laid into the wartime leader. But as Irving’s career moved towards the exculpation of Hitler, academic alarm bells, indeed gongs, should have been sounding across the quads.
Yet the establishment continued to regard him as something of a harmless chump until the moment he tipped into outright denial of the systematic extermination of the Jews. He enjoyed, for far too long, Narrenfreiheit – the conditional liberty of a court jester. Publishers became hard to find but he remained a rich source of entertainment at high table. How we chuckled at the news that Irving had built a wall through his apartment after a messy divorce! It is this misguided tolerance that has fuelled the cause of the freedom-of-expression-at-all-costs lobby; the very British idea that you can remove evil by mocking it.
The fact is, however, that Irving and his ilk have become dangerous. The interests of the European and North American Holocaust deniers – from Ernst Zundel (on trial in Germany) to the French “scholar” Robert Faurisson – are merging with those of the anti-Semitic ideologists of Arab nationalism and Iranian theocratic rule. If Irving walks free from the Wien-Josefstadt Prison next week he will soon be packing his suitcase for the Holocaust conference in Tehran.
The German authorities have already sensibly confiscated the passport of Horst Mahler – a neo-Nazi who has been advising Zundel on his courtroom defence – to prevent him travelling to Iran. Will we do the same for Irving? Of course not. Suspected English football hooligans will be under virtual house arrest during the World Cup, but Irving, as usual, will be free to travel anywhere. You know: freedom of speech.
The Irving-is-a-chump school describes him as a “fringe academic addressing a group of loopy far-right radicals wearing silly hats in a basement in Vienna”. Jailing the man is supposed to award him an undeserved importance. This is a truly parochial view, given that the problem is not strange, skinheaded Austrians in lederhosen (though I worry a bit about them, too) but bearded men in turbans who have never made their peace with Israel. The European input has always been important to the development of anti-Semitism in the Middle East. The widespread Arab hatred of Jews does not derive from the Koran: it stems from the need of national liberation movements for hate figures.
European anti-Semites have fed them from the start. Palestinian nationalists aligned themselves with Nazi Germany, identifying Zionism as the enemy. As the state of Israel took shape, Arab writers (borrowing heavily from European deniers) presented the Nazi gas chambers as a flimsy myth designed to justify a land-grab.
Stalinist anti-Zionism played its part, too: around 1950 Moscow started to churn out pamphlets in Arabic suggesting that Zionists had made common cause with the Nazis to engineer a holocaust and legitimise an Israeli state. This version is too tortured and too far-fetched for many Arabs nowadays, but it lingers in political discourse. The old fall-back for conspiracy theorists, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – an early 20th-century forgery claiming plans for a Jewish world takeover – sells well on the Arab street. The Hamas charter draws on these protocols. It claims that the Jews were behind the French revolution and behind the First World War in order to destroy the Islamic caliphate. “They were also behind the Second World War, because they gained immense profit out of trading in war materials and thus preparing for the establishment of their state.”
Little wonder Irving is something of a hero in the Arab world.
Readiness to deny the Holocaust is not the exclusive preserve, in Iran, of President Ahmadinejad. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s spiritual leader, pronounced recently: “There are documents which show a close co-operation of the Zionist with Nazi Germany and exaggerated, fabricated numbers on the Jewish Holocaust, aimed at stirring sympathy in public opinion.” The “scientific” congress in Tehran on the Holocaust is supposed to set that straight. And among the “scientists” – commitments in Austria permitting – will be David Irving, Bachelor of Science (incomplete), Imperial College London.
Once the Holocaust “fairy tale” (copyright David Irving, 1989) has been put to rest, the scientists can set about dismantling Israel’s moral right to have a state. And then, well, it’s over to the nuclear scientists to finish the job.
Irving may not have a hook, but there is not much else to distinguish him from other hate preachers who are being put behind bars. His intellect, his Britishness, his right to play the fool are not the issues. What counts is the malice that lurks behind his twisting of historical truth. At the London libel trial, counsel read out a poem composed by Irving for his daughter. It was supposed to be recited whenever “half-breed children are wheeled past”.
I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian.
Give me the man with the hook, any day. We are not making Irving into a martyr by jailing him. We (or the Austrians on our behalf) are making the world a little bit safer – and defining the limits of tolerance.
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