Shilling for Hitler 2

On the David Irving-Deborah Lipstadt libel trial as reported in Deborah Lipstadt's History on Trial

This article originally appeared in slightly different form in the publication formerly known as Salon in February 2005.

Let’s imagine that there was a writer who took as his subject World War II. And let’s suppose that because of his ability to amass and cite journals, transcripts, paperwork and all manner of documents, he gained a reputation as a meticulous researcher. Now let’s say that the conclusion the writer drew from all of his research was an unshakable conviction that World War II never happened. It was, he insists, a massive fraud, and he declares under oath, “No documents whatever show that World War II had ever happened.”

Now let’s allow things to get curiouser and curiouser.

Despite this writer’s farcical conclusion, historians of World War II, men who have spent their professional lives studying and documenting the war, still insist on the soundness of his research. It is possible, they say, to draw faulty conclusions from solid fact-finding. They do not bother themselves with the obvious question of how good the quality of any research can be if it can be used to support what is patently false. One historian says he and his colleagues should be able to admit the view of those with whom they may not be “intellectually akin.”

When journalists began writing about the work of this WWII denier, they refer to it as an alternate interpretation or a controversial point of view. One suggests that the writer has opened a useful dialogue around the question “Who decides what ‘happened’ in the first place?”

Eventually, a historian, aware of the esteem in which some of his colleagues hold this writer, agrees to put the writer’s famed research to an intensive examination. What he finds is a consistent pattern of deliberate misquotation, misinterpretation, and outright lies designed to support the writer’s conclusions. Anything that hasn’t supported those conclusions has been either discarded or altered. This historian concludes that “deceptions ... had remained an integral part of his working methods across the decades.” Even this does not deter other historians from continuing to profess admiration for the WWII denier. One even writes that the debunker possesses “an all-consuming knowledge of a vast body of material.” And another, apparently unaware of how he is defaming his profession, announces that no one “could have withstood [the] kind of scrutiny" that the historian had subjected the debunker to.

If you change “World War II” to “Holocaust” in the above paragraphs, you have a precis of how the Holocaust denier and fascist sympathizer David Irving has been both praised and damned. Except for that change, each of the quotes above has been made by or about Irving. The line about Irving's “all-consuming knowledge” was said by British military historian Sir John Keegan. The claim that no historian could have survived the scrutiny accorded Irving was made by another acclaimed British historian, Donald Cameron Watt.