Deborah Lipstadt on the Lies of the Holocaust Deniers

This is a quarter of an hour TED talk by the respected historian, Deborah Lipstadt, on the lies of those, who would deny the Holocaust, and in particular David Irving and the coterie surrounding him. I think Lipstadt is a member of staff at the Holocaust Museum in America. In the 1990s she proved to be David Irving’s nemesis after he sued her for libel. Her testimony utterly wrecked whatever serious academic reputation Irving had, and the last thing I heard he was banged up in jail in Austria. That country, like Germany, has laws against denying the Holocaust. No doubt he’s there with others like him, trying to fend off the attentions of Wolfgang der Kannibaler.

Lipstadt begins her talk by saying that the first time she heard about Holocaust denial, she laughed, because the Holocaust is one of the best documented genocides in history. There is plentiful documentation, as well as eye-witness testimony from the victims and survivors, the Poles, who lived around the wretched death camps, the people in the towns and villages, who saw the Jews being rounded up and herded away, and lastly by those responsible for those terrible crimes. She makes the point that while they often claimed to have been forced to commit them – they were only following orders, or some such – they never denied that they had committed their monstrous crimes against humanity.

Then a few years later she was asked by academic colleagues to look into the milieu of Holocaust denial, and find out what was behind them. She laughed again. But she describes them as ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’. They don’t look like Nazis. They try to look like professional academics, adopting an air of respectable academic discourse. They have a slick academic journal, the Historical Review, they don’t describe themselves as Holocaust deniers, but ‘revisionists’, and they don’t wear Nazi uniforms.

But underneath all that it’s the same anti-Semitism, the same racism and the same Nazism.

So she wrote her book on them, and then a few years later got the news from her British publisher, Penguin, that she was being sued for libel by David Irving, whom she had named in her book. Irving certainly doesn’t believe in the Holocaust. At one point he said that more people had died in Bobby Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than in the camps. She was told by friends that she could just ignore the suit. She replied that she couldn’t do that, as English law, unlike the American and other legal systems, demanded that she prove her case. If she couldn’t, or simply didn’t try to fight her case in court, then by default Irving would have won. And if that happened, she couldn’t look another Holocaust survivor in the face.

She states that she won, not by proving it happened, but by disproving what Irving claimed happened. She did so by looking up every footnote Irving made, and looking at the source literature cited. And in every one – not just one or two, or even several instances, but every case – he alters and falsifies what these documents and books actually say. He leaves things out, inserts things that weren’t there, invents witnesses, alters the sequence of events. The tril ended with the judge ruling that Irving was indeed a liar and a Holocaust denier, but in the type of severely erudite and strong language members of the judiciary use when sending down villains.

Lipstadt says that the trial was important, because not only did it discredit Irving, it also discredited others like him. Because they’re all deeply interconnected. They cite him and he cites them, so that the evidence of Irving’s book effectively shows all of them to be liars.

She ends by making the important point that there is more at stake here than just Irving’s reputation. She talks about how we’ve moved into the supposed age of ‘fake news’ with the internet, and the way this has flattened the difference between reality and falsehoods. She also talks about how academic freedom has dictated that everything should be up for discussion. The internet has enabled the Nazis in the form of the Alt Right. But it isn’t the case that everything is only a matter of opinion. There are such things as facts, and there are some matters which should not be up for academic debate, like the Holocaust. Truth exists, and needs to be defended.

This last piece is an attack on radical postmodernism, which claims that there is no objective truth, only competing narratives. As for Irving, she says that he was slightly passe at the time he sued her. I got the impression that it was the opposite. Irving had appeared in the papers with his book doubting the scale of the Holocaust, and caused a massive controversy when he was invited to speak at the Oxford Union. The trial between her and Irving was filmed as Denial, with I think Timothy Spall as the odious Irving.

New SF Series Coming to Channel 4: Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams

Last Sunday I caught this trailer on Channel 4 for a new science fiction series, Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams.

The title is obviously an homage to Dick’s most famous work, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which became one of the great, classic SF films of all time, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

The series will consist of ten, self-contained episodes, each based on a different Dick short story, starring some of film and TV’s top actors. These include Timothy Spall, Steve Buscemi, Jack Raynor, Benedict Wong, Bryan Cranston, Essie Davis, Greg Kinnear, Anna Paquin, Richard Madden, Holliday Grainger, Anneika Rose, Mel Rodriguez, Vera Formiga, Annalisa Basso, Maura Tierney, Juno Temple and Janelle Monae.

One of the executive producers is Ronald D. Moore, who worked on the Star Trek series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space 9 and Voyage, as well as Battlestar Galactica and Outlander.

More information, including plot summaries, can be found on Channel 4’s website at http://www.channel4.com/info/press/news/philip-k-dicks-electric-dreams And Den of Geek, http://www.denofgeek.com/uk/tv/philip-k-dick-s-electric-dreams/50380/philip-k-dicks-electric-dreams-7-reasons-to-get-excited.

This looks really promising. Den of Geek say in their article that the anthology format already recalls Channel 4’s Black Mirror, and The Twilight Zone. I have to say I wasn’t drawn to watch Black Mirror. It was created by Charlie Brooker, and was an intelligent, dark examination of the dystopian elements of our media-saturated modern culture and its increasing reliance on information technology. However, it just wasn’t weird enough for me. Near future SF is great, but I also like spacecraft, aliens, ray guns and robots. And this promises to have some of them, at least.

Channel 4 have also produced another intelligent, critically SF series, Humans, based on the Swedish series, Real Humans. With Black Mirror, it seems Channel 4 is one of the leading broadcasters for creating intelligent, mature Science Fiction.

‘I’ Reviews New Film of Trial of David Irving

Also in today’s I newspaper was a review of Denial, a film about the trial of David Irving, the historian and holocaust denier in 1996. Irving was a highly controversial historian, who had written a book on the Third Reich claiming that Hitler didn’t know anything about it, along with a series of other distortions. He had already been at the centre of a storm of outrage after he was invited to give a speech explaining his views to the Oxford Union. I can’t remember all the details, but at the centre of the case was the battle between him and an American academic, Deborah Lipstadt, who attacked him for his distortion of history. It’s true that there is no direct evidence connecting Hitler to the planned, methodical extermination of 6 million Jews orchestrated by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. However, considering the sheer murderous venom with which Hitler describes the Jews in Mein Kampf and his speeches, and the sheer scale of the infamous Final Solution, it would have been impossible for him not to know about it. Historians have pointed out that the Holocaust was an integral part of Nazi policy, shown in the way that even when the Red Army was advancing on Germany through eastern Europe, the Nazis were still determined to carry on their mass murder despite the fact that it used resources which otherwise could have played a vital role in Germany’s defence. The Nazis were also very careful in their official communications to disguise the horror they were carrying out. They rarely talked about it directly. Instead, it was always referred to as ‘executive order such-and-such’, or by the euphemism that it was the relocation of the Jewish population to the east. There was even a vile propaganda film made for the German public, which showed happy Jews working away on their allotments in the new settlement the Fuhrer had provided for them. Except that it was all a sham, and after filming was finished, its subjects were loaded onto the cattle trucks and taken away for their deaths in the camps.

The film was written by the noted left-wing playwright, David Hare, and stars Rachel Weisz as Lipstadt. Weisz is probably better known for having appeared in the ‘Mummy’ movies back in the 1990s with Brendan Fraser, fighting undead ancient Egyptian horrors. Playing Irving is Timothy Spall, who has been in any number of TV shows over the years. He was a Brummie brickie in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, a villain, who had taken the form of a rat, in one of the Harry Potter movies. And most recently he appeared as a mad lord besotted with his prize-winning pet pig, in a comedy adapted from the books of P.G. Wodehouse.

Irving lost the trial, and Lipstadt and a series of other witnesses showed how he had ignored and distorted the evidence in order minimise the scale of the Holocaust. Irving left the court with any reputation for historical reliability destroyed as a Holocaust denier.