David Irving, and Holocaust Denial

[BisiBodi]

I know, serious subject at any time but it seems perhaps fitting on today of all days; the anniversary of the end of the war.
For clarity, this OP contains references to facisim, racism, anti-semitism and holocaust denial, but for those of you who want to confront such things it might be worth reading on.

There is a huge range of Holocaust Denial type behaviours but one of the most insidious is the angle of "revisionist history" and the prime example of this is David Irving.

When he first published his book 'The Destruction of Dresden' in 1963 it was received positively publicly as an attempt to recognise and document the horrible actions of the allied forces. Much is made of the huge death toll (which is now understood to be wildly inaccurate and appear to use statements by individuals as evidence that they say they never said) how late the action was in the war (now it seems to us with hindsight that Germany had already lost and was collapsing, but hindsight is 20/20) and how Dresden was a city of art and culture with no war purpose (110 factories with 50k industrial workers and a major transportation/rail hub).

In 1966, when challenged about his numbers for the death toll, he claimed he had since discovered that the document he had used was forged and he felt that the official German figure of 25k was probably more accurate.
Which is interesting as the book has had multiple editions since and while there have been some alterations in numbers the latest edition still carries a much inflated figure.

I am a contrary soul sometimes and I deliberately seek out content that will challenge my opinions, especially when I know the speaker to be lying or deliberately misleading their audience; if we don't know what they are saying or how they are saying it, how can we be prepared to challenge it?

Over the last two days I have watched two two hour plus interviews/speaking engagements featuring David Irving. And it is fascinating in a awful and macabre kind of way.
He wears a veneer of challenging authority with his research and I am sure if you are in the room with him and sympathetic to the agenda he is selling you lap it up. He references documents continually, pulls out specific passages in obscure archives that he claims only he has looked at. He throws names, numbers, ranks and structures around as he talks and for many it must appear to be a radical rethink of history with a compelling body of evidence that if only people would actually look at.

But it isn't.

First of all littered throughout his discussions are little barbs, sharp comments and slightly acidic references, even in his politeist public facing material. All dog whistles at the very least but when combined with his clear anti-Semitic and racist content when he thinks the audience is a little more controlled or sympathetic they are obvious. His retelling of a buying a car where he uses the N word which he claims was fine to say back then and then you realise he is talking about the mid 70s or his discussions of publication in the states and who controls it all.

And in order to support those opinions and to drive his revision of history there is all the twisting of facts and stats to try to present his very corrupt narrative. In one of those interviews he is speaking about the numbers of people killed in the Nazis "special operation" and then compares the number of children murdered according to official German communiqués to the number of children killed in Dresden in 2 hours which he says was much much higher than the German war crimes. He is lying. He knows he is lying. He has already corrected the record, he said, but he still likes to use the numbers he wants them to be for his narrative.

And while picking apart his lies won't change his mind when somebody else comes to you having heard these stories or being dragged towards this false narrative for me it has value to be able to say why, no, that is wrong and point them to the actual evidence. So sometimes we have to listen to a holocaust denier, which of course he denies he is, so that we can fight back.

Because I don't want to live in a world where people think conspiracy theories and far right historical rewriting are correct.
It kind of feels like I just did a mini ted talk weirdly - but now I am going to go and be more angry at David Irving and his clique.

Irving is awful and I am worried by a resurgence of right wing types who see themselves as intellectuals whitewashing his work as just 'challenging a narrative' rather than the harmful antisemitism that it is.

I'm Jewish and a descendent of survivors and yes, I do have some problems with the how the narratives of the Holocaust can be used sometimes, but what is not deniable is that a vast number of Jews and many other groups were murdered by the Nazis. It's pretty damn self evident that an entire branch of my family is missing because they killed almost all of my maternal grandfather's family, and many others have such gaps.

He knows exactly what he is doing

I had no idea he was still around - thought he’d rather gone to ground after Deborah Lipstadt and the trial.

I do pause when I see his books on people’s shelves. During the 70s and 80s he was taken quite seriously- not now I would hope

That's such an accurate description of his behaviour.

If you didn't follow up his references (and find them to be false) or didn't have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject to start with, his "truthiness" is very convincing.

He behaves as though what he is saying is true, makes a show of the trappings of genuine research and sources, etc. But it's not true. And he knows it's not true.

There's a plethora of these men and they're invariably men. They set themselves up as intellectuals and they misuse facts and references in order to support their agenda.

Their agenda is far right and they provide an alternative to red necks wrapped in flags. They intellectualise their bigotry.

IIRC the judge in the Irving vs Penguin case stated that in court, Irving repeatedly admitted - when directly challenged - to instances where his publications were wrong, and openly accepted the correct facts and figures. Yet after the argument had moved on, he simply returned to repeating the material he'd agreed was false.

This is where I learned the word "resiled".

We are Jewish and my grandfather was the youngest of 8 siblings. He was the only one to survive the war/Holocaust. His elder brothers disappeared during the war and were never found and his mother and 4 sisters were all killed by the Germans.

We know many many descendants of Holocaust survivors (as my mum has been working with them for 20+ years). Unfortunately, the world is heading in such a dangerous direction that it would not surprise me if history could repeat itself.

How weird. I watched the film Denial last night having never heard of David Irvine before and now here's a thread about him.

https://www.mishcon.com/news/truth-on-trial-in-the-age-of-disinformation-25-years-on-the-legacy-of-irving-v-deborah-lipstadt

I feel like I've seen an uptick in Holocause denial in recent years. It's scary.

I very much agree, @BisiBodi, that we should refute lies, rather than just ignore them.
On the American public interest television channel, PBS, there were a batch of WWII and Holocaust programs, and then wouldn't have dared to feature a Holocaust denier.

I think he is awful. I actually protested against him speaking my university in the 1990’s.

I think Dresden would be considered a war crime today but that doesn’t take away from the genocide that was committed against the Jewish people.

He's a blatant liar but his faux-intellectual 'arguments' give a gloss to his lies and he's made his living from spreading them to the credulous. Appalling man.

Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei is a Holocaust denier, too.