Christopher Hitchens (3/6) on David Irving, Bob Dole, and Bill Clinton (1996)

April 5, 1996 http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.... Watch the full program: http://thefilmarchived.blogspot.com/2010/08/christopher-hitchens-and-byron-yo...

David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English writer specializing in the military history of World War II. He is the author of 30 books on the subject, including The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Uprising! (1981), Churchill's War (1987), and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996).

His work on Nazi Germany became controversial because of a perceived sympathy for the Third Reich and antisemitism. He has associated with far right and neo-Nazi causes, famously seconding British Union of Fascists founder Oswald Mosley in a debate at University College London on immigration during his student days. He has been described as the most skillful preacher of Holocaust denial in the world today.

Irving's reputation as an historian was widely discredited after he brought an unsuccessful libel case against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 1996. The court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist, who "associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism," and that he had "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence."

Irving was arrested during a visit to Austria and convicted of "glorifying and identifying with the German Nazi Party" in a speech he made in 1989, a crime in that country since 1992 in the Holocaust denial section of the Verbotsgesetz law. He served a prison sentence there from February to December 2006.

In 1992, Irving signed a contract with Macmillan for a biography of Joseph Goebbels entitled Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. Following charges that Irving had selectively "edited" a recently discovered complete edition of Goebbels's diaries in Moscow, Macmillan cancelled the book deal. The decision by Sunday Times (who had bought the rights to serialized extracts from the diaries before Macmillan published them) in July 1992 to hire Irving as a translator of Goebbels's diary was criticised by historian Peter Pulzer, who argued that Irving, because of his views about the Third Reich, was not the best man for the job. Andrew Neil, the editor of the Sunday Times, called Irving "reprehensible", but defended hiring Irving because he was only a "transcribing technician". Pulzer argued that it absurd to describe Irving as a "mere technician" translating the diaries from German into English, asserting that a translator working on a "set of documents others had not seen, you took on the whole man." Irving had been most anxious to examine the diaries in Moscow after learning of their existence from Elke Fröhlich, a German historian who had once worked as a researcher for Irving.

During his time in Moscow, Irving was given access to two microfiche plates containing 90 pages of previously unknown pages of Goebbels's diaries. Though Irving was only supposed to translate the diaries, he removed the plates, smuggled them out of Russia, and copied them. Lipstadt expressed concern that Irving may have destroyed or damaged the plates, thereby depriving the world of knowledge of what was on those plates. During his libel action against Lipstadt, Irving admitted to "illicit" behavior during his time in Moscow but denied breaking any agreement. He took the plates out of the archives during his lunch break, wrapped them in cardbox and hid them to be recovered later. Irving claimed to have been "deeply ashamed" of his taking the plates, but argued that his behavior was justified because he had no formal agreement with the Russians and because the plates were deteriorating under inadequate storage conditions and their contents risked being permanently lost. Irving claimed that his arrangement with the Russian archivists was entirely on a cash basis. Although the trial judge found against Irving in most respects, he accepted Irving's defence that no agreement had been broken and the plates had not been put at risk.

In 1995, St. Martin's Press of New York City agreed to publish the Goebbels biography. By this time, Irving's financial state was such that he very much needed this book deal to be completed in order to pay down the massive arrears on his mortgage. In March 1996, following widespread protests over allegations of antisemitism in Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, St. Martin's cancelled the contract, and left Irving in a situation where he was desperate for both publicity and the need to re-establish his reputation as a historian.

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[adatheraider]

hitchens looking like he's got a columbian cold

[1gladdis]

@TheDwnndog It is true that David Irving makes a big thing of his archival work but that is only one aspect of being a historian. If you then use those sources selectively to fit your pre-conceived ideas, and to support an ideology, you are using history as an ideological tool, as well as misrepresenting the past, and I fear that those are not the proper tasks of the historian.

[01110110010110110101]

why was there no traces of cyanide on the 'gas chambers', a lack of death certs to account for the given numbers of jew deaths,no evidence for the sufficient amounts of coke which would be necessary to cremate that many corpses,

the british intelligence that deciphered the top secret nazi mails, they gave the numbers of deaths in the camps, and it was much less than what was claimed.

now what motive would the jews and zionists who run the world have for exaggerating the numbers? none right? etc

[Moionfire]

@bigderekkeene Revenge for what. You are the one who called americans brain dead for simply asking a question about a pronunciation. You insulted first, I responded.

[elrjames777]

@Moionfire Actually, either way of pronouncing Hampshire is perfectly acceptable: Hitchens is just effecting his preference for received pronunciation: the long I is more like standard English and more technically correct :-)

[cannotbebothered100]

@AceofDlamonds

Exactly. He's known for being good at getting information out of interviewees and for nitpicking as if those facts disprove the murder of the Jews which denial of his he oddly denies!

Having said that, the Austrian law against holocaust denial is stupid because if it happened (which of course it did) then prove it without the use of jurisdictional prohibitions on dissenting speech and if it didn't happen then denial shouldn't be illegal so how to justify that law?

[AceofDlamonds]

David Irving is barely a reputable historian although he makes good points in many areas. He's a writer and archive collector, nothing more. Superb interviewer perhaps. =)

[belzondium]

3:35 "they're like two haunches of the same rear end..."

laughing my ASS off !

[bigderekkeene]

@GuillemotWatcher my calling him/her a moron was just slight revenge. lol

[GuillemotWatcher]

@bigderekkeene I don't think he/she's a moron but you're spot on about the pronunciation. Americans often make the mistake about British accents where we have lots of contractions and short forms. Mind you how Hampshire gets abbreviated to HANTS I never discovered.