Free History + Future

[blackbear]

Holocaust Historian David Irving Released From Prison: His First Interview From The Outside
By David Irving as told to Orato Editor Heather Wallace – January 5, 2007

What follows is an article contributed by controversial figure David Irving; The views, opinions, beliefs and all other material are not those of Orato or any of its affiliates, assigns or employees.

The recent Holocaust Denial Conference, hosted by Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, met with outrage from world leaders. Attendees included many of the world’s most notorious Holocaust denial figures, such as former KuKluxKlan Imperial Wizard David Duke. It cast doubt on what most historians accept as incontrovertible fact: that the Nazis systematically executed 6 million Jewish people in World War II. Controversial historian David Irving wasn’t at the conference, and could not attend even if he was invited – he was serving the final days of a jail term in Austria for violating that country’s laws prohibiting Holocaust denial. Irving has always maintained he is a legitimate historian and laws against Holocaust denial violate free speech and inhibit scholarship. His critics reply that what he calls scholarship is merely thinly veiled anti-Semitism.

Here, in his first interview since he was released December 21, 2006, Irving comments on the Tehran conference. He also talks about being imprisoned for his beliefs, saying the worst thing was being denied a pen and paper and being away from his daughter. Despite the ongoing threat of new charges, Irving remains passionate and vocal about his right to choose how he writes his history and discusses how his work will be viewed by generations to come.

Everybody has crossroads in their lives where they have the alternative of taking the right-hand fork or the left-hand fork. There have been several such forks in my life, and I’ve always taken the right track. But, looking back I can see turnings that I shouldn’t have taken. However, when I started to write my Hitler book, it was the most important turning I took. It was back in 1964 when I decided to write the biography of Adolf Hitler.

I decided to write that biography the way I’ve written all my books, which is based entirely on original, primary sources. If you write from primary sources, then you are bound to come up with a different picture and a different perspective than historians who just copy what other historians have written.

In certain respects, it has become very difficult to write Real History. I call it Real History with a capital ‘R,’ and it’s difficult to write Real History because there is legislation against it in different countries. The legislation is different in the different countries, but it always has the same purpose. In France, for example, the legislation makes it a criminal offense to dispute the history that was laid down in the Nuremburg trial in 1945. In Germany, the law is called Defaming the Memory of the Dead, and in Austria, the law is called The Reactivation of the Nazi Party. The general effect is to make it very difficult to write Real History about the Holocaust.

The Holocaust has been chiseled in stone, and anybody who wants to have a closer look at that stone is running the risk of being sentenced. In Austria this last year, they’ve already had 35 people put on trial for this particular offense and I think only 12 were acquitted. Here we are 60 years after the end of World War II and people are still being sent to prison for what was created at the time. It’s completely wrong. If you looking at a historical object like the Holocaust, you have to have the right to open the package. You don’t have to buy the whole package that’s put in the shop window.

The controversy works against you. If you’re a German or an Austrian historian, you’re subjected to these laws, and it’s going to damage your credibility. The consensus is that it’s not worth the paper it’s written on because the other point of view is not being heard. At the personal level of course, it’s not very fun to spend 400 days in solitary confinement away from your family. For me of course, it’s been ruinous. It’s cost me about 300,000 or 400,000 Euros in lost revenue and legal expenses for all the damage it’s done. We lost our home. It shouldn’t be necessary. It should be possible to write free history. I envy the United States where you don’t have this kind of problem.

I wasn’t impressed by the Tehran Holocaust Denial Conference. I read about it in the paper; I was still in prison of course. I wasn’t invited and I wouldn’t have attended if I had been invited. I don’t think it’s useful to have a conference about the Holocaust in the Arab world. It just sends the wrong message. It’s turning it into geo politics instead of history. The newspaper accounts were not very impressive. There was no attempt to get balance. The pro-Holocaust historians, if I can call them that, didn’t attempt to get balance either. They held a simultaneous conference in Berlin, which was rather amusing - that they had to hold a simultaneous conference. They made no attempt to invite Real Historians, who take a different view on certain matters. They’re all just treading down the same route and making no real attempt to think independently.

I think independently. For example, I spent the last eight years researching Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler and it’s become increasingly evident to me that he was the principal architect of the Holocaust along with Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister and Martin Bormann, the Nazi Party secretary. They kept Hitler in the dark. You didn’t hear what I said? “They kept Hitler in the dark about the Holocaust.”

What am I most passionate about? My reputation, which has come under foul attack ever since 1959. It’s very difficult because the media are in the hands of my enemies. And they can write about me what they want. I tried to defend my reputation in the year 2000 with a huge libel action in England. It was disastrous because my enemies poured 13 million dollars into the High Court in London to defend and help the person I was suing. You don’t get justice like that when one person is going into court with an empty bank account and no lawyers and the other side has 13 million dollars backing them. It’s a very one-sided battle it seems. It’s like David and Goliath, but sometimes David loses.

I’m a historian. Over the doorway of the United States National Archives building in Washington, D.C., is the inscription, “What Is Past Is Prologue.” If you study the past in depth, you have a pretty good estimate of what going to happen in the future. I remember I was in East Berlin at the time of the last days of the East German government…I was working in the archives of East Germany, and I held a press conference on the 9th of October, 1989 in which I predicted within 12 months, Germany would be reunited. I was correct. To the date, the 9th of October, 12 months later, Germany was reunited. People asked me afterwards how I managed to estimate it so accurately where nobody and no Germans or historians anywhere considered it even remotely possible. If you study the past, you have a good feel for the future.

If you call yourself a writer, nobody can sneer. If you call yourself a historian, all those clowns come along and say, “He’s got no degree, never studied history.” Nor did Thucydides, Churchill, Walter Laquer, Gibbon (of Decline and Fall)…My books about history are the ones that will still be around in 100 years from now, long after I’m dead and gone. Scholars will be told, ‘If you want to find out about the Nazi period, then the only true version, the only true book to read, is a book by David Irving.’

Quite definitely if I had a second chance at life, I would do things differently. There are turnings I wouldn’t have taken. Some I had to take because I’m entirely self-supported. I don’t have academic backing, I don’t have university backing, I don’t have family money. I have to support everything I do in life. It’s obligatory to take wrong turnings unfortunately.

I don’t think you can avoid going to prison. I didn’t expect to go to prison this time because I had been to Austria three or four times in the 1990s. The police examined my passport very closely for fifteen minutes at the frontiers, and they didn’t do anything, so I assumed the charges against me had been dropped. They were purely political. So, you took the risk you had to take. Unfortunately, the Austrian government told me how to write my history.

The worst part about being in prison was being away from family; away from my little girl - And the knowledge that they were suffering very seriously. That was very difficult. And the first weeks are very difficult before you get set up with writing paper and pens and ink. The prison authorities wouldn’t let me have ink to start with. The prison officers were very, very friendly, but they wouldn’t let me have ink or paper. When you’re a writer, you must have ink and paper; otherwise you’re going to go crazy. But eventually I got set up and I wrote 4,000 pages in handwriting in the time I was there. I have them with me now – 2,000 pages on memoirs and 2,000 on Himmler. It wasn’t wasted time, but I had to pay $600 in excess baggage to transport it.

The best part about being out of prison is access to the Internet, access to the archives. Free access. This is what you miss. You don’t like being locked up, but I persuaded myself that the prison was locking the outside world out. They were doing me a favor. It was a psychological trick I played. An ideal condition for a writer is being locked in a cell. I used to say to the guards when they closed the door, “Thank you.”

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=5800

Democracy R Us 4 U ......Central Bank Specialist...Liberals 4 democracy in Iran.......My Arse they do...........

[MadgeB]

Never mind the no-planers and the like - what the hell are we giving space to Nazis for? It's the anti-semitic tendency that scares me in this movement.


I've just seen that this Remo Conscious video has been posted before, but here (again) is what we need - it's great!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=602609809942831761&sourceid=do cidfeed&hl=en

[blackcat]

[MadgeB]

Well it’s pretty obvious from the post I was replying to. I think there’s a tendency for some anti-Zionists to get ‘suckered’ into Holocaust denial (Ahmadinejad may be one) but Irving knows what he’s doing - he’s a seasoned propagandist for the far-right.

[ian neal]

I think the case that Irving is a racist and anti-jewish is pretty overwhelming and I personally want nothing to with him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving

If you want to expose the crimes of the zionists sources such as this a far better bet

www.jewsagainstzionism. com
www.jewsagainstzionism.org

etc...........

[blackcat]

I have heard Irving say repeatedly that he does not deny that the Holocaust happened but questions various aspects of what are alleged to have happened as well as the numbers of deaths. When Humphreys interviewed Irving on the Today programme last week Irving objected to Humphreys calling him a "Holocaust Denier" but to no avail. He just carried on anyway. What is wrong with questioning historical accounts? Why is the Holocaust beyond question to the point that anyone who does ask questions is labelled anti-Semitic and a Holocaust denier? Passing laws to imprison people who ask such questions is a brazen denial of human rights. Where did the term Holocaust come from suddenly anyway? It never existed until the 1980s. What was it for the previous thirty years? Where is the equivalent for the massacre of 20 million Russians or even more Chinese during world war two? What about five million Poles? Where is the equivalent "Holocaust Memorial Day" for them? Where are all the museums in the USA and elswewhere for those? In short - what is so special about the Jews? Why do we not have laws to imprison anyone who questions the deaths of Russians or Poles? To put it another way - why do so many people find it compelling to question details of the "Holocaust"? Could it possibly be that there is so much that does not add up?

I think it is far more pressing to concern ourselves with a country actually being wiped off the map (Palestine) and its people murdered and driven out, than to concern ourselves with alleged threats made to wipe out Israel. The ongoing slaughter of Muslims and Arabs is far more of a concern than the supposed threat they pose to us or Israel. The threat made by Israel to make a nucllear strike against Iran is far more dangerous than Iran's alleged wish to acquire weapons that Israel already possesses.

The idea that to criticise Israel/Zionism is anti-Semitic is exactly what is generated by the Holocaust industry, and why they protect it so assiduously. It is not. Jewish behaviour is not beyond criticism.

[MadgeB]

Blackcat - For starters, Irving is a LIAR and usually disguises his views except when addressing neo-nazi groups. See http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/index.php?link=template&story=79
(and thanks to Ian for the other links).

I think the humanist/socialist attitude would be to say that there [u]should[/u] be recognition of genocide perpetrated on other peoples (moving towards ending all genocide) - not that there [u]shouldn’t[/u] be recognition of genocide perpetrated on Jews. It’s not helpful to set freedom for Palestine in opposition to the revision of history by racists. The Holocaust happened - since that time a [u]section[/u] of Jewish opinion has used it as justification for a racist ideology of their own. These things need to be separated.

You say: ‘Jewish behaviour is not beyond criticism’ – don’t you see that this implies ‘Jews’ behave the same way, which is a racist idea? Why not specify the common ideology of those Jews whose behaviour you hate, and which is not only not beyond criticism but is beyond acceptability? That ideology is known as Zionism, and it needs to be named if we’re not to play into the hands of the right. Then we may have the chance to achieve freedom for Palestine, as Ahmadinejad says and as many Jewish people desire. The Irvings of this world won't be any help in that or in bringing the neocons to account.

[wepmob2000]

[Howie]

If Irving was crazy (like the no planers), they would simply produce the evidence to prove him wrong, instead they jail him.

[blackcat]

[John White]

This thread is a clear breach of the forum guidlines. Therefore, its locked down as of NOW: any duplicate will be deleted

Discussion of this kind of material is perfectly acceptable at a forum like www.illusionsforum.com

Regards to all, JW