Page 81 - All About History - Issue 53-17

Interview

t’s something of an irony that Professor assistant to help me but the work is mine — I don’t ensured the forthright academic has remained on
Deborah Lipstadt was forced to cross her depend on someone else,” explains Lipstadt. the frontline ever since. Not just against Holocaust
own line. Tasked to chart the evolution of a “Here I was having to depend on other people. denial and what she calls “soft denial”, rhetorical
fringe belief she had previously disregarded Thank God, they were great people and they were attempts to undermine the unique Jewish aspect of
I as a crackpot irrelevance, Lipstadt’s effort — tremendously committed to this. They were at the the Holocaust, but against any abuses of history.
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth top of their game, [solicitor] Anthony Julius and The words themselves may have the appearance
and Memory (1993) — remains a seminal text in [lawyer] Richard Rampton, they don’t come better of neologisms, but ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’
understanding not just the poisonous evolution than that, so I was entrusting my quote-unquote are nothing new — you can see their fingerprints
of Holocaust denial, but offers a template for fate in the courtroom to tremendously talented on the anti-Semitic ‘stab in the back’ myth that
dissecting all manner of historical distortion. people. But that still was difficult.” steered Germany toward National Socialism,
Throughout the book, Lipstadt explains If Irving could claim another pyrrhic victory, it’s or the crude innuendo swirling around Grigori
her refusal to directly engage with Holocaust this: after Lipstadt finished Denying the Holocaust, Rasputin that helped steer the creaking Russian
deniers, to take part in broadcast debates and she thought she was done with the whole torrid Empire toward revolution. The rise of populist anti-
normalise lies by treating them as a position in subject. Irving not only pulled her back in, but has establishment politics in both Europe and North
an argument that should be based on good faith
and truth. The British military historian-turned-
far right demagogue David Irving had other ideas,
challenging the accusation that he was a Holocaust
denier in court. By making Lipstadt the subject of
a libel case in the UK rather than her native US,
the burden of proof was shifted to the accused and
Lipstadt was forced to break the habit of a lifetime.
She had to engage or else, she says in her broad
Queens accent, “unleash a Pandora’s box of horrors”.
If she had settled or brushed it off, as some
encouraged her to do rather than give Irving and
his creed a platform, “he would have been able to
claim that his version of the Holocaust was valid. I
had no choice but to fight this guy”.
This bruising gladiatorial bout between truth
and deception at the High Court is the subject of
the recent film Denial. Though Lipstadt emerged
victorious and Irving was shorn of his phantom
respectability and cast into the wilderness, he had
forced her into exactly the sort of confrontation she
had been resolute about avoiding. “It was difficult
because as an academic, as a historian, I do my
own work. I do my research, I figure out what I’m In Denial, Irving is played by Timothy
going to write, I write it, maybe I have a research Spall and Lipstadt by Rachel Weisz

Irving sued Lipstadt for libel after she
published that he was a Holocaust denier

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