Review 21.16
01 December - 31 December, 1996

For someone whose right to free speech is supposedly impinged, we have seen an awful lot of neo-Nazi hipster David Irving in recent weeks. The view by the Australian media is overwhelmingly that Irving must be granted a visa, "in the name of free speech" as the Sydney Morning Herald editorialised. Nationally, commentators and media outlets have condemned Irving's views, but come forward with some version of Voltaire's dictum, "I disapprove of what you say but defend to the death your right to say it."

Which all sounds very noble, and perhaps rather predictable. It is hardly surprising as journalists, who trade in information - and champion themselves as guardians of the information and oversight necessary for effective democracy - view free speech as an imperative and themselves its ultimate defenders. But noble as the sentiment of defending the democratic rights even of one's political enemies is, the sad reality is that few media commentators have recognised the painfully obvious; Voltaire's defence of free speech has absolutely nothing to do with the case of Mr Irving.

Mr Irving is a foreigner who applied for a visa to visit Australia in order to promote his books, his views and whatever else becomes opportune at the time. There is not, and never has been, any "right" to a visa to Australia. Indeed, to receive one is a privilege; who obtains one is determined by regulations which ensure no harm or danger comes to the community. Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock concluded that Mr Irving was not of good character, based on Irving's legal record. According to the Minister, consideration was given to the fact that Irving had been convicted of criminal defamation in Germany, deported from Canada after a hearing during which the judge ruled that Irving had lied under oath, expelled from Germany in 1993 after entering that country secretly and illegally, and sentenced to three months in prison in Britain for contempt of court. Not the best Collins Street CV. Mr Irving is obviously quite prepared to flaunt the law and Mr Ruddock was correct when he stated in regard to his decision that, "Applicants with comparable criminal records are routinely refused by my department, consistent with the law."

Behind Ruddock's statement stands the weight of several Federal Court judgements against previous Irving efforts to overturn the decision of the former Immigration Minister, who barred Irving's entry to Australia on the same grounds. Following the Labor Government's 1994 refusal to grant him a visa Irving appealed to the Federal Court. Not only did he lose his appeal in August 1995, and then again in 1996, but he had costs awarded against him. Irving chewed up everyone's precious time. But time is money - even in the colonial empire's far-flung capitalist provinces, and the Australian Solicitor-General slapped Mr Irving with a bill for $50,000. Unfortunately, Mr Irving isn't forthcoming with the moolah. Repeated requests from the Australian Government Solicitor's office for Irving to pay up have so far been ignored. But the Federal Government, already embarking on national austerity measures is not about to give some whining goose-stepping Englishman a free ride. They have returned to the courts. Mr Irving looks as though he will soon find himself declared "in debt to the Commonwealth". Which means Peter Costello is coming to collect....

Until the Minister's decision, David Irving stormed Australia's media. If Hitler had a press secretary, the guy was a dud. Irving is a shooin for the job next time around. In recent weeks, he has appeared on both Network 7's Witness and Today Tonight, national current affair programs as well as Network 9's Today Show, various radio programs, including the ABC's popular national AM program, and Sydney's 2GB, where he appeared not once but twice - so happy were they to have him back. In the quality Melbourne daily, Irving was given the opinion pages to present his views. "The gas chamber shown to visitors at the former Auschwitz concentration camp is a fake built after the war", he trumpeted unchallenged across the opinion pages of the respected Melbourne Age. He has been interviewed by almost every other major daily paper on successive occasions. His Australian publishers report massive sales and unprecedented demand for his books. In fact after Pauline Hanson, Irving topped the national coverage for the month. It is hard to think of any other figure provided with a greater opportunity to put their views to the Australian public.

All of which makes the notion that Australians have been denied the opportunity to hear Irving's views, or that his ability to express his repugnant opinions have been impaired, seem rather bemusing. If anything, his rantings have been difficult to avoid.

It is true that much of what Mr Irving has had to say with his vast media access will bring him few fans. His claims that the only purpose for women is reproduction and his opposition to them having jobs or delivering the news can have won him few friends among half of the population. And some of his other claims also border on the bizarre.

When told his previous visa application had been followed by Synagogue daubings, including one case where the slogan painted was "Irving was here - six million lies," Irving's response was "can I be extreme enough to suggest that there were certain people who had an interest in daubing synagogues with my name in order to keep me out?" During an interview on Today Tonight Network 7, Irving suggested that many "so-called" Holocaust survivors were, in fact, faking it. "There's a large number of people going around at the moment claiming to be Holocaust survivors, and they must run into several millions by now. The world is full of Holocaust survivors and this presents me with a logical puzzle. If the Nazis had the task - as we're told of exterminating every Jew they got their hands on, how come the world is so full of Holocaust survivors now? Well the answer is of course it's a very good thing to be a Holocaust survivor at present. They're much in demand."

Still, Irving did receive some positive exposure from his media encounters. Radio 2GB's Ron Casey was the worst case in point. Rather than confront Irving with his racist and anti-Semitic record or his history of association with German neo-Nazi groups, Casey told listeners that Irving sounded "so reasonable" and fawningly thanked Irving for being so "very kind" with his time. The only friction between Casey and Irving occurred when Irving made disparaging remarks about Germans with respect to his criminal conviction in Germany, and Casey sprung to the defence of his German wife.

Similarly, the Sunday Times of Perth published an almost wholly sympathetic article titled, "The man the Jews try to silence." Uncritically, it used Irving's own phrase to describe Jews as, "the traditional enemies of the truth". The article, by Karen Phillip, unquestioningly accepted Irving's latest propaganda line that he is being persecuted by these unnamed enemies, and cites as corroboration Murray Pope, Irving's Australian publisher and a longtime League of Rights activist.

The Age, following up on their Irving opinion piece reprinted a six month old article from Vanity Fair by controversial writer Christopher Hitchens, extolling Irving's virtues as an historian and arguing that Irving had never called the Holocaust a hoax.

The truth of course is that Irving repeatedly describes the Holocaust as a "blood lie", and told the London Independent that "It's going to be a hot 12 months, but at the end of it, the gas chamber legend will have vanished once and for all." During an address to the London Clarendon Club - a video of which the Review has obtained - he claimed, "If you look at my work on Hitler, only just published, you won't find the Holocaust mentioned in even one line. Not even a footnote. Why should we? If something didn't happen then you don't even dignify it with a footnote". In their rush to support their editorial policy of freedom of speech, The Age ran stories that incorrectly mitigated Irving's excesses.

And yet even when interviewers attempt to challenge Irving, they are tangled in a barrage of half truths and distortions. Irving's latest line to the press has been to assert that the gas chambers at Auschwitz on display to tourists were rebuilt and is therefore evidence of a fabrication. When Irving is asked about his criminal convictions in Germany, he responds that he was only convicted because of this claim, which he insists is true. "I said one sentence which was a criminal offence in Germany... The sentence was, 'The gas chamber in Auschwitz, which they show to the tourists is a fake built after the war by the Poles.'" Radio 2GB (November 8).

But that's not what Mr Irving was convicted for. In the Munich Court judgement dated May 8 1992, the charge is clearly laid out. The conviction is for "slander concomitant with the disparagement of the memory of deceased persons," a crime under German Federal law.

Irving's convictions for defaming the dead resulted from a statement, made at a neo-Nazi rally in Munich: "By now we know - and I'm sure I don't need to point this out as anything more than an aside - that there were never any gas chambers at Auschwitz... We believe that, just as the gas chambers which the Americans put up here in Dachau in the first few days after the war were fakes, those gas chambers which tourists can now sight-see in Auschwitz were set up by Polish authorities after the Second World War... Since, after all, the German taxpayers have had to shell out no less than 15 billion Deutschmarks as penalty for Auschwitz... for a fake."

The statement for which he was convicted is a lot more serious than what Irving tells the Australian press. But it is also true that Mr Irving's current claim about the "fake" gas chamber is a semantic game he plays with what is a half-truth, typical of his standards of scholarship. The story he tries to make into an intellectual "coup" is quite simple and nothing new.

Auschwitz is the name of a largish town in southern Poland, located at a rail juncture. When the Nazis took Poland in 1939, there was a Polish army barracks there which was converted into a slave labour camp, at first mostly for captured Poles. In 1941, a decision was made to build, a few kilometres from the original Auschwitz camp, a giant extermination-slave labour complex called Birkenau, capable of housing over 200,000 inmates, and with five huge gas chambers and a crematorium capable of burning 2-3 corpses per minute. This was eventually to be the centrepiece of the Nazi's final solution plans, but the crematoria and gas chambers were not completed until 1943. In the meantime, a smaller gas chamber existed at the neighbouring Auschwitz camp. But when the much larger Birkenau gas chambers began operating, this was no longer needed and it was converted into a storeroom, which required some alterations in the internal walls.

After the war, this small gas chamber, at the Auschwitz part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, was renovated according to the original Nazi plans, with the altered walls restored, and this is clearly explained to visitors . This is the truth of Mr Irving's revelations about a "fake gas chamber," "admitted" by the Polish government. Repeatedly his views are put forth, and with no-one to effectively rebut them, Irving has undoubtedly scored some points for his pernicious propaganda, designed to exonerate Nazism.

The media also gave Irving another free ride on his academic credentials. Despite repeated advice to the contrary, ABC Radio, the Adelaide Advertiser, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Australian insisted on referring to Mr Irving as "Dr Irving." The record should be set straight; Irving doesn't have a doctorate, Irving doesn't have any tertiary qualification at all. Irving did study at the University of London for a few years in the late 50s, moving from a program in Arts to Science, then English. He dropped out of all his courses. Even Irving concedes this.

Interviewed on the Derryn Hinch program (Radio 2GB), Irving bragged about the number of libel writs he had issued to his critics. When Hinch confronted him with the contradiction between ostensibly pleading freedom of speech and issuing libel writs to silence critics, Irving responded, "Well freedom of speech doesn't mean to say freedom to go round lying about people." The irony couldn't have been greater. The tactic was re-employed against Prime Minister John Howard, who Irving is currently threatening to sue after Howard described him as a "crackpot historian" and a "nutter".

In fact, part of the whole free speech illusion has been the result of an erroneous linguistic convention. Refusing Irving a visa has been universally referred to as a "ban", which means a prohibition or proscription. A ban does indeed sound undemocratic; one bans newspapers or opposition parties to silence them. But Mr Irving has neither been banned nor silenced. He requested a visa to visit and his request was denied. There is no "prohibition" on Mr. Irving, on his views, nor on any right he has. He sought a privilege, a visa, and did not get it. He has not been declared forever forbidden from Australia; things may change, his rabble rousing and incitement may abate, a later application may be successful. To argue that someone's free speech has been violated because they were not granted a specific travel permit is incorrect.

In reality, the only argument on free speech grounds that can be made in Irving's case is the very dangerous one hinted at in an editorial by the Sydney Morning Herald. The Herald admits that the Immigration Minister, Mr Ruddock is within his discretionary rights to refuse Irving a visa, but argues he "should have" exercised that discretion "the other way" and waived the character requirements, so allowing Irving to enter. Why? Because Irving, (as well as Gerry Adams) while controversial, "are part of important debates on issues which are of great public interest to Australia. There are strong reason why, in the name of free speech, visas should have been issued to them both."

The Herald thus comes very close to suggesting, that there is an important public debate which needs to be had in Australia about the truth or otherwise of the Holocaust. It is an extremely corrosive and dangerous argument - the fact that the Herald comes so close to making it is frightening.

This argument no longer simply says Irving has the right to say what he wants, based on essential human rights in a democracy, but that his ideas are so important we should all listen to them, that they "enliven the debate." Despite the fact that the Holocaust is probably the best established event in 20th century history, that denying it is akin to denying that the ANZACS were at Gallipoli (imagine the outcry!), what this argument asserts is that Holocaust denial is such an important point of view, we not only have to allow it, we have to put it on a pedestal in the name of "intellectual diversity" and go out of our way to make sure everyone is exposed to it. We have to let Irving in, despite the fact that any person with a comparable record would not get a visa, specifically because of his "important" views and an important "public interest" debate in Australia.

This is essentially what Irving and other deniers want. They cannot disprove the Holocaust, because it happened. But they can create doubt. They can make the Holocaust at least deniable, a subject of debate among the public at large, if not among academic experts, by attaining headlines about the "Holocaust Debate" and playing intellectual games with half truths, as Irving does. And this is what the Sydney Morning Herald endorsed in its editorial. Which is curious, because they do not advocate a debate about whether or not the earth is flat.

Similarily, Ron Casey on Radio 2GB falls into the same trap as illustrated by this on air exchange with Irving:

CASEY: Is it possible in these death camps for six million people to have been cremated, to have been killed in gas chambers, is it possible physically in terms of - and I hate to put it like this - but to put these people through the process of killing and disposing - is it possible in the time span of the years of the holocaust for it to have happened?

IRVING: Well, that's where you get down to the nitty gritty of it and our opponents don't want the discussion reduced to this scientific level at all.

CASEY: Look you sound so reasonable about it all to me that I am wondering if you make these claims, and if your claims are open to discussion it's beyond me why you're not allowed into Australia to be able to debate it... Now you can't come to Australia, the way to do it might be with a satellite interview so as the rest of the world can make up its mind about what exactly is the answer. Because as it is now all we've got is doubts.

IRVING: I agree. And that's one reason why they build these holocaust museums because they are so cleverly put together to convince the sceptics and they build the holocaust museums with the one hand and every town and city around the world, now, and on the other hand they keep the doubting Thomas's like myself, the historians who have actually been in the Nazi archives, they keep us out so we can't talk.

Unfortunately, it is too easy for people to slip into denial because the Holocaust is such a horrifying event in human history; one which destroys many of the positive illusions about human nature which most of us find important to our peace of mind. It would be more comfortable if the Holocaust hadn't happened; to tell people that they have an option; they can believe it or not, as they choose, then one should not be surprised if many chose not to believe it, regardless of the evidence.

And if people can legitimately deny or even question whether or not the Holocaust happened, even in their own minds, the excesses of the most devastating fascist regime of the twentieth century are successfully diminished. Game, set and match to the intellectuals behind the re-emergence of neo-Nazism.