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Irving Speaks...
by Marc Moran
Several nights ago I found myself in the company of an eclectic group of men
and women who had gathered to listen to an authority on the Second World War
and its leaders. It was, to say the very least, an unusual evening.
David Irving, one of the world's foremost authorities on Adolph
Hitler, has recently found himself touring to promote the recently reissued
volume Hitler's War -- not in the halls of academia, in packed houses
filled with earnest students and learned professors, but rather in the
basements of seldom-used gathering halls across the United States under
strict security. The reasons for this unusual career move are due not to any
flaws in the works of Mr. Irving, but rather to the way in which he has
chosen to relate the information he has painstakingly gathered from a
multitude of sources, both in first-hand interviews and documentary
evidence.
Mr. Irving has become a persona non grata in the literary world and a target for the smear campaigns of the Jew-controlled media. His scholarly
research has been routinely dismissed as "revisionism" and "anti-Semitism,"
despite the fact that he provides plenty of documentary evidence to the
contrary. After reading Hitler's War I found myself better informed about certain details of the Reich, yet filled with other questions that have yet to be answered. If Mr. Irving's intention was to deflect criticism of Adolph Hitler and deny the murder of Jews by the agents of Nazi Germany, he has failed miserably. If, however, his intention was to explore certain
uncharted areas of the historic record, this volume is a rousing success.
Free from the constraints of rigid, dogmatic ideology, this author has
proven that the facts often speak for themselves.
Mr. Irving admitted quite early in his speech that he doesn't "read books,"
but rather relies heavily on primary resources for his research.
"If you take from one book, it's considered plagiarism. If you take from two
books, it's research. Three books, it is deep research," quipped Mr. Irving,
humorously ribbing such luminaries as Steven Ambrose. He did not define what
his heavily researched volumes would qualify as, but from the impact his
words had on the audience, the definition I would give it would be this:
compelling.
Unlike the authors of numerous articles I have read about Mr. Irving, I
found him to be much less of an "anti-Semite" and "revisionist" than I
originally expected. He made no claims that the events of the Hitler regime
did not occur, as some have complained, but rather that some of those events
have been painted with a broad brush, rendering many details obscure and
omitting others altogether. The complete picture remains elusive and the
lessons to be learned too difficult to assess due to their cursory treatment
by mainstream historians.
I use a story from my own life to make an analogy: In the summer of 1969 my family attended a 4th of July barbeque in nearby neighborhood. As was the custom in those days, the adults gathered together while the children went off to play in the fields and woods. One of the daughters of my parents' friends was an especially unpleasant girl, overweight, a head taller than the boys in her class, and particularly cruel in her teasing of those who did not please her. I was, for some reason unknown to me, the object of her scorn and derision on that day. She made all kinds of nasty comments about my clothes, my haircut, and my physical appearance. I tried to ignore her, tried to stay out of her way and under her radar, as they say.
I have no idea what prompted her attack, but one moment I was standing with
friends under the trees and the next moment she had thrown a cherry Slurpee
right into my face and onto the front of my shirt. The shirt, I still
remember, was light yellow with the word Chicago' written across the front
of it.
I will admit now that what I did next was wrong. It is an act that I have
never repeated, not once in my life since that day. I punched that girl right in the face, as hard as I could. She screamed and ran from the woods holding her bloody nose with both of her chubby, oversized hands. I don't recall what I said to the boys I was standing with or if they said anything to me. The only thing I remember clearly was the feeling of a large hand, my father's, clamping down on my scrawny, nine-year-old shoulder. My father spun me around and with his open hand he slapped me across the face as hard as he could.
This was over thirty years ago, but I have never forgotten that incident. I
can still remember the ringing in my ears, the hot stinging tears, the shame
of being struck in front of my friends by my own father for something I
thought was justified. My father grabbed me with a vise-like grip and
marched me to our car, parked beneath a large tree on the edge of the field
where the barbeque was going on. He pushed me inside, rolled down the
windows and slammed the door of the car. He told me to stay there and I did.
It was dark by the time my parents came back to the car and when they got in
I was all cried out. I was hurt and humiliated, but I was with my parents
again and that was all that mattered. On the way home in the dark we drove
by a lumber yard that had caught fire when some errant fireworks landed in
the middle of the kiln-dried wood and my father pulled the car over to let
us watch as the firemen pulled hoses and sprayed the roaring conflagration
with plumes of water.
I do not recall my father or my mother ever talking about that episode
again. I know that I never brought it up and I understood the unwritten text
of that incident even if my father never articulated it. You don't hit
girls. Never, under any circumstances, was a female to be treated with
equity, at least in regards to physical assault. She attacked me, but the
real crime was that I retaliated against a protected class of person. There
was no inquiry, no fact finding, no trial and no testimony needed. All of
the evidence had been taken into account when she showed up among the adults
with a bloody nose. Justice was the boxing of my ears and my exile from the
celebration of others.
On a camping trip with my father several years ago the story came up. I
don't remember the context, or the line of discussion that led us to that
recollection, but my father listened, one adult to another, to the childhood
memory of a long forgotten event. My father did not remember the incident,
although he did remember the barbeque and the fire at the lumberyard. He was
unsettled by my story and he asked me why I never told him about the
unprovoked attack I had suffered.
"You never asked." I said.
This has been the biggest hurdle for anyone who seeks answers to what
exactly happened in Germany during the period of the Third Reich. The
victors wrote the history and the losers were hustled off the world stage,
their ears boxed, to sit quietly waiting for readmittance into the
civilized world. Was there a justifiable reason for the actions of millions
of Germans or was theirs an act of utterly unacceptable racial hatred and
violence directed at an innocent victim? Are the answers already known to
the world or are there untold stories of relevance that may perhaps mitigate
the actions of a conquered foe? Should we ask the questions that dare to be
asked, or should we, as obedient children allow ourselves to be punished for
the crimes of others and keep our witness to ourselves?
And so it was with Mr. Irving.
Mr. Irving doesn't appear to be any more intelligent or sophisticated or
connected than anyone else in his field. What he appears to be is
persistent, and utterly fearless of the evidence he uncovers. He is one of
those rare men who, despite the repercussions of his actions, would prefer
to know the truth than to walk in darkness. While recounting an interview
with a Hitler associate, Dr. Giesing, Mr. Irving recalled that this
individual had in his possession first-hand documents that had, until that
interview, never been uncovered. Mr. Irving, knowing that the Doctor had
gone through the Nuremberg trials asked why they had never shared this
information with others.
The response?
"You were the first to ask."
And therein lies the genius behind Mr. Irving and his work. He asks the
right questions and does not shy away from the answers. I suspect that if
Mr. Irving came across a document in the Führer's own
hand that detailed the plan for a "Final Solution,"
he would be the first to disclose it.
All of us, every American with an IQ above 75, know who Adolph Hitler is
and what he did during that period known as the Third Reich. We have all
seen the movies and the mini-series and read a book or two, whether fiction
or biography, but how many of those have presented anything other than a
monochromatic caricature of a bedeviled little man, chewing carpets and
ordering the systematic extermination of millions of people because of their
religion?
How much of what we have learned is accurate? Will we ever know? Should we
even be allowed to ask these questions or should we, in our benevolence
close the books on this chapter and mark it "Case Closed"?
I would suggest that if our interest is in preventing another "Holocaust,"
we might want to investigate at greater length the actual reasons that
precipitated such an event. I may not know everything about
mankind, but I
know one thing: it is nearly impossible to motivate an entire nation to do
anything good for itself, never mind something horrific and self-destructive.
In this country less than 50% of those who qualify, vote for the candidate
of their choice
in a presidential election. How is it that Adolph Hitler was
able to rouse a nation from depression and send it into a world conflict if
those who followed had no motivation
other than blindly following a rabid
carpet chewer? The answer is that it wouldn't have been possible, unless
they did have a reason and one that was worth sacrificing everything to
accomplish that end. The problem with most historians is that they never ask
the important questions. Mr. Irving has, and he lays it out in a compelling
manner that
leaves us not necessarily with more answers, but certainly with
more questions. Why would German high command in encrypted communications,
specifically tell an Eastern Front commander that the Jews arriving on an
eastbound train from Berlin, "Were not to be
liquidated." This same group arrived not
only with several weeks of provisions, but with "appliances" as well.
That group of nine hundred souls was in fact liquidated and the field
commander was returned to Berlin to be dealt with by Himmler. While stories
such as this one do not exactly exonerate the Nazis, they do raise
questions about policy. and these are the questions that are routinely
dismissed by those who either don't care or those who care, but prefer to
adhere to a story that serves their ends better than one that has been
revised.
Did Hitler have a policy to liquidate the Jews? Did Hitler intend on
carrying his war and the Third Reich across the globe? Was the Nazi state
the goal or merely a platform for Global domination?
As we move even further from the fray the opportunities to clarify pertinent
details of the Second World War becomes even more difficult. Unless
individuals like Mr. Irving are allowed, in fact encouraged to continue
their important work, we will continue to move further from 1945 and
inexorably closer, ever closer, to 1984.
MARC MORAN
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