David Irving - the hate that dare not speak its name
▻http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/exclusive-david-irving--the-hate-that-dare-not-speak-its-name-8792411
Irving, 75, is justly paranoid about security. During a career spanning 50 years and more than 30 books, he has emerged from relative respectability to become a notorious revisionist historian, and a target for anti-fascist demonstrators. In 2000, he lost a £2m libel action against the US historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. The judge ruled that Irving “is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist”.
Five years later, Irving was sentenced to three years in an Austrian prison for “trivialising, grossly playing down and denying the Holocaust”. He was released after 13 months and banned from returning to the country. He has also been banned from Canada, Italy and Germany.
After a period of relative quiet, Irving has now returned to publicise his unfinished book about Heinrich Himmler, founder of the SS and architect of the Holocaust. A series of talks began on 18 August in Southampton. Stops since have included Bristol, Coventry, Manchester and Edinburgh. He is due to speak in Oxford tonight, and in London on 21 December.
Eventually, we come to the Holocaust. Since his conviction the historian has denied denying the Holocaust, conceding that millions of Jews did die in gas chambers. But in Peterborough he says: “If you read the memoirs of Churchill or Eisenhower or de Gaulle, they don’t mention it at all. It never happened as far as they were concerned.” In around 1970, he adds, the Jews were “advised by a PR firm to give it one name, stick to that name, and stick to those figures and gradually you’ll make billions out of this. That’s what happened.”