There is something a little ironic about being banged up for the crime of “denying” the Holocaust by the very people who started it. Such was the fate of David Irving, the British historian, who was released from an Austrian prison last week having spent 400 days inside — almost all of it in solitary confinement, according to him.
“It did occur to me how many of the leading Nazis were either Austrian by birth, or educated in Austria. Really, if they’re so touchy about the whole thing, they shouldn’t have done it in the first place,” he told me over the phone.
An arrest warrant for Irving was issued in 1989 after he announced, while on Austrian soil, that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. They finally got their man last November. Irving, meanwhile, has revised his view about Auschwitz; maybe there were a few gas chambers kicking around the place, he concedes, somewhat grumpily.
I think it is fair to say that Irving does not like Jews — a quick visit to his horrible website will quickly establish that. It’s a litany of hatred; Jews being beastly, Jews cheating, lying, conniving, murdering. “You don’t like them, do you, Dave?” I ask him. “Nor do the Palestinians,” he replies. Ah, so that’s okay, then. You might argue that an otherwise promising career as a historian has been destroyed by this consuming, obsessive hatred.
But then, this. He was a British subject, arrested abroad and imprisoned for what we might reasonably call a crime of conscience. During his incarceration, his seriously ill wife — she is bed-ridden 90% of the time — and 12-year-old daughter were left to fend for themselves with no income. Irving has been, as he puts it, financially ruined. The British government encouraged prosecution. The campaigning groups — Amnesty, et al — refused to get involved.
Irving spent his time in prison keeping his head down — (“In Auschwitz, the ones who survived were the ones who weren’t noticed”) — and avoiding his Romanian and Bulgarian fellow inmates whom he touchingly describes as “the scum of the earth”.
With dumb pride he relates how he signed copies of his books held in the prison library for the governor, until the Austrian government had them all burnt. And he scribbled away, writing 2,000 pages about one of his most favourite subjects, Himmler.
“A bit of a bad lad, old Heinrich,” I venture, tentatively. There’s a pause at the end of the line and then: “Ah, well you say that, Mr Liddle — but to achieve what he achieved, all by the age of 44 . . .”
What a singularly unpleasant man Irving is, in almost every regard, despite his obvious erudition. A snob and a pathological racist who will now revel in his role as martyr to the freedom of speech.
And then there is the little girl Leah-Beth Richards, 8, who has spent almost all her short life suffering from terminal leukaemia and can take the whole thing no longer; she wishes to cease treatment and spend her remaining months at peace with her family — not fighting the disease but bravely succumbing to it. And for which decision she has, of course, invoked the wrath of her doctors who have insisted the “child protection services” be called in to sort her out. Such arrogance.
Jenni Murray, presenter of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, last week told listeners she was suffering from breast cancer. She will not be seeking pity. Last year, after Kylie Minogue was diagnosed with the disease, she wrote: “Let’s hear no more of blame, battles, guilt, positive attitudes, good nutrition or any of the other nonsense that’s bandied about. It’s just life and sometimes life’s a bitch.”
What a wonderful and accurate verdict in the face of adversity. It is typical of the woman. In your separate ways, good luck Jenni and good luck Leah-Beth.
Tune in to Strictly Come Socialism
Once they drew their inspiration from Karl Marx, William Morris and the Fabians. Now the Labour party has turned to Strictly Come Dancing, a BBC television programme in which people you have vaguely heard of learn to dance. According to one of the party’s biggest weblogs, The Progressive, this ecstatically bland show epitomises modern socialist values. Activists are instructed, with leftie condescension, first to watch the programme because “it’s a salutary experience for us serious-minded folk to indulge in popular passions from time to time”. Then to be uplifted by it, because it should “act as a spur to everyone engaged in the social democratic project”. A modern-day clause 4, then.
Never mind nationalising the top 100 companies, Labour’s patronage of dancing may prove vital: “The feelgood factor generated by this boost to dancing could even swing a tight election.” Reading this, you wonder who to feel more sorry for — the party, or the harmless millions watching Strictly Come Dancing unaware they are handmaidens to a revolutionary political movement.
And our next couple on the floor are Keir Hardie and Rosa Luxemburg who will be doing the cha-cha to Touch My Bum by the Cheeky Girls.
Stuff the sanctimony and let us get drunk
There is just one respite from the misery of midwinter and that is Christmas. By tradition we are allowed to get drop-dead drunk for five days and watch useless television, lie in a stupor on the sofa — or hibernate in the garden shed with a crate of Jack Daniel’s, 500 Raffles cigarettes and the Viz Christmas annual.
Yet as every year passes we are assailed by more sanctimony. The charities and pressure groups which insist that because some other people are miserable, we should be too. Church of England bishops — the sober ones, at least — lecture us about materialism, newspapers tell us that Christmas was better 50 years ago when all you got in your stocking was a new ration card.
Oh, give us a break. Allow us one day free from this nagging stuff. We know that both collectively and individually we’ve messed it up and that the world is a dark and dismal place, full of poverty, injustice and weapons of mass destruction. But please let us return to worrying about it on the evening of January 3, when our hangovers have gone.
Muslim extremists in the Middle East and beyond were cheerfully chopping up bishops and setting fire to priests long before the first tanks rolled into Baghdad — and will continue doing so, one suspects, long after our troops have been withdrawn.
A polite request to those Muslim countries within which Christianity is illegal, or officially repressed, and where converts are imprisoned or put to death by the state, might have been more useful. Instead, Williams indulged in yet more Anglican self-flagellation.
