Feb 7, 2005
Intellectual Freedom...and Intellectual Accountability
by Liberty and Power
In light of the recent discussions here and elsewhere about Hans-Hermann Hoppe's run-in with UNLV, I think this altogether fascinating review of Deborah Lipstadt's own account of her libel trial against David Irving --"History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving" -- will be of interest. It's a Salon article, so I recommend viewing the ad and getting the Day Pass; it's more than worth it. (For the sake of clarity and to avoid unnecessary arguments about the points mentioned below, I should immediately state that I do not consider the brouhaha about Hoppe's remarks to be remotely in the same category as the long-standing debates about Irving's work. And I myself find next to nothing even objectionable about Hoppe's class remarks as reported, and I am very glad to see that the ACLU has taken up his cause -- although some of his other statements that I have seen referenced do give me serious pause.)
Two issues in the review are of special interest to me. The first is the argument of certain of Irving's defenders that to attack Irving's views and/or his scholarship in strongly condemnatory terms is to skate too close to censorship -- thus ignoring the difference between private and governmental action. I'm not entirely sure how Christopher Hitchens'"defense" of Irving on these grounds is related to Hitchens' voyage from Trotskyite to neocon-supporter; perhaps it's simply another indication of the remarkable sloppiness of Hitchens' analytic abilities in recent years. As nearly as I can tell, the only constants in Hitchens' travels from left to right are his reverence for The State, and his sympathy for the Great Man theory of history. The specifics of the goals Hitchens advocates may change, but the underlying dynamics remain the same.
In his discussion of Lipstadt's book, Charles Taylor writes of Hitchens and similar Irving defenders:
Irving's supporters -- and I include in that group not just the pathetic fools who greet with laughter his comments about"Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars," or"ASSHOLS," at the white-supremacy rallies and conferences he often addresses, but the more upscale fools who are not Holocaust deniers but who continue to believe in his efficacy as a historian -- have long tried to cast those who oppose Irving as enemies of free speech.
This is the tack Christopher Hitchens has long taken when writing about David Irving, and it is worth dwelling on him, as his writing provides a useful compendium of Irving apologias. In a June 1996 Vanity Fair column after St. Martin's Press canceled its contract with Irving to publish his biography of Joseph Goebbels, Hitchens, styling himself the macho defender of the First Amendment, called the anti-Irving articles that led to St. Martin's actions"hysterical and old-maidish." Of the historians condemning Irving he wrote,"These are supposedly experienced historians who claim to have looked mass death in the face, without flinching. And they can't take the idea of a debate with David Irving?"
The sly implication of those lines is that Irving's opponents are afraid to confront him. What Hitchens ignores is the position that Deborah Lipstadt has taken for years: that to debate Holocaust deniers implies they are expressing a fact-based vision of history. Shilling for Hitler, Irving is expressing no such thing.
To see this you need look no further than the Goebbels biography that Hitchens is so hot about. In a May 2001 review of the Evans and Guttenplan books for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Hitchens wrote, of St. Martin's decision,"St. Martin's gave no reason of historical accuracy for its about-face." The implication being that none exists.
What Hitchens perhaps did not know in 1996, and seemingly chose not to mention in 2001, are the falsifications in the Goebbels bio that Richard Evans discovered in his examination of Irving's work. ...
Giving Hitchens the benefit of the doubt about the lies of the Goebbels book still does not excuse this claim from his 1996 Vanity Fair article:"And, incidentally, [Irving] has never and not once described the Holocaust as a 'hoax'." Restricting ourselves just to what Hitchens could have known before writing that, we find that, testifying at the 1988 trial of a Canadian Holocaust denier, Irving said,"No documents whatever show that a Holocaust had ever happened." What's the defense of this? That Irving doesn't use the word"hoax"? OK then. How about these?
In a 1991 speech, Irving said,"Until 1988, I believed that there had been something like a Holocaust ... but [in] 1988 ... I met people who knew differently and could prove to me that story was just a legend."
In 1990:"The holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened. That of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is an invention."
And, again, in 1991:"More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz."
Remember, Hitchens' defenses of Irving did not appear on, to use his own phrase,"some ghastly Brownshirt Web site," but in Vanity Fair and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Inevitably, in the L.A. Times piece, Hitchens brings up the totem of Irving enablers,"the censorship of Irving." What is he referring to? St. Martin's Press did not censor Irving; it chose not to publish his book because its chairman, Thomas J. McCormack, was sickened by the thought of publishing a book whose subtext, he said, was"the Jews brought this onto themselves." St. Martin's did not prevent the book from appearing elsewhere, and in fact, the Goebbels bio was published in Britain, from where the faithful could order it.
Taylor goes on to show that Irving himself has engaged in numerous attempts to silence his critics (although Taylor himself wrongly uses the word" censorship," thus forgetting the lesson that he has just pointed out).
The other issue that I think merits attention is found in this passage:
Considered solely as a historian, how could Deborah Lipstadt be privy to knowledge about Irving's long history of lying, deliberately misquoting documents, and baiting Jews in his speeches and not be appalled and disgusted at the persistent myth of David Irving as a misguided chap who is nonetheless a reliable researcher? If the practice of history means taking into account verifiable facts, how could Lipstadt not be alarmed by the failure of two eminent historians, John Keegan and Donald Cameron Watt, to alter their view of Irving after the trial proved his work worthless? Irving did not lose, as Keegan claimed he did, for"faults" of interpreting"an all consuming knowledge of a vast body of material." He lost for a consistent pattern of deceit. Keegan's claim that Lipstadt was a member of the"self-righteously politically correct" when she had not testified, and when he, by his own admission, had not read her work, raises the question of what political correctness possibly has to do with an assertion that the Holocaust actually happened.Lipstadt is probably right in suspecting that Keegan and Watt were annoyed by what they saw as the impertinence of a woman and a Jew who did not know her place. What seems to bother Irving's defenders is the very notion of professional and intellectual accountability. Running into Lipstadt after the trial, Watt said to her,"None of us could have withstood that kind of scrutiny." In a column for the Evening Standard, he said,"Show me one historian who has not broken out into a cold sweat at the thought of undergoing similar treatment." What Lipstadt was perhaps too polite to say to Watt was that any historian who wishes to be worthy of the title had damn well better be able to withstand that kind of scrutiny.
And that, I think, is the primary point: by all means, let the debates rage. But if historians are going to make genuinely novel and extraordinary claims, they had better be certain of the factual evidence for their views -- and they further should be prepared to be judged intellectually, professionally and morally, if it can be demonstrated that they have engaged in deceit and misrepresentation in a systematic and widespread fashion.
In any case, I offer these excerpts and the link to the article primarily for the many illustrious historians here. I am not a historian myself, so I would welcome their thoughts on these issues. And do be sure to read Taylor's entire piece, including the deliciously well-aimed last line. (There are also links to additional Salon articles on this topic at the article's conclusion.)
(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.)
Irfan Khawaja -
8/4/2006
This essay reaches a new low, even for Arthur Silber.
I wonder if I could pose a question for Silber: had you honestly read the Hitchens articles before you posted this?
A few specific points:
(1) Hitchens does not “defend” Irving in either article. In the 1996 article, he accuses Irving of anti-Semitism, fascism, inconsistency, and paranoia, and describes Irving's ideas (without irony) as “depraved.” In the 2001 article, he intensifies and adds to those criticisms.
I’d like to challenge Arthur Silber, Charles Taylor, or anyone else to find a passage in either article that amounts to a “defense of Irving,” i.e., of David Irving as a person. It is not there to be found. Read out of context, there are passages there that might sound like defenses of Irving's historiography. But read critically and in context, Hitchens is not defending that, either.
What Hitchens defends in the first article is the dialectical utility of Irving’s historiography, however meretricious, in clarifying the assumptions of bona fide historiography. The point is not that Irving himself is defensible as a person, nor even that his historiography is defensible as historiography, but that Irving's work serves a useful purpose because (a) he is a fascist and (b) we are not. Historians are biased by their ideological predispositions, and Irving's biases are an important challenge to our liberal ones.
Not being a defender of dialectical method myself, I don’t happen to agree with Hitchens. In my view, historiography should be judged and published on its own merits, not on the “gadfly” role it might play in public discourse. By that measure, Irving’s books are a failure (as, I might add, are Silber’s posts and Taylor’s journalism). But regardless of that disagreement, the fact remains that neither of Hitchens’s articles is a defense of Irving, and Hitchens is simply NOT accurately described as an “Irving defender” (he is not now, was not in 1996, and was not in 2001).
By the second article (2001), Hitchens asserts that he regards Irving as humiliated, discredited, and refuted. But he insists that it was necessary to engage him in public debate to get to that stage. This article is in no intelligible sense a "defense" of or apologia for Irving, and anyone who wants to claim that it is ought to come forth with the textual evidence that supports that claim--or to borrow Taylor's language, had "damn well better" come forth with the textual evidence that supports that claim.
It should come as no surprise that the besides Taylor and Silber, one of the few people to regard Hitchens as having defended Irving “to the hilt” is… David Irving. He says this of the 1996 article in which Hitchens describes his ideas as “depraved” and accuses him of anti-Semitism, fascism, inconsistency and paranoia. Irving, alas, seems to have missed the significance of these latter claims. But then, so have Taylor and Silber. Welcome to the club!
(2) Both Taylor and Silber deny that Irving was “censored”—while gliding effortlessly past the problematic claim that Irving’s contract with St. Martin’s press was “canceled.”
What does the word “canceled” mean in this context?
According to Hitchens, who read the correspondence between Irving and St. Martin’s, it means that the contract was legally “breached” (“Strange Case of David Irving,” p. 260 of “Love, Poverty, and War”).
I myself don’t know the legal details of the contract or correspondence, but if the contract really was breached as Hitchens says, then St. Martin’s initiated force against Irving, i.e., used initiatory force to prevent Irving from exercising a legal right to free speech. Breach of contract may not be the usual method of censorship, but qua force-initiation, it is censorship just the same.
I admit that a reasonable person without access to the relevant documents could justifiably wonder whether the cancellation really was breach of contract (I am such a person). But a reasonable person in the same predicament could just as easily wonder whether it might be (I am also such a person). So obviously, the legal details are crucial here.
Naturally, neither Silber nor Taylor makes any attempt whatsoever to discuss the legal issue. Confronted with the breach of contract issue, Silber (who does not seem to have read Hitchens on the subject) ignores it, and Taylor (who clearly has read Hitchens on the subject) openly evades it.
None of this, of course, stops Silber from lecturing us fatuously about “intellectual accountability.” In Silber’s universe, “accountability” evidently consists in appealing to the concept of “accountability” to make random accusations--while violating norms of accountability when it comes to backing them up. (Haven’t quite outgrown “Fact and Value,” have we?)
Taylor claims that Irving was NOT censored because while St Martin's deprived him (Irving) of one publication venue, it left others open to him.
The claim is a blatant non-sequitur. If X forcibly deprives Y of one of Y’s rightful alternatives at time t, the violation at t is not excused, mitigated or erased because Y will have other rightful alternatives at time t +1.
Free examples: If I force you not to wear magenta shirts, I have still violated your rights even if I give you the choice to wear shirts of any other color under the rainbow. If I breach a contract with you, I have violated your rights even if your neighbor keeps your contract with you. If I assault you, I have violated your rights even if I give you a chance to run away.
Do I really need to belabor this any further? I find it remarkable that Silber, the self-appointed defender of Ayn Rand’s “radical” legacy, doesn't seem to have grasped these elementary facts about the nature of rights. But he hasn’t.
At any rate, there is a sense in which the whole “censorship” issue is a red herring. Though Hitchens uses the word “censorship” once (in the 2001 article, not the 1996 one), his main complaint is not so much that Irving was censored, but that St. Martin’s acted in an unprincipled or cowardly way in canceling his contract.
I personally would not have put the point that way, but Hitchens’s claim does contain an element of truth: even if the cancellation was not a breach of contract, it is true that St. Martin’s, which claimed to be upholding historical truth, refused to defend its actions in a rigorous way on historical grounds, and so deferred the issue of how Irving’s claims were to be confronted (p. 258 in “Love, Poverty and War”). The confrontation, as we know, took place in a libel trial. Hitchens’s point is that it should have taken place earlier.
Of course, if the cancellation really was breach of contract, the use of the word “censorship” turns out literally to be true.
(3) Taylor insinuates that Hitchens has systematically excused Irving’s mendacity and scholarly malfeasances and cites (of all things) Hitchens’s reaction to Richard Evans’s scholarship as his primary evidence for the claim.
The assertion is an Orwellian inversion of the facts: Hitchens’s 2001 piece is in fact a favorable review of Richard Evans’s book, and it seconds both Evans’s main claims (“Evans was quite devastating,” p. 262 of “Love, Poverty and War”) as well as those of D.D. Guttenplan (another critic of Irving), while defending Guttenplan’s claims against Evans’s criticisms.
(4) Taylor complains that Hitchens doesn’t mention the falsifications in Irving’s Goebbels biography, insinuating that Hitchens was unwilling to admit Irving’s capacity for systematic misrepresentation of evidence.
This claim is about as preposterous as the preceding one. It is obvious to any HONEST reader of Hitchens’s 2001 piece that Hitchens doesn’t belabor the issue of Evans’s discovery of the falsifications in the Goebbels book because the article as a whole endorses the court findings against Irving: “I mentally closed the book [against Irving] when I reached this stage [Evans’s testimony in the court case].” Hitchens also describes Guttenplan’s case against Irving as a “QED” (both claims on p. 263 of Love, Poverty, and War), and describes Evans as “reducing” Irving’s claims “to powder” (p. 264).
I am simply at a loss to see how an honest, intelligent reader could misread Hitchens’s essay as a defense of Irving. It is, of course, no mystery at all how a dishonest imbecile might do so, however.
(5) Taylor claims in his article that Irving’s “very real attempts to quash the work of historians are never mentioned by Irving’s defenders.” To use his own language, Taylor “seemingly chooses not to mention” the fact that Hitchens offers a direct counter-example to this claim (p. 262 of “Love, Poverty and War,” end of the first full paragraph).
I will not take the time here to quote or cite any more passages of Hitchens that support my claims—though I could. There are limits to my patience and time. But if anyone wants to argue the point, I invite THEM to produce what they regard as the offending passages from the two Hitchens essays in question (“Hitler’s Ghost,” Vanity Fair June 1996; and “The Strange Case of David Irving,” orig. LA Times, May 20, 2001, reprinted in “Love, Poverty, and War”). Quote them in full and tell me why they contradict what I say. I may not agree with everything Hitchens says, but nothing he says contradicts my defense of him here.
Silber offers up his garbage dump of a post with the bewildered plea that well gosh, he isn’t a historian, so what’s a fella to make of all this history stuff? It’d be a nice try—if we were dealing with Forrest Gump. As it happens, I’m not a historian either. But you don’t have to be a historian to read documents before you use them to engage in a smear campaign. Nor do you have to be a historian to want to avoid smear campaigns.
I have a piece of advice for Arthur Silber. If you read HNN’s “rules for discussion,” you’ll find the following:
Please do not post any comments that are defamatory, obscene, pornographic, abusive, or unlawful. If you violate the law or are guilty of defamation you may be held legally responsible.
Please be civil. No ad hominem attacks.
If those standards were enforced more scrupulously here, Silber would be tossed unceremoniously off of this site, never to be invited back again. And if I were running the site, that is exactly what I would do. Nor would I worry about accusations of “censorship.” It wouldn’t be censorship. It would be intellectual hygiene.
By the way, should anyone feel the need to accuse me of violating the norms I’ve quoted, I anticipate that criticism in this way: the tone of my post is exactly calibrated to respond to Silber’s; it is Silber who is initiating the problematic tone, not me. I don’t feel obliged to be civil to those who are not themselves civil, and if Silber can get away with endless defamation (as he has with impunity for months), there is no reason why he shouldn’t be paid back in the appropriate way.
I cannot be the only person to have discerned that even if we put aside this post, Silber’s posts contain absolutely nothing in the way of argument, evidence, or information. The only mildly interesting question they raise is why anyone as ignorant as he is should be writing here, and why his colleagues insist on ignoring that patently obvious fact about his “work” and keep him on. Happily, that’s their problem, not mine. I’ll leave it to them to work out its ramifications.
