Handcuffed to the memory of Hitler

Irving is not without responsibility for his own fate, however much his website claims that conspiratorial "enemies of free speech" (most of them Jews) have done for him. He brought the 2000 libel action against Penguin that resulted in his financial ruin, and he decided to speak in Austria despite an outstanding arrest warrant, over-confident that Austria's leisurely way with prosecuting Nazi war criminals would somehow exonerate him.

Present-day politics are not Irving's strong suit. There was little prospect that Austria's centre-Right government was going to open itself to charges of being soft on neo-Nazi sympathisers, even when they wear a pinstriped suit and read P G Wodehouse.

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This Holocaust industry amounts to a secular religion. Tony Blair's Government has encouraged establishing this cult through a wholly unnecessary Holocaust Day. The cult has its priesthood, ever ready with words of encouragement or censure from far away Los Angeles.

And it has nasty sectarian jealousies, with some Jews resentful of any mention of persecuted gipsies or homosexuals, and the latter resentful of compensation paid to Jewish people. It has several articles of faith and taboos. In these circles, it is taboo even to broach the fact that, in the 20th century, communism happened to kill many times more people than Nazism. It is not done to query such vulgar, anti-Catholic presumptions as the alleged culpability of Pius XII for his supposed silence during that period. It is also not done even to refer to "the Holocaust industry".

tags: persecution  irving  religion  holocaust  revisionsim