It's so rare for historians to make the news these days. But on Tuesday, the independent British scholar David Irving was sentenced to three years in an Austrian prison for Holocaust denial (story here).
In case you're not familar with Irving, he's a historian of the Third Reich who famously lost a libel case in the High Court in England in 2000. He sued a fellow historian, Deborah Lipstadt, and her publisher, Penguin Books, for portraying him as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier and impugning his reputation as a historian. He lost the case in spectacular fashion, with the judge concluding that he was "...an active Holocaust denier; ...anti-Semitic and racist."
Irving has spent the last few years since that judgment in well-deserved obscurity, having lost his home and declared bankruptcy as a result of the £2 million in damages awarded to Lipstadt and Penguin. But last autumn, he travelled to Austria and was picked up by police, who have had a warrant for his arrest since 1989. His trial for Holocaust denial (in which he pleaded guilty) ensued, and despite his claims of a change of heart regarding his odious pro-Hitler views, he was found guilty and sentenced to three years in a Vienna prison.
I want to re-acquaint myself with this man's story and have a think about it for a bit. I'll post more on the subject in a couple of days.
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