Given my post yesterday about the strange things people like to stick up their nether regions, it makes perfect sense to revisit a man who has his head up his ass: David Irving. It’s pretty funny to see that his former comrades are none too happy with some of his recent statements:
A famed Holocaust denier is revising his revisionist thinking — and the move is opening up a rift among his fellow travelers.
David Irving, who was released from prison last December in Austria after being convicted of Holocaust denial, recently announced that he is rethinking his position on the fate of European Jews during World War II. Irving now concedes that a mass slaughter of Jews may have occurred.
In a series of interviews, including one with the Forward, Irving outlined his new beliefs. After his release, he said, he discovered in a volume of trivial Nazi communiqués a memo from SS major Hermann Höfle that refers to “S,” “B” and “T” — code, Irving claims, for the concentration camps Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka. He said he is 80% sure that the document is genuine and that no other piece of Holocaust evidence has seemed as legitimate.
“This is the only one,” Irving said. “If [the document] is genuine, it refutes the view of the revisionists that nothing happened.”
The unmitigated arrogance of the man! He dismisses the mountains of German documents recording the Nazi policy to exterminate European Jewry as not being genuine. Only the single document that he claims to have found is genuine, and so he believes only that.
Of course, some of the harder core Holocaust deniers are none too pleased with his new admissions, even if Irving claims that “only” 2.4 million Jews were murdered. For example:
Among the unsympathetic is Michael Santomauro, who runs the revisionist Web site Reporters Notebook. “[Irving] is a flip-flopper on the Holocaust,” Santomauro said. “I think he’s positioning himself to sell more books.”
Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review is a bit more sympathetic:
One of Irving’s main allies in the United States is Mark Weber, director of the revisionist Institute for Historical Review. Weber countered the claim that Irving is simply engaged in a publicity stunt.
“Those people who are disappointed that Irving has switched [sides] shouldn’t be, because he’s always been ambivalent,” Weber said, adding that Irving’s current stance marks a return to the way he was thinking when he published “Hitler’s War” in 1976.
Irving agrees with this interpretation of his trajectory.
This makes perfect sense, actually, because Hitler’s War, published in the 1970s, was, as far as I know, the first time that Irving made the claim that Hitler never knew about the Holocaust, and that’s what he’s saying now.
It will be amusing to watch Irving’s fellow Holocaust deniers eat one of their own. It also seems to me that David Irving needs a visit from a skilled general surgeon desperately. Only such a surgeon might be capable of pulling his head out of his ass without killing him, although it would be a long shot.
