David Irving is a nutter

We all knew after the Lipstadt trial - and indeed before - that David Irving is a thoroughly nasty piece of work. However, once upon a time he was quite an effective historian (see, for example, his book on Dresden) and even in his later books he still showed great acumen in finding and speaking to people in Hitler's circle to whom nobody else had spoken, even though his conclusions became more and more outrageous, and driven by his racist convictions rather than the evidence.

So I knew he was a racist and an anti-Semite, but I didn't think he was an out and out loon. But he clearly is now. Johann Hari's profile in the Independent yesterday suggests that he has finally lost the plot. The Indy headline goes with Irving's bizarre claim that Hitler foretold that Irving would be his biographer ("...Hitler replied: “One day, an Englishman will come along and write my biography. But it cannot be an English man of the present generation. They won’t to be objective. It will have to be an Englishman of the next generation, and one who is totally familiar with all the German archives.”") But the piece is stuffed full of lunacies. His Hitler love is now strong that he believes that Hitler was "the best friend the Jews had in the Third Reich"; and, which I didn't know before, he is clearly a semi-pathalogical misogynist.

All rather sad. I saw him speak at my school, and he was a very impressive, authoratative figure who turned up in a Roller and who could recall masses of information in great detail without recourse to notes. My teacher primed me to ask about evidence that apparently contradicted something he'd written; he expertly demolished what I'd said, and then, fixing me with a frankly malevolent glare, said "I'd be very interested to know who put you up to ask me that." I think I avoided an involuntary glance at my teacher who was staring at the floor in the corner; but Irving probably had his mind on a more sinister, Zionist explanation...

(Incidentally, it will be no great surprise to regular readers of JMP that I'm wholly opposed to criminalising holocaust denial, and wholly in favour of defeating the deniers in argument rather than making them martyrs.)