David Irving, the Walking Controversy

I probably should not admit that David Irving does rather give me a laugh at times. I think that, like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore, he is to a significant degree an entertainer. His latest comment, describing a particular colour of brown as "n*gger brown", was obviously a big tease, and it got him the headlines he wanted. He is what Australians would call a "stirrer".

Like Chomsky, however, he lets off his verbal grenades among other sensible-sounding utterances and he has certainly got a point with this:

"You can't have a genuine consensus about histories about a subject like the Holocaust... if the proponents of one argument are given the knighthoods and the money and their opponents are locked up in prison."

The pity of it is that Irving is actually an extremely knowledgeable historian as well. I doubt that there is any other historian who has immersed himself in the Nazi period as fully as he has. His books show that and he was also the only historian who immediately fingered the Kujau "Hitler Diaries" as a fake. I say a little more about Irving here.