Talk:David Irving

bias

I edited the Infogalactic page on David Irving to remove blatant Wikipedia bias, words like "pseudoscience" and "Holocaust denier" (in the lede), and user:froglich restored the Wikipedia version.

Regarding "holocaust denier", this is addressed in the body of the article and was left untouched. This is a word like "racist" and basically has zero information content other than you don't rubber stamp whatever the latest orthodoxy is.

I eliminated "pseudoscience" in regard to the Leuchter report. This was a straight chemical analysis. It may be shoddy or it may not be. It may be correct or it may be in error. But unless you're talking about "ghosts" or "crystal energy" it is not "pseudoscience." "Pseudoscience" is a favorite word of the left, like "racist", used to publicly discredit research that does not support the orthodoxy without criticizing the details of the research itself. It does not belong in most Infogalactic pages.

David Irving is also obviously a historian (it is what he is known for) unless you strictly limit your definition to credentialism. The Wiki version explicitly excludes this from the lede. --preceding unsigned comment by Cloudswrest

David Irving is a "historian" only in the most mangled sense in which any and all propagandists are entitled to claim that mantle no matter how disreputable or repeatedly caught straight up lying. What he is, is the aging façade of the moribund paleo-Nazi rehabilitation industry. Exonerating Hitler and the Nazis of culpability in genocide by either claiming it didn't happen or that Hitler didn't know about it if it did (and, more tangentially, absolving the Nazi regime of having impure motives for any other activity undertaken) are the only topics of interest to Irving's "Institute for Historical Review" and associated network of front-groups. Regarding the fraudulent Leuchter report, I would argue that "pseudoscience" is an excessively lenient indulgence to the cause of impartiality as opposed to calling its evidence-cherrypicking the antithesis of science (which would serve Infogalactic Canon #7 nicely).

I would point out that Joseph Ellis is also claimed to be a historian on this site despite what I believe are his proven lies (in one case about his military service, but in the other case, as cited below, about the 'Secular' nature of Webster's speller.) Perhaps Irving's 'mendacity' is so much greater than than of Ellis such that we can no longer regard him as a historian but I would simply regard them both as, perhaps unreliable, historians. -- Crew (talk) 15:21, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

--It is my strong hunch that, over the last forty years, the IHR and similar ilk are back-door funded through intermediaries by the Shadow Party as deliberately provocative "heels" in order to drum up support for hate-speech legislation which, once implemented, is then employed to harass anybody at any time (e.g., SJW convergence, O'Sullivan's Law, etc). --Certainly it's the only real legacy these guys have had, strongly begging Occam's razor.--Froglich 04:43, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Forking the article?

I recommend creating a different version of this article to better describe the different interpretations and viewpoints, like David Irving (revisionist view). The two versions should also link to each other at the top of each introduction. -- Jack-arcalon (talk) 21:06, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

I endorse adherence to Canon #7: "Facts are facts". David Irving, previously wishy-washy and having it both ways (e.g., blaming Allied soldiers for the Holocaust in 1986), openly embraced Holocaust-denial from 1988 onward in association with Ernst Zündel, and this is not a matter in historical dispute. --Whether he or his supporters like the term "Holocaust denier" is another subject. I would argue that it's not only the term most commonly used for half a century, but one that clearly identifies a topic under discussion (the Holocaust) and a standpoint (acceptance or denial) regarding it. In other words, it relays facts.

"Revisionist" (as in "revisionist historian"), otoh, is a much cloudier and more specious euphemasia, and should be avoided as a descriptive. Historical revisionism (negationism) itself highlights the problem in its first lede sentence: "Historical revisionism involves either the legitimate scholastic re-examination of existing knowledge about a historical event, or the illegitimate distortion of the historical record." --By covering both "legitimate" (i.e., honest inquiry), and "illegitimate" (i.e., deceitful) applications, "historical revisionism" has been reduced to an arbitrary, gutted-shell anti-concept which simultaneously elevates mendacity while cheapening virtue by smashing them together into false-equivalence under a single term encompassing both. The goal of Newspeak is to provide every word and phrase in the language with multiple contradictory meanings, thus destroying the ability to relay knowledge accordingly.)--Froglich 01:00, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

However, it seems you have not provided evidence that Irving previously blamed Allied soldiers for the 'Holocaust' ... Sure, I know that it is there in the Infogalactic article, but it refers to a book, and if I get the book on inter-library loan will it actually say what is claimed in the link? Will I actually have to track down the transcript of his talk in Australia to see what he actually said? -- Crew (talk) 02:05, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

I was citing the article's content, which wasn't in dispute in the context of this current discussion given that no edits by myself or Cloudswrest have altered it. --Froglich 22:36, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

What does Robert Jan van Pelt say compared to what the Infogalactic article says he says

This is what https://infogalactic.com/info/David_Irving#Movement_towards_Holocaust_denial says:

In a 1986 speech in Australia Irving argued that photographs of Holocaust survivors and dead taken in early 1945 by Allied soldiers were proof that the Allies were responsible for the Holocaust, not the Germans.[66]

Since I managed to get a copy of that book today (The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving trial, Robert Jan van Pelt), page 40:

In 1986 he told a an audience in Australia that the photos of the concentration camps taken by the English and American soldiers in the spring of 1945 did not provide evidence of German atrocities. "The starvation, the epidemics, the typhoid had only broken out in the last two or three weeks of the war." The Allies, not the Germans, probably carried the blame because of the deliberate bombing of the German transportation and industrial infrastructure.

You can see the quoted section on Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=83dvJxPm--EC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

There is a big difference between those two. I think the Wikipedia author of that article simply lied! (As an aside, there must be a lot of 'Holocaust' deniers in my local community because the 'Holocaust' section in our local library is huge.) -- Crew (talk) 03:06, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

---

In short, my statement in re that Irving "blam(ed) Allied soldiers for the Holocaust" is upheld. See the next, indented, paragraph from van Pelt, p40, quoting Irving:

(Irving:) "We have deliberately created the conditions of chaos inside Germany. We had deliberately created the epidemics, and the outbreaks of typhus and other desease, which led to those appalling scenes that were found at their most dramatic in the enclosed areas, the concentratration camps, where of course epidemics can ravage and run wild. And so it is symbolic of the hypocrisy that existed at the end of the Second World War that we picked on those awful photographs, which were of course good television one would say nowadays..."

Perhaps this is at the heart of the issue and will require much more research on my part but it seems to me that the plain reading of what Irving is saying is that a large number of deaths occurred in the closing weeks of the war due to a breakdown of conditions there caused by Allied bombing and not that the Allies were responsible for the 'Holocaust' which is alleged to have taken place from about '42 or '43 until towards the end of the war. -- Crew (talk) 14:55, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

--It's a good sales-pitch to the converted, and those unaware of the Höss affidavit:

(Höss:) "...I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about 3,000,000 dead...." (The most irksome thorn in the side of Holocaust-denial proponents is the testimony from actual Nazis.) --Froglich 22:36, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

So there is a problem with the number that Höss confessed to: https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/17/world/poland-agrees-to-change-auschwitz-tablets.html. None other than the NY Times now claims the number is 1.5 million. ("It was previously thought that four million died at the camps. More recent research has revealed the figure to be closer to 1.5 million.") Add to that the various claims that Hess was tortured in order to obtain that confession, and things look like they stink. If the current agreed number is 1.5 million then that looks like a false confession. It is also interesting that the NYT makes no reference to the 'confession' as if it is no longer important or perhaps they understand the value of a coerced confession.

I would be interested in your interpretation of the current discrepancy with Höss' 'confession'. -- Crew (talk) 14:55, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

If his numbers were a little high (figures for Auschwitz seems to have settled around 1.1m), Höss likely extrapolated from a provided "busy day"'s statistics, as I can't imagine a Kommandant laboriously counting every passing inmate personally. (Then again, I can also envision the Nazi penchant for meticulous record-keeping (see below) falling behind once it became clear that losing the war was imminent, and the race-was-on to murder as fast as possible. Even if all we do is count the shoes and divide by four under the unlikely hypothesis that every inmate brought a second pair with them, it's clear that a very, very large number of people met their end at Auschwitz.)

Anyway, it’s not just Höss. Nazis loved keeping dairies. There’s Gustav Gilbert, Johann Paul Kremer, Hans Aumeier, Ada Bimko, Salmen Gradowski, Stanislaw Jankowksi, Schlomo Dragon, Henry Tauber, etc. One of the reasons that Irving was blown out of the water during the Penguin Books libel case is that many of these people were still alive at the time and came in to testify.

Concerning Irving himself, as alluded to previously ("strong hunch" above), my conclusion is that he's a professional idiot or deliberately aware "heel" playing his part in a larger political kayfabe/fall-back propaganda operation that even he doesn't know the scope of, if aware of at all. --Froglich 21:39, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

So now you are back peddling. You initially triumphantly pointed to the 3M number but now you say "Yeah, maybe he is off by a bit." ~2M is off by a bit? A few million here and a few million there and pretty soon you have big numbers. Furthermore, what of the other claimed inaccuracies in his 'confession'? "On the other hand, there was no “Wolzek” camp, and none of the three camps Höss claimed to have inspected existed in 1941" The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes -- Crew (talk) 17:49, 6 May 2018 (UTC)

(Augh. Gad...how do I proceed here? OK; I'm going to jump straight to the chase while you're still giving me the time of day.) Numbers, camps, whatever. ) See new topic at end: Picking your poison. --Froglich 19:11, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

I will reiterate that none of this (the blaming-the-Allies claims of Irving, as recited by van Pelt) was in dispute in the context of this current discussion given that no edits by myself or Cloudswrest altered it. --Froglich 22:36, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

You are correct. I quoted it as an example of what I claim is the mendacity of Wikipedia authors and how they claim their sources say what I don't believe their sources say. -- Crew (talk) 14:55, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia mendacity etc

I have noticed things that were outright mendacity or bordering on mendacity in Wikipedia pages before. In one case when tracking down a reference cited in a Wiki page I found that it actually simply restarted another person's claims and I had to track down the paper involved only to find it was dubious.

In another instance that someone else documented (American Spelling Book) Wikipedia has relied on the demonstrably false claims of a Historian and probably have never cleaned their page up.

In this instance, I did not know what I would be in for when I tracked down the cite, but was staggered to find that it clearly misrepresented what van Pelt said about Irving.

From that point of view I suspect there is a need for a page that deals with Wikipedia mistakes or mendacity with respect to these topics. -- Crew (talk) 18:12, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

Resolution of the main issue discussed

After a bunch of discussion with Vox and research, I believe that the original edits by CloudWrest were reasonable given that the claims of 'Holocaust' denial and other general perfidy were left intact in the body of the article.

I will take up the issue with Froglich as well. -- Crew (talk) 18:16, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

I will reiterate my position (see a ways above) regards employing the phrasing "revisionist historian". Similarly, Leuchter cherrypicking which 50yo evidence he chose to subject to chemical analysis is not honest science; it is clearly pseudoscience intended to support a predetermined outcome, an outcome he had been specifically hired to support. --Froglich 22:53, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

I haven't read the report as yet, but I have heard Irving talk about it. The issue is not cherry picking, as far as I can tell, but the readiness of HCN to bond with iron in brickwork and the fact that there is clear evidence of that in the place(s) where fumigation of clothing with Zyklon-B was undertaken, but seemingly none in the 'gas chambers'. Of course, since those structures seem to have been destroyed, it may have been difficult to unambiguously identify the brick work from those 'gas chambers'.

My plan for proceeding

I plan on:

1. Introducing a section on what Irving actually claims that will be based on my viewing of his videos and reading material he has published.
2. Calling him a historian. One only needs to read the introduction to Hitler's War to realize that Irving is a historian with a preference for primary sources. Moreover, he is not a Hitler Sycophant.
3. Removing the pejoratives but present the claims of the other side. I am of the opinion that pejoratives like 'Holocaust Denier' and 'Climate Denier' have no place in base-level articles on Infogalactic. They can, however, appear in discussion/articles about the base-level articles.

I will accept criticisms but will not tolerate edit wars on this subject. -- Crew (talk) 16:21, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Picking your poison

The most important (indeed, circa 2018, only) lingering effect of the Holocaust is how debate surrounding it has resulted in "hate speech" legislation that has now snowballed to encompass nearly everything, converted Europe into a dictatorship, and is currently making serious tilts at the 1st Amendment in the last-bastion United States. Thought experiment: Envision said legislation not evolving by happenstance, but by concerted and careful planning over many, many decades. What would it take for such legislation to come into being? What would its proposers need to make it happen? To get it accepted by legislatures and passed into law?

What they need is political kayfabe, or a managed environment in which heroes and villains are shaped in the public consciousness. It then does not matter who the spectator gets behind, only that he buys a ticket for the match convinced that he's seeing a real contest.

To accept this thesis, one needs to make a tiny leap of faith: Assume you're being lied to. I assume that I am being lied to constantly: children lie, cops lies, teachers lie, journalists lie, coworkers lie, spouses lie, in-law lies, bosses lie, employees lie, your best friends lie. Politicking is synonymous with lying. The purpose of a lie is to obtain what the truth will not provide, with less effort than overt coercion. The biggest liars of course are those working toward power, or being paid to groom those already in it. Therefore, any activity or topic involved in securing power, and marginalizing anyone else on the scene, is marinated in lies, and those lies are stacked up in a giant cake with more than layers than anyone can count. Even the most jaded and cynical of us err in underestimating the depth of the lying. I

So, what pastry chef is capable of this? And, how does it manage to get away with it? --Simple: free smorgasbord, and everybody picks their own poison (it's important that each diner assume he's discovering the meal for himself). What poison the citizen picks is unimportant; what matters is that he nurses it for the rest of his life like a tamagotchi he's utterly devoted to, wastes endless amounts of time on, and will always have a lingering soft spot for even after thoroughly deceased and tossed in a drawer. What makes for the best poison? Whatever appeals to our evolutionary taste-buds. Barely descended from trees, tribalist sentiments are always popular because there is purportedly strength in numbers and our egos are easily stroked when personal failures or plain bad luck can be written off as actually due to enemy action by others who don't look the same. And, as always, people love to get something for free, and even better if they think it'll come from someone they hate...been trained to hate.

How does that cottage-industry known as "Holocaust denial" fit into this? Take Joe Blow, your hard-working white male dude, making money and getting taxed and swindled accordingly in The Land of the Free where he should seemingly be cock-of-the-walk. Odds are poor that he'll submit to this abuse his entire life, and from the perspective of the powers that be living at his expense, he may eventually be a threat active in politics in an attempt to end the predations. Therefore, that threat-potential must be neutered. The best way to control any individual in the Information Age is via temptation into self-discreditation, causing him to instantly implode should he ever set foot on the campaign trail.

People tend toward simplicity: their thinking is binary, yin-yang, hero/villain. Feed the people a bad guy, and they'll clamor for laws to keep him in line, rock-head stupid to the prospect of them being who'll be kept in line by the new law. If you're a bad guy yourself, you need a worse guy to take the heat off you and cast yourself as a hero opposing. So, who make good villains? Well, there's no doubt that Nazis make good villains. But with the originals long dead in the war or wheezing in nursing-homes, what to do? Solution: make new ones. (Fakes can do the job, too, but there's the constant annoyance of having to pay them as well as ensure they don't have a crisis of conscience.)

Holocaust denial is a rabbit hole you're supposed to fall down and waste years of your life mired in, each hole similar to thousands of others, intertwined and interconnected in an endless real-life open-world mmorpg with new updates published monthly for decades on end. After a time inside this chrysalis, you'll emerge as a caterpillar transformed into an easily-downvotable person who'll never be a contender with class. But if you're really special, you'll get a swastika tattoo and start complaining on the internet about how Jews control everything and are bent on destroying the white race. At that point, you're the perfect golden heel who'll then be made infamous across a thousand SJW Twatter and Wikigasms and used to justify all manner of legislation.

What is the truth, then? --The truth is the one thing that is never discussed in mainstream or alternative media. If it's talked about, at all, it's probably poison (a lie of some type). For example, in The Great Weinstein Overthrows of 2017+, almost without exception every one of the deposed was a white male who just so happened to also be Jewish, this latter aspect discussed nowhere while the official media narrative was one of groping perverts finally being spitted and women breathing free as the glass-ceiling shattered, while the alt-media narrative was one of SJWs run amok. The puzzle piece of religious unanimity and what that portended was ignored: Something *orchestrated* was obviously going on, but no one was talking about it. Not CNN, not NYT, not Alex Jones, not WikiLeaks, not RT. The piece didn't fit any peddled narrative, so it was ignored. Or suppressed, if one be conspiratorially-minded.

--If a jigsaw puzzle piece isn't fitting into the puzzle, most set the piece aside, assuming it's a false piece or that it goes somewhere else. But the reality is that the piece is not false. The still-unfinished puzzle, as built so far, is what is false. Some of those dogs aren't in right-side-up. To be successfully completed, it must be torn apart and restarted from scratch. But it is human-nature to cling to and defend labors already undertaken, to "throw good money after bad", and so most persons are stuck with an incomplete, false puzzle, and are conditioned to ignoring "inconvenient" pieces that do not fit.

I'm an older fart now. Been around. Closet full of 'done-it' T-shirts. Am here to tell you: I have torn apart that fuckin' puzzle so many times to restart that you wouldn't believe it.

The only puzzle I've seen into which all pieces fit is this: the Shadow Party is very real, very old, and very experienced in using the truth to crush the lies it has fed those who might potentially oppose it. Like The Many-Faced God, it knows what's true, what's false, and where and when you first ate its poisoned candy, and will mercilessly whip you to the floor when it catches you regurgitating its own propaganda. --Froglich 19:11, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

Irving as part of the controlled opposition?

I am failing to see how this is relevant to a discussion of whether or not to call David Irving a Holocaust Denier. If questioning the 4M number the Soviets first claimed, or the 3M number that was probably put into Höss' mouth then it seems that even the NY Times and all those who have claimed it is 1.5M or 1.1M or the more recent claims of ~750,000 that I have seen must be regarded as Holocaust Deniers. -- Crew (talk) 16:16, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

It really doesn't matter what the number is, so long as the answer is still "a lot". What matters is how much time the poison-candy-eater devotes to a "lost cause" with over a half-century of taint around it, and how public perception of that cause is used to crush them. --You pick your battles with a preference toward those which are temporarily relevant and potentially winnable. The Third Reich is not relevant, and salvaging its reputation is neither a winnable project nor useful. Who rules today is what is relevant.

I'll reiterate my conclusion that Irving is a self-aware political kayfabe "heel" serving the Shadow Party agenda. His job is to suck in perfectly good white boys and throw them in the trash while stoking Marxist class-struggle and race-warfare narratives. And of course he's going to boast about his Rolls-Royce, because cultivating an aura of unremitting repulsiveness is the stagecraft of a professional heel. --Froglich 20:16, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

The claim that Irving works to divert right-wing dissidents into an "intellectual dead end" of Holocaust revisionism in order to discredit and thereby neutralize them should definitely be prominently mentioned in his article. -- Jack-arcalon (talk) 18:08, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

I'm not aware of any "reliable source" (or otherwise) that could prove that conjecture. I simply observe that such a hypothesis is a puzzle piece that solidly clinks into place like Thanos dropping a power-stone into his glove. What many do not understand is that Shadow Party penetration of the ostensible "right" is as thorough as it is the Left, because "left" and "right" are a false-dichotomy anyway, existing to create division and distraction. The only political spectrum that matters is liberty <-> tyranny.

In the end, a Third Reich that kills several hundred-thousand instead of millions after revised counting isn't going to be held any better in the hindsight of those who, in the 21st Century, still differentiate WWII from the "hazy mists of yore" containing Waterloo and the Crusades. Even if you could pursue the subject without being relegated a social pariah, every second spent indulging it is a second not spent more fruitfully elsewhere, such as documenting the current-day activities of SJWs and communist academics (among other Shadow Party pseudopods) and researching the backgrounds of its political errand-boys (such as Frank Marshall Davis, Jr. and Russian-asset Angela Merkel. Emphasize battles there's still a chance of winning because they're not over yet. --Froglich 01:42, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

Why does everyone refer to the second of Höss' Afadavidts/confessions and not the first?

In researching the 'confession' of Höss it seems that there were two documents he signed. One on around March 16 1946 of 8 or so pages, and a shorter, 3-page on dated April 5, 1946. The shorter one does not contain any hand-written notes and leaves out the 'inconvenient' stuff, but it is in the record.

The first one (NO-1210 of 8 pages or so) can be seen here: https://archive.org/stream/Nurembergdocs/NO-1210

The second, shorter one, can be seen here: https://archive.org/stream/Nurembergdocs/3868-PS

It is clear that the second is derived from the first by cleaning it up and omitting the 'inconvenient' bits.

Is it dishonesty that compels people to only admit to the second 'confession' or is it ignorance?

An additional issue here is why were the Germans using Zyklon-B, essentially a commercial insect killer, when they had Sarin? Is it that when the various stories first surfaced (some in BBC propaganda) during WWII no one was aware of Sarin, so they went with what they knew, and no one sent them the memo about the existence of Sarin until well after the war, but the edifice was too hard to turn around after that? -- Crew (talk) 16:16, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

Regards Sarin, it's incredibly fucking dangerous to handle. Spill a drop on your skin, and you have less than ten minutes to get the antidote, or your dead. Inhale it, and you're almost certainly dead unless you have treatment in your possession. It evaporates readily, meaning any crack in a container results in the interior space of a closet or warehouse becoming filled with a deadly cloud. (US Army procedure in the 1970s for entering Sarin storage was in full hazmat gear with mask and respirator, and carrying a cage containing a rabbit or other small animal, which would croak if it wasn't safe.) While German scientists has synthesized at least one of Sarin's two main antidotes (atropine and pralidoxime), it's unclear whether they knew those chemicals had antidotal properties at the time since Sarin was first developed in 1938 and wasn't available in any quantity outside of a lab until 1939. Additionally, unless very pure, Sarin has a tendency to chemically break down within a matter of weeks, so shelf-life would have been a logistical problem. Essentially, Z-B was the safest (to its handlers) and cheapest thing that did the job. While somewhat slower to kill than nerve agents, it was much faster than carbon-monoxide and less injurious to the morale of troops than shooting civilians for hours on end at mass-grave sites. --Froglich 21:11, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

Every time I check something I find the accusers have been bending the truth

It is claimed that the Leuchter is "pseudo-scientific" and yet Irving claims that the samples were actually sent to Cornell for testing? So now I have to check the actual report. Why do I always find what appears to be mendacity on the part of those opposing Irving when I check things that are claimed? Here is the video I found the claims in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArNyyHXe3b8

In addition, Irving labels himself as a "deviationist" which is probably how the lede should list him as well, although it should also report that he is labeled by others as a 'holocaust denier'.

-- Crew (talk) 16:40, 10 May 2018 (UTC)