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Drink Scotch Whisky All Night Long and Defend the Indefensible

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I hope you have all seen this unintentionally hilarious re-enactment of The Quiet American. (Jeebus, any good colonialist would know that you don’t just come out an tell your supposed inferiors that it only counts as democracy if it gets the results your natural masters prefer; that’s supposed to be left implicit. Ah, the Decline of the British Empire.)

It’s times like this that compel me to point out again that Christopher Hitchens is an incredibly sloppy thinker who’s never met a bad political idea he didn’t like, going from defenses of Stalin (“There wasn’t a famine,” he said, smiling slightly and lowering his gaze. “There may have been occasional shortages….”) to defenses of Bushism without bothering to stop off at a defensible ideology. While it seems to have disappeared from Salon’s front page quickly, then, it’s nice to have Charles Taylor’s review of the new book by Deborah Lipstadt, the actual historian that the fascist historian David Irving sued for libel in order to punish for pointing out his Holocaust revisionism. As some of you may recall, Hitch wrote an article in Vanity Fair defending Irving, which Hitchens’ lickspittles have trained to explain away as being about opposition to “censorship.” Anyway, first of all, let’s go to the original article (warning: seems to be from Irving’s site.) Here’s Hitch:

I feel the need to say, very clearly, that St. Martin’s has disgraced the business of publishing and degraded the practice of debate. David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism. But you would never have known this from the way that the controversy was written up….

[…]

And, incidentally, he has never and not once described the Holocaust as a “hoax.”

Ah, poor, poor, trodden upon Irving. As Taylor notes, this defense is rather, ah, problematic. Taylor gives us some relevant quotes from Irving, all uttered prior to Hitchens’ 1996 article:

Restricting ourselves just to what Hitchens could have known before writing that, we find that, testifying at the 1988 trial of a Canadian Holocaust denier, Irving said, “No documents whatever show that a Holocaust had ever happened.” What’s the defense of this? That Irving doesn’t use the word “hoax”? OK then. How about these?In a 1991 speech, Irving said, “Until 1988, I believed that there had been something like a Holocaust … but [in] 1988 … I met people who knew differently and could prove to me that story was just a legend.”

In 1990: “The holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened. That of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is an invention.”

And, again, in 1991: “More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.”

 

The idea the Irving was some kind of victim of censorship is, of course, risible. I am not aware of any free speech principle which obligates a publisher to put an historically fraudulent Goebbels apologia into print. And, of course, Hitchens’ invocation of the U.K.’s lack of a First Amendment is particularly, er, Orwellian given that not only did Irving have no free speech rights whatsoever violated, but he was using the lack of free speech protections in Britain in an attempt to bankrupt people for accurately characterizing his work. Now there’s a free speech crusader everyone should get behind! And to call a Holocaust denier any kind of reputable historian is simply self-refuting, of course.

Hitchens’ new-found appreciation for colonialism is just the latest in a long line of examples that make the intellectually impoverished nature of his “contrarian” politics abundantly clear.

 

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