Bad history v. fake history
By 
Last night I watched Denial, the 2016 film about the David Irving-Deborah Lipstadt libel trial. It’s a pretty good film about an extremely important subject, which is the crisis of knowledge in contemporary societies — a crisis that has gotten much worse since Irving sued Lipstadt nearly 30 years ago now.
Irving’s claim was that in her book on Holocaust denial Lipstadt had libeled him, because he was simply a historian who had different views on how many Jews had died in Europe during WWII, as well as how and why. Lipstadt’s claim that Irving was a knowing falsifier of history, and therefore not really a historian at all.
British libel law was extremely favorable to Irving, because the burden lay on the defendant Lipstadt to prove not only that Irving’s claims about the Holocaust were false, but that they were knowingly false, and not merely products of professional incompetence and negligence (In America, by contrast, Irving would have had the burden of proving that Lipstadt’s claims about Irving were either knowingly false or made with reckless disregard for the truth, the so-called New York Times v. Sullivan standard that our local friendly fascists are so eager to discard, as it makes it more difficult for rich and powerful people to silence criticism via litigation).
This complex legal situation got translated in the popular media as if the trial was about whether the Holocaust really happened. Holocaust historians Richard Evans and Christopher Browning spent the better part of two years producing hundreds of pages of expert testimony on the question, ultimately, of whether Irving was a real historian or not, since that was what the case, legally speaking, was actually about. In other words, given the relevant legal standards, Irving could win his case if he could demonstrate that Lipstadt had failed to demonstrate that Irving was a fraud, rather than merely a bad historian.
What this led to, inevitably but unfortunately, was weeks of testimony regarding questions such as what evidence there actually is for the existence of the Holocaust in general, and for specific aspects of it, such as gas chambers at Auschwitz. This is unfortunate because debating such things as if they are real historical questions is like debating whether the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor or whether the Germans invaded Russia in June 1941. These are not real questions, and someone has to be either a liar or frankly delusional to think they are. Again, Liptstadt’s perversely difficult legal situation was that the burden was on her to prove that the former rather than the latter was the case in regard to Irving.
Ultimately she was able to do so to the satisfaction of the judge — per the movie anyway Lipstadt’s lawyers successfully baited Irving into accepting a bench rather than a jury trial, by appealing to his vanity and snobbery — and Irving was bankrupted by the British rule that a losing plaintiff in this sort of context has to pay the defendant’s costs, which were millions of pounds.
This whole incident does capture an important distinction, I think, which is the difference between bad scholarship and fake scholarship. Alice Goffman, for example, turned out to not really be a sociologist, because she was doing fake sociology, rather than merely bad sociology. (Goffman knowingly fabricated many incidents in her book On the Run, apparently to “punch up” the narrative as they say in Hollywood. This got her no less than three glowing features in the New York Times from credulous journalists, before the relevant elite institutions finally put her away quietly, as the Bible characterized another awkward situation. I do find it interesting that ten years later none of those institutions have ever acknowledged either what happened, or their role in it happening).
In any event, I think the distinction is an important one to maintain, in a society where knowing fraud on the part of the ruling regimes of so many countries, very much including this one, has become standard operating procedure. Such fraud is or rather should not be a part of legitimate public discourse, under the guise of protecting “intellectual diversity,” because we don’t need a diversity of views in regard to true ones versus fraudulent ones, which is why we don’t need things like debates about whether the Holocaust happened. That was the ultimate message of the Irving trial, although one that was easy to lose sight of then, and even easier to lose sight of now, in the age of Donald Trump, whose entire life and the political movement it spawned is simply one enormous fraud on an all too willing public.