Holocaust. From the Greek, holos, whole or entire, and kaustos burnt: wholly consumed by fire. And David Irving was right. There was no holocaust. The genocide which consumed the Jewish and Romany peoples from 1941 onwards had none of the cleansing and singular purity of an all-consuming flame. That genocide was sprawling, brutal, bloody and largely done by human hand. Whether gas chambers were involved is irrelevant. Most of the victims of the Nazi genocide were probably shot or, worst of all, were worked to death.
The imprisonment of David Irving is the very quintessence of European hypocrisy towards Jews. The continent which hosted the Final Solution is also the primary subsidiser of the Palestinian Authority, which is also probably the greatest source of published anti-Semitism in the world. The PA churns out books and television programmes which present Jews as pigs and monkeys, and which extol the virtue of suicide bombers who kill Jews.
Yet simultaneously, across almost the entire EU, it is illegal to say what I just said in my opening paragraph: that there was no holocaust.
As it happens, I have read most of David Irving's works. He is a brilliant researcher, is partly mad, and is clearly bad. But those who say he denies the Nazi programme of genocide of Jews simply haven't read his writings. Page 12, volume two of his extraordinary Hitler's War: "Hitler had jeered in January 1939: 'Today I am going to be a prophet again. If the international finance-Jewry inside and outside Europe manages just once more to precipitate the world war, the outcome will be, not the bolshevisation of the earth and the consequent triumph of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race on earth.'" In the next paragraph, he quotes Hitler on November 8th, 1942 referring to that prophecy: "As a prophet, [ the Jews] always laughed at me. But of those who laughed loudest then, countless laugh no longer today. Nor are those who are still laughing even now likely to laugh when their time comes."
Page 15 talks of the "demographic extermination" of unwanted elements in Poland, including the Jews. Irving refers to the "murderous orders" of the SS chief Heydrich, and his project of "liquidising the Jews". The Nazi General Riechenau's statement is quoted: "This is why the soldier must understand why we have to exact a harsh but just retribution from the Jewish sub-humans. This serves the added purpose of stifling at birth uprisings in the rear of the Wehrmacht, since experience shows these are always conceived by Jews." Irving quotes Hitler as saying the proclamation was "excellent", and then himself goes on to refer to the "barbarous massacres of Jews". "The ghastly secrets of the extermination programme were well kept." "Each day after July 22 a trainload of five thousand Jews left Warsaw for the extermination center at Treblinka." "By August 1942, the massacre machinery was gathering momentum."
I say all this because I am sick of reading the misrepresentations of Irving's opinions - that he is a consistent denier of the Nazi programme of genocide. Moreover, I am inclined to share his distaste for the fashionable "branding" of the fate of Europe's Jews by the term "holocaust". And I am emphatically with him when he rebuffed a challenge from a particularly stupid BBC reporter: "Do you accept that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust?" Six millions Jews did not die in the "Holocaust" and there was no singular "holocaust", capital h or not. We don't know how many Jews died, but the Nazis were not so efficient as to ensure that it was precisely 6 million. There is a numerical purity about that number every bit as dogmatically insane as the Nazi notions of racial purity. We can never know how many Jews were murdered - but that they were murdered, in their millions, even David Irving did not deny in his trilogy, Hitler's War.
Irving's most contentious points are that Hitler did not know of the genocide of the Jews, which is simply silly, and that more people died at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, which is unforgivable, but in a moral, not a historical or a criminal sense. It is disgusting to make such cheap gibes about Auschwitz, of which Irving himself wrote: "But Himmler's ghastly secret was coming out, for two Slovak Jews had escaped from Auschwitz extermination camp. . ." But even that acknowledgment is irrelevant. Anyone has a right to have wrong opinions, free of the sanctimonious dogma of doctrinaire EU liberal secularism. Anyone should be able to declare that the Nazis didn't massacre Jews, or that no Armenians were murdered in 1915, or that Dresden was a legitimate target, or that it was right to bomb Hiroshima, or that Jesus was not the son of God or that Muhammad was not a prophet, without going to jail for doing so. In a free society, being able to be wrong is the very definition of freedom: otherwise we are ruled by thought-police.
And paradoxically, the only countries in Europe which have made "holocaust denial" a crime are those which were once governed by Nazi thought-police. But not Ireland, not Britain. The intellectual legacy of the Third Reich lives on wherever people today are not entitled to be wrong. For being wrong is not wrong. What is wrong in a free and civilised society is using one's opinions - right or wrong - to promote racial or religious hatred. That is what the Palestinian Authority does - and moreover, we in the EU pay it to do so.