Irving tastes freedom to a blast of Mozart

I cross-posed with Svi. But here is the (almost) straight story from The Times:-

David Irving, the historian jailed for three years in Austria for denying the Holocaust, is free after a court reduced his prison sentence on appeal.

Irving, who was sentenced in February, was released after Vienna’s highest court ruled today that he should serve one year in prison and the remainder of his sentence on probation.

After already serving 13 months behind bars since his arrest in November 2005, Irving had his handcuffs removed today in a small courtroom crowded with his supporters and members of the local press.

“He is free, and he can leave, and he will leave,” said Herbert Schaller, his lawyer, adding that he would advise the historian to leave Austrian soil as soon as possible.

Irving, under strict instructions not to talk to journalists, did not confirm whether he would be flying to Britain but shook hands with his supporters and returned to prison to pick up his belongings.

He left court triumphant and, by coincidence, to a blast of Mozart, which was being played in the courthouse to celebrate the appointment of a local judge.

Irving, 68, entered court this morning with the possibility that his sentence could be increased rather than reduced. After his conviction on February 20, lawyers for both sides had appealed, with the prosecution arguing that the disgraced historian should serve closer to the maximum 10-year sentence allowed under Austria’s stringent Holocaust denial laws.

Irving’s conviction was upheld by Austria’s highest court at an earlier appeal in September.

Just a quick personal observation. I have never been an Irving supporter. He gives off the clearest impression of beng an immensely self-destructive fellow, and his website is as anti-semitic as any Jewish race-ace could wish. But his imprisonment was another issue, of course. My real disdain is reserved for the Austrian Establishment that legislates such shockingly slavish, unEuropean strictures on free expression as the retrospective law under which he was convicted.

As for Irving the researcher and interpreter of German wartime history, he was bound to deal with facts as he found them, and that he found them wanting might yet one day prove the saving of his reputation rather than the damnation of it.

As for Irving the man, perhaps the rank air of unrespectablity that clings to him is not necessarily something that has solely been pinned there by his semitic foes. Perhaps it is merely what becomes of a man locked, as he is, in a frightful cosmic struggle with his own worst nightmare. Perhaps it is just him, and only his own conflicted character drew him to this highly conflicted area of study.

In any event, he will be home in London tonight and it will be interesting to see how he conducts himself from here. Not much different, I would think. His first step, I believe, will be the publishing of his very own prison diary.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 at 11:28 PM in Revisionism
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Comments:

Posted by Matt O'Halloran on December 22, 2006, 12:32 AM | #

David Irving’s insatiable taste for notoriety means he has done more than any other one person to retard the progress of Holocaust revisionism. No wonder that, 30 years after Arthur Butz introduced its main theses to the English-speaking world, it has to go to Teheran and be co-opted by Islamic fundamentalists to gain even dismissive attention.

On his own admission Irving knows little about it, and indeed his tunnel vision makes him useless as a guide to any aspect of 1933-45 except military history and Nazi high politics. His libel action against Devorah Lipstadt was foredoomed, but his confusion about the logistics of Auschwitz-Birkenau was as great as any Nizkor-regurgitator’s.

Apparently he has copped a plea and made some amende dishonorable about the possibility of experimental gas chambers; and that has allowed the Austrians to remit his sentence without jettisoning their own guilt-ridden fervour for persecuting opinion-- the same neurosis that made them unblushingly plead that they were ‘Hitler’s first victims’, cruelly subjected to an Anschluss which 99.7pc voted for. A nation which will unanimously extinguish its independence deserves no more esteem than the artificial ‘Germany’ of Bismarck and Versailles which the Austrian upstart ruled and ruined. Osterreich and Herr Irving deserve one another.

Irving is now free to posture in safety and rationalise his tergiversations, trying to make a little money out of his strenuously sought martyrdom. It wouldn’t be the first time. Some of us remember how he correctly assayed the Hitler Diaries when my Lord Dacre was sniffing them and pronouncing them kosher-- only to panic at the last minute and validate them just before the fraud was unmasked.

Paul Rassinier and Robert Faurisson are worth a hundred of him.

Posted by Desmond Jones on December 22, 2006, 01:50 AM | #

jettisoning their own guilt-ridden fervour for persecuting opinion

I’ll suggest it is not guilt, but an elite triangulation strategy that serves to protect the interest of the few. The Nazi ascension was the culmination of a succesful insurrection that utilised the apprehensions of the German Volk, regarding their future, to dispose of a long reigning German elite. The heavy-handedness of Austrian reprisals for holocaust denial, serves, at least in part, to protect a liberal Austrian elite that pays little for its racial rectitude, in bounty or power.