Professor Richard Evans | Cambridge Union

well who's david irving well he's a writer as i said not a university historian did not have a university degree but he was a successful writer of books about world war ii particularly about the german side of world war ii he began with the book on the bombing of dresden 13th to 14th of february 1945 uh which became quite well known in germany and german translation this book uh made extensive claims for um atrocities carried out strafing of civilians fleeing and gave a very high number of dead in the raids thanks to this book he was regarded among old nazi circles in germany as somebody who'd be relied upon to put their point of view forward and so he had access then to a lot of papers and documents in private hands former generals former leading nazis all kinds of people which he then uh published and used for his best-known book it's called hitler's war published in 1977 it was an account of the second world war from hitler's point of view it was followed by other books of a similar similar sort he relied entirely on his writing for his income didn't have another job and so he claimed that by calling him a falsify of history deborah lipstadt and her publishers penguin books were striking at the very heart of his income and his livelihood so he claimed exemplary damages now if you're faced with a libel suit like this you've got a number of choices you can say that the words complained of are not defamatory but they clearly were defamatory he's quite right say that you can claim that they don't mean what the person bringing the bible sees says they mean but deborah litzat writes a very clear prison it's absolutely there was a black and white on the page he falsifies history he's a holocaust denier so there's one avenue left to you it is to say yes the words mean what this claim to mean yes it's defamatory but they're true and that's an absolute defense in english law of course if you think about it it's rather topsy-turvy you the person who's being accused in a civil action uh by somebody else you have to prove that your innocence you have to prove that what you said is is true they don't have to prove that what you said is untrue but that's the way it was that's explained very clearly in the movie that was made in 2016 called denial about about the trial in fact i i wouldn't surprise me if it's if it's used in law teaching uh because it's a really excellent explanation of the differences in the law so anthony julius the solicitor was commissioned by deborah lipstadt to organize a defense the penguin commissioned they had their own legal department which had their own solicitors but it was anthony julius who really worked he was very well known indeed at that time even famous solicitor he had represented princess diana in her divorce suit against prince charles and won her a record settlement and while the trial was going on the preparations of the trial uh when i was in the offices of mishkan derea anthony julius's firm this i occasionally see this tall emaciated figure flitting through uh it was jerry hall who he was acting in on behalf of in a palimini suit against mick jagger so he had a certain reputation he decided that the defense would be organized around expert witnesses that's a very important point because what the trial was about wasn't whether the holocaust happened or not it was about as irving said quite rightly in at the beginning his opening statement it was about what happened within the four walls of his own study more or less and in some places where he gave speeches and so on but it was about his own writing and speaking about the holocaust of course if you prove that what he said was false and manipulative and based on messing about the sources and so on then that has a lot of implications for whether the holocaust happened and the history of the holocaust but so kind of the one subject bleeds over into the other still it was a very important distinction to make what the defense in a libel suit does is to turn the tables so it puts the spotlight absolutely directly unremittingly unceasingly on the plaintiff on the claymont anything else is a distraction double us that was very keen to go into the witness box but the solicitors anthony julius and his team wouldn't allow it very frustrating she's a very uh very um volleyball and and powerful speaker in fact but she wasn't she had to keep absolutely silent no press conferences no interviews nothing during the trial any of that would have taken the focus off irving it would have allowed him to say what he actually wanted to say at the beginning what was stopped from saying by the judge which was that she was part of a world conspiracy a world jewish conspiracy to discredit him because he was telling the truth about the holocaust so uh witnesses well of course in the iceman trial in jerusalem in 1961 a very famous trial in which adolf eichmann the ss officer who had been one of the main people carrying out ordering and organizing the mass extermination of six million jews in the second world war been kidnapped on a tip-off from the german legal officials by the israeli secret service in exile in argentina and brought to jerusalem put on trial that trial had a succession a long succession of holocaust survivors coming to testify uh in the witness stand as to what they had undergone and eichmann's role in it all and that wasn't what the 2000 trial was about it focused as i said on irving's writings i was asked i was phoned up in my london office i was teaching at birkbeck at the time i was found out about anthony julius uh who said he'd like me to act as an expert witness in the last six months he said it won't be much work it'll be it'll be a doddle in fact it took three years and became quite clear very quickly that there's far too much material for me to master on my own so i persuaded the lawyers to pay two of my phd students to help me and actually to my horror i discovered after i'd written my report had to write an expert report uh on um uh irving's writings uh did he falsify history was he all of us deny that every document i cited in my footnotes had to be there in the court um i said i couldn't possibly find them all so they then employed in the end they had 40 people in the lawyers office working on the various expert witness reports and there were 400 files or as the courts rather quaintly called them bundles as if they were kind of parchment wrapped up in in in ribbon uh around the walls of the court so people could refer refer to them so my job was to look at irving's writings my assistants watch videos of his speeches there's a process called discovery which it means kind of the opposite of what it you might think it means which is it's really disclosure so each side in the action has to disclose to the other side all the relevant documentation in fact anthony juris attended court order to make irving disclose everything my my two researchers spent two weeks in in irving's flat going through all this stuff and getting videos and speeches and and so on enormous massive material and the uh this is one uh there were other expert witnesses as an expert witness who testified to irving's involvement with the german neo-nazi groups there was there were other expert witnesses who as it were testified to the evidence for the holocaust that irving was then uh had been accused by lipstadt of distorting and manipulates manipulating christopher browning peter longrish um there were others we didn't actually ask a political scientist to talk about irving's connection to neo-fascism but he turned out to be completely useless because he i won't mention his name because he spent too much time writing about the theories of neo-fascism what is it how do you define it with the varieties what the court wanted was more or less the same as what historians want and so in that sense the the uh there was a kind of nice congress between the epistemological understanding of history and and the law what the court wanted was a statement that would say at this point irving was seen by this witness here's the quote here's the document uh in this hotel lobby talking to this man who is well known as neo-nazi here's the documents and so on so quite precise empirical material and that worked really pretty well and as an expert awareness your duty is to the court it's uh just when we the trial started the lawyers are absolutely really furious because tony blair's government abandoned from using latin in court and they rather like to produce latin phrases with a with a flourish so i wasn't called an amicus courier but a friend of the court so it's the rather grumpy uh called me so you're there to advise the court on matters which the court can't be expected to know about itself the classic of course is in a murder case you have a pathologist who said the wound was this deep and that angle and it must have been a left-handed uh man who was six foot three tall and uh wielding a kitchen knife something that sort of thing actually most days but witnesses are pharmacologists so it's by far the most common kind of expert witness there's a couple of let out clauses that were that mean you don't that mean uh that gets you out of being regarded as being biased so first of all probably most important part from the fact that you you swear an oath to the court that you're going to be absolutely objective and you're not going to pay any attention who's paying you because i was paid by the solicitors um you're paid by the hour so in other words you know you put in a kind of weekly bill uh the standard rates across the board laid down by by the courts and if you end up with a report if i reported and said irving is a wonderful historian that lipstad is talking absolute nonsense they could not have turned around and said well we want our money back so you you are able to be absolutely independent the movie gets it slightly wrong in this respect because right at the beginning in the opening scene uh it has me and my assistants sort of saying uh oh we're raring to go we're going to get him we're going to nail him something like that nothing like that at all we had no idea we haven't read everything's work because it's not useful for academic purposes uh it's very much empirical narrative history and we didn't know what you find and in fact a lot of the excitement uh in our weekly meetings was um just you know one of my assistants would come and say you never guess what i've found here let me guess what he's done how he's changed this and he's done that and so on so uh that was really not a little bit misleading so reacts awarenesses you've got um we we we started preparing and researching our uh our report the reports were in this must have been in the beginning of 1997 and the court hearing was set for january 2000 the reports have to be in six months before so that the other side and get a chance to to examine them now um i'm sure some of you at least have had the experience of going and asking for an extension to an essay deadline but if it's a high court judge saying that's when you've got to get it in that's not going to work so it's a really absolutely tight deadline the court case rested on expert awareness reports and the preliminary hearing before an official known as the the master the queen's bench this um this hearing again it appears in the in the movie quite accurately uh irving was persuaded that it should be tried by a judge and not by a jury one of those impressive things about the the whole case is the fact that uh the lawyers were very keen to keep the case as short as possible and to reduce the costs as far as possible so if a jury had been considering it then i'd have had to be in the witness box basically telling the jury what was in my report and the same with the other expert witnesses as it was the judge read the report and uh based his judgment on that plus on all the reports plus the testimony given uh by by us and um the the court proceedings the defense had the option of not calling uh the an excellent witness in fact we didn't call this political scientist at all um because they felt that it wouldn't be very useful and if they don't call you as an exit witness to go into the court and be cross-examined then the court has to disregard your report just doesn't bother with it so that's another let out uh for the expert witness it means you can write whatever you whatever you like so it was held before a single judge charles gray who was an expert very experienced former barrister in the whole area of defamation law the second peculiarity of the case was that irving conducted his own case either he couldn't afford a barrister or he didn't think he could rely on a barrister to make the political capital out of he advocates that he wanted to now the case why did he bring the case well you have to go back a bit so 1977 his book uh hitler's war very successful he managed to he bought a rolls-royce had a flat in mayfair was doing very well but then in the single 1980s uh he changed his views on the holocaust up to then he'd been regarded as a a solid historian with a a an ability to dig up new sources rather eccentric on the matter of hitler who he claimed was either did not know about the holocaust or had tried to stop it and it's characteristic he didn't see there was a contradiction between these two these two arguments but in the late 1980s a case was brought against a german a canadian man called ann single who was a holocaust denier and uh he was prosecuted in canada under a rather archaic law against spreading false news it dated i think for the days of the american revolutionary wars and which is subsequently ruled unconstitutional and gentle was then deported but so recalled the number of witnesses he called irving and in his defense and irving uh read a curious document called the lustre report and fred luster a rather sinister figure who made a living designing illegal injection facilities for american penitentiaries had been sent by holocaust deniers in california to at the self-styled institute for historical review review two auschwitz to take samples off the inner walls of the crematorium building where uh large numbers of jews had been gassed so he went there illegally took them off put them in a bag sent them to a chemist without saying what they were and they came back and the chemist said there's a very small tiny residue of cyanide a precipitation of cyanide there solution concluded triumphantly that therefore the gas this cannot could not have been a gas chamber used to kill people it must have been used for delouting clothes briefly there are two problems with this um one is that he took great chunks out of the wall instead of taking very minute scrapings off the inner wall so that it would have been diluted secondly you do need 22 times greater concentration of hydrogen cyanide to kill the human being then allow us because the lights can creep into the interfaces of clothes and so on uh humans just breathe it and they die so it was a completely phony fraudulent piece of science but having claimed to believe it he judged the moment was right and became a fully fledged holocaust denier now so he's got this idea that hitler was a basically didn't know or tried to stop the holocaust and also in any case the holocaust didn't happen so um in fact that was his argument how could he be a holocaust denier if it didn't happen you can't you can't deny something it hasn't happened but this is a logical tangle that the court decided it wasn't going to get involved with um he changed his books so look his war came out in 1992 in another new edition uh he had changed auschwitz from a death camp to a labor camp he had expunged all the references to the the holocaust and to gas chambers and in fact by that time he wasn't able to publish his work by mainstream publishers penguin published his war in 77 but irving had become known now from since 87 88 as a holocaust denier he got into a lot of trouble when he discovered the through a a tip-off that after the full of communism that was a complete set now accessible of joseph goebbels diaries the diaries of the propaganda chief of the nazis on glass plates kind of microfiche there were bits and pieces have been known before but not a complete set they're very very voluminous he was one of these divers who just has to write every day about what happened the day before and they were in the moscow kgb special archive the kgb is predecessor of the nkvd had taken a lot of documents from germany and scrolled away in its own archive for its own use and this stuff was now available another thing that's very good at reading the old german handwriting goebbels is running quite difficult so he managed to sell this uh the idea of of printing translating and printing extracts to the sunday times now the saudi times had its fingers burnt with the hitler diaries in 1983 a blatant forgery and it insisted that irving should actually prove the documents that the diaries the plates were genuine so he smuggled one out uh had it tested and smuggled it back in the archive they were undoubtedly genuine but when they came out of course he was selecting extracts and translating them in a way that showed hitler in a favorable light uh and there was a huge storm the sunday times had to uh uh had to cancel his cancellous contract they had to pay him the fee nonetheless it cost them some money it didn't get them very good reputation so um after that he could only publish and can still only publish his work himself self-published the 1992 edition of hitler's war was self-published and um okay oddly enough when i went consulted in the british library i had to go to the pornography desk i know you've ever done this but in the british library if you're reading pornography um you what some scholars do they're perfectly reputable uh there's a special desk with a sort of surveillance in front of it sort of keep your hands on the table this kind of thing you know um so uh i had to read that well i told this in this in court the uh i think got really furious and i don't know why british library did this maybe they thought neo-nazis would get too excited or something but there it was and there were other things and there were a lot of speeches that my poor assistants had to read and transcribe parts of and and so on so we produced our report 740 pages of it robert yan van pelt expert on auschwitz who had discovered contemporary documents by the firms that built the gas chambers he wrote a 600-page report there's a lot of us 2000 pages of documentation and that's what you do in the libel kit six pages of lip slap 2 000 pages of expert testimony saying the same thing but a lot more and in a lot more a lot more detail this is presented to the court and the judge the proceedings then began with the uh the judge i think having read all the reports obviously and they began with irving being cross-examined by uh by richard rampton the cue defense qc and then the expert witness is coming on and being cross-examined in their turn by irving i was in the witness box for 28 hours over about 10 days it's quite stressful business there's a two and a half hour session in the morning two and a half hour session in the afternoon being subjected relentlessly to hostile questioning all the time i got one piece of two pieces of advice from anthony julius one don't look him in the eye or you'll get annoyed i did at the beginning i did so and then i re rethought it and address my remarks to the judge because in the end you are advising the court and that in turn got irving annoyed and he started calling me witness and uh being quite quite abrupt secondly don't drink too much water it's embarrassing to ask for a comfort break so that's all the only advice i got and i wasn't actually asked i i wasn't allowed to see or meet or talk to the defense team while i was in the witness spot during those 10 days but fortunately my old tutor from oxford samartin gilbert uh the bogrov of churchill um an author of a number of large number of books about jewish history was attending the trial oddly enough to recover from a quadruple heart bypass operation i think more relaxing things to do but still there he was and so he very kindly took me out for for lunch every day while i was in the awareness box um it was um an extraordinary trial it's a civil action it's not a criminal action and the civil action is decided on the balance of probabilities and that of course is what we do as historians we make our decisions on the balance of the probabilities and we conclude this all that exactly what the court did so there's no real clash of epistemology there either well um i i of course i don't want to go into any any detail about the the trial there isn't really time the movie denial does actually uh give a pretty fair account of the trial every courtroom scene is taken direct and unchanged from the transcripts so i had the rather odd experience of seeing an actor saying my lines what i'd actually said myself on the screen i have to say john sessions who played me should have lost weight before he played me honestly i think but apart from that of course he was actually giving his my evidence and i thought god i was really good wasn't i and then of course i realized he's he's an actor he can practice them he can he can actually deliver them but forcefully i probably sort of mumbled them i didn't have only had one shot at it and was sort of unprepared it was a curious experience because irving was so confident he didn't believe that an academic even a cambridge professor could actually pick hull's major huge holes in what he'd been doing uh and so he didn't start reading my report until very late on in the day uh not far about about christmas i think and so he um uh but he questioned me it's not a page by fade page what did we find uh what we found was not uh not shaken in the least by irving's questioning uh what we said was absolutely solid it's taken a lot of effort to do what did we find when we found massive manipulation we found he'd put words into quotes from sources we got hold of the original sources we had a cooperation from archives in washington moscow munich berlin tel aviv london everywhere all over the place he'd taken words out when he quoted them he changed the order of sentences he picked a bad translation when it favored his own uh argument and a good one if that favors him when he was using when he was using english translations mostly it was about about german normally with holocaust deniers as with other conspiracy theorists it's very unprofitable to engage in debate because you might have an hour two hours three hours even for a seminar or lecture or something like that all you've got is sound bites you can't actually um get in into subjects in any depth in the court we had limitless time we could pursue every point as long as we wanted to we could argue the toss until the judge suddenly said really right i've got the point let's move on journalists attended the case in the press gallery but more or less as soon as i got into the witness box the press gallery emptied because it was mostly about german documents and they got very bored very quickly the one press report of my cross-examination said disbelievingly they spent half an hour arguing about the place of a full stop in a document but that's a great advantage we had three months we could discuss all of these different aspects in absolute depth as long and as much as we wanted to so the case was decided by the judge in the favor of the defense he found that lipstick's allegations were true and dismissed irving's suit awarded costs against him the costs came to something over three million pounds by the time everybody gets paid especially rich rampton the barrister who was worth every penny absolutely brilliant he even learned german for the for the case in his early 50s and uh of course having declared himself bankrupt and never paid a penny the costs are paid by penguins insurance every publisher is insured against libel uh for the first million then pearson longman who the multinational owned penguin and then a fundraising effort by deborah lipster the impression given by the movie that developed studies uh raised all the fun money itself is not really terribly accurate so uh it was um well the two remaining questions i think uh first of all why did i having do it secondly um why did you have those views the judge said he had the prejudices he was a racist he was anti-semitic and he manipulated the evidence to try and conform to his prejudices why does it do that now the second question is what it all mean okay so the um the after the trial well the one before and one after there were there were he was in cautious enough to be interviewed by two uh radio psychiatrists and these guys have got a way of making a reveal a bit more you think you're revealing and in addition to that i was uh rung up in my office just after the the trial and the chat said uh he'd announce himself as a psychiatrist writing about freudian slips now in this final statement to the court irving at one point mistakenly called the judge mind fuhrer amazing you can hardly believe it but everybody felt about laughing until the judge called order and this uh this psychiatrist said did you really say it and i said well i'm not sure you know i i could swear i heard it but it seems so weird you know so unlikely the judge the psychiatrist yeah the judge the judge said uh he said he did say it because charles gray the judge is unusually forthcoming for a uh for a high court judge and the psychiatrist phoned him up too and he said yes serving as mumbled an apology to him uh while everyone was falling about laughing so how do you explain all this well irving was born in 1938 and he lived brentwood just to the east of london his father went away to see uh in in 1941 i think and uh and never came back as sailors do he found a wife in another port or he whatever reason he didn't come back to the family and almost straight away uh irving found a substitute father figure oddly enough in hitler because his mother must presumably have told him according to these psychiatrists that his father was going to fight for mr churchill for whom irving then conceived of visceral hatred uh and he has a twin brother and this twin brother actually even changed his name at one point in his life when he was working for the ministry of defense and he remembers serving at the age of four taking him out and giving a nazi salute to german bombers going overhead and uh somehow he had the sort of hotline to the truth about hitler that he was a good guy he could do no wrong and so if the evidence said anything against that he was entitled to alter the evidence because with the evidence that wasn't true and in that sense his holocaust denial and his denial and hitler's involvement in it had all kind of merged into merged into one and that was the motivation i think the personal motivation behind the whole business and he was of course absolutely uh politically uh a neo-fascist he'd even at one point in the early eighties tried to form his own neo-fascist movement in britain but it had failed since he'd announced that he would provide the officers and the the national front and bnp in these other organizations provide the foot soldiers which they weren't really very pleased about hearing that so that was that was really i think why he did it and to get back into publicity to be able to spread his ideas through the medium of the court when he was no longer able in the early from the early 90s to present them through books that were sold in bookshops talks lectures and and so on well what did it mean well first of all i think we did discredit irving there were a number of historians one very senior mran an expert in nazi germany told me just before the trial that we would never be able to prove it but he was on the whole perfectly respectable historian apart from some odd ideas about hitler he called two leading historians john keegan d.c what as witnesses who said more or less the same sort of thing and then after the trial wrote articles in the press denouncing me and saying that it was all terribly biased for any historian who was subjected to the kind of forensic dissection that i and my team had done would uh would you'd find exactly the same thing but it's absolutely true in fact what i met cameron was i said are you really telling me that if i went through all your work i'd find it was just as manipulated deserving of course he had to say no and that's true this is a level of manipulation far greater than you see anywhere else and crucially of course we historians make mistakes we get things wrong we make little slips it's it's inevitable however much you try you know you publish a book you've been through it 10 times you have proofreaders you've had copy editors and so on the first time you get a published copy you open it and you find a misprint on a page point about his mistakes was that they were all in the same direction all of his errors supported his own arguments now if you're just careless the effect will be random some will support your argument some won't some will be irrelevant to them and that i think above all is what convinced the judge that irving was deliberately manipulating and falsifying the material what we did i think discredited him he's not been able to recover we also i think upheld the freedom of speech this is often been misunderstood by commentators the point was that irving wanted a book deborah lipscott's book withdrawn pulped he wanted her and penguin and everyone to commit themselves never to repeating these allegations about him or anyone else it would have been impossible had he won to say that anybody was ahold of a holocaust denier and and a false affair manipulator of history so it held the lines that hasn't stopped irving from uh talking writing uh works of holocaust denial nor has it stopped anyone else there are countries in which holocaust denial is illegal but in my view and in that of chevrolet as well because we both appeared in the union and the other place uh arguing a debate for this uh it's wrong to um uh to outlaw holocaust denial it turns them into martyrs for the freedom of speech and they're certainly not interested in freedom of speech gives them a prominence they don't deserve and it's very difficult to to prove irving eventually when he went to austria was arrested and imprisoned for a year under a holocaust denial law he's allowed one phone call a day who did he make the first phone call two it wasn't to his wife his child it was in the bbc uh it gave him a lot of publicity which he she craved it's the oxygen of holocaust tonight's lives the victory for freedom of speech was only partial because publishers remained worried about being sued for libel i boiled down my reports added some impressions of the trial and tried to get it published as a book came out in america fine britain turned down by six publishers because irving was writing to everyone threatened to see them if they published my work in the end i enlisted a couple of journalists who wrote about this scandal and he uh and um tarik ali uh phoned up a trotskyite um activist and director of new left fox we will we must publish this book to uh defeat the uh this fascist and so i've i went with him and the director the financial director of verso new uh new books uh to anthony julius who offered to represent them in a strikeout action now as to say if irving had sued then they could say strike this action out please um because it's already been decided you don't want to fight the whole thing all over again even that would have cost some money however and but that was free julius said we'll do it for free the barrister you might have to pay the barriers you won't have to pay us uh even that didn't convince most publishers but the political drive behind um terry cowy and the directors was of verso were sufficient to overcome the financial director's worries i have never seen before or since a man literally shaking with fear as i did that financial director in anthony julius's office but they published it uh it was a great success for about six months it sold five thousand copies in six months and then sort of declined and lost the public interest they are somebody asked the uh publicity director of sir aren't you worried about being sued for libel he said no bring it on i mean we need the publicity nobody's ever heard of us i mean if we become a center a big libel for exactly the right the right case [Music] well doesn't have butt the butt in this because i think we we felt perhaps a bit complacent about what we'd achieved because i think the rise of the internet the rise of social media has actually brought holocaust denial back uh it's because the traditional gatekeepers gatekeepers of opinion formation and journalism and expressions of opinion newspaper editors radio tv editors magazine editors they're essentially bypassed by the internet and so there's a lot of holocaust denial out there in addition there's the old style neo-nazi neo-fascist holocaust denial which is absolutely central uh to their beliefs has been joined by islamist extremists uh holocaust denial and so most of the websites you follow us on our websites you find now a large number of them are islamist extremists but in a way it's less important to them than it was to old style fascists because their aim of course is to discredit the state of israel so in safari the holocaust is a legitimate factor in the existence of israel they will attack its legitimacy but much more important to them i think are criticisms of the policies of the israeli government treatment of the palestinians gaza and all of those kinds of things nevertheless i think we are in a situation where we have to be concerned again about about holocaust denial in conclusion let me say that i am very proud of my involvement in the case it took three years and not six months as anthony julius had said i started it as a kind of test case for some arguments i've been putting forward about truth and falsehood in the little book i wrote called in defense of history but it became much bigger than that i couldn't who could fail to be moved was looking at the public galleries and we had to move after the first day to the biggest court on the strand when you could see elderly people sitting there with their sleeves rolled up and their auschwitz prisoner to two numbers showing sitting next to young skinheads with swastika tattoos on their necks it was extraordinary achievement i think daily telegraph a paper i don't often agree with but a paper that said coming quite rightly after the trial that it did for the 21st century what the irishman trial did for the second half of their twenties because i think what we showed contrary to liberal stats concern that when survivors finally die out there'll be nobody left to tell the tale holocaust denial will become easier and get more credence it showed that historians when we look at all the evidence examine it carefully we can reach reasoned conclusions yes it did happen yes uh it was one of the greatest crimes in human history why was perpetrated and many other questions of that sort we can continue to argue with the basic facts i think are well established thank you very much thank you richard for that fantastic fantastic talk um we're going to move now to just a few questions so very nice last question raise your hand i'll go to the gentleman the pink pink sweater thank you so clearly irving was defeated and he ran out of oxygen but he was only an individual so how do you think we should defeat the manipulation of history by governments and states for instance over issues like the armenian genocide and the massacre of chinese civilians in the 30s and 40s which are still kind of manipulated and partially denied by current japanese and turkish governments uh that's a really really good good question i mean irving is important of course because he was relatively respectable historian before the trial and therefore his ideas will give him more credence than those of others more obvious extremists how should we deal with the distortion of truth by governments well i think that is a very serious issue and become more serious i think if you go back in history and found and there's nobody told more lies in yours of globals for example in the nazi regime but uh the uh there are a lot of deniers of genocidal um mass murders whatever you want to call them there are there's a great deal of manipulation of history that goes on i think the best way to do it is just to insist on telling the truth um it sounds very simple maybe a bit naive but it's our duty i think to counter these whatever the whatever the cost and the other thing i want to say is that we should insist as much as possible in as strongly as possible that governments should not get involved in telling people what to believe about history so you know the absurd situation that it is illegal in turkey to say that the murder of armenians in world war one in 1915 by the ottoman empire was a genocide uh there had been strong movement in france to declare it illegal to say that it wasn't a genocide governments get involved in manipulating and laying down what they want people to believe about about the past i had a tangle with michael gove in 2010 2013 the early early part of this decade over his attempts to reform the school curriculum and for history which he wanted made into patriotic narrative celebrating the triumphs and wonders of the british achievements through through the centuries and finally uh there was a large movement amongst history historians british academy the world assault society and so on against that and we managed to stop that we have to keep on fighting i think i go to the gentleman in the second row are you touched upon the slightly in your closing remarks with the internet and also now so you have to speak a bit more slowly a bit more of course you touched upon this with uh your closing remarks and also now with using truth to combat the spread of misinformation but how is this an effective strategy in the rise of what is called a post-truth society where we are losing these standards for universal objective truth in favor for more individual truth and believing what one wishes to believe or what feels true yeah well i think uh we have to respect evidence what the evidence does is to i think um constitute the boundaries within within which we can argue of course you can dispute those boundaries but there are boundaries in the end so you can argue endlessly about who started the first world war was it germany was it russia was it serbia was it france and so on but if you say it was a a rocket full of little green men who came down from space i think you're entitled to say that's not true so um when you talk about objectivity for me that means focusing upon the object the evidence uh of course that's these things these things are all arguable but that is what i think we have to to focus on and one of the worrying things about the internet and social media is how opinion seems to be all that matters and that um the fact it doesn't really matter if there's no evidence for an opinion so i think that that will be my response i think we could have two more questions we'll go to the gentleman in the first row and then the gentleman of the third row thank you for your talk um you talk about kind of using sources honestly and i've recently been studying the civil war and the dispute between kishlan ski and john adamson and i was just wondering within the context of university we're taught to write streamlined essays with arguments and the argument is central but how is a three-hour exam going to concert how does that constitute good learning for historical practice shouldn't it be an exam based on an a piece of evidence that we've found and analyzed rather than a streamlined argument with evidence that might not even really be true in of itself well i mean university history education is both isn't it you've got if you do a special subject you have to do a special subject in your final year and that is based on the analysis of documents so it's not just opinions i mean i always thought that writing a a a short essay on a big subject it was a wonderful basis for becoming a politician because it gives you confidence in talking about things you really don't know very much about but at the same time plausibly and and and they hope convincingly that that's in in a way why i went on from being an undergraduate historian to doing a doctorate where you have a chance to pick one subject and going into it in enormous depth to satisfy one's desire to study things more deeply so but i think a good history degree will surely combine both of those things within the limits of three years of study okay go to the gentleman's third row uh professor thank you so much um i wanted to ask two questions if possible and i apologize make sure they're quick because so you spent uh obviously a number of days uh across the across the room with from david evan i was hoping you could maybe uh give us some color on like your reflections of the man himself like if there's been there's obviously a lot of talk about your personal well you have to you have to repeat that about your personal dislike of him like the wikipedia page says so like i can't really follow you sorry what do you think oh sorry uh you spent a number of days sitting across the room from david irving can you maybe cast some color on what you personally like or dislike the man and how you were able to keep calm over 10 days when all right so when i was in the witness box being quite examined by irving well uh of course it's a it's very weird unfamiliar situation um but once i'd kind of calmed my nerves at the beginning um i insisted he would say now you say professor evans blah blah blah so i say can you point me to the passage on page whichever number name the page in the paragraph and the passage in my report and the judge said come on professor evans do we really need this so so i said i'm afraid we do because i can't trust mr irving to give an accurate rendition of what i'd said and that was true time after time i found that when he claimed i'd said something in my report uh it doesn't actually wasn't actually what i said at all uh and that gave me confidence i i think to continue and i sort of got the measure of him really it was quite a dramatic moment when we were discussing hitler's political testament and there's an extraordinary passage there where in effect he admits to the holocaust and he says the jews have been made to pay for their crimes i.e he blamed the jews for the bombing of german cities even if only in a more humane way meaning gas chambers said so are you saying professor that the gas chambers were humane i said no it's hitler saying that and the kind of gasps in the audience so that level of distortion you know they used to say about harold wilson the labour prime minister decades ago that he was so devious that if he swallowed a six inch nail and come out the other end as a corkscrew and and i thought that feeling about him so it was stressful in the sense i had to look at every single um passage sometimes he'd quote a sentence from the middle of one of my paragraphs which gave it a different meaning from when you had in the whole path so i'd start reading the whole paragraph and you then start shouting at me but i actually asked the stenographer there were stenographers they were amazing women um taking it all down and we all had uh um computer screens where what have been said three or four minutes before would start rolling down so i said to her well we're all when we're both talking at once who do you who you listen to she said well the one who shouts the louder so i raised my voice after that okay thank you very much richard um just a few notes the key tickets uh going online online two minutes ago so if you haven't yet bought a ticket we have another uh limited release the carry takes place on saturday um and we also have george dursarty uh later today later today which is in collaboration with the wilberforce society um thank you all for coming and thank you to the stewards who have made this event possible um the cleo who have collaborated with us and all of you for coming here and last but not least last but not least uh professor evans if you could join me for one last round of applause

Channel: Cambridge Union

Views: 4,509

Rating: 4.4366198 out of 5

Keywords: Cambridge Union, Cambridge University, Wolfson College, Richard J Evans, In Defence of History

Id: kY2ONByZOJE

Length: 54min 50sec (3290 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 05 2019