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From: Hilary Ostrov 
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: David Irving's Hymn of Hate - "a pathetic piece of work"
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Date: Wed, 09 May 2001 00:58:40 GMT
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Was Churchill a flasher?
Churchill's War Volume 2: Triumph in Adversity
David Irving (Focal Point Publications, £25) 

Reviewed by Andrew Roberts


Hallelujah! Admirers of Sir Winston Churchill can breathe a huge sigh
of relief. For 14 years since the publication of David Irving's first
volume on Churchill they have been waiting to see what foul
conspiracies the extreme Right-wing historian might have managed to
dig up in the hundreds of archives from which he has worked, but in
this 1,063-page hymn of hate it is clear he has not managed to land
one single significant blow on the reputation of Britain's wartime
leader. 

[...]

Many of Irving's assertions are completely contradictory. If Churchill
"invariably put the interests of the United States above those of his
own country and its empire", why did he not warn the Americans of what
was about to happen in Pearl Harbour? Or if Mr Irving's notorious
views on Auschwitz are correct - that Jews were not being
systematically killed there - why should Churchill be held to account
for not ordering the RAF to bomb it? Mr Irving consistently wants it
both ways, but consistently winds up getting neither. 

[...]

The selective quotation is legion. When Irving claims Churchill wished
to "eliminate" de Gaulle what Churchill in fact recommended to his
Cabinet colleagues was that they should consider whether they should
"eliminate de Gaulle as a political force and face Parliament and
France upon the issue". 

Irving's entire Pearl Harbour theory rests upon an obvious misreading
of the diary of the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office,
Sir Alec Cadogan. 

If Mr Irving really has, as his publisher's blurb suggests, spent 27
years researching and writing this book, then he has wasted half a
lifetime. For in its long series of silly, snide, unproven innuendoes
he has ultimately produced only a rather pathetic piece of work.
Instead of trying to rebuild his historical reputation which was so
damaged by his defeat in the Irving v Lipstadt and Penguin Books libel
trial last year, he has written something that will only convince the
most extreme Right-wing conspiracy theorists. 

When Irving writes that Churchill was of "partly Jewish blood,
although safely diluted", he is simply being repulsive. When he claims
that Churchill "was ambivalent about why he was really fighting this
ruinous war", he is deliberately ignoring the evidence of dozens of
the finest speeches ever delivered in the English tongue, which
explained to Britain and the world between 1939 and 1945 in utterly
uncompromising language precisely why Nazism had to be extirpated for
human civilisation to survive and prosper. 

When he writes that the Duke of Windsor was forced to leave Portugal
in August 1940 at British "pistol point" Irving is simply writing
rubbish. 

[...]

If you have £20 to spend on a book on Churchill, buy Geoffrey Best's
excellent work Churchill: A Study in Greatness, (reviewed on the
facing page), not this tendentious collection of ostensibly
politically motivated slurs on the memory of the man who preserved the
right of freedom of speech in this country. It is a right that has
never been more abused than by David Irving. 



http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/lifestyle/books/top_review.html?in_review_id=388669&in_review_text_id=335175

hro
=====================
Hilary Ostrov
E-mail: hostrov@telus.net
WWW: http://www3.telus.net/myssiwyg/
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