The Sorrow and the Pity of David Irving

Michael C. Moynihan | July 28, 2008

The Nation's Max Blumenthal invades a secret David Irving speech in Manhattan—in the Upper West Side, away from all those perfidious Jews!—and produces a decent, if slightly depressing, video. It could have been considerably better, though, had Blumenthal not spent his brief interview time quizzing Irving on the particulars of his "friendship" with Christopher Hitchens, who once famously called the Hitler's War author not only a "fascist historian" but a "great historian of fascism." Blumenthal, son of Hitchens's ex-friend Sidney Blumenthal, is revisiting a scurrilous charge introduced by his father in 1999, when the two fell out during the Lewinsky investigation. There are a number of points with which I disagree, and he fails to emphasize the the "fascist historian's" deep Judeophobia, but this Hitchens review of D.D. Guttenplan's fantastic book on the Irving-Lipstadt trial is hardly sympathetic to Irving, or, of course, to Holocaust denialism. When sticking to the more interesting topic—Irving's apologia for the Holocaust and his denial of Hitler's foreknowledge—Blumenthal gets some interesting footage: