Richard Evans' Lying About Hitler

[MalignD at aol.com]

For anyone interested, and by way of contrast, Christopher Hitchens, (albeit 
himself not free of controversy) also writing about the Irving affair, offers 
a rather less rabid opinion about the biases of historians:

"History, especially as written by historians in the English tradition, is a 
literary and idiosyncratic form. Men such as Gibbon and Macaulay and Marx 
were essayists and polemicists in the grand manner, and when I was at school, 
one was simply not supposed to be prissy about the fact. We knew that  
Macaulay wrote to vindicate the Whig school, just as we knew of the 
prejudices of Carlyle (though there were limits: Nobody ever let us read his 
"Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question," a robustly obscene defense of 
slavery). Handing me a copy of "What Is History?" by E.H. Carr, my Tory 
headmaster loftily told me that it was required reading in spite of its 
"rather obvious Marxist bias." The master of my Oxford college was 
Christopher Hill, the great chronicler of Cromwell and Milton and Winstanley 
and the Puritan Revolution. Preeminent in his field, Hill had been a member 
of the Communist Party and could still be slightly embarrassed by mention of 
his early book, "Lenin and the Russian Revolution," in which the name of Leon 
Trotsky was conspicuous by its absence. Moving closer to our own time, we had 
Sir Arthur Bryant, whose concept of history as a pageant culminated in 
extreme royalism and a strong sympathy for Franco and Mussolini and Hitler. 
Then there was A.J.P. Taylor, one of the most invigorating lecturers of all 
time, who believed that the Nazis had more or less been tricked into the war. 
And how can one forget Hugh Trevor-Roper, author of the definitive narrative 
of Hitler's final days, who had close connections to British intelligence, 
who might be overheard making faintly anti-Jewish remarks and later 
pronounced the forged Hitler diaries genuine?  These were men who had been 
witnesses and participants as well as archivists and chroniclers. Their 
accounts were essential reading; the allowance for prejudice and inflection 
was part of the fun of one's bookkeeping.         

This of course doesn't license absolute promiscuity. Eric Hobsbawm, a member 
of the Communist Party (much later than Hill), may have advertised his 
allegiances but retained the respect of most critics because he had a strong 
sense of objectivity in his historical work. In other words, no dirty tricks 
were to be allowed. 

However, what I mean to say for now is that when I first became aware of 
Irving, I did not feel it necessary to react like a virgin who is suddenly 
confronted by a man in a filthy raincoat."