アーヴィングの復活 - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

Carole Cadwalladr “Antisemite, Holocaust denier … yet David Irving claims fresh support” https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jan/15/david-irving-youtube-inspiring-holocaust-deniers

デヴィッド・アーヴィングという著述家がいる*1。所謂「ホロコースト否定者」*2。彼は一時裁判に負け、破産宣告を受け、さらにはオーストリアでホロコースト否定論の罪で刑務所に入るなど、一時は表面から消えていたが、最近ではその人気が復活し、ロールスロイスを乗り回すまでになっている。

“Interest in my work has risen exponentially in the last two or three years. And it’s mostly young people. I’m getting messages from 14, 15, 16-year-olds in America. They find me on YouTube. There are 220 of my lectures on YouTube, I believe, and these young people tell me how they’ve stayed up all night watching them.
“They get in touch because they want to find out the truth about Hitler and the second world war. They ask all sorts of questions. I’m getting up to 300 to 400 emails a day. And I answer them all. I build a relationship with them.”

最初に言及した、米国の歴史学者デボラ・リップシュタットさん*3と争った裁判はDenialというタイトルで映画化されている；

Irving v Penguin Books Ltd was one of the most infamous libel trials of the past 20 years. An American historian, Deborah Lipstadt, had accused him in her book, Denying the Holocaust,and Irving, then a somewhat respected if maverick historian, sued her and her publisher. The film, Denial, with a script by David Hare, is released at the end of this month and stars Rachel Weisz as Lipstadt and Timothy Spall as Irving. It depicts how Lipstadt’s legal team fought the case.
James Libson, a junior solicitor in the case and now a senior partner at Mishcon de Reya, said that the verdict seemed “momentous at the time”. Lipstadt won, with the judge concluding that Irving was an antisemitic, racist Holocaust denier. He was forced to declare bankruptcy and his scholarly reputation was shattered. “We really thought the verdict marked a line in the sand,” says Libson. “That it marked Holocaust denial as a done subject. We’d proven it, conclusively, in a court of law.

しかし、インターネットの効果については勘違いをしていたという。裁判では勝ったけれど、ネットでは負けた。ジェイムズ・リブソン弁護士の言葉；

“We naively thought that the internet would help that. All the material from the case was published online and we thought that would provide sufficient answer to anyone who could possibly doubt it. Whereas, of course, the internet has actually done the opposite.
“I wasn’t aware until recently of how Holocaust denial has now taken off online again to such an extent. I was really excited to watch the trailer for the film and I couldn’t believe the number of absolutely vile comments beneath it – about the holohoax and so on, more than 4,000 of them. It’s incredibly disturbing. It’s actually way worse now than even Irving was because they’re so abusive.”

アーヴィングの言葉。スコットランド高地の豪邸で語る；

Irving lost the case – and another that he brought against the Observer over a review by Gita Sereny*4 – but speaking from his home in the Scottish Highlands, a 40-room mansion near Nairn provided by an anonymous benefactor, he says that history has “vindicated” him.
“History evolves. The truth about the Holocaust is gradually coming out. And this is thanks to the internet. It’s how this new generation finds me. There’s a general belief among people out there that they are being misled. The people I’ve called the traditional enemy [Irving’s term for Jews] are very worried about this phenomenon. They don’t have a handle on it.
“Newspapers are dying. And the internet is suddenly there. And they don’t have an answer for it. It’s like some ugly weed they don’t know how to deal with. Eventually they will hack it down but by then it may be too late.”

リップシュタットさんの正攻法な反論；

Lipstadt said the idea that Irving had been vindicated by history was “preposterous”. “There was nothing, zilch, in the historical claims that he made. We proved that. But this is the world we are living in. Where facts don’t matter any more … and it’s absolutely terrifying.
“I’ve no idea of knowing if his claims about his newfound popularity are true or not but you’d have to be living under a rock not to see that this proliferation of racism and antisemitism is being disseminated by the internet.
“This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. It’s about truth and lies.”

アーヴィングによれば、みんな「主流の情報源」、例えば日本的な表現を使えばマスゴミとかを信用しなくなっており、代わりの「薬（remedy）」を強烈に求めている。そして、自分もその「薬」の一つなどだという；

Irving, however, says that he is speaking to people who have lost trust in mainstream sources of information. “It’s all to do with this phenomenon of people not trusting what they are told by their governments and newspapers. They seek around to find someone who provides some remedy to this. And they find me.
“I am part of the remedy. It’s not just that I’m selling huge amounts of books around the world. One of the big changes of the last two years is the amount I’m getting in donations.
“It used to be small amounts, and they still come in, but people are now giving me very large sums indeed – five-figure sums. I now drive a Rolls-Royce. A beautiful car. Though money is completely unimportant to me.”

自分のファンとドナルド・トランプ支持者が重なっていること。労働党内部の反ユダヤ主義騒動*5への言及；

His new fans, he says, are the same people who in the US are supporting Donald Trump, who he believes will make a good president and “has his heart in the right place”. Though, he says, he is also impressed by the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
“The Labour party is tearing itself apart with these allegations about antisemitism,” he says, “but Corbyn seems like a very fine man. Maybe it’s because he’s near my age, but I’m impressed by him.”

ところで、アーヴィングの復活には、グーグルも（結果的に）一役買っていたことになるという；

Google, which owns YouTube, has come under pressure for disseminating hate speech about Jews and promoting Holocaust denial after the Observer revealed that its top results for searches around the Holocaust were directing people to denial sites*6. After weeks of pressure, Google agreed to make changes to its algorithm, but they are far from comprehensive. Google auto-complete still suggests the Holocaust is a “lie” and a “hoax” and still directs to neo-Nazi websites such as Stormfront, where Irving is considered an authority on the subject. He also has a presence on Facebook, where his page has gathered more than 7,000 likes.

*1:http://www.fpp.co.uk/ See eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%87%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A3%E3%83%83%E3%83%89%E3%83%BB%E3%82%A2%E3%83%BC%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A3%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B0 “David Irving” http://archive.adl.org/learn/ext_us/irving.html?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=2&item=irving “David Irving” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/david-irving

*3:http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/ See eg. http://www.js.emory.edu/faculty/lipstadthomepage.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Lipstadt また、裁判について語ったインタヴュー記事としては、Harry Wallop “Deborah Lipstadt: ‘Many would like to stand up to antisemites. I had the chance to do it’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/14/deborah-lipstadt-interview-denial

*4:See Tim Adams “Memories are made of this” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/feb/24/historybooks.features

*5:See eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chakrabarti_Inquiry Kate McCann “Thousands of Labour supporters could be expelled from party over anti-Semitism and abuse allegations” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/20/thousands-of-labour-supporters-could-be-expelled-from-party-over/ “Labour accused of 'incompetence' in dealing with anti-Semitism allegations” http://www.itv.com/news/2016-10-16/labour-accused-of-incompetence-in-dealing-with-anti-semitism-allegations/

*6:Carole Cadwalladr “Google 'must review its search rankings because of rightwing manipulation'” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/05/google-must-review-its-search-rankings-because-of-rightwing-manipulation