134: Denial, Genocide, and the Shadow of David Irving
In this episode we talk about two dramatic portrayals of a seminal 2000 libel trial, the court case brought by Holocaust denier David Irving against American scholar Deborah Lipstadt: a contemporary UK television drama-documentary 'Holocaust on Trial' and the 2016 film Denial. We then consider the legacy of Irving, his reputation today, how fascists now see him, how they see the 2016 film, the planned republication of his work by Antelope Hill books, and how he is weirdly replicated in current 'rising star' internet Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper. We then consider our own coverage of Israel's genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the question of how to talk about genocide after the Nazi Holocaust. Our discussion also touches upon another of the 'guests' brought on by Jubilee to debate Mehdi Hasan in the recent edition of 'Surrounded'. We also briefly discuss the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad thing. CONTENT WARNINGS Episode Notes: Mother Jones piece on Darryl Cooper: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/martyr-made-darryl-cooper-nazi-jews-juggernaut-nihilism-tucker-carlson-joe-rogan-substack/ Mari Cohen at the *Jewish Currents*, "Can Genocide Studies Survive a Genocide in Gaza" https://jewishcurrents.org/can-genocide-studies-survive-a-genocide-in-gaza "Little changed even after Amnesty International published a landmark report accusing Israel of genocide in December 2024. For Nimer Sultany, a scholar of international law at SOAS University of London, this silence pointed to a glaring double standard, in which many scholars could rush to imply that the Palestinians had committed acts reminiscent of genocide, but be “unable to or unwilling to make the same charge against Israel, when Israel has committed much worse atrocities against the Palestinians since then.” “This shows that the early use of genocide was propagandistic and political in nature. It shows that they don’t care in the same way about Palestinian civilians or Palestinian victims,” he said." Polite Conversations, with the same title: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5mpxDnGm1c8isJlDGgidqc?si=igr81Hv4SvOMw_rdFA6V9Q Doomernaut Substack: https://substack.com/@thatonewhitepopulist , "Number 1 alogger of the kosher right "" Antelope Hill Publishing, *Nuremberg, The Last Battle* by David Irving https://antelopehillpublishing.com/product/nuremberg-the-last-battle-by-david-irving/ Holocaust on Trial (2000) – NOT on the pro-Irving channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCe3G9gODU4&t=1s Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
This line from Goethe d'Hot Neur or Er Siker means a coward only threatens when he feels secure.
I thought you didn't speak German.
You learned German in the last year.
Well, I had to master all these documents.
Irving had 40 years start on me, so I had to catch up.
Did you?
know Daniel, how are you doing?
Well, I've been thinking about Holocaust denial for a week, so I'm about normal, I guess.
No, not really.
By the standard.
This has been a rough, this has been a rough week.
Thinking about the details of Holocaust denial actually is worse than most of the stuff I do these days.
I was like, please give me Megan Kelly, not more David Irving, please.
That's something I thought I would say.
But, you know, hey, that's where we are.
Turns out there are some things worse even than Megan Kelly.
And yeah, I think that David Irving definitely qualifies.
David Irving, as an individual, probably isn't.
Like, he's much less annoying than Megan Kelly.
But in terms of-I don't know.
I get the sense that in person, David Irving is a real prick.
Well, I think we're gonna, I think we're going to discuss that in more detail.
So we did kind of cover Irving before in a previous episode, which we will link to below.
I did not really listen to that episode, but anyway, so.
Before we get on to the main subject, though, we kind of feel like we ought to address the gigantic rampaging elephant that was in the room for pretty much everybody talking about politics the last as usual.
We're late to it, but you don't come to us for hot off the press's topical discussion.
No.
Which I'm, of course, talking about the Sidney Sweeney jeans ad.
I mean, I'm a child of the 80s and 90s.
I grew up on the guest ads and the, you know, like the Anna Nicole Smith and Pamela Anderson and like, you know, all this cheesecake stuff.
And I heard there was a controversy over like a racist, you know, Sidney Sweeney ad.
I mean, you know, a Sweeney ad for American Eagle for this genes company.
And I was like, all right, I need to, I want to look at this for myself.
And so I sat down, I popped into YouTube, I put it in, I watched like a 30-second ad and I'm like, all right, that's annoying, but whatever.
That was kind of my immediate response.
It turned out I saw because I didn't realize there were like six of them, I thought it was just like one, but no, it's an online ad campaign.
And so there are a bunch of them.
And I happened to watch like the least offensive one, like, you know, you know, and then I watched some of the other ones and I'm like, no, this feels a little more nasty than I was originally thinking it was.
And then it's funny because it's like not even like the right wing hacked onto this as a like a big story they could spin for weeks because like some lefties on Twitter and Blue Sky were having what is, I think, a fairly reasonable conversation about like the use of like eugenic language in terms of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman having good genes, etc.
I don't know.
I think, I think, you know, obviously the right-wing backlash is like out of like pure bad faith in terms of what any mainstream person was doing with this.
I feel like I did pretty much the same thing.
I sort of saw it come up on the feed and I thought, oh, I'm not interested.
And it kept on going.
And mainly what I was seeing was people joking about it, laughing about it, being ironic, taking the piss out of the idea that taking the piss either about people being upset about it or about the idea that people were upset about it.
So I thought, okay, well, I'll go and see what this is about.
And I went to YouTube and I found a video of Sidney Sweeney doing, you know, sort of the sexy voice and the sexy body language thing that's clearly, clearly taken from those like 90s guess ads and all that stuff.
I don't know how pervasive that was over on your side of the pond, but they were doing this in the early 90s.
They were putting, they had like cheesecake gene ads.
It was all over the place for like five years in my teenage years.
So well, the thing about the advert was that I just thought, well, this isn't anything unusual.
This is just normal stuff.
There's nothing here that's the slightest bit unusual.
Either the, you know, the sort of the cheesecake objectification or the using sex to try to sell a product in an advert, or even the stuff about genes.
I thought, I mean, what is it?
It amounts to her saying, you know, I've got good genes or I've got blue jeans or something.
And that's, I, you know, it's kind of like a lot of adverts, it's just kind of stupid and annoying.
I don't even understand what's being what I'm supposed to think is happening in it.
I think it's also worth, how often do you watch ads, Jack?
Like, I don't, you know, well, I have very low tolerance for ads, partly because I really, I don't watch very much television.
I don't have the TV on.
I, I, I seek things out.
If things, if I hear about things that I want to watch, I seek them out and I obtain them without subjecting myself to television.
So I really don't see very many ads at all.
So I think over the years, my tolerance for them has come down to a bare minimum because basically I see a TV ad now and I'm just instantly furious at it.
Yeah, yeah.
So I pay for YouTube premium precisely so I don't have to watch the fucking advice.
Yes, I will, I will pay money to the evil Google Corporation so that I don't have to watch the American Eagle ad.
So I think there's also the thing that just, you know, you and I are just not posed to or not poison a place where we just see ads all the time.
And so this is just, you know, but anyway, I think that might be a factor in just the way the two of you approached it.
The two of us approached it anyway.
But yeah, yeah.
And I have to say that at 49, I don't feel like Sidney Sweeney has any meaning for me anymore.
Like, you know, I can, I can, I can tell sort of in a theoretical way that that's a very attractive young woman, but that doesn't have anything to do with me at this point.
You know, that's just like, yeah.
But the thing that the thing that I found interesting about it firstly was it's again, it's a quote unquote controversy.
Well, it's not.
That's the point.
It's a fake controversy.
Yeah.
And it's been completely ginned up by the right.
And the way they've done it is because they've sort of attached this semiotic thing to Sidney Sweeney, presumably because she looks like a fucking Valkyrie, you know?
Yes.
And they've, they've attached all this sort of freight or baggage to the idea of Sidney Sweeney.
She supposedly, you know, she supposedly sends people like us into a fury because she exists and people find her attractive.
I suppose the idea is that woke people or left-wing people deny the existence of attractiveness.
I don't know what that is.
Or like because she's white and blonde and eventually attractive, because you, you know, that's, that's what people are angry at because, because she's conventionally a very attractive.
And it's like, no, I've been on the left for a long time.
I've been in a lot of lefty spaces.
It turns out that lefty people have a lot of sex.
It's fine.
But I suppose it's because it's, and I don't know to what extent American, the name is a bit of a giveaway.
I think American Eagle genes, which I'd never heard of before this.
So I suppose their marketing department scored a coup there.
Yeah, they've been, they've also been known to do like they do like more genes.
I watched some videos about this just from other content creators that they do have a history of doing jeans for people who are otherwise underrepresented.
So people with like kind of, you know, bodies with like shorter legs and like bigger asses and that's, you know, like where it's, you know, deliberately going out there and like marketing their products to someone to two people who are not, who don't look like Sidney Sweeney.
Let's put it that way, you know.
Okay, well, that's interesting.
That's not.
They also have a history in their advertising of doing, you know, of doing like, you know, you know, people of all states and sizes.
Let's just put it that way.
That's interesting because that's not what I expected.
So that makes me think, that makes me more puzzled about what's going on here because it seems like a deliberate thing to choose this particular actress with all this freight attached to her from the right wing, you know, and also to do this kind of play on good genes.
That's well, that's a bit odd.
This is, this is where, this is where I, where, you know, something that I've been hearing from the right wing and a little bit from the, from, from left here.
So again, I put very little, I put less than an hour into this all told, except for just in my daily listening, because all these right-wing dipshits had nothing to talk about except for Sidney Sweeney's ass for three days.
You know, the real criticism and the real thing that I think is, is probably true is that American Eagle in this, they're seeing the writing on the wall in this kind of new Trump era and going like, well, we gotta, we gotta court the, we gotta court the, the Charlie Kirk fans a little bit more.
You know, we've gotta, we've gotta, we've gotta, you know, and um, I mean, you know, just for pure harsh business numbers, you know, they're just, they just read the writing on the wall and going like, well, we need to, we need to attract a more right-wing audience.
This is a way to do that.
And yeah, that's depressing.
It indicates that we're leaving the admittedly very imperfect era of woke brands and entering into the even worse era of volk brands.
Yes, yes, yes.
I like that.
Yes.
No, I think, I think that's the most interesting thing about it.
I think we are, I think that that's just true now, you know, when we see that, you know, Target not putting out, not doing a big like Pride Month celebration thing, you know, it's like, you know, the right-wing backlash has worked.
The right-wing backlash has worked.
Yes.
And it was always cynical.
It was always cynical.
It was always, it was just, it was just something, but it has worked at the thing.
It has the corporations have learned the lesson that they were being taught.
And that is to not, you know, to not be woke.
Sorry.
Not that they were really particularly woke to begin with, you know, but you know what I mean.
Yeah.
To change the marketing so that it's ideologically acceptable to the people who now seem to be in the ascendant.
Yeah.
And which is, you know, in its way, this silly, privileged, frivolous story is indicative of something very depressing that's happening across American society and to a lesser extent because we're a bit behind you on the same road in British society, which is the, you know, complying in advance and the capitulation of institutions, be they educational or political or journalistic or commercial across the board, just like dominoes, just complying and capitulating across the board.
So yeah.
I think the domino's guy was probably a racist.
I think that was just, you know, anyway.
I don't think that was compliance.
I think that was, you know, yeah.
Anyway, I'm not trying to get sued here, but you know, I said, I think.
I said, I think.
It's okay.
He said he thinks.
It's allegedly.
The lighting laws are very different than the US and the UK.
We will cover that shortly.
But anyway, continue.
Yes, we will.
The thing I was going to, a couple of things to say before we move off this very silly topic.
It is a ginned up controversy.
The idea being that the left or the woke or whoever, whatever they call people that aren't them now, basically, were upset about this advert.
Now, I didn't see any of that personally.
I follow an awful lot of left-wing people on Blue Sky.
I didn't see a single person really saying, you know, this ad amounts, this, the advert amounts to eugenics or anything.
I saw people criticizing it, but that's all.
And as I think has now been revealed in a newspaper article which analyzed the analytics, you know, people simply were not talking about these ads.
Maybe a couple of people on the left were saying, you know, this is eugenics language, which it kind of is.
I mean, it is.
Yeah.
I mean, it only took off as a quote-unquote controversy after the right started to talk about how the left were having a meltdown about it, which is the pattern that we've seen again and again and again and again.
And even then, from what I've seen, the vast majority of the quote-unquote left discourse about this has been, yeah, well, it's a bad ad, but you know, look, look at what the right are doing.
Look at what the right is saying about it, et cetera, et cetera.
The other thing I want to say about this is that, yes, this advert partakes of what is essentially a eugenics discourse.
That is endemic in our culture industries.
That is everywhere.
I am begrudgingly coming to the end of a watch of the television series Picard, which is sort of picking up what happens to Jean-Luc Picard 20 years later.
I'm in the third season now.
The entire, I'm not going to, don't worry, no spoilers.
Everybody who wants to see it has already seen it.
It's fine.
And if you haven't seen it, don't, honestly.
I don't even know why I'm watching it.
But the entire plot of the third series hinges at the individual particular level and at the macro level, the sort of race essentialist species level, which is built into Star Trek anyway, on the idea of people having particular personality traits because of their genes, the entire thing and being good or bad because of their genes.
This is everywhere.
It's everywhere in science fiction.
It's everywhere in fantasy, which are the dominant modes in pop culture.
It's everywhere in true crime.
Every other true crime documentary is called Born Evil.
You know, this is not.
It's not that the advert isn't partaking of a eugenics discourse.
It is.
It's that our entire cultural production partakes of that same discourse all the time.
Yeah.
I mean, this is a little more on the nose about it, you know, but yeah.
And yeah, no, I agree.
I agree.
You know, how could I not?
That's basically all I wanted to say about it.
I have two other very brief points to make.
I will make them in less than a minute.
So we can move on to this.
I'm not talking about genes anymore.
Certainly not in this episode.
So two things that I think do, well, CB Sweeney has a history of doing these kinds of things.
She sold like bathwater stuff.
She's done other advertisements that, you know, kind of prey on the male gaze.
Like she sold, she sold like her bathwater in a soap at one point, like a limited asset.
It did come out that she's a registered Republican as well.
That was one thing.
Yeah, she has a registered Republican.
In 2025, that makes her a fascist.
I mean, pretty much, yeah.
Also, I found out I was perusing her Wikipedia page as you do.
I'm going to talk about this.
Let's peruse her Wikipedia page just to just to get the basics.
Only for research purposes, yeah, purely for you know, I have other tabs for the other things I might want to think about about Sidney Sweeney.
I'm fine, don't worry.
Actually, she is not, it's fine, it's fine when it comes to this sort of thing.
Sidney Sweeney is so vanilla, you know, believe me, believe me, I have much more interesting people to think about in that terms than Sidney Sweeney.
Anyway, the other thing is, and this is the burn her at the stake moment, you know, ironically, not literally.
Um, she was born and raised in the panhandle of North Idaho.
That area is a Nazi hotbed.
It is, yeah, it is very much so.
You know, Randy Weaver's compound was up there, you know, like very close to the Aryan nation.
Yeah, no, she, she, she, she grew up in that area, and so it is entirely possible that she has some Nazi tensions to her person, to her, you know, political beliefs, even if she's not a full-on white nationalist herself.
So, you know, I just saw grew up in North Idaho.
I'm like, yo, she's a Nazi.
God damn it.
I caught you.
Damning evidence, indeed.
Yeah, damning evidence.
You know, everybody who grew up in North Idaho was a fucking Nazi.
Not the case at all.
They're a great anti-fascist group working out of North Idaho.
But, you know, as like they did this with Taylor Swift back in the day, you know, you remember the white nationalists were like, yeah, they did this with Taylor Swift.
And I was telling this to my wife.
I was kind of telling this story.
It's like, you know, just casually, like, you know, like the right wing kind of like pretends that they've been using like Taylor Swift's like app to like share Nazi memes and stuff.
You know, just like, why are they using Taylor Swift?
It's like, well, she's blonde.
She's blonde.
She's blue head.
She's blonde.
She has blonde eyes and blue hair.
That's what I'm trying to say.
You know, she's conventionally attractive.
She kind of looks like an Aryan goddess.
And she's never said anything about it, you know.
And my wife just went, you.
And I'm like, yeah, that's all she has to say.
All she has to do is say the word you in public in this topic.
And I would just totally believe that she does not follow these things.
And then later on, she did.
So, you know, we're fine.
But to my knowledge, Cindy Sweeney has not like said anything at all about this, about this topic, which kind of makes me think, you know, anyway, there's it's we've already gone on too long about this.
Um, if you want more, we could do a full episode on this.
I really don't want to.
I'm going to just stop talking about this.
Um, if we were going to do it, I would bring it into context, all those 90s ads.
That's what I would do.
Yeah.
So, one more thing I wanted to say before we move on to the main topic.
Um, because apparently I still haven't made myself clear on this issue from feedback that I've had.
Okay, perfectly civil feedback, by the way.
Um, the ADL.
Yes, I agree.
Don't cite them.
I agree.
Okay.
Do not cite the ADL.
Okay.
Done.
So let's move on.
Thank you.
I think it's very funny that you get this feedback and I don't.
Maybe you're just more active blue sky.
I think that's probably the case.
I should really be getting.
I get it sometimes, but it seems like you get it a lot more.
Anyway, I think it's because people trust me less than they trust you on these issues.
And that's fine.
You know, I'm getting told stuff I need to hear.
So that's good.
Well, if I do things that are problematic, you can reach out to me.
It's fine.
You know, I do check my blue sky.
I'm just not on it as much.
I do other things with my free time these days.
But anyway, okay.
That aside, main topic.
Let's go.
Yes.
So on to the main topic of the episode, which is, well, the original plan, as I understand it, was for us to do something nice and easy to bridge a bit of a gap.
So, Daniel, you suggested that we talk about the 2016 film Denial, which is a dramatization by David Hare of Deborah, Deborah, the American scholar Deborah Lipstadt's own book, which I can't remember what it's called, but she wrote denying the Holocaust.
Scott Denying the Holocaust.
No, that's the original.
That's the book that Irving sued her over.
She wrote another book about the trial.
No, the book is History on Trial.
History on Trial.
That's right.
And Hare adapted that book into the screenplay, which became the film Denial.
It's about the occasion in, well, it started in 1995.
The process from Irving, the book being published, Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust, in which she says perfectly correctly that David Irving is a very influential falsifier of history about the Third Reich and has connections with neo-Nazis.
He sues her and Penguin Books, which published that book.
It takes five years, 2000 to get to a British court.
He sues in Britain because British libel laws are insane.
Basically, if somebody sues you for libel, you have to prove that you didn't do it.
Um, yeah, this will be a topic we have to cover down the continuous.
Yes, well, when I say insane, what I mean is that they're insane for 99% of us, they're perfectly sane from the point of view of rich and powerful people because that's uh what they're designed designed to protect rich and powerful people from criticism.
Um, in this instance, they laid a perfectly innocent, at least of libel, scholar and her publishers open to an aggressive, frivolous, potentially damaging lawsuit from a Holocaust-denying neo-fascist, David Irving, who pretended to be a historian and ended up in court in the year 2000.
And it's it's a seminal moment in these issues, certainly a seminal moment in David Irving's career.
He lost big after the defense mounted an incredible case where they got scholars from they got a professor Robert van Pelt, who's the world expert on Auschwitz, they got Professor Rich J. Evans, who's one of the world's foremost experts on the Third Reich, they got Peter Longerich, the excellent German Third Reich historian.
They got all these people in to write, and they basically demolished Irving's contentions and his career in the process because certainly Evans, in his analysis of Irving's work, demonstrated that Irving was a falsifier of the history of the Third Reich.
He lost the case, had to pay all the damages, etc., etc.
And the film is about that.
So, you wanted to talk about that film.
And I, when you mentioned it, I said, Well, there's a dramatization, a drama documentary from the time, from the year 2000, which I watched again.
We were talking last in the last bonus episode about me watching the BBC television film of Copenhagen at the time.
This is another thing I watched at the time.
I might have seen this one.
I was, I was, this aired on Nova in the US, and I was an active watcher of Noah at Nova at that time.
So, I may have seen this, um, but I wasn't interested in the topic at the time, so I didn't, you know, it didn't stick into my brain.
But at that time, I think I would have already seen Mr. Death, and Mr. Death is like one of my all-time favorite movies, and certainly my favorite movies about this topic.
So, I don't know, maybe I missed it, maybe, but like it's entirely possible it passed across my consciousness at some point, and I just never thought of it again.
But yeah, anyway, but this was, I mean, it was huge, hugely influential for me.
As I say, I watched it at the time on Channel 4 in the year 2000.
They taped it, I had it on VHS for many years, watched it many times.
Um, and that is a um, a documentary stroke dramatization of just sections from the trial transcript, right?
And uh, yeah, so so I watched the movie Denial, and you watched the television drama documentary Holocaust on Trial.
And uh, but it turned out to be the episode has turned out to be a bit more complicated than just an episode where we talk about these two dramas, hasn't it?
Yeah, let's let's talk about a movie.
That's you know, it's so easy.
Let's just do a Marvel movie next time.
Let's, you know, we need a little bit of a filler.
Let's cover Captain America again.
Why not?
You know, like, you know, it's fun.
Certainly, no like lurking presence of you know, political subculture underneath the Marvel Cinema universe.
Jesus Christ, good lord, no, no, there's no, no, there's no, you know, sociobiology or eugenics in any of those movies.
Oh, hang on a minute, hang on a minute, they're all over those fucking movies anyway.
Yes, let's continue.
So, I don't know.
Do you want to do you want to talk about these two dramas a little bit before we get into that?
Yeah, yeah, I know, no.
I do.
I do want to, I do want to, I do want to discuss this.
So, um, yeah, I mean, um, so I, I know, I think you said something to the effect of I despise the 2016 film.
Um, and I, you know, I think I, you know, I, I don't know, I'm lukewarm on it.
I did really like Holocaust on trial.
Um, if this was my first, if it was my first watch, I did really enjoy it.
I think there are things that the 2016 film does that I wish that the documentary did, namely kind of emphasize exactly how horrifying the libel laws in Britain are on these topics and just how like absurd it is.
The absurdly high bar that they had to cover, they had to reach in order to succeed at this.
And that's something that the 2016 film does does it does it well in other threats that it emphasizes it because it's a Hollywood movie and it does it, but it also chooses the Very wrong viewpoint character and gives us some really skewed decisions in terms of the way they choose to tell the story.
So, but yeah, no, I really like, I mean, I'll just say, I really like Tom Wilkinson.
I like him in everything.
I first saw him in the bedroom, in the bedroom, not in the bedroom.
He wasn't in my bedroom, but I saw him in the bedroom.
That would have been in like 2000, 2001 or something like that.
And then he was actually in an HBO movie called Normal, in which he is a 50-year-old man who transitions.
He does a gender transition.
This is 2003, you know, and he's brilliant in it.
It's a very like well-acted.
It's a very well-understood.
I haven't seen it in 20 years, but I'd be willing to bet that that holds up even to 2025 standards.
It's really, really fucking good.
And I've just always loved Tom Wilkinson things.
I mean, obviously, he's in Batman.
He's in a whole bunch of other stuff, but he should have been the lead character here.
Like, ultimately, the problem is this movie, you know, the trial isn't about Deborah Lipstadt.
I mean, it is about like, but the drama, the story that we're going through, it's not about Deborah Lipstadt.
It's about, you know, it's about Richard Rampton, the solicitor, you know.
Yeah.
Sorry, which one is barrister and which is solicitor?
I can always, I can never keep track of it.
I think he's the barrister, right?
Yes, he's the barrister or the QC.
Yes.
Anthony Julius, the solicitor, is played by, I think his name's Andrew Scott.
Andrew Scott, yes.
In the film?
Yeah.
Yes, yes.
No, in Britain, you have a solicitor and you also have a barrister or a QC who actually argues the case in court.
Yeah.
So Richard Rampton, played by Tom Wilkinson here, is the barrister or QC.
Yeah.
Yes.
I first saw Tom Wilkinson in the mid-90s BBC adaptation of the Dickens novel Martin Chuzzlewit, in which he plays Seth Pecksniff.
And he's absolutely brilliant in that.
He's hilarious in that.
I believe him ever since then.
He's always bright.
Like, I mean, I just love him.
He's no longer with us, unfortunately.
But I mean, he's.
Yes, he died a couple of years ago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's legitimately one of my favorite actors of all time.
So the movie also has a quite good performance, I think, by Tim Spool as Irving.
Yes.
Yes.
I think a little bit too sort of overtly villainous at times, maybe.
But yeah.
I think there's a conversation to have there.
But yeah, I can see where you're coming from.
Yeah.
But as you say, I mean, the problem with the movie is that it sort of focuses on a, I'm pretty sure, heavily fictionalized version of the scholar, Deborah Lipstadt, who, you know, the story isn't about her.
And as you say, dramatically, it should be about this QC.
Yeah, or it should be about the case.
It should be about almost anyone else, you know, even Irving.
There is a twisted version to this.
You could make this about Irving.
You could do like a like Oliver Solomon's Nixon version of like, you know, we're watching this man.
We're like, you were like looking at him, you know, like tell these lies and be confronted by them in court.
I mean, I think there's a really compelling case for that being a really good story.
That would be really fucking difficult to do, but you know, like, you know, but I'm afraid the let's get Werner Herzog in for that one, huh?
The film struggles, I think, with, you know, dramatizing these events and it has to manufacture loads of spurious conflict on, you know, between Lipstadt and her team of lawyers and so on and other people.
And it's just, I don't know, it just feels deeply unconvincing and pointless and irritating to me almost all the way through.
When the film focuses on the stuff that's of interest, and both the film and the television docudrama, they have scenes in common, so to speak, because they both have scenes which are drawn directly from the actual trial transcripts.
So you get dialogue in both, which is almost exactly the same because it's the transcript of the actual draft.
In preparation for the trial, the defense has had access to all of Irving's private diaries compiled over a 40-year period.
They're able to make use of some of this material in their cross-examination.
This is Irving in his diary speaking to Irving.
This is not Irving punting some thesis about Jewish culpability to a television audience.
A quiet evening at home, etc., etc.
Jessica, who is Jessica?
My little infant child.
Yes.
When she was nine months old at this time.
A quiet evening at home.
Jessica.
Who is Jessica?
My little infant child.
Yes.
She was nine months older than September 1994.
Nine months old in September 1994.
Jessica is turning into a fine little lady.
She sits very upright on an ordinary chair.
Her strong back muscles are a product of our regular walks and my arms to the bank, etc., etc.
On those walks, we sing the binkety-bankety-bong.
And, more scurrilously, when half-free children are wheeled past, and then you go into I-Tanto.
I am a baby Aryan, not Jewish or sectarian.
I have no plans to marry an ape or a Rastafarian.
Racist, Mr Irving?
Anti-Semitic, Mr Irving?
I don't think so.
Teaching your little child this kind of poison?
Racist, Mr Irving.
Anti-Semitic, Mr Irving, yes?
I do not think so.
Teaching your little child this kind of poison?
Do you think a nine-month-old can understand words spoken in English or any other language?
When it focuses in on that, instead of doing its sort of Hollywood thing where they all travel to the Auschwitz camp, and you get loads of sentimental stuff and, you know, Lippstadt's character, the fictional version of Lippstadt, is depicted as sort of flying into a rage because everybody isn't instantly agreeing.
It's actually quite a nasty portrayal, I think.
It makes her look like a sort of a bad-tempered, intolerant shrew.
Whereas, as I mentioned, the historian Richard Evans, who wrote a brilliant book about the trial, in which he then represented his own research demolishing Irving's work.
The book is called Lying About Hitler.
In that book, he describes Deborah Lippstadt as relentlessly positive and upbeat all the way through the entire thing.
So, you know, the version that we get in the film is just needlessly over-dramatized.
But when it's not doing that and focuses in...
Don't worry.
We're going to talk a bit about Deborah Lippstadt here in a minute.
Don't worry.
Yeah.
She has committed some sins.
Let's just put it that way.
But, yeah.
Denying the Holocaust is a good book.
I read it for the first time.
The first time we talked about this, back when we talked about Holocaust denial, because we talked about Mr. Death, and then we talked about this trial a little bit in those earlier episodes.
And I went back and I did actually read the book, the original book, Denying the Holocaust.
And I went in not expecting to like it, because Deborah Lippstadt's politics and my own are quite different.
But it is actually...
It's a good book, I think.
Denying the Holocaust is a good book.
The one thing that she's...
And we'll just do it here, because we're talking about it, so it's fine.
Well, it has to be said.
In 2019 or 2020, when we did those first two episodes, Deborah Lippstadt, that the claim was, in certain quarters, that she deliberately sort of elided the crimes of Israel, or, you know, in terms of, like, treated Israel as like a special project, and, like, that Israel could not commit genocide.
Israel obviously is not doing, like, you know, was not, like, speaking accurately in terms of the actions of the State of Israel on the Palestinians in general.
And that there are some spurious things that you can find in Denying the Holocaust.
You and I read Denying the Holocaust.
I think we went through those exact pages together, and came to the conclusion that we did not think that was an accurate characterization.
That Lippstadt, regardless of her, like, personal opinions, that book does not go there, you know?
No, it doesn't.
Lippstadt has, you know, even at the time, she has made a lot of comments on, you know, to the effect of, you know, the actual Holocaust.
The Holocaust was a different kind of genocide.
That it was unique in its own way.
And that, of course, we need to pay attention to all these other genocides as well, but the Holocaust was unique.
And I think I agree with that.
That, you know, the scale of it, the speed of it, the, you know.
Yes.
But.
I do, too.
To my own surprise, I believe that, yeah.
Yes.
I mean, there are other genocides in Lippstadt up until a certain day in October 2023, was always very careful on these issues, at least in terms of, I don't pay a ton of attention to her, but, you know, at least.
And since then, she's really gone off the deep end of this.
And I think now she is actually engaging in racist behavior towards Gazans.
And she's not, she's not a Douglas Murray.
She's not a Sam Harris.
She's not a bitch in Netanyahu.
But she has tipped over that line significantly.
I mean, I don't have an exact quote from her, but I have seen enough to know that she is, you know, you know, it is one of those things that October 7th really threw some people's brains into the blender and hers was one of them.
And, you know, it's really disappointing because, you know, as much as you and I would disagree with her politics on a lot of other things, she was actually pretty good on that topic and now she is not so it's just disgusting i mean it is one of those things we're gonna come we're gonna talk about this in more detail shortly.
But, you know, it is astonishing to me that anybody who studies the Holocaust, that anybody that like and who and who is of an ethnic group in which this was done to you would not see what's happening in Gaza for what it is.
It's just, I mean, it's just baffles my mind.
It has to be like selective blindness.
Anyway, Denying the Holocaust is a great book.
I read it for the first time in my early 20s.
I reread it.
I've reread it five or six times since I did not reread it for this podcast, but it is a great book.
For what it is, it is a great primer on this kind of material.
It's almost as good as anything you can find even now, accurate up to the time.
But Lipstadt is kind of doing monstrous things.
That's all I'll say.
Yes.
Yeah.
She is now an apologist for the genocide that the state of Israel is currently in the process of committing with the collusion of your state and mine.
Yes, yes, and that is indefensible.
Yes.
Yes.
Especially for someone who is as educated and knowledgeable as she is on these topics.
You know, like, especially for someone like Deborah Lipstadt.
It's just, it's unconscionable.
Anyway, yes.
Okay.
Well, I don't, I don't really know that I have much more to say about the films.
You know, I really like the TV dramatization of the trial and the document, the documentary elements in it are very good as well.
Certainly as an introductory thing, it's a documentary even now.
I would sort of say if you've got a young person, not a very young person, but a young person, you want to kind of they're interested and you want to start them on this topic, you know, you could do a lot worse than starting with this with some warnings in advance.
Yeah, yeah.
Starting with this as a as a sort of an introduction to this subject.
It's it's very good indeed.
The movie, I think it's it's too hammy and uh overdramatized and and and yeah, I don't like it.
Um yeah, sure.
That's basically all I have to say about it.
Yeah, I have I have more tolerance for that kind of thing than you do.
I think that's just true about both of us, but I think we agree on the specifics of like how what it does right, what it does wrong, and so it's fine.
So yeah, do or do not see these movies if you care to.
So why are we doing this?
Why did I get why did I light upon this topic as something?
Why did it click in my head like, oh, let's do a casual movie episode about Holocaust tonight?
Well, David Irving, David Irving is still alive.
Yeah.
Despite false reports, I think last year that he died, he is still hanging on.
He is very ill, apparently.
From what I gather, he's from what I gather, he's having health issues.
And, you know, I do not believe in a hell and I do not believe in torture and for any, but certainly I will look forward to the day when he is ready in hell, you know, as a metaphor, not as a real thing.
Oh, it turns out that I think we've mentioned the publisher Antelope Hill Publishing before.
Do you remember Antelope Hill?
Not specifically.
Okay.
Antelope Hill is a explicitly white nationalist publishing house.
Sorry, is it?
Is it?
Are you saying Antelope Hill?
Antelope Hill, yes.
Antelope Hill.
Right.
Antelope Hill.
So, Daniel, why is it called something as silly as Antelope Hill?
That was going to be my next question.
I cannot answer that question.
I don't think they've ever described it.
They don't have it on their about page or anything like that.
But I would ask you, what else starts with the words AH?
Yeah.
Yeah.
There might be some person that's really well associated with far-right movements with the initials AH.
I'm just curious.
I'm just asking questions.
It could be.
Just asking questions.
Yeah.
I am almost certain that is where the name comes from.
Anyway, you know, if it was not, they would have some explanation for it on their webpage.
That's that's all I'm going to say.
They are an explicitly white nationalist publisher and they are doing a stands for ass holes.
Yes, that's possible.
That's possible.
The only thing you can think of is like some family lore where there was a hill with a bunch of antelopes on it.
They just named it after a family crest or something.
I don't, I don't, it's possible.
I'm just going to say that the fact that it has the same editions as Adolf Hitler, you know, that is not a factor that did not influence what this publishing house is doing.
Anyway, they're kind of uninteresting.
There's some lore behind them.
They act like they're kind of a major kind of independent publisher.
They're like ramping up in production.
It turns out to be like a married couple and they have they've abused one of their employees and done there's some reporting for a few years on that.
I'm not, I'm not really interested in that today.
If you want a full episode on antelope hill, we'll do a full episode on antelope hill.
It's fine.
I can do it, but I'm not interested in that today.
They are releasing a sorry, I got it in front of me.
They're releasing a reprint of a long out-of-print book by David Irving.
And apparently, they had to reach out to the family and they reached out to Irving to get the rights for it.
They described this in a podcast I listened to, and it's called Nuremberg The Last Battle.
So it's David Irving's, you know, kind of revisiting of the Nuremberg trials.
And so David Irving comes up, David Irving, you know, he's, you know, and of course, I was listening to the political accessible as I do every week.
And well, I've got it, I've got a quick clip for you.
They were just, this is so you remember the political accessible?
We covered them a way long, long time ago, but they're kind of a neo-Confederate podcast.
They've been drifting more and more towards overt, you know, Hitlerism lately, um, over the last year or two, um, as the culture just moves with them.
I think they were always there, but they knew how to hide it a little bit better.
And now it's like every episode, it's like, you know, Jewish influence and power, Jewish influence and power.
It's like, yeah, God, this is the most boring fucking podcast.
But, you know, I listen to it every week.
Yeah, this is part of my pennants.
You know, I must have done something terrible in a previous life, right?
You know, I'm a reincarnated SS guard or something.
You know, anyway, anyway.
Um, so and James, again, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I suffer through this so you get to listen to this, but um, this is so James Edwards, whenever he starts talking about David Irving and whenever he talks about like David Duke, he brings up like Black Klansman and how that's an A-list movie.
And so, and then whenever he brings up, you know, David Irving, he has to talk about this Hollywood movie that was made in 2016.
It's like this big production and everything.
And he has one thing to say about the casting.
Rachel Weiss placed Deborah Lipstadt.
He has one thing to say every fucking time anybody talks about this movie on the right.
They have one thing to say.
That was a movie that came out about 10 years ago now, Denial.
And I don't know, Taylor, of anybody else who adjacent to our cause who has received a treatment like that from Hollywood.
I mean, that was an A-list film.
Of course, the narrative is pro-Jewish.
But, and it leads you to believe, you know, of course, certain conclusions.
But, you know, I think it's important to watch these movies.
I've seen that movie a couple of times.
They cast.
You notice how carefully he's talking around that?
Like, that's anyway, we'll talk about that in a minute.
I just want to get to the render of this clip.
But Timothy Spall in the role of David Irving in that movie, and he did a wonderful job, frankly.
Interestingly, creative casting for the role of Deborah Lipstadt.
Rachel Weiss played her, who and Rachel Weiss is a gorgeous woman.
Lipstadt is certainly, they did her a favor in that casting, that's for sure.
But she's an Academy Award winner, and then Tim Wilkinson plays in that.
He's an Academy Award nominee.
The point is, everybody takes interest in David Irving.
And Hollywood had certainly taken interest in him.
And that movie revolves around his libel trial in the early 2000s.
They always say this about the casting of Rachel Weiss.
It's like, well, she's playing that old hag.
And they hired a creamly, extremely attractive, you know, non-Jewish woman to play.
It's like, it's a Hollywood movie.
They hired an attractive actress.
This is how Hollywood works.
This is how Hollywood has worked since the 1920s, if not before.
What are you talking about?
It's like, you know, they can't portray their Jewish selves as ugly, as twisted as they really are.
They have to, you know, they can't have some hag up there.
They've got to have like a beautiful woman.
And, you know, I looked it up, you know, Rachel Weiss was about the same age as Lipstadt was at the time of the trial at the time the movie was made.
She's a few years younger.
I looked up photos.
I mean, you know, I was just curious.
What did Lipstad, you know, does not does not a Hollywood actress, but it was a few years older, but you know, I saw pictures from the trial.
I mean, she, I mean, she looks like a perfectly attractive 50-year-old woman.
I mean, you know, again, we have our issues with David, Deborah Lipstadt, but you know, the fact that she's some like hideous crone is not like, you know, it's not on the list.
But, you know, of course, these guys are Nazis.
And so, you know, that's, that's just the language they have to use.
Every single time, every single time.
This is just what movies do.
Movies, movies cast pretty people.
They do it with Nazi Schindler's List, right?
They cast race fines as Amon Goethe, the commandant of the Plagshoff concentration camp.
Have you seen photographs of Amon Goethe?
It does a real favor.
Hollywood almost always does that.
That's just, that's just how Hollywood works.
You know, everybody, you know, I saw, I've known people who've worked in the film industry and it's like you know you know working in a film is like you sit there it's like a small manufacturing job you're sitting in building sets all day you're putting cameras in place you're doing all the and then for five minutes a day two super bottles walk in and talk at each other for a few minutes you know like that's just every hollywood production is just like that it just is that's what that's what movie stars are like we we talked in the last in the last bonus episode we talked about the the movie conspiracy they cast tennis branner as reinhard heydrich and
Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann.
Yes.
One of the other Nazis was Colin Firth.
I mean, what are we even talking about here?
It's just what they do.
But of course, it has to be a conspiracy.
It has to be this thing.
The Jews are secretly trying to associate young, attractive, non-Jewish women with Deborah Lipstadt because they don't want you to know how hideous she really was.
It's like, I know, it's stupid.
Because, of course, if you saw a photograph of the real Deborah Lipstadt, then there's no way you'd actually sympathize with her for exposing a Holocaust denier.
You'd be on the...
But you notice how, A, the thing of where he's having to talk through, he's like, well, the movie reaches certain conclusions, and then he kind of has a big pause, and it's like, you know, and it doesn't...
But he says he's watched it multiple times.
Like, he's a fan of the movie.
I mean, what does that mean about the way the movie was?
And what does that mean about how this cultural product exists?
Is, I think, the question that we want to...
I want to ask and not answer just yet.
But that's something that really started to interest me, was he's talking about that, and then I saw the movie, and then we had our criticism of the movie.
But, like, that's a really important question that really talks also to what we do.
And I am definitely open to criticism on this.
So, you know, but let's continue.
But that's what James Edwards had to say.
And the point of the...
I use the incident quote because, you know, the point he's making is like, well, this is a big, expensive Hollywood movie.
And, of course, David Irving is such a scholar.
He's such an important person that even people who hate him, you know, think of him as a truly important person that's worth making a Hollywood movie about.
And if you believe that, I have seen a lot of movies about people who are, you know, not exactly stellar examples of human achievement.
Let's just put it that way.
Well, I mean, there's being somebody who's important enough to make a movie about, and the movie isn't really about him anyway.
And then there's, you know, being somebody that a movie portrays positively.
That movie does not portray David Irving positively.
No, it does not.
That's not the point of that movie.
The point of that movie is not that David Irving is this great guy, you know.
I have my issues with the movie, but it manages not to...
Let's get it.
Let's get it.
I think this is the perfect place to say this, then.
There is a reading in which it does.
There is a reading in which the Holocaust on trial sides with David Irving.
There's a reading of it.
The movie, the Hollywood movie, we'll talk about that one further.
I mean, but they both do it.
Portray accurately.
David Irving, representative, he chose to represent himself.
He's up against a brilliant scholar, a Jewish scholar for that matter, with a team of lawyers from a publishing house that they spent millions and millions of dollars in five years defeating this David Irving character.
And, you know, so it's like the big publishing company, the big guys in their they're just beating up on this little David Irving who, you know, never went to college, taught himself German, who taught himself all this, who became a very respected scholar.
And then when he reached conclusions they didn't like, you know, they kicked him out of their stuff.
They call him a racist.
They call him the equivalent of being called a pedophile is kind of what Irving says in one of the movies.
It is like being called a wife beater, a pedophile.
It is a verbal yellow star.
And ultimately what Irving says is, you know, look, they don't have the document.
The documentary evidence does not say what they say it does.
The documentary evidence, you know, we don't have the blue cyanide in the walls.
We don't have all that, you know, and everybody in this movie emits that, that the way you know how the Holocaust happened is not through that, but through all this other documentary evidence.
Well, if you believe Irving is correct, if you believe that Irving is actually right about this, it's very easy to believe.
Well, of course, those are all just fake documents.
That's all just, that's all just a bunch of Jewish clip, flim, flam, et cetera.
It's very easy to, to kind of see that.
Like, you know, the both, I mean, the Holocaust on trial, you know, presents us like, well, this building has been destroyed, but then it gives us like the CGI, like walkthrough of like, this is what it was.
And it's like, that's just a fucking drawing.
I don't know that that existed.
I don't want to know that existed.
Of course, if you read all the documents and you spoke German, you spoke years of this, you would know that it existed.
That's unquestionably true.
you cannot reach another conclusion honestly that's what the trial finds but it's very easy to just reject all that and go like no irving irving's the little guy or irving's the david and you know the jews are the goliath and they he he tried to he tried to make a civil action against them to to gain his reputation back, and they crushed him.
That's exactly what that's it's very easy, and it's very easy to watch that movie and come to that conclusion.
You and I are very if you go in determined to do that.
I mean, yeah, I don't think that's the fault of either text.
Well, I agree with you on that, okay?
I agree with you on that because ultimately they portray accurately kind of what's going on.
But it does, you know, make us wonder, you know, well, should we tell these stories?
You know, how is there a way of doing it that doesn't do that?
I think is kind of the question.
And I think this podcast does it does a good job, but like we do not highlight the works of these guys.
We do not go places that we do not make it comfortable for them.
We've never invited them on.
We never will invite them on.
I play brief clips and then it counters them in a lot of context.
We don't link directors to their materials, although I might have to do that today for a different reason.
But, you know, again, I'm not expecting, you know, like it's just to me, it's an industry question of like, even with these works, which are explicitly designed to tell David Irving as a flame flower artist and a piece of shit.
It is very easy to come to come, you know, again, I, I know how they think.
I can, you know, I was watching the movies and I'm like, yeah, no, of course they like this movie, you know, like, you know, it's very easy to come to that conclusion.
And I don't know, I again, I don't think it's on the part of the filmmakers.
I just like, I don't know, what do we do with that?
I think there's a big question that's been going on in like kind of media studies and sort of, you know, kind of news coverage.
It's like, what do we do about misinformation?
When you have people that are like just willfully unable to be reached on topics.
And this is like, it goes much larger than the Holocaust, of course, but you know, you know, there's all I mean, I listen to Megan Kelly in Jeff Sophie and Charlie Kirk and they just, they're just feeding lies all day long about like what's going on in the Trump White House.
And like, you know, how do you, how do you combat that?
You know, even for people who don't listen to it as many hours a day as I do, you know, people just believe it casually.
And then, you know, suddenly the, you know, Russia gave it was just a hoax the whole time.
And it's just like created by Obama and Hillary Clinton and the, you know, it's the deep state and everything.
It's not like, you know, and Epstein was never, you know, it's like, it's like they just, it's just, you create this alternate world, you create it to such a fidelity that it's very easy to get in there.
And then any cultural product that goes against that like narrative, any culture, no matter how skillfully produced, by definition, it's just going to be either dismissed or viewed through that lens.
And like just, and especially with something like Holcost dial, where, you know, people have spent like 40 years figuring out how to deny the Holocaust.
You know, there is, you know, there are like hundreds of thousands of, you know, not hundreds of, there are like thousands of books written from a denier perspective that look on the surface, always on the surface, like very detailed technical treatises on these topics.
And I, some, somebody can't, even somebody with an interest in this topic, I couldn't approach that material and immediately tell you why it's wrong.
You need another scholar to do that.
And so then it looks like, well, you just have these two scholars at a very high level having a legitimate academic debate.
That's the whole point of Ervic's career.
And I mean, I think, I mean, I mean, you know, he lost a lot based on this trial.
I mean, he lost, you know, he lost the trial.
But I mean, they're still republishing his books.
They're still like, he's still very well respected in those in those spaces.
Like in those spaces, yeah.
Right.
I think one of the one of the things that the TV docudrama gets across better than the film is the extent to which, and this is really more fundamentally, this is what this is about.
This isn't, this trial wasn't about Deborah Lipstadt fundamentally.
It wasn't even fundamentally about the Holocaust.
What it was about was the fact that this guy, David Irving, was not a historian.
He was a falsifier of history.
And this is what Professor Evans, this is the great service that Professor Evans did when he went into this and he produced his report for the trial and then turned it into his book.
He documents in pitiless, merciless detail the extent to which Irving falsifies the evidence, falsifies the facts, lies, omits, distorts, mistranslates.
And Evans also at the start of the book, he goes through the public perception of Irving versus the reality.
One of the things, and he's quite acerbic on the journalism around the case as well.
He's acerbic about the fact that the journalists commenting on it talk About it as if Irving is the defense, as if he is the one who is being picked on, as if he is the one who is being sued, as if he is on trial, because they haven't properly assimilated what's going on.
And they're repeating the standard view of Irving that they've heard from other people, that he's a respected historian who's got a reputation for discovering new documents and stuff like this.
And he exposes that as Irving's narrative that this guy has no formal qualification as a historian.
He doesn't have a PhD.
He doesn't have a professorship anywhere or tenure.
He doesn't have, he doesn't actually discover new documents or burrow around in archives more than any other research historian.
Right.
Evans exposes this whole thing for just a mirage.
And I think that the TV docudrama does it, but it doesn't concentrate on the idea of the Holocaust, denial of the Holocaust, and the historicity of the Holocaust.
Absolutely, because that's from the point of view of the documentary makers, that's the most important thing.
And of course, in terms of history and politics, of course, it is the most important thing.
But what the trial was actually about, as I say, was the fact that this guy is a fraudster.
He's a neo-Nazi fraudster.
It wasn't enough to show he was a Nazi.
You could easily, I mean, you could, and you could say, well, he's just allowed to believe that, you know, because they had to show that Libstadt was correct and not being defamatory when she said that about him, which they, which they did.
So they have to show not that he is a Nazi, not that he believes odious things, although it is important to show that he believes odious things, but also that he was falsifying the documents.
He was falsifying the stuff.
And again, lying about Hitler gets deep into the weeds on this.
It's like goes into particular lines where he's omitting certain things.
And, you know, again, this could be an easy mistake to make.
Were Irving as not accomplished in the German language as he is?
He is well respected as being as a native speaker of German as you can be and not actually be a native.
He is incredibly fluent in German.
That's the thing.
And also, there's a pattern of it.
He's constantly mistranslating.
Yeah, yeah.
And the mistranslations are always in the favor of Hitler.
Exactly.
And that's the nub of what really the movie could have been about is like is about how he's a falsifier of history, not, you know, not just a Nazi.
And so, you know, I think, I think, you know, it's worth seeing, particularly the TV film, I think it's worth seeing.
You know, if you want the Hollywood version, the Hollywood version, I think it's fine.
It's annoying, but it's fine.
But yeah, no, like the like the movie I want to see is like Herzog looking at like lying on the lying in the documents.
Like that's the movie I want.
You can even have the same cast, you know, but on the on the deeper point, I mean, I kind of agree.
These were kind of the debates that people put up around this at the time.
They were saying, you know, shouldn't you just ignore it?
Because by going after Irving, which of course, as Richard Evans points out, wasn't what was happening.
They were not picking on him.
They weren't going after him.
They couldn't just ignore it.
She and Penguin books had been accused of defamation.
But the idea was, you know, you shouldn't do this.
Essentially, people were saying you shouldn't defend yourself against this accusation because you'll be platforming him.
And well, you need, you need to establish the actual record.
I mean, we've talked about this on previous episodes.
There was a point in time where I, and I know that this is true of you as well.
I believed the version of the conspiracy theory about around the JFK assassination when I was much younger.
I believed that.
And at that time, no amount, partly because of that fucking movie.
And at the time, no amount of non-conspiracy history writing about it could have convinced me otherwise because I was in that conspiracy-brained headspace.
But what allowed me eventually to climb out of it was the presence of good arguments elsewhere.
They were there for me to find.
I wasn't ready to accept them at the time when I was 20 years old, but they were there for me to find when I became ready to go out and seek them.
And that's, I think, that's the service that is done by combating stuff like this in this forum, which is that it puts the reality on the record.
It's there for people who are willing to see it.
Yeah.
And making it like Richard Evans writing the book is an important thing.
I think everybody who listens to this show should read that book.
It's a brilliant book.
It's a brilliant book.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't do a lot of book recommendations just because I don't read that many books these days, you know, but basically everything Evans wrote.
He wrote an excellent book recently called The Hitler Conspiracies, where he talks about five conspiracy theories centering around the issue of the Nazis in the Third Reich.
That's a great book.
He wrote a three-volume history of the Third Reich as a whole, which is, I haven't read all of it, but the stuff that I've read of it, basically, the first volume, very good indeed.
Um, you uh sent me you obtained a copy of this and then sent me that copy through very legal means, of course.
And yes, everybody sees through this.
It's fine.
The TV docudrama, you mean the TV docudrama, yes.
Um, yeah, yes, uh, because that one's and so I did watch the version you sent me, and then I was like looking for something else, and I was like, let's just let's see if this is findable online.
YouTube found it the whole 90-minute version, found it instantly.
It's like the first link on YouTube.
It was right, it was fine.
It was the first when I looked for it on YouTube, I only found the cut down 50-minute version.
Oh, that's on YouTube.
Oh, oh, oh, you're gonna, you're gonna bite those, you're gonna butt your tech a little bit.
Guess what?
The channel it's on that hosted the whole thing.
Oh, it's a channel called Irving Books.
It includes also the entire 45-minute thing that Irving filmed when he confronted Lipstadt at the talk and other David Irving materials.
This is an Irving fan posting this documentary or this docudram or whatever.
Well, that is bizarre.
I, you know, they think it exonerates him.
That's what I'm saying.
They think it exonerates him.
Yeah.
You know, like on that topic, I have another, you know, I have another, you know, I have another clip.
This one is not related.
This one, I was going to do this as a kind of a roundup thing, but I had a, we're coming at this a different way.
And we're kind of talking about how these guys kind of use their media appearances and how they talk about their media appearances.
And in a previous episode, I think the most recent numbered episode, or maybe in the last most recent news roundup, we do a lot of episodes.
I can't keep them straight anymore.
But we talked about the MediaSan Jubilee appearance, right?
That was a news roundup.
Yeah.
That was a news roundup.
Okay.
So we talked about the MediaSan Jubilee.
And you talked about this guy, Connor, who was Pinesap.
And I found out Pinesap had been on Elisha Schaefer show.
He did a full appearance there.
He is very much a Dick Flintes acolyte, et cetera, et cetera.
And I said to you, because I had only watched it one time and I hadn't gone through and looked at a bunch of the other clips at that point, and it wasn't really kind of relevant to what we're talking about, that he was not the worst one.
He was not nearly the worst one because I watched the whole thing and you didn't.
And I said, there's backwards hat guy.
And if you've seen the thing, if you've even seen clips, you've seen the guy with the green baseball habits on its own backwards.
He's got like tussled hair.
Went up twice and was he was actually the last person to speak before the like kind of the 10-minute end debate thing.
So he had he had kind of the final word.
Well, let's just say, if you remember when we talked about James Alsip, I said, and then also put on fascination for a while.
And I said that James Alsip never wanted, he never wanted to be Richard Spencer.
He wanted to be Jazz As McFields.
He just like eats every, you know, every word that Man Smith says and regurgitates it at him.
Well, this guy, he goes by Doomernaut on Twitter or on Substack.
He's not, he may be on Twitter, but they, so they linked to his substack.
I will now read to you the title, like the, the, he is the number one a-logger of the kosher right.
And the first two articles, as of the, as of this time, are about this guy, Nathan Kaftis, who refutes Kevin McDonald through using other evolutionary psychology methods.
So he's like a right-wing eugenicist dipshit who believes it's actually because the Jews are just naturally better at being humans that they end up in, you know, high positions of authority rather than being because of they are, you know, they have some in-group strategy, you know, it's just because we're better, because, you know, eugenics is right, et cetera.
So in defense of Kaufnes over, or in defense of McDonald over Kaufnes, because he believes Kevin McDonald, by the way, testified for David Irving at the survival trial.
I did.
I did.
I'm not digging the movie for this, but I have listened to many hours of Kevin McDonald's speak.
I know very much what that actor did not sound anything like Kevin McDonald.
It's fine.
Nobody knows what Kevin McDonald.
I know what Kevin McDonald sounds like.
It's not a problem.
It's just like Kevin McDonald has a very particular way of speaking.
It's just like, I didn't even tweak that it was Kevin McDonald at first.
I'm like, oh, that's okay.
That's supposed to be McDonald's.
I get it.
But I mean, the substack is titled, you know, that one white populist.
Like, this is, this is, I mean, this is explicitly white Nationalist material, YouTube, the Jubilee channel, when it linked to everybody's social media, they linked to this substack on that where 10 million people have seen it.
So, anyway.
Yeah.
Right.
Dubernaut, Dupernaught really wanted to be, he wants to be Mikey Enoch more than Mike Enoch wants to be Mike Enoch, I think, at this point.
He's a huge, he's a huge fan.
And apparently, they think they were in contact like behind the scenes on Twitter, you know, or something.
Maybe he's probably on the forums.
He's, you know, anyway, I didn't, I didn't look deeply into this.
Dubernot went on to went on the daily show, episode 1,368.
And yes, there have been 1,360.
Actually, a few more now because this is like a week and a half old.
But this is Hosis Dumernaut talking about the, A, you're just going to get to hear him chat with Mike Enoch.
So apologies for making a list of any amount of Mike Enoch.
It's only 40 seconds long, but you know, but also he's talking a little bit about the selection process, like how he got on Jubilee.
They reached to my friend and they were like, you know, you know more, way more about politics than I do.
And they were like, and she's more of like a normie kind of she's more, she's right wing, but she's more of a normie.
And she was.
He means not a white nationalist, probably.
Like, you know, you should apply and I'll throw in a word for you.
And I applied and they really liked my application.
I had to, I went through, I was interviewed on a Zoom call by the producer.
And then just, yeah, they set me up.
So pretty simple, actually.
It's way easier than people think it actually is.
And they don't really reimburse you, which is so like they, there's probably like, they're probably looking for people to come own.
So it's actually probably pretty easy to get on it.
It's really hard to be any more damning about the Jubilee process at this point than listening to that 40 seconds clip, right?
Yeah.
I'm an open Nazi.
They interviewed me.
I probably told them I was an open Nazi.
They linked to my Nazi substack because they're not paying people.
Who they think they're going to get with this stuff?
We want far-right conservatives to come and debate somebody.
We want somebody who's itching for that little inch of fame who really wants to get out there and make viral clips.
This is, you know, again, it's exactly, but again, this is how these guys like he thinks he won.
Like if you want to, we could do an episode about this, about this daily show episode.
We can go through all the things that like every time that Media-San did what I think Mediasan is right to do is like, look, I have made these particular claims.
I want you to debate this claim.
And he's like, no, I don't want to debate that claim.
I want to debate the Jews.
I want to debate, you know, I want to debate other things.
I'm not interested in Trump, et cetera.
Like, he wants to bring it on to, he wants to do Mike Enoch's rhetoric at Mediasan.
That's what he wants to do.
Yeah.
And Mike Enoch in his discussion of debates, you know, he's always like, well, no, you just, you don't let them make their points.
You ask them, you ask them about Jews.
You ask them about Jewish influence.
You ask them about this.
Do not talk about any other time.
No, we are not talking about we are talking about Gaza.
We are talking about, you know, et cetera.
We are talking about these topics.
This is all we're talking about.
This is all I'm going to be here to debate you.
And I refuse to discuss anything else.
And so, and, and, you know, in the turn of the online blood sports era, that that's a really effective technique because like, you know, people are not as trained as Media San is and they're not like able to come in there with an arsenal of facts and going like, I'm not going to, I'm not here to discuss it.
I'm here to discuss this.
I mean, ultimately, they're kind of doing the same thing.
They're just like, and it's very clear in like Media San's, like, other things.
And I re-watched a couple of those clips with Dumernaut just to kind of get him in my head again.
It's very clear Mediasan realizes he's talking to a Nazi very, very quickly and he just doesn't.
So he understands.
Yeah.
He gets it.
I really wish he just said it.
They're always going to think that they won, though, aren't they?
Or at least at least they're going to pretend that they won in public.
That's the thing.
Yes.
They're going to come out and they're going to say, well, of course, you know, I wiped the floor with him, et cetera.
You know, just the one kid, there was the one kid who tweeted, you know, like he didn't get to go up and he said, you know, he just, he did, he did a screenshot of himself sitting there in his chair.
He's like, I didn't want to go up because Media San spelled terrible.
And it's like, you know, he didn't even get to talk.
You know, you're, you're trying to like, you're a little bit, I won by not going up there and debating Media San.
Like, Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's just cope, obviously.
And racism.
And this is something, this is something.
And again, this may sound like self-defensive.
This may sound like a thing, but I have been critical lately of my decision not to do an episode kind of talking about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, like not doing early in 2023 or 2024 early on, or even doing, I thought about doing something like how the Nazis are talking about this topic, right?
You know, and kind of doing that.
I was Dissuaded from doing so by a wiser head, but you know, and I'm just like, I just don't know how to do this.
I don't know how to do this episode, given what we do.
And the thing, and I've said this to you privately, and I'm going to say it here on the podcast, just like I am, I feel really bad about that.
But in my head, this is why.
Because the first thing they're going to do is like the famous anti-fascist podcaster, this guy who knows us inside and out, who you know, who disagrees with everything we believe in, also thinks the Jews are doing terrible things in Gaza, in Gaza.
He doesn't say they're Jews.
He says it's the Israeli government, but he knows they're fucking Jews.
And then the idea of having my words used against me in that context, that made me go away from doing that, that topic.
And, you know, I'm maybe that was cowardice on my part.
Maybe I would not, I should not have made that decision, but that's that's my answer to that.
You can respond to that or not.
I think that's the right decision.
I mean, I, okay.
I'm not going to tell you how to feel, but I think that was absolutely the right editorial decision.
I think we did talk about this.
And there were sort of structural problems with our remit as a show that made it very difficult to find a way to cover it in a way that was more full and focused that just were kind of inescapable.
I mean, I think you made the right call personally.
Okay.
And I love that call.
I'm open to criticism on that on that basis.
Although Jack will probably get the criticism.
That's what that's what we find out.
You know, people just reach out to Jack.
I think what Daniel did is unconsciousable.
I can't believe you're still in a podcast with him, et cetera.
I think a really interesting, this is a sideline, but I think it fits into this.
There was a great episode of Polite Conversations with the title, Can Genocide Studies Survive a Genocide in Gaza?
And it's with an author, Mary Cohen, who is at the Armari Cohen, I'm not sure, at the Jewish Currents.
And Cohen wrote a really great, very long, but really great article with the same title.
And it's about how the, you mentioned the ADL earlier.
It's about how the particularly sort of like the field of genocide studies has been so focused on the Holocaust, so focused on like Lipstadt, on the treatment of the Jewish Holocaust as being in some way unique.
And that criticism of Israel is like denying the Jewish people their sanctum after the events of the Holocaust.
There's this very legitimate feeling in some circles about that.
And that these organizations, that these scholars and these organizations have refused to make statements as they very well should have, made statements about what's going on about the ongoing genocide or ethic cleansing, however, whichever term you prefer, about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, because they are reticent to reach that, to upset people in that way.
And it's a great article.
I have a quote, but I don't need to, I didn't quote it here.
I just kind of described the article.
Listen to that conversation.
It's a great conversation.
Look at that article.
And the reason I wanted to bring it up here is because it also fits into that same question.
It's like, well, how do you cover this?
Like, how do you, I mean, I'm not, I'm not standing the ACL or the ADL, the ACL, the ADL.
I'm not, I'm not in any way defending the ADL or the ADL is a monstrous organization on this topic.
There's, there's just the ADL should be front and foremost of, you know, criticizing, you know, and I think like people like Jewish Voices for Peace, et cetera, are essential voices because they're Jewish, because they, and that, and yet they do very strongly criticize the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza in the strongest terms, not probably not the strongest terms, but you know, whatever, they're, they're, there's no equivocation whatsoever on that.
Unsparing.
Yeah.
And I think it's, you know, for me, this is all like kind of, it's all this kind of like failure of actors in this space to actually reach conclusions and to actually, you know, have the gumption to go about and like say what needs to be said and, you know, like call it out whenever, whenever it needs to be called out.
I mean, you know, look, you and I, I mean, look, I think I defended myself on this topic earlier.
You and I have spared no bones about complaining about, you know, the U.S. government and the UK government.
We, we toured Biden over the coals on many occasions over all the failures that he had.
And we would have done that to Kamala Harris as well.
There's absolutely no, you know, we, we, we see these things clearly and we don't mince words when we talk about them, except for legal reasons, of liable reasons, etc.
You know, you have more to worry about there than I do.
But we, you know, again.
Well, my government has basically just made being in solidarity with Palestine illegal.
So Yeah, well, you know, mine is, mine is getting there.
Mine is getting there.
Yeah.
You know, and God, that's actually the thing that the Nazis hate Trump for the most.
It's like that we love everything except his stance on Israel.
He's not, he's not, he's not harsh enough on Israel.
You know, like he's too like they love him on everything, but it's like the Israel is like the turd in the punch bowl.
You know, it's like, we love the punch bowl, but why does there be this turd floating in it?
Yeah.
No, I just wanted to, I just, again, to me, it's like it was part of the same process, the process that kind of brought me to kind of talking about this.
How do we talk about this?
What do we say?
What do we do?
This is not to say we are blameless.
This is not to say, you know, like it's just these organizations, we have to be able to call this stuff out where it is and we need to be honest about it.
You know, you and I use humor.
We use, you know, we're a small show and we use, you know, what we use the techniques that we have to talk about this stuff.
We don't, we are not beholden to the budget of a, you know, denial was made for $10 million.
They could have been a lot more radical and gotten that $10 million, you know.
But I don't know.
I think there's just responsibility for how we talk about these things.
And that's what interested me.
And I don't have a good answer for this.
I don't have a good answer, but I wanted to kind of pose the question.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
I think, I think there's a lot to be said about the idea that the Holocaust is unique.
I think it is unique in some respects.
I'm kind of reluctant to say that because so many of the people that say that are doing so for reasons that I disagree with or even using the idea of the uniqueness or the incommensurability of the Holocaust, you know, for political objects.
I mean, let's just say it.
The Holocaust is weaponized ideologically by people to defend the state of Israel or to deflect criticism of the state of Israel.
Or, you know, that's a fact.
And that is completely reprehensible.
And the idea of the unique, the categorical uniqueness of the Holocaust is often used in that way.
I think nonetheless, it's true to say that it was unique in some respects.
I think every historical event of that kind is unique in some respects.
I think it's worth, you know, it's worth pointing out the fact that it is categorically unique in some ways.
But I do think a lot of the, just even aside from the question of the weaponization of the Holocaust as a topic to silence or deflect or blacken a criticism of Israel, even aside from that, so much of how we talk about the Holocaust in our culture is just morbid and salacious.
And frankly, it's been commodified to a huge extent.
And I think, you know, I think kind of my meta complaint about stuff like denial is that it is part of a kind of a commodification of this topic, you know, for sort of selling a kind of sentimental media version of it, which I find pretty distasteful.
As was Schindler's list, as was Shind's list.
As was Schindler's list.
I mean, yeah, I absolutely agree.
Yeah.
On the question of on the question of Irving and what the value is of combating people like him, I think it's worth pointing out that we have this guy now, Darryl Cooper, who Mother Jones did an article recently about this, which is very good, I think.
And it points out the guy is Darryl Cooper.
We've covered him in a previous episode in passing anyway.
I used to listen to his podcast.
I used to listen to Martyrmade, but I haven't listened to that much.
Martyrmaid.
That's exactly.
On X, he has hundreds of thousands of followers, one of whom is JD Vance.
He was interviewed by Tucker Carlson and praised by Tucker Carlson.
He's the biggest history blog on Substack, chillingly.
Substack, which just recently sent out a push notification to people for a blog, which was just openly anti-Semitic.
And he was on Rogan.
And Rogan has said, oh, there's no way this guy's anti-Semitic.
This guy is an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier.
And it is frightening how much he is like David Irving.
I'll just read a little bit from this Mother Jones article.
It's talking about the fact that one of Darryl Cooper's things is that he likes to attack Winston Churchill.
Now, again, I'm no apologies for Winston Churchill.
David Irving did that as well.
David Irving wrote a book about how he decided that Winston Churchill had the Polish leader, General Sikorsky, assassinated, which far as I can tell is complete bollocks.
This is another, this is Darrell Cooper thing as well.
And from this article, he says Churchill, he's talking about Churchill being primarily responsible for the Second World War because of his alleged ties to financiers and a media complex supportive of Zionism.
He later specified that his source for this claim was David Irving, an infamous British anti-Semite and Holocaust denier.
Irving, who now lacks for who also lacks formal training as a historian, because Darryl Cooper, no formal training.
Irving, who also lacks formal training as a historian, has been discredited for decades.
In 1991, after denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, he used the acronym assholes to refer to the Auschwitz survivors, survivors of the Holocaust, and other liars.
And it talks a bit about the case that we've just been talking about.
And then it goes again, it talks a little bit about Richard Evans debunking his work and so on.
And it shows Cooper is not just drawing on Irving.
He's also misrepresenting Irving by downplaying.
He's recycling Irving's arguments while downplaying his anti-Semitism, re-phrasing his arguments so that they sound less openly outrageous.
Here's a bit.
In Cooper's telling, Irving believed that gas chambers were not a primary method of killing.
That's a quote at Nazi death camps.
Irving put it more bluntly: I'm a gas chamber denier.
So he's laundering Irving as he repeats his talking points.
He's also mis Mother Jones actually got the historian Richard Evans to respond to some of this, and he responded by email.
Cooper is not just misrepresenting Irving, he's misrepresenting Irving's criticisms of Irving, Evans's criticisms of Irving, making it sound that Evans is less critical.
So this, we have this guy who's now the biggest, he's a star Holocaust denier on X and Substack and Joe Rogan and podcasts and Tucker Carlson.
And he is not just very, very much like David Irving.
He is directly using Irving's arguments and laundering him.
I would argue Irving invented that like alt-right attitude in some ways.
He may have invented it.
But I remember when we did our original episode on this, I found like some old YouTube clips of when Irving came to the States in either 85 or 86.
I can't, I think there was, I think my source is different, so I don't remember if it was 85 or 86, but he gave some talks to some conferences and he does the, he does the racist jokes.
He does the, he does the, you know, like plausibly denial, but not really plausibly denial thing about race.
You know, he does the, you know, African people are just stupid.
He does, he does, he plays all the hits.
He sounded exactly like Richard Spencer in 2016.
And he did it 30 years earlier.
Even the bit, we see this in the denial movie, you know, the fact that he, he does this stunt.
You know, he has somebody in the audience to ask about him and he comes in and it's like, I'm David Irving.
And he films the whole thing and he puts it up in his, you know, it's like, it's just so, he's just so born.
He was born 30 years early for this era.
Yeah.
But he kind of invents this stuff in a lot of ways.
He's he's the progenitor of it.
But luckily he's not David Duke.
You know, he's got this little avatar in the form of Daryl Cooper.
As, you know, as that's what happens.
He's, you know, I mean, look, David Irving lost the trial, but he kind of, he kind of like he's winning.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't know.
He's the trial didn't stamp out his ideas.
You know, the movie didn't stamp out his ideas.
We didn't stamp out his ideas.
He's still there.
You know, certain people can still watch that movie.
And apparently that documentary as well and say, yeah, that's my guy.
He looks good in this.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's because they're determined to.
It's because they're deliberately reading those texts against the grain, but they're still doing it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
Well, bit of an anti-climax there.
But I don't know.
This was a bit of a, this was a bit of a difficult one to get together and assemble.
So I was just going to do, I was just going to talk about the 2016 movie for 45 minutes.
It was going to be fine just to get some content out there.
And then we just, you know, it turns out when you step into Holocaust now, you're just stepping through shit all the time.
Yeah.
Anyway.
So let us know how you feel about, you know, what we discussed here.
If you want to hear us do the Sydney Sweeney, we can do the Sydney Sweeney episode.
If you want to hear us do the episode of the daily show with Dumernott and I can walk through all the little rhetoric pitches, that's just be really annoying to do, but I can do it.
It's not easy.
It's not hard.
That's, you know, that's an hour and a half of content just to cut through and find clips and talk through it.
That's easy to do.
So, if you want to hear those, I don't think it's important enough.
