In Salon today, Charles Taylor reviews Deborah Lipstadt’s new book History on Trial, her account of the libel case brought against her by the Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer David Irving. Taylor is particularly interested in the way that some historians continued to support Irving even after his fraud and mendacity had been laid bare for all to see. Money quote:
What seems to bother Irving’s defenders is the very notion of professional and intellectual accountability. Running into Lipstadt after the trial, [British historian, Donald Cameron Watt] said to her, ‘None of us could have withstood that kind of scrutiny.’ In a column for the Evening Standard, he said, ‘Show me one historian who has not broken out into a cold sweat at the thought of undergoing similar treatment.’ What Lipstadt was perhaps too polite to say to Watt was that any historian who wishes to be worthy of the title had damn well better be able to withstand that kind of scrutiny.