Skinhuvuden bjuder ju inte in Irving för historielektioner, men för att han säger vad de tycker är roligt.
Citat:
Speech in Tampa, Florida, 6 October 1995, (p 16-19).
'When I get into Australia I know what is going to happen, the media will be there, they will trot out their own homebred survivors. Every town has a survivor. In Florida, I understand that every school now has its visiting survivor, who comes to inflict the nameless horrors on these eight-year-old toddlers, telling them what happened to them at the hands of the Germans. In Australia there are professional survivors, a woman called Mrs Altman who will roll up her sleeve and show the tattoo to prove that, yes, she was in Auschwitz.
Of course already we sceptics have caused problems because when I spoke in Cincinnati, my host, his wife, she was a school teacher and she said you know Mr Irving we've got a bit of a problem because we now have to teach the Holocaust - the same as you do in Florida - it is part of the school curriculum. You have to teach the Holocaust and last week we had a Holocaust survivor who came and lectured to the children, she was an old woman and she lectured to these eight year old children in my class and several other teachers came along to listen and one of the eight year old children, a girl piped up at the end of the lecture and said "How did you survive then? How did you survive?" Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings come these questions and this woman, this survivor said, "I managed to make a hole in the back of the gas chamber and escape". [Laughing] And my friend said "we teachers, we looked at each other and we didn't dare say anything. But the trouble is that the children believed it".
This is the basic problem. And that's how it's going to be with Mrs Altman. I was saying Mrs Altman, you have your tattoo this is an interesting thing to show everyone, but we have a basic problem here, you are a survivor. I used to think that the world was full of a thousand survivors. I was wrong. It is full of hundreds of thousands of survivors of the Holocaust if not, in fact, millions by now. The numbers of survivors seems to grow these passing years, it defies all laws of natural deceased and all laws, now the number of survivors is growing.
And I said isn't the existence of so many survivors in itself an indicator, something doesn't, it doesn't fit. If the Nazis had this dedicated programme to exterminate the Jews, how come so many of you have survived, were the Nazis sloppy or what? They let you out, they let you escape?" It's a basic question. And she'll get very indignant and talk about her honour and her integrity and how she suffered and I'll say "Mrs Altman, you have suffered undoubtedly, and I'm sure that life in a Nazi concentration camp, where you say you were, and I'm prepared to accept that, we have no reason to disbelieve you, was probably not very nice." And life in Dresden probably wasn't very nice, and probably life in Pforzheim wasn't very nice. "But tell me one thing", and this is why I'm going to get tasteless with her, because you've got to get tasteless, "Mrs Altman, how much money have you made out of that tattoo since 1945? [Laughter] How much money have you coined for that bit of ink on your arm, which may indeed be real tattooed ink? And I'll say this, "half a million dollars, three quarters of a million for you alone." It must be in that order of magnitude because think of the billions of dollars that have been sent that way, billions.
You American taxpayers are happily, indeed joyously, giving to the State of Israel 3 billion dollars a year, if not 4 by now. The German government is adding another 1 billion dollars a year in compensation. $5 billion go to be spent on people like Mrs Altman with their tattoo. Divide that up amongst all the survivors and it's a very sizeable annual income that they are getting. And I'll say - I'm in front of the television, "Mrs Altman there must be a million Australians sitting there thinking to themselves 'why is it that they have got all the compensation and yet our troops who suffered in the Japanese camps and building the Burma railway and the people who died in the air raids cities and the rest of it didn't get one bent nickel by way of compensation?' How is it always these people who get compensation and not the others?" She won't have any answer for that I'm sure.
And what these people don't understand, by way of conclusion, is that they are generating anti-semitism by their behaviour, and they can't understand it. They wonder where the anti-semitism comes from, and it comes from themselves, from their behaviour. We don't promote anti-semitism, we've got no reason whatsoever to promote anti-semitism. I find the whole Holocaust story utterly boring. It goes on and on and on and they keep on going on about the Holocaust because it's the only interesting thing that's happened to them in the last 3000 years. [Laughter]
We have no reason to promote anti-semitism, it's not in our interest one way or the other, but they are doing it. I don't know why. Whether it's because they want to be the centre of attention or what.
To an audience in Louisiana, I spoke in Freeport, Louisiana about 6 months ago, and to my embarrassment half the audience turned out to be with the local Jewish community. They'd come along to cause trouble, the rest was normal, but half the audience was this Jewish community with their Jewish community leaders and they showed their true colours after I had begun to speak. And after they had interrupted and behaved in a thoroughly obnoxious manner, for about half an hour while the rest of the audience grew increasingly impatient with their behaviour. I interrupted the flow of my own lecture, and I said to their ringleader, who I recognised by his accent, which came from a particular suburb of London called Colindale or Cricklewood, we English can tell from their accent, from somebody's what class they are, what family they come from and also what particular suburb of London they come from. I said "Do you come from Colindale or Cricklewood?" and he said "Why do you say that?" and I said "Well I can tell by the way you're shrieking at me, but do you mind if I say this, I am disliked, I know I'm disliked, I know I'm disliked because the Newspapers say I'm disliked. [...]
And is it the historian's job to be liked? Obviously it isn't. An historian's job is to find out what happened and why. But I said to this man from Colindale, leader of the Jewish community in Louisiana, I said "I'm disliked and I know why. I look in the mirror when I shave in the morning and I think 'You're disliked, you could alter it overnight, but you don't, it's your own fault, everything that's happening to you. You were disliked, you people. You have been disliked for 3000 years. You have been disliked so much that you have been hounded from country to country from pogrom to purge, from purge back to pogrom. And yet you never ask yourselves why you are disliked, that's the difference between you and me. It would never occur to you to look in the mirror and say 'why am I disliked, what is it the rest of humanity doesn't like about the Jewish people, to such an extent that they repeatedly put us through the grinder?'"
And he went berserk, he said, "are you trying to say that we are responsible for Auschwitz, ourselves?" and I said, "well the short answer is 'yes'. The short answer I have to say is yes". I mean he really got my gander up. "The short answer is yes, but that's the short answer obviously between your question and my answer, yes, there are several intervening stages but that is it. If you had behaved differently over the intervening 3000 years the Germans would have gone about their business and not have found it necessary to go around doing whatever they did to you. Nor would the Russians, nor the Ukrainians, nor the Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians and all the other countries where you've had a rough time. So why haven't you ever asked yourself that question?" It's an interesting point, but they don't, they go round the other way and they make life unbearable for those who try to analyse whatever happened, whatever it was.'
