David Irving

[Pagan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsFCUNm6Okw

The greatest researcher and historian of our time, tells about Winston Churchill(the drunkard) and major causes of ww2.

[kemo]

You'd be hard put to find a historian that agrees - or even one that regards David Irving as a historian. It is possible for one person to be right and everyone else wrong but given Irving's history it seems very unlikley.

I gather that he earned some respect for his early work on the bombing of Dresden but even that has since been repudiated. His skills as a researcher have been noted but the problem is the spin he put on his research.

Apart from the forged Hitler diaries which he claimed were genuine and later admitted they were forgeries, he famously launched a libel action against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin books, which he lost and bankrupted himself in the process.

The defendants were supported by a number of expert witnesses, including Prof Richard Evans of Cambridge who stated:

"Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about. ... if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian."

And further ....

"Irving, (...) had deliberately distorted and wilfully mistranslated documents, consciously used discredited testimony and falsified historical statistics. (...) Irving has fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary amongst historians that he does not deserve to be called a historian at all."

I seem to recall that under cross-examination Irving even admitted some of these accusations.

As for Churchill - well we know he drank and suffered from depression. That's not new but I haven't watched the video because there's no point as I would not believe a word of anything David Irving says.

[Pagan]

I suggest you watch the video. kemo ;)

[ThePythonicCow]

The greatest researcher and historian of our time, tells about Winston Churchill(the drunkard) and major causes of ww2.David Irving's main books are available for free download in pdf format from http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/index.html

[ThePythonicCow]

David Irving is certainly not without controversy :). Here for example is a quite derogatory essay on him: Suffering Fools Gladly? David Irving & Revisionism, by Dr. Karl Kolcheck (http://www.davidirving.8m.com/).

A more neutral profile and brief biography of David Irving can be found at Profile: David Irving (BBC News) (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4449948.stm).