DAVID IRVING EMAIL!

On Sunday afternoon, I sent David Irving this email:

Dear Mr Irving,

I am researching your work, in particular your website, for a school assignment. I was wondering if you could answer some questions relating to your historical work online for me to use as a part of my assignment.

How do you select the material for your website? Do you employ a particular historical method in your selection criteria?

Do you feel there is more freedom online to express your historical opinions than writing specifically for a published book?

Any feedback would be an amazing addition to my assignment, and I would be immensely grateful for any correspondence from you I could cite as a primary source in my work.

Thank you

Audrey Marsh

And, amazingly, this morning I awoke to this email from David Irving himself:

Hello Audrey.

Here are some answers.

1.  I receive about three hundred emails a day, and many friends around the world suggest newspaper and other items on the Internet that I should link to.  If they come roughly within my own fields of interest (World War II, anti-Semitism, Holocaust, free speech, immigration, racial problems, governmental lying, atrocities, war crimes, etc.) then I will add that link to my site and various sub-indices (e.g.http://www.fpp.co.uk/Hitler).  The popularity of my website varies. If I am the centre of media attention, then it may go up to a ranking position of No. 40,000 on the Internet. Currently it is below that. Note that we accept no paid advertising, so we are not affected by outside influences like that.

2.  My method of material selection is the same as the way I select material for my books.   If the topic interests me, then it will probably interest my website readers.

3.  The answer at present is Yes, there is more freedom to express opinions online.  There is a risk that is growing however: some of these opinions may be illegal in some countries (yes, opinions can be illegal in modern democracies!); and a country's prosecutors may claim that because a website can be read by its citizens, you have published illegal opinions in that country. Now that we have Europe-wide automatic extradition laws in place, this is a real worry for some websites. (The only slender safeguard for the moment is that Britain insists that an extraditing European country can grab a British citizen only if his offence is also an offence in Britain, which my opinions are not.)

Germany and Austria have a very bad record in all this. In fact, those two countries have had a bad free-speech record for some time...  In Germany you will not find my website on Google (www.google.de) for example: because Google has reached a quiet agreement with the Berlin regime. So much for freedom. Google talk loudly about standing up to China, but ... meanwhile ...

Good luck with your project, Audrey. My motto: "Don't believe everything they tell you."

David Irving
(now writing in Key West, USA)                                                                                                                                                        
David Irving's own online bookstore is now open again at irvingbooks.com , better than ever, a year after its malicious destruction on Nov 13, 2009. 

Obviously this is an amazing primary source. I can't help but notice his lax historical method "My method of material selection is the same as the way I select material for my books. If the topic interests me, then it will probably interest my website readers." His comments about the freedom to express his historical opinion online were perfect, fitting seamlessly with the theory I was currently developing. Irving was outcast from mainstream historical publication because his views were too radical, and possibly illegal as he points out in his email.

A really great source I have stumbled upon here. I think his final remark "Don't believe everything they tell you" is an almost ridiculously Irving-esque thing to say, and a perfect summing up of his mindset as a whole.