However plausible this might have seemed , it was clear that the filmmakers considered the incident too undignified and , on the screen at least , too inexplicable to show , and so it was omitted , along with many other dramatic moments in the proceedings . The film in general stuck commendably to both the spirit and the letter of the case . The issues at stake were serious ones , and by showing them from Lipstadt ’ s personal perspective , David Hare and the director Mick Jackson helped audiences identify with the fight against Holocaust denial that Lipstadt was waging . It conveyed complex legal and historical issues with admirable clarity , and it made clear that the court ’ s decisive ruling against Irving had underlined in detail the fact that Holocaust denial necessarily depended on the falsification of history and the manipulation of the documentary evidence .
It was also – and this does not come through strongly enough in the movie – a victory for freedom of speech . Some commentators thought that Lipstadt , along with Anthony Julius and his legal team , was trying to silence Irving . The reverse was true . Holocaust denial was , and is , not illegal
8 . Permanent exhibitions at the Auschwitz Memorial Museum | EUROM in the UK . It was Irving , as a Holocaust denier , who was trying to silence Lipstadt . Had he won , she would have been forced to withdraw her book and the publisher would have been obliged to pulp all the copies in its possession . Bookshops would have been open to litigation had they stocked it on their shelves – and indeed the original Statement of Case by Irving had included four bookshops along with Lipstadt and her publishers , among the defendants , though mention of them was withdrawn before the trial began . No publisher would have dared to bring out any book or article criticizing Irving , saying he was a Holocaust denier , or claiming Holocaust deniers told lies . It would have been a disaster for freedom of speech .
As it was , a publisher who produced a British edition of a book in which an American historian , John Lukács , writing some time before the trial , accused Irving of denying the Holocaust and distorting the evidence , bowdlerized the text by softening the criticisms of Irving before bringing it out in the UK , and my own book on the case , already published in the USA , was rejected by six British publishers on the grounds that it risked incurring a libel suit from Irving , who was writing to publishers warning them that he would sue if they published it . Eventually it was brought out by a small left-wing publishing house , Verso , who , when asked if they were worried about being sued , replied that they would welcome a libel writ from Irving because it would give them publicity they badly needed .
The trial , the books that came out of it ( including the 350-page court judgment ), and the movie Denial , struck an important blow against Holocaust denial . Irving had been taken seriously as an historian before the trial , but this was no longer the case afterwards . But while it discredited Holocaust denial amidst an international blaze of publicity , its effects did not last long . The rise of the Internet and especially social media has given Holocaust denial a new lease of life . The struggle against it continues .
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