The Big City

The Iranian government is baiting the Israelies again. First it was a competition for cartoons about the holocaust, now they’re running a conference to discuss whether the holocaust actually happened at all. They are trying to demonstrate that the West is as intolerant of discussion about the holocaust as some Muslims are of discussion about the prophet Mohammed. Not only is it a childish point, but it’s also clearly inaccurate. How many people have been murdered or condemned to death for holocaust denial? David Irving doesn’t seem to be living in fear for his life, unlike Salman Rushdie. The truth is that Islam in Iran still has a very long way to go; they are in no position to talk about freedom of speech.

I was wondering if David Irving had been invited to the Iranian conference when I accidentally found myself on his ‘Campaign for real History’ site today. I really didn’t mean to be there, honest guv’. I followed a link from the excellent Cabinet Magazine to an article from the November 1938 edition of Homes and Gardens which offered its readers a breathless Hello-style guided tour of Adolf Hitler’s “Bavarian retreat”. It’s a hilariously gushing piece, originally published on the web in 2003 by Simon Waldman. IPC magazines, the publishers of Homes and Gardens, made him take it down so lots of other people, including David Irving, published it and now they’ve given up trying to supress it.

It’s not surprising that IPC was embarrassed by the article. By November 1938, when it was published, Hitler was already a dictator, having supressed all opposition parties and murdered at least 77 opponents within his own party, the Luftwaffe had killed more than a thousand Spanish civilians bombing the undefended town of Guernica and the Nazi racial purity laws were all in place including measures banning Jews from having professional jobs, bidding for government contracts and attending public schools.

The fact that Homes and Gardens was prepared to publish such a paean to the Führer shows how widespread support was for the Nazis and their policies in Britain at the time. When people talk about how the second world war was fought against the scourge of Nazism it’s worth remembering how many people in the UK and US only started objecting to it once Germany seemed to be a threat to their own countries, they didn’t give a hoot before then. In the current context of attacks upon our own civil liberties it’s also worth remembering that a brutal, authoritarian regime can still look very respectable even when it’s already well on its way to killing millions of people.

The Guardian story about the Homes and Gardens article
The Homes and Gardens article (not on David Irving’s site)