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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1380

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

A collision of social worlds: racism, anti-Semitism, and Holocaust denial in the David Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd and Deborah Lipstadt trial.

Authors: Johnson, Alison Jeannette
Submitted by: Johnson, Alison Jeannette (University of Leeds, United Kingdom)

In January and February 2000 in a trial lasting 32 days David Irving, writer and historian, pursued his libel claim at the Royal Courts of Justice, London. In particular he rejected the categorisation of ‘Holocaust denier’ by Deborah Lipstadt, in her book: Denying the Holocaust: The growing assault on truth and memory (Penguin, 1993). In his opening statement (he did not employ a barrister and was his own advocate) he calls the Holocaust denier label: ‘poison’, ‘lethal’, ‘deadly’ and ‘a verbal Yellow Star’ (David Irving v. Penguin Books and Lipstadt, Day 1: 25-26), drawing a wilful parallel between his own situation and the position of Jews in Nazi Germany. So began the libel trial, brought by Irving to attempt to protect his reputation as a historian and writer. The defence barrister, Richard Rampton QC, successfully defended his clients (the American academic, Lipstadt, and her publisher, Penguin), drawing on strategies of impoliteness to reveal the truth of Irving’s ideological beliefs.  Simultaneously, in the media world, continuous reporting throughout the trial, alternately presented the complainant, Irving’s, view and the defendants’ views. And at the end of the trial, the judge, Justice Gray delivered a judgement in which the descriptions of Irving as a racist, anti-Semite, and Holocaust denier were not only justified, but Irving was judged to have manipulated history for his own ideological beliefs. The trial and its accompanying intertexts (Wodak 2000) can therefore be seen as a complex collision of social worlds, suspended in time for the duration of the trial process and in an institutional social space, the courtroom, where strongly polarised contested meanings are held up to extended scrutiny in an adversarial battle of words. On the one hand historical revision is argued for the factual evidence of the Holocaust; on the other is historical manipulation of those facts. This contradictory space finally gives way in the verdict to a reality where truth and lies are separated and distinct.

In this paper, I examine the trial transcript data, using discourse analytical and corpus linguistic methods to examine the ways in which impolite and taboo language is used by Rampton in his cross-examination of Irving. Along with direct cross-examination questions that probe Irving’s views (examples 1 and 2), Rampton frequently adopts a provocational stance in order to try to reveal Irving’s racist views to the Court (example 3):

1. Rampton: That is a racist remark, of course, Mr Irving. It is worthy of Dr Joseph Goebbels, is  it not?

2. Rampton: Racist, Mr Irving? Anti-Semitic Mr Irving, yes?

3. Rampton: So every time there is a pogrom or a machine gunning into a pit, or a mass gassing, it is entirely the Jews' fault because some of them make money and some of them are good  at the piano, is that right, and some of them are clever?

[from Irving v. Lipstadt and Penguin, Day 14]  

We see how discourses of taboo are part of an impolite register adopted strategically for institutional meaning making (Sarangi and Roberts 1999).