Like many of the writers Evans quotes in his section on the press reaction to the verdict, Guttenplan is unable to draw a distinction between fact and interpretation. Commentators fretted that Irving's defeat was a defeat for free speech. They wrote as if Deborah Lipstadt had tried to suppress his views instead of what actually happened: Irving had attempted to suppress a book that was critical of him. One claimed that the issue was "the right of historians to examine and interpret ... events ... without being tied to a foregone conclusion." But that was never at issue because, as Evans points out, Irving has never examined and interpreted facts for the simple reason that he is not a historian. He twists or suppresses evidence to fit a foregone conclusion -- the opposite of what any reputable historian does. In a column that could have been written by Guttenplan, a writer for the London Times claimed that "people like Irving do us a service" by forcing us to "examine the foundations of our orthodoxies." But of course it's only a service if you're foolish enough to doubt what Irving called into question to begin with.

Guttenplan's questioning of who decides facts -- not interpretations, but facts -- may spring from a desire to level the playing field by reminding us of the truism that history is written by the victors. Here, however, it is playing right into the hands of the brutes. Deborah Lipstadt has long refused to debate David Irving or any Holocaust denier, contending that to treat them as if they were "the other side" would be to grant validity to their delusions. When Guttenplan asks in relation to Auschwitz, "How do we know anything beyond what we ourselves have experienced?" he's indulging in the sort of mental masturbation that you should be finished with by the end of your freshman year in college. Of course, we can never "know" the texture of the experience of the death camps, but we can know the fact of it. And what, as Evans asks toward the end of his book, finally becomes of facts if we decide that they can only be known by direct experience? In practical terms it means that within 30 to 50 years, the Holocaust will cease to have any historical meaning because there will be no survivors left who actually experienced it.

Of course, history is more than a recitation of facts. That reductionism is what Guttenplan so rightly finds offensive in the work of statisticphiles like John Keegan -- the elimination of the human element. But when Guttenplan bemoans the elimination of the human element in the Irving-Lipstadt trial he misses not only the brilliance of the defense strategy but the moral fineness of it. Early on the defense decided that no Holocaust survivors would be called to testify. They felt it would be obscene to expose these people to the ridicule of David Irving. "Witnesses, memories, testimony -- all that was left outside the courtroom," Guttenplan writes, "and that seems to me cause for regret."

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	Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial By Richard J. Evans Basic Books 318 pages Nonfiction Buy this book
	The Holocaust on Trial By D.D. Guttenplan W.W. Norton 328 pages Nonfiction Buy this book

On the contrary, it seems to me a means of paying honor to the weight of history, the defense's way of making sure that the enormity of the events in question were not reduced to the absurdity imposed by British libel law. Both Evans and Guttenplan confess to recognizing that absurdity even as they concentrated on the narrow focus of the trial, of sometimes forgetting just what the disputed documents and figures were about. But that narrow focus was a way of defeating David Irving on his own turf, of turning the very things he claimed to rely on -- facts and documentation -- against him. And it was an implicit demonstration of what his version of history so ruthlessly ignores. It was a way of saying that here was something beneath the consideration of humanity.

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Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"