It is best not to mince words. The imprisonment of David Irving by the Austrian authorities is a disgrace. It is a state punishment for a crime -- that of expression and argument and publication -- that is not a legal offense in Mr. Irving's country of birth and that could not be an offense under the U.S. Constitution. It is to be hoped, by all those who value the right to dissent, that his appeal against both sentence and conviction will be successful.

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Now may I mince a word or two? I have been writing in defense of Mr. Irving for several years. When St. Martin's Press canceled its contract to print his edition of the Goebbels diaries, which it did out of fear of reprisal, I complained loudly and was rewarded by an honest statement from the relevant editor -- Thomas Mallon -- that his decision had been a "profile in prudence." I will not take refuge in the claim that I was only defending Mr. Irving's right to free speech. I was also defending his right to free inquiry. You may have to spend time on some grim and Gothic Web sites to find this out, but he is in fact not a "denier," but a revisionist, and much-hated by the full-dress "denial" faction. The pages on Goebbels, as in his books on Dresden, Churchill and Hitler, contain some highly important and very damning findings of his work in the archives of the Third Reich. (The Goebbels book contains final proof that the Nazis financed Sir Oswald Mosley's blackshirts in England: a claim that Mosley's many sympathizers have long denied.)

Compared to this useful evidence, the fact that Mr. Irving was once a Mosley supporter is unimportant to me. I believe myself to be grown-up enough to read a historian, however tendentious, and winnow the wheat from the chaff all by myself. I happen to teach part time at the New School for Social Research in New York, which was a proud haven for antifascist scholars in the 1930s. In those awful days, the school even produced an unexpurgated and footnoted translation of "Mein Kampf," replete with all its racist incitement, in order (too late) to enlighten American readers. I keep a copy on my shelf, partly because if I needed to refer to it in a hurry I would now have a very hard time obtaining it from any of today's nerve-racked American booksellers.

I would not, however, as H.L. Mencken once did, give "Mein Kampf" a lenient review. In fact, and if it matters, I have also authored, or caused to be published, several harsh attacks on Mr. Irving. (His book, arguing that the 1956 revolution in Hungary was a rebellion against Jewish Bolshevism, owes its well-deserved obscurity partly to my efforts and to those of the American historian Kai Bird.) I have heard Mr. Irving say detestable things, and seen him reported as saying even worse things, and there came a time when I could not manage to go on having conversations with him. (Vide my recent book "Love, Poverty and War.") However, I claim the absolute right to have such a chat if I change my mind, and to consult the man who knew enough German, and enough about the subject, to expose "The Hitler Diaries" as a fabrication when several establishment historians had fallen for the hoax.

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