You Were Just Getting Interesting, Irving
Holocaust denier inexplicably recants at moment of martyrdom
Man, Nazis are cowards. It's all racial purity this and Triumph of the Will that until the real struggle begins. Then they'll do anything to get out of jail and back to their drinking dens and willowy girlfriends.
Irving might not be a dyed-in-the-wool fascist, but he acts the part. The Third Reich offered order in a European chaos, but actually delivered the opposite -- an absolute void in which ridiculous and loathsome rules were enacted with precision. Irving offered the same order -- a scholarly testament of German leadership before and during World War II. But his thought life was chaos: he glorified war and battle, was an out-and-out Nazi sympathiser, lionized Hitler. "I'm not an expert on the Holocaust"? Sure.
We'd all like to believe in salvation, and that's exactly what Irving is hoping: that we are so cow-eyed and sentimental (he's sentimental too, but not when it comes to ethics) that we'll believe him, so long as he lays it on thick enough. Now, I believe we should live and let live, and not give Irving any more scrutiny than the Potsdamer Platz pamphleteer who just handed you a schizophrenic photo collage dotted with exclamation marks. But if Austria wants to put their weight behind this law, then they should punish Irving to the letter. Because this ideological backpedaling is horseshit.
For new book titles aspiring to pay off Irving's cavernous debt, I suggest In The Name Of The Father (if he writes it from prison) or Escaping the Eagle's Nest (if he gets away clean).