Business of LifeThey are invisible, unappreciated, and unremarked. As delicate and as strong as a spider's we depend upon networks of trust around us, that food will come to the store, that electricity will be delivered, that the money is good and the bank will give us some back.
We also depend on the accuracy of accounts by reporters and historians. For the latter, we should be more skeptical. Or better still, trust but verify, like Richard Evan, scholar and hero, did.
Neo-neo con brings us the remarkable tale of popular writer Clifford Irving who along the way became anti-Semitic and a liar, falsifier and Holocaust denier.
Undone by his own hand, it began when he chose to sue Deborah Libstadt for libel in her book Lying About Hitler whose legal team and she was ably defended by her publisher Penguin, hired Richard Evan, an historian, whose " remarkable scholarship and persistence" exposed Irving's manipulation and exploitation of the network of trust that allows historians to depend on the truth of what other historians write.
It's one of those stories that is very satisfying in its denouement: it turns out that Irving's own desire to silence his critics started a process in motion that ended up discrediting him in a comprehensive way that most likely would never have occurred had he not started the lawsuit. The wheels of historical justice grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine.
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Irving's game, unfortunately. He had an almost perfect m.o.: he choose arcane and difficult-to-find sources, and quoted them in ways that made them doubly difficult to trace. He became suspect, but no one had the actual goods on him until classic hubris drove Irving to push the envelope and sue someone who was accusing him of doing exactly what he was in fact doing.