Some movies are thought provoking (i.e., making you think), and the 2016 British-American biographical drama movie Denial is one of them. I was not aware of it until yesterday and after watching it (with rewinding and repeating for some episodes), I cannot stop thinking about it.
For those who never heard of it, it was based on a book by Deborah Lipstadt in 2005 “History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier.” The movie dramatized the case of Irving vs. Penguin Books Ltd. in which Lipstadt the Holocaust scholar, played by Rachel Weisz with a very attractive face and excellent performance, was sued by David Irving, a British right-wing historian and a Holocaust denier, for defamation. They ended up in a British court and Lipstadt hired a very talented and canny legal team, including Richard Rampton, who acted as what would be called a “trial lawyer” in the US. In the end, Irving was defeated and the judge, Charles Gray, ruled for the defense that Irving was indeed deceitful as Lipstadt claimed.
There are several things that have stricken me in this movie. First and foremost, it proves that justice is a game and just because something is true or right does not mean one can sit there waiting for justice to come. Lipstadt initially followed this approach (as she elegantly put it: “You don’t debate facts, you only debate opinions.”) While this sounds reasonable and attractive, the truth is that facts, especially historical facts, are also subject to opinions. Therefore, one cannot separate facts from opinions completely except simple facts in the physical world.
The second thing I have learned is to break big fact into smaller ones. For historical events like the Holocaust it seems almost too big to argue about. Yet the court debate depicted in the movie was not about whether the Holocaust happened or not, but whether Irving’s personal reputation was wrongfully damaged by Lipstadt’s book. Many times people have different opinions because the subject matters were too big to be judged objectively. The good thing that placing debates in a court of law is that the fight is limited to a smaller range, which allows objective ruling.
The third thing is strategy matters. The movie clearly shows how the British legal team worked its way out to win, starting from little things that seem to be trivial but turned out pivotal. Two members of the team visited Irving’s house early on to get his voluminous diaries. I don’t know if by British law whether Irving can say “no” to the request. After all, diaries are his personal and private records. But if the law allows Irving to keep those documents off limit, his volunteer move to grant permit to others, especially to team members of the opposite side was a stupid mistake that eventually helped bury him in the end. Allowing himself to be his own lawyer was another wrong step, especially facing a strong team of experts on the opposite side. The smart team has proven the lesson that one should never forget to use the mistakes your enemy made to your advantage!
#activate the necessary libraries
library(RWordPress)
library(knitr)
# Tell RWordPress how to set the user name, password, and URL for your WordPress site.
options(WordPressLogin = c(jayjiyuan = "Wildfire@717"),
WordPressURL = "https://ideabins.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php")
# Tell knitr to create the html code and upload it to your WordPress site
knit2wp('Denial.Rmd',
title = 'What Can We Learn from the Movie "Denial"?',
publish = FALSE,
action ="newPost")
## ## ## processing file: Denial.Rmd
## Error in parse_block(g[-1], g[1], params.src): duplicate label 'p'