Talk:Foul Ole Ron

Not really an annotation as such, and I'm not sure how this can be verified, as it relates to a bit of Pratchett ephemera.

The Discworld Desktop Diary, I think for 2002 or 2003, one of the "365 pages that you tear off and throw away as the year gets older" variety, carried pencil/pen illustrations (by mr Kidby).

The one of Foul Ole Ron (don't ask me which day)had a striking physical resemblence to the idiosyncratic historian David Irving.

At the time, Irving was locked in lawsuits and libel actions in two or three different countries concerning his reluctance to accept the fairly certain fact that the Holocaust happened (a bit of a professional drawback in a historian specialising in WW2 Germany, you would think. More to the point, where does Irvine think six million European Jews suddenly dissappeared to? Hard to hide, for instance, a UFO abduction of this magnitude)

As in losing his lawsuits Irving risked not only total loss of professional reputation but also financial debts that would have reduced him to the status of a Foul Ole Ron, I do wonder if this was deliberate... especially as Holocaust deniers appear to inhabit a plane of alternative reality that makes Ron look sane and on the ball. Mr Kidby's sense of humour, and an interesting bit of back-story to one of his illustrations?

(Irving lost all his court actions and spent time in an Austrian nick to boot, having broken their law on advocating denial of Nazi mass-murder, so he's in no position to sue this website should he ever read this)--AgProv 12:55, 3 May 2007 (CEST)