[German translation]

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2003: The attacks multiply. There have been unkind articles in Nepszabdsag and Magyar Hirlap, but they are all written by the usual people and I am not too badly wounded.

I write to Benté:

My back is killing me this morning from sitting at an angle in an ancient Volkswagen for seven hours, while three adults chain-smoke. Aaaargh. Aaaargh!

We drove along a single lane highway to Pécs near the Serbian border, a mining town. Audience was rather lost in the large 500-seater Ifjuság theatre, dimly lit, real Soviet-era stuff. Hard to get any kind of atmosphere going in a talk in such conditions.

No pictures, as the interpreter who takes them for me 'stepped outside' as soon as the talk was over, evidently desperate for a cigarette.

It is a real epidemic, the nicotine addiction in eastern Europe. Drove back and arrived at the hotel at midnight.

Your bank's news just about capped a very grim day. . . I suspect that Barclays are doing their usual trick of sitting on their hands and whistling, and pretending they can't find the money.

The publisher comes at two PM and we drive out to Györ. Good meeting in a local hotel. Around seventy people in a tight room, only two chairs empty so far as I can see. It goes well, but the witticisms all fall flat by the time they are interpreted.

There is the usual obnoxious man in the front row who keeps bobbing up and down and flashing photos; I tell him to stop. There is also a rather wan-looking Eva, who can't afford the book, so I donate one and have her stand next to me for a photo.

At question time an elderly author complains that I have refused to accept his book. I explain it's in Hungarian, which I don't read; I don't know what's in it; and my luggage is regularly searched at both ends, so I have made a point of carrying only the barest essentials on planes with me. I relate the story of how my trunk went "missing" in the USA in 1995 -- it enjoyed a little side-trip to Washington DC, where it was opened by all sorts of people.

After supper the Volkswagen breaks a fan belt and it is midnight before we get back to Budapest.

INTERVIEWS AT THE HOTEL with Magyar Nemzet and Magyar Konservativ; the latter is right wing. Today's newspapers say I was invited to Hungary by Csurka, which is not true.

The Nepszabadsag article today was written by Andras Mink. He says I'm a communist; yesterday's Magyar Hirlap insists I am a fascist. Living in the past.

In the morning I am interviewed by István Kádár for Demokrata. Hungarian Television has axed not just the interview due to be shown this weekend, but the entire programme, permanently, giving specious reasons.

There is an article about it in today's Nepszabdsag, the old communist party newspaper:

Certain analysts feel that the reasons offered by the chiefs of Hungarian Television are not the real reason.

They speculate that the real reason for the axing of the programme is that at the end of the October 26 episode the presenter announced that the following week's programme will contain excerpts from David Irving's lecture about the Holocaust.

However, there is no proof of this. It is merely speculation.

Of course, I have not talked about the Holocaust. That is not my topic. It is boring.

As for the USA plans, Chicago is shaping up well, with an exclusive sixtieth-floor restaurant booked on Michigan Avenue. Let's see the JDL's rioters try to get past the security there!

LONDON AGAIN. Michael Howard has virtually won the Tory leadership from the feckless Iain Duncan Smith. Now Tony Blair has real cause to be worried. In fact, Howard would have been my choice. Although a Jew, some years back he was the only European home secretary to refuse to sign on to Europe's Holocaust Denial legislation. Doesn't mean he can't change his spots however.

A Norwegian academic, Asle T, writes to me from Cambridge:

Shortly after the [Lipstadt] trial I had a seminar with Dr Richard Evans ["Skunky"] in Cambridge where I am writing my PhD. I was struck by the level of animosity verging on hatred he displayed against your person and research, claiming inter alia that all the research that had been carried out was all 'worthless'.

I realise that the academic tone is rougher in Britain than in my native Norway, but nevertheless the eagerness to assert that if one has done one mistake all the research ever done is worthless, struck me as ill conceived.

Let's face it: It would be the nightmare of most academics to have every footnote ever written rummaged.

The malice of Dr Evans reminded me of the advice given to me by my history professor in Tromsø when as an undergrad I contemplated looking at the Holocaust: 'You are not Jewish and the only thing you will achieve is to part with your good name and be branded an anti-Semite'.

Unfortunately also academia is playing up to the increasingly 1984esque political correctness of the international politics today.

I just finished reading HITLER'S WAR which I found thought provoking. I also enjoyed the ROMMEL biography. I do find the step by step hypothesis more compelling than the 'take over the world' strategy generally taught in schools. I very much agree that WWII is a historical phenomenon that should be dealt with by historians like other phenomenon -- this seems to be increasingly possible, although the trial was a blow to the academic freedom of expression.

I reply: "I expect you have read my website dossier on Evans. He is filled with hatred, I know only Christian charity."

Linda N has managed to convert the Quark XPress files of the new Hungarian book to pdf for posting on my website. I thank her for this great work, and add an afterthought: "One very minor thing. Around pages 18-20 there is a list of names. The word zsidó (Jew) is in bold face. Can it be unemboldened please throughout the list. That bold face was done by the publisher without consulting me, and will cause needless trouble."

A MESSAGE FROM F WARNS ME that he may have inadvertently infected my computers with a virus.

I reply: "Sniff. In fact as I told you we're all-Mac, and Macs don't get viruses. Tee-hee."

Asle T phones to say that he will come to London in February to do an interview for Morgenbladet. He says once again that Professor Evans struck him by the level of personal malice he displayed toward me -- on being asked whether it was his desire to see me "removed from the world of published historians," Evans made plain that it was. If I'd known then what I know now about him, I would have had him removed as an expert witness, with disastrous consequences for Lipstadt's defence.

IN THE EVENING I DRAFT THIS letter to historian Sir John Keegan (left):

I was sorry to hear from my American friends that you have this evening appeared on Booknotes [a C-Span TV program] and attacked me, safe no doubt in the knowledge that I cannot defend myself.

One writes, 'Mr. Irving, -- John Keegan is now on Booknotes with Brian Lamb. There have already been at least two call-in comments on you and your works. Keegan is not as vicious as others, but he still trashes your work.

But later this correspondent reports: "John Keegan did say that you cannot be ignored, and said that Deborah Lipstadt's works were boring. He said that you were not boring. However, he seemed to be agreeing with the court-decreed "anti-Semite" label.

"He used the term 'philo-Semite' and Zionist to refer to your accusers, which brought on a tirade from one such call-in, who began reading statements from the Lipstadt Trial.

"Keegan also said that HITLER'S WAR was your only book in which he had any interest."

So I won't now send the letter.

I walk with Jessica to a restaurant for lunch, then on to HMV for her to buy a record.

She chats brightly the whole way. In the afternoon and evening she is absorbed in her Mac. She talks about using I-frames; I know what "frames" are -- I avoid using them, as search engines can't peer into them -- but not I-frames.

I glance once or twice and she is deeply immersed in Photoshop 7.0, using brushes and layers, etc. She has ten layers on a file she is working on.

This morning she leaves it until half-past eight to leave for school, as she is "just taking down some FTP details."

I warn her that if she mentions FTP to her headmistress, she will retort: "Don't use that bad language to me." Jessica smiles scornfully: "FTP isn't bad language, it's File Transfer Protocol." (I know that, but I don't let on). We walk to the bus chatting about the various domain-hosting offers of rival ISPs. Where is her childhood going?

MAYOR KEN LIVINGSTON has withdrawn an invitation to Black professor Tony Martin to address a Black conference in London because he spoke at our Cincinnati conference in 2001. Who am de bigots now?

Professor Martin has protested to the organisers:

You called yesterday and expressed upset because a Jewish newspaper [The Jewish Chronicle, October 17, 2003] said that I spoke at a conference organized by David Irving. You also said something not entirely coherent about what you called 'holocaust denial.' About an hour afterwards you emailed me abruptly revoking Rosemary Emodi's five months-old invitation to me to address the First Voice Conference, on the basis of the concerns transmitted to you by your Jewish sources.

At 10:56 AM there is a phone call, "David Irving." "You are scum".

That's okay, then. "Caller withholds his number." Not very brave, these folks; they know mine, I don't know theirs.

Jessica tussles with "paths" and a "cgi" problem on her computer, and solves it by herself, after I fail.

I retire to bed mortified.

NOVEMBER 2003: I MAIL OUT 184 letters to my Ohio address list; but there is a postal strike in London, so how many will arrive by the seventeenth!

After breakfast a bad Trailing Lump thing develops on my throat glands. I am gradually falling to bits.

Dinner at seven PM at Simpson's in the Strand, organised by the Traditional England group with Tony Martin as special guest.

I naturally assume it is "our" Tony Martin, the Black American academic; but it turns out to be the Englishman sentenced to life imprisonment for shooting dead an intruder. He is a Norfolk farmer, with a reserve of wit which comes to the fore only during question time.

I TAKE JESSICA TO SCHOOL again. She has done a good project on Deciduous Trees; I pilfer one of her downloaded pictures to use as a heading for today's website.

Bill J [senior BBC television producer] calls for dinner. Lets me talk for hours, very nice of him. He is very interested in the Joel Brand stuff; I give him a copy of CHURCHILL'S WAR, vol. ii.

Everybody thinks I am rich, and he does too: with Bente and Jessica around, I am. In money terms, not. I shall become rich long after my death.

RAINING WHEN I GET UP TO take Jessica to school, so we go by taxi and I chat cordially with the Jewish driver all the way there and back. Give him a £6 fare and £4 tip, for which he is grateful.

I have Gott mit uns, it seems, today. At eleven-thirty somebody emails to me:

This morning at 7.50 on BBC Radio Four's 'Today' program they had the Thought for Today slot. Some woman called Anne Atkins was doing it.

She was defending Freedom of Speech and railing again the PC lobby. She said David Irving was a good example when 'he was criticised for questioning the extent of the Holocaust.' She said that whether one agreed with you or not you had a fundamental right to Freedom of Speech.

Just thought you'd like to note this.

That must have upset a lot of people's breakfasts.

I TELL JESSICA IT IS SAD THAT we have only one more "quality time" bus-ride together before I leave for the US. She asks when I will be back.

"End of January," I say, and add silently in Latin God willing.

My counter-attack against the official Trustee who last year illegally seized all my possessions begins in the High Court tomorrow. Her solicitor has just emailed me a belated offer to negotiate, and I reply: "No doubt we can agree certain points before tomorrow's hearing, which I propose to use just to ask for directions. Please draw up a short list of points you can agree in advance. I will attend at Court half an hour ahead, i.e., at midday, to facilitate a discussion between us."

I AM AWAKE FROM SEVEN, then drift off back to sleep, awakened by an indignant Jessica at eight-thirty.

We rush to the bus stop and get her to school just on time. Three different correspondents have sent me a dispatch of the Jewish Telegraph Agency in New York today, reporting "a pro-Irving protest" in Budapest:

Thursday, Nov 13, 2003 -- Some 2,000 people rallied in Budapest to protest the cancellation of a TV show after it hosted Holocaust denier David Irving. Irving visited Hungary at the invitation of the far-right Justice and Life Party for the Hungarian holiday commemorating the anniversary of the 1956 revolution.

The show, Night Shack, aired on Hungary's state-owned public station and caused great uproar among liberal media and the public. The station quickly cancelled the program.

During today's protest, speakers, among them the head of Hungarian State Radio, denounced the socialist government for suppressing free speech.

Former Prime Minister Viktor Orban joined those who are protesting the show's cancellation, saying "This is not the first time that programs supporting Christian values are being attacked."

I post it on the website with this comment:

- Not much mention of this in today's British press; which provokes the question in my mind, why therefore does the estimable Jewish Telegraph Agency in New York, four thousand miles from Budapest, splash the story? What is their interest in the story, I wonder? -- Just kidding, we all know the answer to that one.

Note however that

• as a punishment for filming its interview, the Socialist government cancelled the program, not just the show;
• for the JTA, in this context I am a "Holocaust denier" -- not the author of a best-selling book on the anti-Jewish, anti-Bolshevik Budapest Uprising of 1956;
• and another minor correction: Although the left-wing and liberal journaille in Budapest has claimed the opposite, I did not visit Hungary at the invitation of the MIÉP party.

The invitation was issued by my Budapest publisher, who met all the expenses of the tour. If the press says 2,000 demonstrated, of course, the real figure may well have been substantially higher.

No, I just won't lie down. Five minutes late -- I am in court.

We rapidly agree on directions, basically that the Trustee serve a witness statement within three weeks, that we agree categories of documents, etc., by the end of January, and that a hearing of fifteen minutes is set down to be heard at noon on February 9 to decide whether a Judge or Registrar should hear my application.

At one point I say that today is the first time in eighteen months that the Trustee has deigned to respond in any substantive way to my complaints.

The Registrar says, "Well, now that you have made this application, they have to."

On the way out I inform the other side that this is the first of two cases I am bringing against the Trustee, the second being on account of her conversion (i.e., theft) of my possessions.

IN THE EVENING I PHONE LOU B in Kentucky. He says that the Veterans of Two World Wars club were downright offensive to him when he asked for a repeat invitation, and that the St John's School has also come under pressure not to allow me to talk on its premises; so that seems to rule out Louisville.

Yesterday I mentioned on my website that I have lost my copy of Hitlers Lagebesprechungen. By today no fewer than ten people have written offering to get one for me. That's the power of a big Internet website!

NOVEMBER 16: THE GREAT US tour begins. I solemnly shake hands with Jessica as I leave for the airport.

The British Airways check-in desk detects that my big trunk is one kilo over the limit. The woman says the baggage handlers will go on strike, and asks tartly what I propose to remove -- and what I will do with it. "A book," I say, "and that's reading matter, which I am allowed." That shuts her up.

Long flight, nearly nine hours. Very crowded, not much room to type. The immigration officer at Chicago comments on the book I'm carrying. I explain I've had to take one kilo off the luggage. He says, "You could do with taking one kilo off yourself too." Uncalled for, but right.

I rent a Hertz car, a new and heavy beast, three inches taller than me, and drive into Chicago. A crabby old woman at Radio Shack, with a tight perm crimped into her iron-gray hair, is sniffy about replacing the broken battery-charger for my phone. She says it's an "obsolete model" (I bought it last year), and I must buy a new phone. I don't. At the airport and US Customs I pick up a hundred-kilo box of my books that has arrived from Hungary, and fill up with $14.50 gas at Champaign; I am now down to two dollars cash in my pocket.

Muddled dreams all night, but I am up at six-fifteen. I parcel up boxes for shipping over to the west coast, and after lunch load the car in pouring rain. My brown Church's shoes do not like squelching around in the puddles and mulch outside the warehouse. The car takes the final load of about 900 kg of boxes well however. I drive on eastwards towards Indianapolis in the rain at four PM.

From Grosvenor Square, Benté writes: "Lots of police around due to President Bush's visit." I am well out of it.

I reply: "Cleveland... Good function last night, I'll tell you more this evening, as I have to drive to Cincinnati. Drove four hundred miles yesterday, driving four hundred more today. Still jet lagged."

PEOPLE ARE STILL REPORTING on that Keegan interview:

John Keegan was featured last weekend on C-Span (political cable TV channel) for two hours and acknowledged your research was one of a kind, and essential to understanding the war; he curiously used the term "unoriginal" to describe Lipstadt as both historian and author (a reference to her supporters?), but says that he thinks your handling of Jews in your book is deplorable (my paraphrase) . . .

On a whim, I did a Google search on "British historian". The results were dominated with links to your books, court case, etc. You are becoming part of history yourself.

BY AFTERNOON I AM already sleepy. Benté phones, waking me while I'm snoozing in a highway rest area. I check into the Drawbridge at Cincinnati; a massive headache overtakes me, from last night's poncing around in the rain loading the car.

The headache worsens all evening. John F, a local organizer, comes for dinner and arranges a Sunday evening meeting right here in Cincinnati.

He has just returned from four months as a reservist in Iraq; he drove a brigadier around all day. Is scathing about the war, Private Jessica Lynch, etc.

Says the US are building big military and naval bases as part of a permanent presence. Raison d'être of the campaign.

The headache is now a real humdinger, it takes me to bed at eight PM. It worsens all night, with sweating, shivers, hallucinations, bad dreams. Bitter vomit taste in my mouth. A mild touch of flu, I hope nothing more. I'll take it easy today.

The military show here is not as good as it used to be. Few high profile dealers present, or good items on sale.

Tomorrow will be very quiet, as most dealers have already packed up and left, and half the tables are empty.

Bed early, at nine PM, as I am still jetlagged. Wild dreams ensue -- I am driving through Ohio, and the clouds fall apart above me, in a straight line ahead, like the Red Sea opening, as A Sign! I am in Court, ordered to see the Sarjeant -- I presume he has an olde-worlde spelling, and since his location is secret I am led through a myriad of tunnels, ventilator shafts, and roof spaces to his office, but he is not there.

It is very exhausting to have to endure such dreams all night.

TODAY I MUST MAIL OUT invitations to all my friends in Texas. I am running late with the mail-outs. A message comes from Los Angeles about a carol service on December 8. I ask for precise driving directions. "You will recognise me, tall, fly-spattered, dishevelled, and flat tired (that is just the car)."

Tongue starts swelling after I eat a bag of chips. Hah! -- an obvious connection. Horribly uncomfortable, as my mouth fills with the swollen tongue.

I write to Joel in California: "I hope we can meet. I have located a gentleman with spliced-together 16mm home movies of Hermann Göring totalling, he says, two one-hour reels: they were obtained from a GI who got them from the Berghof ruins; black-and-white, but they also contain around ten minutes of color footage of Hitler."

I WRITE A LETTER TO JESSICA:

Soon you will be ten. I can't believe it is ten years since you came into the world. How happy you have made Mummy and me, both then and ever since. We are so proud of you, and of how well you are doing at school.

What pleases Mummy most is when the teachers tell her this, and about how you are the most popular girl in the whole school. This is something that has to come from within yourself; we can't help, or tell you how to do it.

I am still driving every day huge distances in America. I hope we can soon move into a larger home so you will have your own room -- to make a mess of. Then we will have to have a serious think about whether you can have the Mac in your room, or in the "public" areas.

I tell everybody here about how clever you are on the Mac, and your present is going to be the domain name and web hosting. I also authorise Mummy herewith to give you a new ten pound note. Don't settle for anything less!

 

I CHECK OUT OF THE HOTEL at two PM, and drive south. Somebody phones just as I approach the Interstate fork and I miss the exit to Louisville; I do not realize until ten miles further on, so I carry on and cut across Kentucky on Route 22 and lose an hour that way. Pleasant undulating countryside however, which one would not normally see. At ten-thirty PM I check into a very cheap motel ($29) just before Nashville, Tennessee.

A message alerts me to the fact that I have not yet notified any of those who registered for tomorrow's Atlanta function. Aaargh! I do so around eleven PM They will complain. Worse, I realize I have still not even arranged any location for two talks next week, in Albuquerque and Oklahoma City.

Set out for Atlanta, a journey of about 350 miles. I drive all day in heavy traffic (tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day). The room has already been set up, a horseshoe table and smaller rear tables seating around 50 or 60. But at least seventy are present, most of them strangers. I have not expected so many because of the holiday.

I begin my talk this time with an episode reported by the Washington Post and other newspapers on April 11, 2003: when Allied journalists invaded the abandoned home of Tariq Aziz, the urbane Iraqi deputy prime minister, they found a copy of my HITLER'S WAR among his bedside reading: a pity, I say, that Bush's generals had not read it too, then they might have anticipated more of the guerrilla war tactics now being developed by the Iraqis.

Under pressure from the Jewish ADL my books have been taken off the set reading lists at West Point and elsewhere.

NOW FOR NEW ORLEANS. I drive through horrendous rain and arrive at Hammond, north of New Orleans, at four PM.

A good meeting here. Up at six AM by mistake, as it is light and a passing freight train blows a deafening blast on its steam-whistle, then rumbles endlessly past, shaking this bedroom.

An hour earlier I have had another strange and ominous dream, a product of these ridiculous security checks in US airports -- a nation now scared of its own shadow: a ticket agent calls over an official, my baggage is taken away from me (Rome airport, June 1992!) and I am taken aside into an interrogation area that looks like a theater's backstage, with girders, cables, black-painted walls.

The official is friendly, tells me to lie down on my back, then jumps up and down a couple of times on my stomach ("Is that okay?") as a security check. I am then led into a small movie- or lecture-type theatre, upholstered from floor to ceiling in dark blue-black velour; an audience begins trickling in for what is to be my interrogation.

At this of course I begin to enjoy the event; I pace from side to side of the small stage, I ask for a microphone so that everybody will be able to hear -- an act of thoughtfulness which brings a round of appreciative applause; and I ask if I can have a transcript. Yes, says the Man Who Is In Command, but not for publication on the website.

I assure him I will give whatever written undertaking is needed. "You will note we have a couple a German speakers here," he says, and the balding man in the left end of the front row, holding a clipboard, nods, being one of them. I ask the man next to him who he is. "Come off it, Irving," he says, irritated, "I'm Commander Nevins."

The name rings a bell, I don't know if he really exists. I worry about missing the flight, and the people who will be meeting me, and having to rebook, costing another three hundred pounds or more; but I decide the entertainment is worth it.

The dream ends before the interrogation begins; I am sure I'd have found it no problem.

I ARRIVE BY CAR IN HOUSTON, Texas, at five PM, and find that the evening's location, Alvin, is twenty-four miles south of the city, and the instructions are ambiguous. I drive down the highway, past an airport -- I wonder which it is, then see a familiar sight on the far perimeter: a building with twenty-foot high lettering, PRICE COMPRESSOR COMPANY.

That takes me straight back fifteen years -- to Billy Price and his secret room of Hitler memorabilia ("The good news is that at least fifty per cent is genuine," I told him -- he was shocked). It's a weekend and he won't be there today.

I have predicted an audience of ten here in Alvin, and that is what I get: in all of southern Texas, just ten friends now.

"Driving Sunday up to Dallas," I report to Benté. "Long journeys ahead now."

Up at seven AM. I finally fix a location for Albuquerque for December 3, three days hence! Another glooper.

I SET OUT FOR OKLAHOMA CITY at midday, and arrive -- after an idyllic drive across warm, undulating, yellowing prairies -- at five PM at the location, a motel some way out along the city's NW Expressway: it is a seedy, Asian-owned fleapit.

A large elderly man seated in the reception area, smoking heavily, leaning with both hands on a stick, introduces himself as the local organizer.

He reminds me strongly of my father in the months before his death, approaching total ruination from smoking and obesity.

The room he has hired, for all of thirty dollars, is on the second floor, with no elevator. I am generally rude to everybody for half an hour, and sweat half a ton of boxes upstairs, leaving many in the car in the belief nobody will turn up anyway.

I am wrong. To my surprise the room is packed, and we have to set out more chairs. I start with a reference to the Jewish Telegraph Agency's smear in 1995 that it was I who supplied "the trigger mechanism" for the bomb which Timothy McVeigh used against the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building.

So McVeigh's attorney Stephen Jones stated soon after, on Sacramento Television; he subsequently apologized in writing to me -- he had now realized who I was, and had found that he had my books on his shelves -- as had Tariq Aziz of Iraq, who was reading HITLER'S WAR when George Bush launched his war of aggression in April this year.

That story launches me into the talk; none of my audience dies, so I can consider the evening a qualified success.

NO TALK TOMORROW, JUST two days' solid driving over the desert to New Mexico. I will do the California mail-out tomorrow.

The photos taken here at Oklahoma City show me looking roughly okay; those at Arlington, Texas, are dire: I look on the point of death. Haggard, dishevelled, perspiring. This bulletin goes to Sacramento:

"I have today sent out 350 letters to my California list; I hope there is only one Tony Roma's restaurant in Sacramento?" (No matter, as it turns out).

I arrive at Albuquerque after a second day's journey of around five hours across a totally treeless, flat landscape, which gradually climbs to 5,200 feet.

Sunny but decidedly chilly after the sun sets. Young Mat B. phones from Seattle, and persuades me to talk there as well, although it will mean a nine-hour drive on to Idaho. I like Seattle, and announce this new location on the website.

I check into a Sheraton hotel in Albuquerque. My room costs $109, the meeting room $150, plus tax, plus other charges; just three people turn up, so we have a nice private gossip for two hours. Aller Anfang ist schwer, the Germans say.

 

IT IS NOT THE FIRST TIME I have been to Albuquerque: on the morrow, I navigate across the city to the home of Robert A Gutierrez, on Ranchitos Road. G was the mysterious CIC colonel who got all Eva Braun's private possessions in 1945, including her photo albums, her diaries, and her bundles of letters from Adolf, and brought them back to Albuquerque; most have been missing ever since. On the trail of these relics, I visited him in December 1973, exactly thirty years ago, and again in 1987.

Now I speak with his daughter-in-law, who has been married 27 years to Robert's son Sidney, the astronaut. I give her a copy of HITLER'S WAR. She confirms that Robert died (of Alzheimer's) at the end of 2000 (Social Security records show that he died on December 26, 2000.)

I ask if they have any mementoes of their father. She knows nothing of the significance of his work other than that he was "in the war". I do not explain what it was that he found in 1945.

ONWARD, SOUTHWESTWARDS, to Arizona. I check into a motel seven thousand feet up, and at around eight PM I send this email to London: "I am now in Flagstaff after a spectacular drive, the last two hours past magnificent mountains in the sunset, and a Navajo Indian reservation. I held them at bay."

At Tucson another glooper looms. A radio station is advertising me as speaking at a breakfast in Phoenix at eight AM tomorrow. That is 130 miles north of here. I advise Donald P: "It is highly annoying, as I am talking until ten PM here and packing boxes until midnight. How on earth has this happened? The station has not made any contact whatever with me."

Two hours loading boxes into the meeting room. I have no idea how many will come tonight. James B organizes, and worries me by saying that Judge Robert L, who is coming with his wife and another, is a George W Bush fan who will wreck the talk. In the event he does not, though I have a certain amount of informed voice-booming and finger-jabbing to contend with.

I SET OUT FROM TUCSON AT around midnight, and haul into Phoenix at two-thirty AM, after dozing for half an hour on Interstate 10. The hotel is right next door to this evening's venue. I sleep a few hours with an eye on the clock; up at seven AM, and drive over to the Beefeater Restaurant for this morning's unplanned (by me) Breakfast Club meeting.

I speak for an hour on Hitler, Churchill, and -- this time -- Pearl Harbor (tomorrow is the anniversary). Heavy travel expenses these last few days have depleted the cash in hand.

Good audience in the evening, and I am all packed again by ten-twenty PM. Long drive tomorrow over the mountains and desert to Las Vegas.

LATE IN THE EVENING, DON phones from Las Vegas: An enemy mole has infiltrated my list, and tomorrow's restaurant location has cancelled after two days of harassment by local Jewish bodies. The lovers of free speech!

I am in a quandary. If Las Vegas is off, it will be easier to drive straight to California from here. I must assume however that Las Vegas goes ahead. I will be on the road, too, and unable to notify my list of any new location. The "mole" may well be on that list anyway.

At 9:25 am Don phones, very verbose, and agrees with my new proposal for Las Vegas.

Leaving Phoenix, I get lost in road works for an hour. Eventually I find Route 60, then Highway 93. It opens out into naked desert and mountains, dotted with hosts of candelabra and prickly pear cactus, some of the taller sentry plants being rather incongruously propped up by wooden stays, and the Joshua Tree Forest, etc.

The last hundred miles begins as flat desert, traversed by mile after mile of this dead straight road; then it goes over a rim, and there are mountains suddenly and deep canyons and lakes, thousands of feet below.

At four PM I drive over the Hoover Dam and take several photos from both ends. What a breathtaking achievement, built over six years from 1931 to 1936, just colossal!

The new security checkpoints at both ends seem rather puny: single police officers eye the drivers of each car, and wave them through unexamined. That should save the Dam.

In fact it would probably take a nuclear device to bring it down.

The Dam is on the Nevada border, so clocks go back an hour: my little speaking tour has reached the Pacific Time zone.

Our dossier on the origins of anti-Semitism

 

Index to this Action Report

DAVID IRVING says: "Thanks -- See you in Cincinnati, Labor Day 2004!"