Letters to David Irving on this Website

Unless correspondents ask us not to, this Website will post selected letters that it receives, and invite open debate.

William Sterling Jr wants Mr Irving, Monday, August 16, 2004, to suppress opinions about other ethnic groups

Rude language about minorities - or realism?

A LADY friend shared your yellow Action Report No. 26 dated August 1, 2004. I noted the reference to Italians as "dagoes" and your resentful comment about Asians in the US who were working in hotels and motels where you visited in Florida.

While I am sure some of your supporters welcome such racist comments, I think they damage your reputation and standing. Are not such utterances blatant racism? In the US, very few if anyone would publicly state such vituperation on the record. It also I think compromises and embarrasses supporters of yours who do not wish to be associated with such shocking utterances.

Your game plan in resisting censorship and intimidation should be to stick to your history, stick to your rights of expression, stick to your interpretation of the holocaust.

Here you are on the verge of a major come back with the NZ situation, and now this comes out. You are too smart and too intelligent to simply give the Justice Gray ruling that you were a racist such credibility. I do hope in your noble efforts at revisionism, these comments of yours are not made public. Some of your supporters will vanish as defending such views becomes impossible. Do you really want people to know that you harbour and articulate such views about those whose skin is different that yours?

There is no advantage to you in articulating such racist comments. Think about it!

Your legacy as one of the great historians of the past century, I can assure you, will be interwoven with your public utterances. I do hope these comments you have made are not used against you.

William Sterling Jr

BBC reported that 60% of the motels in the US are now owned by one Indian "family", the Patels

 

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Mike Oldfield of British Columbia adds this postscript (Tuesday, August 17, 2004): "When I did my last driving tour of the western United States in 1994, I found that whenever I stayed in a motel that was run by East Indians, the rate they charged me for an overnight stay was always higher than the rate quoted for that particular motel in the American Automobile Association's guidebook. Somehow I don't think it was a coincidence. "

 

DAVID IRVING writes:

THE "dagoes" reference was to Javier Solana, below, a Spaniard; and a NATO mass-murderer at that. I do not use milk-toast language about people like him.

The reference to Asian hotel-keepers is frank, honest, travel advice to others, as in: "If you find a hotel in the USA managed by an Asian, drive on." It is nothing to do with racism, merely a realistic travel hint. In my experience -- and I drove 15,000 miles around the entire United States since November -- Asian-managed hotels are dirty, poorly maintained (bugs!), and being slowly run down.

The light bulbs have been replaced by 40-watt bulbs throughout. The coffee machines have been removed. The soap bars could hide under a 37¢ postage stamp. There will always be exceptions, true, but I did not find even one, and I don't believe in mincing my language. When you go out in the world, on the road, in farflung towns and cities, as I often do, you pick up a few worldly-wise tips about hotels like those above: I pass them on; it is open to others like yourself, who have perhaps led more sheltered lives, to ignore them if you want to, to go out there, and make the same mistakes that I used to.

Politically-correct Miami used to refuse to put up street signs diverting tourist traffic away from the city's unsafe (i.e., Black) areas. It took a couple of very nasty incidents for them to change that policy and erect idiot-proof "sunshine" icons to channel arriving tourists safely to the right districts. One German family took a wrong turning from the airport in a rental car (which in those days were all recognizable by the "Z" in their license tag) and were dead within five minutes. As said, overweening political correctness then took a back seat to realism. Tourists who've been harrassed do not return; that German family did not either.

In England they now say: A Conservative is a Liberal who has been mugged. I appreciate that political correctness has a set of rules of its own; but respect for ones fellow humans does not oblige us to be quiet about their shortcomings -- particularly when you are a weary traveler, on the road.

Incidentally, since I wrote those lines about American motel system, I have received very many letters from others quietly expressing the same puzzlement about its gradual collapse. Race does not come into it: if the common factor were seven-feet tall hotel managers, or two-headed hotel managers, I would say just the same about them; in this case, the common factor is that they are recent Asian immigrants, and seemingly out of their depth in the culture of the United States.