I find myself thinking a highly improper thought: 'We must do this more often.' I can already think of a few Royal personages whom history would not really miss. -- David Irving

April 9, 2002 (Tuesday)
London

Queen Mother's funeral this morning. Solemn music on the radio, and TV. Again the spectacle of bands, Guardsmen, etc., is spoiled by the endlessly chattering commentators telling us what we can already see (but, thanks to them, no longer hear); this time the camera lingers on the occasional Black face that it has picked out, rather bored, mostly schoolchildren dragooned into attending. Again the images are spoiled by lone Metropolitan Police horsemen leading the procession, their shambling horses spoiling the precision of the marching troops. These totally superfluous police horsemen were never in the processions in earlier years.

The ordinary British people -- and I mean once again the native English -- have risen magnificently to the occasion. The funeral of Princess Diana was a rehearsal for this, which is a rehearsal for others no doubt to come. Seeing how the unpredictable public rises and cocks a snook at the leftist media, who predicted a thin turn-out ("SORRY MA'AM" was one gleeful daily Daily Mirror headline above a carefully angled photo of empty barricades last week), and enjoys these after-echoes of a great imperial past, I find myself thinking a highly improper thought: "We must do this more often." I can already think of a few Royal personages whom history would not really miss.

MEANWHILE, Ariel Sharon and his Jewish gangster friends have risen to the occasion in their own way. Just as our own beloved Tony Blair's colleagues secretly advised each other last September 11 that that day's events might be a good chance to "bury bad news" about the British transport system, Sharon has decided to use these few days while the civilised world's eyes (at least those in Britain) are averted, to bury Palestine.

What is it about him that reminds me so much of the 1956 methods of Nikita Khrushchev? The realisation that what you have, you hold: that in international gangsterism, a week is a short time, and that a week later the gangsterism is forgotten as the newspapers move on.

Of his criminality, not least in the constitutional sense of a Slobodan Milosevic, as head of state, there can be no doubt. I have over the last few days received from various quarters appalling evidence of what has been happening to the innocent Palestinians, sheaves of atrocity photos. One picture shows a toddler held in the arms of an elderly officer -- the baby's head has been blown right off by a rocket fired by one of the helicopter gunships so kindly supplied by the eager American taxpayer; the romper suit was powder blue, so it was probably a baby boy.

Victims of Mr Sharon

LAST NIGHT (April 8) television stations in the Arab world showed film footage of a Palestinian man in Bethlehem sitting beside the bodies of his brother and mother. Sharon's brave soldiers will not allow ambulances to remove the bodies so they decompose before his eyes.    "Why us?", the Jews will wail once again, the next time misfortune befalls them.

Another, even more nightmarish, photo is of an innocent Arab youngster killed in a gun battle some time ago. The corpse, returned to his next of kin, hangs as limply as a deflated beach-mattress painted with human features; this is because it has been robbed of most of its vital organs, which have been "harvested" by his murderers, the Israelis, for retailing on the international human-organs market. One wonders what historians would have made of it if Dr Josef Mengele had done the same.

No doubt for reasons of taste, the national press has failed to print any such photographs in their reporting on this wanted war criminal, Sharon; to my shame, I have to admit that I will not post them on my website either. They are obscene, and one feels dirty for having even looked at them.

I have no doubt that the victims of the suicide bombings in Israel do not look any more wholesome. Nor those crushed by the collapsing Twin Towers. But it is the dishonest refusal of intelligent statesmen to draw a direct line, between Cause and Effect, that I find baffling, between the hopelessness of these Palestinian warriors and what Sharon and his predecessors are doing, and the American-Jewish world of capitalism, and the greed of the United States military-industrial complex.

INCIDENTALLY, there has been much talk of the kamikaze airmen, and of the Arab suicide commando (I myself heard President Bill Clinton call them "cowardly and despicable") who took an explosives-laden rubber dinghy alongside the "defenceless" destroyer USS Cole in the Yemen and blew themselves up, and of other such Himmelfahrtskommandos, as the Germans used to call them; but nobody has pointed out that in April 1945 scores of German airmen, driven to the same desperate straits of hopelessness and a fatalistic sense of impotence against force majeure, resorted to just the same device.

Three weeks before the end of World War II, in a carefully orchestrated and long-planned Luftwaffe operation Werewolf, oft-postponed, seventy suicide pilots crashed their fighter planes en masse into a US heavy-bomber formation attacking Hannover. That was on April 7, 1945; and a few days later, the survivors of that operation crash-bombed their planes into the bridges over the Oder as the Russians began their final advance on Berlin.

These doomed pilots were, it is reasonable to guess, probably young men who had lost family, friends, children, and all that was dear to them in the Allied saturation bombing raids, and this was their one chance of striking back at a ruthless Übermacht. Sounds familiar?

All the evidence is there, in the war diary of the Luftwaffe High Command and the stenographic records of the conferences of Field Marshal Erhard Milch. Nobody commemorates these German patriots now, so let me. I shall post the relevant pages from my GÖRING biography on my website: it provides better inspiration than looking at those photographs.

Pages from David Irving's biography of Hermann Göring reveal that the German air force carried out desperate kamikaze-type suicide operations in 1945