July 21, 2002 (Sunday)
Key West (Florida)

A LOT of work done last evening knocking my Churchill files into shape for completing volume 3.

Up at 7:45 a.m. Beset with gloomy dreams for the last two or three hours: half awake, I reflect that is ten years since I was in Moscow with S., getting the Goebbels diaries from the KGB archives; and all that has happened since then. I wonder if Jumbos now fly into Moscow airport.

I find myself visiting the desolate ruins of my old home in Duke Street: wreckage strewn everywhere, like after an air raid, as I imagine -- my old bicycle, its front tyre burst, and the rim buckled from some object falling on it; a copy of the Weidenfeld edition of Hitler's Table Talk on the floor beneath the debris, -- the one I quoted from verbatim in Hitler's War, which did not stop Richard Evans and his skunking ilk (and Mr Justice Gray, after them) of claiming that I had deliberately fabricated and distorted the translation! -- the front cover of Max Domarus' Reden und Proklamationen, almost unobtainable now, poking out from a heap of plaster.

There are the usual dreamland incongruities and anachronisms: the bike is my Key West bicycle with its big basket (in which little Jessica used to sit, complete with white helmet, seven years ago: a front page photo in The Miami Herald recorded it). The corridor is the upper gallery of the gym at Brentwood School, round which one walked on the way for the ritual "execution" (caning). The room appears to have been a room at Park House, where I was born. Too much cheese in my supper sandwich again, I presume.

ERIC M., our website's resident Arabist, spots a few typos in yesterday's posting. I point out: "Thanks; I damaged my laptop screen badly, it will cost $1,200 to repair and I am peering through large black blobs of broken LCD at present! Hence the typos."

Several readers have written in, puzzled by the hysterical attacks on me. One writes:

In this regard I refer to Mitchell Symons' incoherent blather [in the London Daily Express] about how disgusting and "odious" you are; and that "you should live and die in penury, a fate that a pariah like you justly deserves" -- or words to that effect. Not only do I find this type of lurching, dervish style of slander to be extremely tiresome, but even worse, it is frightfully unhelpful in saving the entire world, in all of its glorious innocence, from your fiendish clutches.

I am presently reading two of your books at the same time: Apocalypse and Hitler's War. When these are done, I shall obtain Goebbels and proceed through that as well. Next, Goering, after that Nuremburg, and so on. To date I can not for the life of me understand what motivates the irrational, almost demonic hatred exhibited by your detractors.

In reading your books, I have yet to encounter any exhibitions of the kind of "Hitler adulation" that you are so wont to exhibit in your work. (Actually, I think you are sometimes a little rough on the chap). If, indeed, it is Hitler's War that is your great apologia for Hitler, than I want someone to find the passages for me and indentify them by page and line

THERE are however very many of these congenitally-disordered haters populating the enemy ranks. The Daily Express calumnist Simons is just one. The gloating New Jersey lawyer Gary Redish is another; he has shifted from his fitful slumbers again to send me another batch of messages filled with the kind of real hatred that only his brand of vermin really seem to thrive on.

When I put a link on his last offering ("Next home: A cardboard box in The Strand: You now have received what you deserve -- have a nice life!"), so that people could pass their own measured responses on to him, he went whining to my London lawyers with a demand that this "incitement to terrorism" be halted! Like his widely-revered government, it seems they can dish it out, but they don't like to take it in return.

Mr Redish starts by mocking my special appeal on AR-Online, posted on Friday, for a fighting fund of fifteen thousand dollars in the next days to power our final legal punch against the enemy in the Lipstadt and Penguin action. Not having the billionaire backers that my opponents did, and having seen all my own assets seized while I was 6,000 miles away in Seattle, I have no alternative but to turn to my supporters. Two loyal friends have each already pledged $1,500 (and a lot have already sent less). Two? "Not so good," scoffs Mr Redish from New Jersey. "Perhaps you should again tap Matthew Gordon Lennox -- did his Dad take his check book away?"

Well, the fact is that "Matthew Gordon Lennox", if he ever existed, did not contribute one penny to the battle: he could not have been better designed to discourage others from assisting this final battle had he been a figment of The Guardian's imagination.

Lawyer Redish's next tortured subject is the word Schnorrer. Having polished up my German as a Ruhr steelworker in the late 1950s I was unfamiliar with the word, but in the 1980s I heard it being used frequently by Dr Karl Weinrebe, an elderly German who was assigned to warm up the audiences for my lectures in Germany. Then that word flowed freely, and it brought the house down each time.

Weinrebe had once worked in the propaganda ministry Dr Joseph Goebbels (left). It was he who revealed to me that he and his colleagues had fed what is now called "canned applause" into the loudspeakers around the auditorium at the key moments of the Goebbels speeches, taking cues from a script, to start the huge ovations going. Of course every US television sitcom has now copied the Goebbels trick.

During the endless train journeys across Germany, I once sketched a cartoon of Dr Goebbels at his podium, with a gear-shift concealed under the top, preset to various levels of audience reaction: "modest", "polite", "enthusiastic", "frenetic". I recalled that Weinrebe used the phrase "die alten Schnorrer" to describe our opponents quite a lot, meaning, so far as I could judge, the wastrels and layabouts.

Redish seems to think it is a Yiddish word, and I defer to his inside knowledge.* He writes: "After I read today's AR," -- now there's an accolade for you -- "I thought it might be well for you to look up definition of this Yiddish word." But he does not tell us what is to be found.

Inquiries, as before (but please no undeserved abuse), can go to Gary S. Redish, Esq., of Winne Banta Hetherington & Basralian, Court Plazza North, 25 Main St, P O Box 647, Hackensack, NJ 07601 PC, at 201-487-3800, Ext. 230; or at 201-487-8529 by fax. [email]

THERE are however other voices out there. A friend in Illinois passes on to me what he calls "a bit of good news".

You might be glad to know that many of your works have escaped the clutches of the would-be censors in my Midwestern town. A search of the Chicago Public Library system reveals eighteen currently in the catalog; when I requested The War Path, I had a three-month wait until other reservations ahead of me had been satisfied! Convoy is here, and of course Fox; even the otherwise hard-to-find Sikorski.

Yes, David Irving is alive, well, and admired by his readers here in Chicago.

Recently I performed a survey of my own, to gauge the popularity of your War Between The Generals.

My local library branch owns a copy, and since I am in that building almost every day, I am in a good position to observe the collection; in the last six months, that copy of Generals has only been seen on the shelf three times. In other words, someone is always reading it! Even Hitler's War has been overlooked by the literary Mossad here, and by keeping things 'mum,' that happy situation will hopefully continue.

Well, that's enough blowing my own trumpet for one day.

 

* Schnorrer: I HAVE received a dozen emails on the origins of the word Schnorrer. Mark Oldfield of Vancouver, BC, is one of many who knew that in the Marx Bros. film Animal Crackers Groucho "makes his entrance wearing a tropical sun helmet and singing. My name is Captain Spaulding,   The African explorer. Did someone call me Shnorrer?   Hello! Hello! Hello! The word is Yiddish in origin and means: a beggar, moocher, sponger and a very resourceful parasite."

 

Previous Radical's Diary