Real History and Attempts to Suppress Focal Point Publications

Posted Monday, October 21, 2002

I somehow suspect that The Bookseller would advertise editions of Karl Marx and Mein Kampf if asked; but somebody, somewhere, has put the boot in.

October 21, 2002 (Monday),
London

IN the mail I find a letter from The Bookseller, which has been urging us for several years to advertise (we have advertised in their pages several times in the past, including whole page advertisements for "Churchill's War", vol. ii: "Triumph in Adversity" -- left). We submitted our new whole-page, full-colour advert, showing Hitler in a bookstore, but now they state:

"At this time our editor has decide[d] not to run adverts from Focal Point Press [sic]. I hope this has not inconvenienced you."

Of course, what they really hope is that they will not be "inconvenienced", as they would if they did run our advertising. They prefer to lose £5,000 or more rather than that.

Britain's leading booktrade magazine thus joins History Today, The New Statesman, and other respectable journals who have first badgered us to advertise, then quietly succumbed to this insidious form of censorship of Real History. In future, only the books by the conformist historians will be advertised.

I somehow suspect that The Bookseller would advertise editions of Karl Marx and Mein Kampf if asked; but somebody, somewhere, has put the boot in.

There is as yet no Nazi-style burning of books by the authorities in the U.K. It is not necessary, because other than by the Internet -- and the traditional enemies of free speech are working feverishly on that unexpected problem -- the dissemination of contrary ideas is being made increasingly impossible.

To prevent the spread of Real History those enemies have, in my own experience, put pressure on publishers, newspapers, advertising media, printing works, distributors, and bookstore chains, while all the time expressing outrage at the claims that this is happening.

They tell the radio and television stations of the world on no account to let me appear, let alone in live broadcasts.
They pressure governments themselves to deny me travel visas.
They threaten to riot when venerable universities invite me to speak.

In Germany, the work force at Rowohlt Verlag threatened to come out on strike if they published my Churchill biography (Rowohlt cancelled the deal, then sued me for their losses). In New York, St Martin's Press were subjected to a campaign of terror (they cancelled the contract to publish my Goebbels biography). In Britain, Macmillan Ltd quietly succumbed to the same campaign, destroyed all my books and directed their staff to allow no publicity.

The wealthy and influential opposing organizations try to seal every outlet. Browsing, I come across my diary of November 14 a year ago: it used to be the libraries and Stewart Stephen of The Evening Standard and Miriam Gross of The Sunday Telegraph. I am not even going to comment on the way in which the law courts can be manipulated if enough money is poured in. But in Britain, the people say, free speech is not "censored."

. THE passing of the old Daily Telegraph has saddened me, and I suspect tens of thousands of other Englishmen. For many years I used, in time of national difficulty, to comfort myself with the thought that in Britain there were still two million people who bought The Daily Telegraph each day. Now, while the masthead, the typeface, and the layout are still the same, the editorial cargo it bears has changed.

In which connection I have been looking at an excerpt from the memoirs of that old fraud Max Hastings. For years he edited The Daily Telegraph. He is a would-be patrician gentleman, but I rather like him; twenty years ago he used to come to the receptions I held at Duke Street, and we exchanged much cordial correspondence.

When commissioned to write his book on the D-day landings, he discovered rather late in the day that he had forgotten to do any research. My own book The War between the Generals was by that time a thing of the past, so I sold my complete research files, the work I had done in the Eisenhower Library and elsewhere, to him for, I think, two thousand pounds. The result was a splendidly promoted book, and he earned over a million pounds in subsidiary rights. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, -- just as I used to say of Robert Harris and his huge success with Fatherland -- and for nine years, under his editorial command, the Telegraph prospered and endeavored to steer an even course.

During that time however the Telegraph company fell into the hands of Canadian money-man Conrad Black and his chameleon wife Barbara Amiel. Black is chairman of the Hollinger Group, a leading member of which is the sinister Pentagon "adviser" Richard Perle (right).

I have no idea of which mechanisms have been operated, but the Telegraph has now become an instrument of the American and Israeli war party. We can guess at those mechanisms however from a reading of Hastings's new memoirs.

Max Hastings, who knows what a war is -- he covered the Falklands war -- would have had no part of this, I am sure.

Although Black himself is not Jewish, unlike Amiel, the Telegraph had already switched over to the Israel Can Do No Wrong camp. The first clue was about two years ago when a United Nations resolution, yet again powerfully condemning that "sh*tty little" entity, was tucked away to a two-line item on an inside page.

As the Palestinian civilian deaths mount, the Telegraph turns away without a blush of protest. The Ariel Sharon line that the "terrorists" are using civilians as a shield is adopted to explain away every fresh atrocity -- including the bulldozing of entire streets of Jenin in April, in which the elderly, the infirm and the infants were crushed beneath the blade of an eighty-ton Israeli army bulldozer.

Bulldozer: Bookseller. The same number of syllables.