If ever God sat at his laptop and his finger hovered over the key marked SMITE, it seems to have happened two days ago with Hurricane Katrina.

August 30, 2005 (Tuesday)
London (England)

Jessica goes off shopping for trainers -- starts a new school in Hammersmith on tomorrow.

At 2:20 pm at the Public Record Office. I order up file FO.370/1348, on the archives of Auschwitz camp. The file comes to me at 4:49 pm, and inside the folder I see a loose page has been inserted by somebody in the bowels of the building, reading "Churchill's War was brilliant!" -- in capital letters, pencilled on a small slip. Seems I have at least one fan here in the PRO.

August 31, 2005 (Wednesday)
London (England)

Shipilov reports from Moscow that a Russian firm has issued a pirate edition of my book on Adolf Hitler's atomic bomb project, The Virus House, the old Soviet edition.

I reply at 10:38 am:

Yes, tell [...] to take legal action to stop this. The book was Virusne haz in Russian, and published by Atomizdat, also without my permission, but eventually they paid me. This piracy must be stopped before it starts!

THE television pictures from New Orleans are grim. The city is being evacuated after the Hurricane Katrina disaster. I am surprised incidentally that our traditional enemies do not object that only Aryan names are used for these disasters -- why no Hurricane Isidores or Chaims? It is quaint to hear English newsreaders pronouncing the American names -- Orleans as though it were still French, instead of N'Orleens or even Nawleens, the way the locals have it; and "Biloxy" instead of "Biluxxi," if I remember how the locals say it each time I pause there on my way through.

I am not sorry to see the casinos at Biloxi and in Gulfport go, washed inland or out to sea: they sprang up like mushrooms behind a slum dweller's toilet over the last ten or twenty years, milking the Mississippi poor of what little money they had.

So what fun, what déja-vu, we "racists" have once again wallowed in this evening in watching the familiar images of looters storming the superstores. 'Nuff said on that score: I don't want to be packed off to sensitivity-school like our illustrious London mayor Ken Livingstone.

I flick the remote. Over on CNBC there is an American financial pundit, talking about the disaster. Yes, the big reinsurers, like Lloyds and the Münchner Re, are going to be badly hit. But he ever-so-delicately points out that historically such disasters have always generated a boom in the economy, because of the subsequent reconstruction work, and that stocks in all the big concrete, granite, construction, and heavy building gear companies are soaring since the first pictures of the New Orleans disaster hit the airwaves.

I watch the lady governor of Louisiana stumbling, and misusing every possible long word in her answers, just like a British trades union leader of the forties and fifties, and I find myself wondering how David Duke would have fared in this emergency if he had made it to Governor -- as he nearly did before the traditional enemies woke up and pulled the plug on him. He certainly has a better command of the English language than she does.

Only in one program do I hear people asking the awkward Holocaust-question: "Why us?"

Well, here are two possible answers from myself, a simple and God-fearing soul, proffered in reverse order:

• Secondly, because your president has refused to sign on to the Kyoto Treaty to halt global warming, because American big business told him not to; and warming is where these super-hurricanes come from.
• And firstly your country has a God-fearing president now, who professes to be a born-again Christian, to have lately foresworn cocaine and all the other damaging sins of the flesh except beer and pretzels, but has launched an illegal war against an impoverished nation already worn down by ten years of brutal Anglo-American sanctions; so this might just possibly be your God himself speaking to you now, George.

I waited in vain during your 5 p.m. (EST) press conference to hear just one reference to the religious beliefs you touted so fervently in your presidential campaign, what Winston Churchill so endearingly once termed "that Godstuff you Americans like so much," in conversation with Ambassador Joseph P Kennedy.

If ever God sat at his laptop and his finger hovered over the key marked SMITE, it seems to have happened two days ago with Hurricane Katrina.