| ||
The Journalist, the British journalist. The last time I spoke to you was on July 4 [1992], on the afternoon of my return from Moscow with the Goebbels Diaries in my pocket, which the Sunday Times began serialising the day after. And two weeks later that serialisation in the Sunday Times collapsed in flames. They had entered into a contract to pay me eight thousand pounds for that particular job. They were scooped two days before by the Daily Mail, the Daily Mail had paid twenty thousand pounds for a rival set of -- rather inferior -- copies of the diaries; and much to their rage, the Daily Mail then found, having trumpeted for one week that it was rubbish to say that David Irving was one of the few people who could read the handwriting of that German propaganda minister -- the Daily Mail found they couldn't read the handwriting of the pages that they had paid twenty thousand pounds to get! So there were some nice "inside" things happening. But what was less nice was that Andrew Neil, the editor of the Sunday Times, obtained from me these diaries, he published them -- if you remember he had sixty-foot long posters, he had hoardings in all of the Jewish ghettos of Great Britain. I had nothing to do with that. I thought it was rather tasteless. I got a certain amount of glee out of it I must admit, the thought of these fifteen-foot tall swastikas appearing one morning . . .[loud Laughter] . . . But I had nothing to do with it. He didn't come to me, Andrew Neil, and say, "Irving, what can we do really to get up the nose of those people?!" Because if Andrew Neil had said to me "What we can do really to get up the nose of those people?!" I would have said, "Andrew, why don't you put up sixty foot posters, red-white-and-black, with fifteen foot swastikas, and some Goebbels phrase like THE WORLD WILL TREMBLE WHEN . . ." Of course that's what he did and he never heard the end of it. But a week after that he then announced, having published the material that I had found in the Moscow archives, that he wasn't going to pay me. [Voice: "No!"] He welched on the deal. He published the ..[tape interrupted]. | ||
announced that he wasn't going to pay. And he thought he would get away with it. Which was a big mistake. And I know why he did it, and I must say that a tiny corner of my heart bleeds for him, and in fact if I was a nineteen-fifties journalist I'd "light a little candle in my heart" [Angstmeier chuckles]. Do you remember, that is what the then prime minister of Israel said: He "lit a little candle in his heart" every time that a British serviceman was killed in Palestine. I light a little candle in my heart for Andrew Neil for all the trouble that he got himself into. He told me -- half way through this crisis that the Sunday Times found itself in -- that at no time in his entire journalistic career had he ever come under such immense pressure from You Know Whom: from our old traditional enemies; pressure not just from the advertising industry, pressure not just from the self-appointed, ugly, greasy, nasty, perverted representatives of that community in Britain: he came under pressure from the international community too, because the Sunday Times like many other newspapers needs international capital to survive. And the international capital is provided by the great international merchant banks. And the great international merchant banks are controlled by people who are no friends of yours and mine. And Andrew Neil found that these sixty-foot long posters had annoyed these people, and they put immense pressure on him, and we know this because from all over the world I have been getting press clippings sent to me -- two thousand press clippings in those ten days alone; two thousand press clippings! Any normal editor would be delighted at the publicity. Two thousand press clippings! You've dominated the front pages of all your rivals for day after day after day. But for him it was a total nightmare, he told me, a total nightmare. His hair shrivelled, until it resembles the Short-and-Curlies, on his head! He's one of the few men who wears his pubic hair on his head. I don't want to be offensive about him of course, believe me, I've got no desire to be offensive about Andrew Neil, but he has his short-and-curlies on his head, and of course where his pubic hairs are his bollocks can't be far away! Now you may think this is David Irving taking a pretty robust view about his erstwhile editor and the answer is: Yes, because as I said, he welched. He decided he wasn't going to pay. He announced to the newspapers that were putting him under pressure -- in the Jewish Chronicle, front page, in the international, the Canadian Jewish News, the American Jewish -- , the world Jewish journals, he said, "I've decided to breach the contract with Mr Irving and I won't pay him another penny." And this is going to cost him dear because just three or four weeks ago we served a High Court writ on that gentleman, on Times Newspapers, and he's now going to learn what he probably didn't realise as a newspaper editor, that only a few weeks down the road from receiving service of a writ in the High Court comes a very ugly stage called Discovery. Capital "D" -- like "H", capital H, Holocaust. Everything that has a capital letter is a bit phoney but a bit nasty too: Discovery is the nastiest stage you get into in a High Court action because it's when you're required by law to open your innermost secrets, your innermost files and documents: I had to provide copies of all my telephone logs and private letters and diaries, and nobody can -- I don't mind, because I've got an open conscience. But he has to provide to us, and to my solicitors, he has to provide copies of all their internal conference memoranda, all their internal Minutes, all the letters between themselves and the Advertising Department of the Sunday Times telling him that they're coming under immense pressure from Marks & Spencers and the merchant banks and all the big companies and corporations, and I know put pressure on Fleet-street, on Wapping, on the traditional organs of the British media to alter opinions because it doesn't satisfy and suit this minority. | ||
I know this happens, because it's happened repeatedly over the last thirty years of my career. And journalists, who are basically decent, and upright, honest and true people deep in their hearts: they come and tell me privately. Phillip Knightley of the Sunday Times many years ago, when my book HITLER'S WAR was first published, said, "David, you know, the Sunday Times had a contract to serialise HITLER'S WAR, but they had to repudiate the contract under pressure from the advertising department because of pressure that the advertising department of the Sunday Times came under from Marks & Spencers and from other bodies like that." And these are the documents that are going to have to be produced in the High Court a few months down the road from now, by Andrew Neil and Times Newspapers Ltd. They're going to have to produce all the letters written to them by all these self-appointed lea -- , community leaders, by all the various bodies, and worthies, and Labour members of parliament, and lesbian groups -- all these gaggles and gangs of people who have been demonstrating outside my apartment in -- , in Mayfair again this morning. This odd and ugly and perverse and greasy and slimy community of "anti-Fascists" that run the very real risk of making the word fascist respectable by their own appearance! It's all going to come out in the wash. The media were thrown into a total frenzy by the realisation that "Andrew Neil had commissioned me of all people," as they said, "to work on the Goebbels diaries." In fact it was the other way around: I commissioned the Sunday Times. It was my project. I had the materials. I gave them to the media. The Sun, when it came out, that worthy journal, the Sun came out with this little article called Goebbeldegook. [Laughter] Goebbeldegook! It [printed] Three weeks ago I warned that Irving was planning a London rally to publicise his warped views that it is a myth that six million Jews died in Nazi gas chambers. We're going to be proven right. I give it another six months to run, that particular legend, and then the whole legend will collapse. I asked the Home Sec -- "I asked the Home Secretary," writes this jumped-up journalist of the Sun, "I asked the Home Secretary to ban the rally as a threat to Public Order." Who's the threat to Public Order? Us, or them -- the people outside who demonstrate. That's the way these journalists write when they're acting on instructions from above. They don't have a kind of circular: they don't get a duplicated memorandum, saying, "Oh, by the way, twist what you've got to write about Irving. Twist what you've got to write. . .!" They're on auto-pilot, these people: they know what they've got to write. (Voice: "Yes.") They know, if they want to keep their jobs. Later on, they'll become window-cleaners and the rest, when the Sun folds, and [Laughter] and then they'll have a decent and clean job they can do. But until they're cleaning windows they're writing this kind of garbage: I asked the Home Secretary to ban the rally as a threat to Public Order! But it went ahead, as did the violence that any fool could have predicted. David Irving's status has been enhanced by working for one of Britain's most prestigious papers. A word about that word prestigious, incidentally. Those of you who used to subscribe to my old magazine FOCAL POINT, you remember that at the back page we always used to have something called "Prestigious Points," uh, "Prestigious Claims," a competition: people used to submit things like "Sotheby's, the prestigious auction house." The real meaning of the word prestigious is not something glittering, and amazing and fantastic; prestigious, if you look in the Oxford English Dictionary, means fraudulent, deceitful -- nothing to do with being wonderful and magnificent. Prestigious comes from prestidigitation -- [gesticulates with hands] Oh there's that picture again, like in the Independent, -- prestigious comes from prestidigitation, which means sleight of hand, or conjuring, or deception, hence prestigious fraudulent. Sotheby's, the fraudulent auction house." [Laughter]. "David Irving working for one of Britain's most prestigious Sunday newspapers." Well I suppose it's true. One of Britain's most fraudulent papers. The Sunday Times. [Loud Applause]. | ||
My reputation is so "enhanced," apparently, for example, that the Guardian then went on to give Mr Irving half a page to expound his obnoxious views. Fifteen of July. On the eighteenth of July, in no other newspaper than the Sun, they gave me half a page to propound my obnoxious views. In the same newspaper! "Give blacks thirty thousand pounds to go home says Irving." [Applause]. "Thirty thousand pounds." I never said this. I mean, again they're -- they've got the drift of what I said. But I was also very plain what I said in an interview that they concocted that -- I never gave an interview to the Sun -- of course they concocted this half page interview in which they give my views in a very positive manner. I said many years ago, I think that it is time to find some way of persuading the, the ethnic minorities in this country who are unhappy and are causing much unhappiness both to themselves and to others by their presence here to find an upright and honest manner in which we can transport them back, in a benevolent manner, to their homelands if they wish to go. But we have to make it attractive to them. We have to provide them with full economy, uh, a full-employment economy to which they can return. We can't send them back to unemployment; if you pay them five thousand pounds to leave from Heathrow they'll come back in through Prestwick, and leave again through Heathrow and it'll be the biggest stage army since Henry the Fifth! [Laughter] So my views are roughly given there. But it was given half a page of prominence on the eighteenth of July by the Sun, with the result that just two days later the Sun found it necessary to give another half page of prominence to my views, this time with a negative sign in front: Irving lies leave nazi taste in the mouth. Obviously ... solicitors got in touch with the Sun or with Mr Rupert Murdoch and said "This won't do at all! You're giving him all that publicity and it is totally unacceptable. You've now got to smear him. And smear him in such a way as he now finds it necessary to drag the Sun into the libel courts. And so that article is the most appalling concoction with one lie after another, two or three lies in every sentence against me." And the Sun then sat back and waited until I served a writ on them. And I didn't! Because if I've learned one lesson from the laws of Clausewitz, the great German military strategist, it is that you don't do battle on the battlefield that your enemy has chosen. Instead I am suing the Observer for libel [Laughter] in an article they published [rest of sentence lost in Applause and Laughter]. The Observer decided to hire the services of a bearded prophet called Mr Chaim Bermant, who came to interview me back in January. I didn't realise he was Jewish and I could have kicked myself; I mean -- any-body called Bermant, or anybody call Chaim, and anybody who looks like Moses -- [loud Laughter]. But I let him in because he said he was a journalist, and so I assumed quite falsely of course that he was upright, honest, decent and true. But he writes vicious, vicious lies, like: "Mr Irving who tries to conceal his working class origins and aspires to a lower middle class status" [audience gasps]. Wounding, wounding, wounding wicked likes like that! But that isn't what I went after him for, I went after him, and I'm suing the Observer, because he said in this article, right at the beginning, things that were materially false. He said that we published our book HITLER'S WAR, which has been published for years already by Macmillan and by Hodder & Stoughton, -- we've now published it ourselves in our, my own printing house called Focal Point. Purely because we can produce a de luxe edition with colour pictures and everything which the big regular publishers can't afford to do -- Chaim Bermant said, "Mr Irving couldn't find any publisher of his book, so he paid for the production of his own book. When I visited him to interview him thousands of unsold copies of the book were lining the walls of his home." | ||
A pack of lies. But of course the idea is to humiliate me in the eyes of the readers, the literary editors, the booksellers, the publishers -- just about everybody, to make it look as though my name stinks, that I am unpublishable twerp. Totally untrue, and that's what we're going to have the Observer for! You pick your own battlefield.
What I am particularly grousing against the English media for is that they are not representing the English people. They are representing nameless international causes -- not just the cause of the particular ethnic minority that finds such delight in harassing us. They are representing the Americans, they are representing the Europeans, they are representing Monsieur Delors, they are representing the Internationalists, they are representing the African National Congress, they are not thinking straight and asking the obvious question that every English journalist and editor should always ask, How can I write things which are in the interests of the English people? And the interests of the English people are best served by writing the Truth. There is no question at all. Again and again and again we want to be told the truth. We want to have it laid squarely on the line. We weren't told the truth about Robert Maxwell. Those of us who suspected the truth about Robert Maxwell, we were hounded. Maxwell was the propagator of the Holocaust myth in Britain. He held the great Holocaust Seminars, because he and his ilk survived and dined out on the Holocaust Myth. We're all Holocaust survivors, every one of us who was born in 1939 or, or from then until 1945; but we don't go around dining out on that particular legend. The ones who suffered in the Holocaust were the ones who died, not the ones who survived. But the Holocaust Survivors are the ones who are earning, of course. And Robert Maxwell was the Holocaust Survivor par excellence. He was nowhere near a concentration camp. He claimed that his family went: he never actually enumerated the members of his family who went, who suffered from the Holocaust, but he was part of that grand fraud: he held the seminars in Oxford, the seminars in Central Hall in Westminster, and when regular decent chaps like myself tried to get into those seminars there were those great burly types with the walkie-talkie telephones, and although we'd booked in under false names they recognised us and they had us out straight away right through the revolving door. Robert Maxwell the Great. -- And now of course he's identified as the Great Fraudster and the Great Cheat and the Great Manipulator. The man who stole millions of his pensioners' funds, millions of pounds from pensions funds of his newspa-pers, companies that he'd expropriated; he stole these pension funds in order to get involved in illegal share-propping operations to boost the share-prices, to prop up the share prices of his companies, which as we all know is an operation that is totally illegal under the rules and laws of this country. | ||
And yet is that not precisely what our own Government has been doing for the past two or three weeks?! Borrowing seven billion pounds in order to prop up the overseas price of the pound! You're propping up the shares of Great Britain Limited, and you're borrowing effectively money that's going to belong the generations of Britons to come, in order to get involved in what should surely be an equally illegal share-propping operation. And all because of course they're all in the pockets of the great merchant banks and the currency speculators, who've been making the killing while we poor mortgage-payers have been suffering and sweating. They've all been aghast and agape with frank amazement and astonishment at this conjuring trick which Mr Lamont pulled out of his top hat. Borrowing seven billion pounds in foreign currency in order to keep on buying currency in order to keep the price of the pound artificially high. With any man in the street who's got a bank debt -- any workman -- knows the problems you get into once you start borrowing on that scale. You never get out of hock. But of course the people who are behind the newspapers, the Conrad Blacks and the people who are behind them, they don't want Britain to get out of hock. They want us to be permanently in hock, because that is the way to keep Britain, the great British people down. Yet has one newspaper spotted this, and is one newspaper warning us? They are not talking to us in terms of an illegal share-propping, pound-supporting operation. That's all they're saying -- it's a marvellous piece of manipulation. What Maxwell did was criminal of course, but what Lamont did is a wonderful piece of sleight of hand to support his great friend John Major. We have all seen through John Major too, I am quite convinced, every one of us in this room. All of us, even the editors and journalists have seen through John Major: a failed bank-teller. [Laughter] No more, no less, we don't expect any more from John Major as a failed bank-teller than we would expect from a man of that position in life. And yet there he is, somehow whisked into power by nameless hands. We don't know how he somehow ended up at the tiller of this country. But there he is, and for the last two years he has been steering Britain -- not through the shoals, but straight onto them! And the British people are trying to scream, but it's like a nightmare, where you wake up and you can't find you're voice, you can see the shoals ahead, the liner's bearing down on them, and there's nothing you can say because You Can't Find Your Voice. And we can't find our voice because the voice of the British people is suppressed. The voice of the British people is television and radio, and they are not trained to speak for the British people. For the last four weeks just for once I have gone away from London, where I have been sitting down in Torquay, which is a white community. We saw perhaps one black man, and one coloured family in the whole time I was down there. I am not anti-coloured, take it from me; nothing pleases me more than when I arrive at an airport, or a station or a seaport, and I see a coloured family there -- the black father, the black wife and the black children. I think it is just as handsome a spectacle as the English family, or the French family, or the German family, or the South African family, or whatever. I think that is the way that God planned it and that is the way it should be. When I see these families arriving at the airport I am happy (and when I see them leaving at London airport I am happy). But if there is one thing that gets up my nose, I must admit, it is this -- the way ... the thing is when I am down in Torquay and I switch on my television set and I see one of them reading our news to us. It is our news and they're reading it to me. (If I was a chauvinist I would say I object even to seeing women reading our news to us.) Because basically international news is a serious thing and I yearn for the old days of Lord Reith when the news reader on the BBC, which was the only channel in those times, he wore a dinner jacket and a bow tie and he rose to the occasion. And at great state occasions one had the satisfaction of knowing that not only was the news reader wearing the dinner jacket and the bow tie, -- at great State occasions I think it was even a white tie that was called for -- but you had the satisfaction of knowing that the gentleman behind the camera was also wearing a dinner jacket. It gave one a certain solid sense of satisfaction that All Was Well in the Best of Possible Worlds. But now we have women reading out news to us. | ||
If they could perhaps have their own news which they were reading to us, I suppose [Laughter], it would be very interesting. For the time being, for a transitional period I'd be prepared to accept that the BBC should have a dinner-jacketed gentleman reading the important news to us, following by a lady reading all the less important news, followed by Trevor Macdonald giving us all the latest news about the muggings and the drug busts -- [rest lost in loud Laughter and Applause]. Because, what perverse delight in self-abdication drives the British people to do this to itself? Who is it who's in charge at the BBC who says, "Okay, they are only about nought-point-five percent of the community, I suppose, but let's give them fifty percent of the say in the news programmes and let's give them a very high profile indeed in all the children's programmes." Who decides these things? Who is turning the world on its head in this manner, and more important, Why? The answer is of course, they're trying to force this multicultural, this multi-ethnic mix, what Winston Churchill himself called a kind of artists' sludge: as Churchill said, "If you look at an artist's palette, with all its magnificent and brilliant pure colours, which you have squeezed straight out of the tube as God designed them, and you take your palette knife and you smudge them around, what colour do you end up with?" He said: Churchill said, that not some racist, extremist from beyond the fringe of the law, but one of the greatest living English, or, English-Americans, saying these words. And he knew what he was saying, because he was speaking back in the 1940s and 1950s before this appalling national tragedy was inflicted on us. Not one newspaper is standing up and saying the obvious. That the British people, is unhappy at what has been done to it, without the slightest shred of democratic make-believe. Nobody asked the British people if it was to be done to us in this manner. It just happened. The Cabinet discussed it back in 1958, it now appears, if we go to the Public Record Office, and we see that the Cabinet decided back in 1958 -- Lord Hailsham, the present Lord Hailsham -- said, "Well, it's just a hundred thousand in at present. I don't think it's likely to be on balance many more. We don't need any special Acts at all." And those doors were left wide open. And yet, with a bold press, and a powerful propaganda machine, and the right kind of linkage and steerage and the right kind of intellects writing the articles and writing the television films and designing the media, we could persuade these different minorities that, Yes, we have done them an injustice, bringing them here as some kind of cheap slave-labour in the 1950s, but yes, we are also prepared to mitigate the injustice that we have done to them. We could never totally "ethnically cleanse" Britain: it would be wrong to set about doing it. But we can relieve the pressure. And there are grand ways that we could do it even now. Look around, if we were the editors of national newspapers, and instead of running these rather pathetic appeals for Somalia or for Pakistani flood relief or for the crisis in India, starvation or whatever, we could say, "Let us send out great British forces of relief-units, to help these countries. Let us send out specially adapted units of British citizens to go and help in Somalia and Ethiopia and Pakistan and India. Wherever there's a need, we have the expertise, because we have these people living in our midst for the last thirty or forty years, civilised folks, the Afro-Caribbeans, the Indians, the Pakistanis." | ||
We'll form them together, we could do that -- just as the United States did -- we could form peace regiments, an African peace regiment, an Asian peace regiment, a Pakistani peace regiment, and send them out to Somalia, send them out to Pakistan or India, send them out to help with their expertise, and we'll provide them with the backing and the money to take goodness and benevolence and succour and salvation to these people who have been in the grips of the Marxist elite for too long. And they would not be there just for a few weeks or a few months, it is clear; it's a major job, for these Africa peace units, they'd have to be out there several years [Applause]. All men, and no doubt just as they clamoured when they came here from India and Pakistan, they'd like to have their wives and children with them, out in Somalia [Laughter] or out in Pakistan, or back home in India, and we would be happy to fund that operation too, I am quite sure. We could do it with the right kind of background and the right kind of initiative and the right kind of willingness. We've got the skills. For the last thirty or forty years we've been instilling skills into these people. We could do it. Of course. But the newspapers would never dare to do it, because the newspapers are still terrified of that word Race. They don't realise that Race and Patriotism are one and the same thing. "Patriotism is good, Race is bad" is the kind of George Orwell kind of paradox that we're all finding ourselves in. We're all proud patriotic English people here, me too. Occasionally, when I speak in Germany, like in Munich last weekend, last Saturday, somebody in the audience stands up and says, "Mr Irving, why do you stand up for Germany so much?" And I answer, "I don't stand up for Germany. I stand up for the Truth, as an historian." I am a patriot. I ask myself sometimes, then where do our journalists come from, who write this kind of appalling garbage. And I am reminded that many years ago I had a lovely friend who worked in Harrods, in the perfumery. A beautiful girl, and we were friends for many years, and she told me that when her friends in the Pharmacy at Harrods got bored they used to take packets of condoms and stick needles through them. [Laughter]. And I think this is the answer to where those journalists have come from. [Loud Laughter]. It only takes one little prick. I had a secretary who used to work for me many years ago, he lives not far from here, and he came to me one morning, and he said, "David have you seen what the Sunday Times has written about you yesterday." I said, "What, what is it this time, Robin." And he said, "Look, they said: 'Mr Irving it appears has seriously over-estimated his mental stability.' They're calling you mad!" [End of tape recording] |
write to David Irving