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PART 2
 ANUARY
1, 1998
I work until two a.m. copying files for
Observer discovery. Groggy. Sunny but bleak
morning. Jessica busy with stick-ons in a Hercules
book.
I say, "That's
Hercules riding on a horse." "Not a horse, Daddy,"
she replies. "Pegasus!"
In the
afternoon, a surprise visit from J., a South
African diplomat, now stationed in Maputo,
Mozambique. She recalls that she attended my speech
at Johannesburg [see picture below],
which is so nastily "described"
by a Jewish gentleman [David
Katz]
on the Internet. I ask if she ever heard me use the
word "niggers" either there or at any other time,
and she says emphatically that I definitely never
used it, at any time. I wonder if I ought to get an
affidavit from her, in case I ever need it. These
little monkeys -- you never know what tricks they
will spring on you, otherwise.
 I
work from 10 p.m. until two a.m. looking for more
missing documents required by Discovery for the
Observer action; find two of them, and a
host of other interesting stuff.
Eight a.m. I
rise and bath and dress Jessica. She returns to
school today; she has been a handful, very
demanding, inquisitive (where do babies come from?
when will you die, Daddy?).
I write this
letter to the Data
Protection Agency:
--
I note
that your agency has yet to respond to my
letter, written some weeks ago, protesting at
renewed refusals by the Board
of Deputies of British
Jews
and its sub-agency the Community
Security Trust
to provide me with lawful access under the Act
to their data on me.
2. Since the
Board of Deputies of British Jews is
hiding
behind the (untruthful) pretence that the data
concerned are manual, not electronic, can you
please inform me when the new European directive
is to come into force which will oblige data
users to give us access to such files as well?
And what the procedure in that event will
be?
Mr S. phones. I
wrote to his wife re Sir John Sterndale
Bennett [wartime head of Foreign
Office's Far East department]; his wife
died last year, and as far as he knows all Sir
John's historical and private papers were sent a
few months after his death to a friend in the
Foreign Office; Sir John was writing his memoirs at
the time of his death.
Sterndale-Bennett
the musician phones, comments on the wartime gap in
S.B.'s entry in Who's Who. I say I suspect
he was in MI6. He too. There are no war medals or
decorations in the batch sent to his son, only a
1939 wartime telex sent to him in Berne, advising
him to "get the hell out" because war was
imminent.
I write to the F
O Library asking if they have S.B.'s
papers.
Rainy, and dark
impenetrable rain-clouds obscuring the sky most of
the day. What a dreary place London is in
winter.
Four p.m. at
Garfunkels, I wait outside in cold drizzle with
Jessica; Josephine and her friend Spencer turn up
-- he has pushed her wheelchair all the way from
Covent Garden -- and we sit outside in the cold for
an hour drinking tea. She sits in her wheelchair,
thick blankets concealing her missing legs. Jessica
is very well-behaved. Josephine, thirty years her
senior, looks more and more like me; her face is
very fleshy through lack of exercise. Spencer looks
after Josephine tenderly and well. Where would she
be without him, I wonder! What mysterious ways God
does move in.
  N
INTERESTING letter comes from The Observer's
lawyers [Lovell White Durrant]
….
[rest of sentence removed at their
request]?
Bed at 2:10 a.m.
At eight a.m. I am wakened by a rustle, and it is
Jessica standing silently in her hat and school
coat next to my bed, contemplating whether to wake
me or not.
Taxi to Lovell
White Durrant, taking two heavy boxes of 3,400 pp
of photocopies. Then on to Euston station. At
Wolverhampton Grammar School I speak to pupils
about the writing of history. I take a copy of
GOEBBELS.
MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD
REICH,
and say I'll give it for the best question asked. I
award it to a rather scruffy girl, Rose, in the
front row -- turns out she is their history
teacher.
She suggests
that Jews attract envy because of their superiority
at matters of finance, etc. I respond that to
suggest any one people has a genetic superiority
over others is a racist comment. But talk goes down
well.
Up at eight
a.m.; Jessica bouncy and boisterous. Wants more
dresses for Barbie. I say we'll get them if she's
good, after school.
K. arranges to
finance a Website for us. The name
"Focalpoint"
has gone, but we get "fpp" which is as
good.
Afternoon I take
Jessica to Hamley's for Barbie clothes.
She has her
interview at a new school in Bayswater; they are
thrilled with her, and she wants to stay on right
there and then. A most unusual child.
All day
finalizing the Discovery list in my
action against Deborah
Lipstadt.
The
Hewlett-Packard printer finally dies during the
evening. What a clunker; I called it my
"Handley-Page". Ink everywhere. I'll have to buy
another printer, and money is running
low.
Evening: I draft
this letter to Ian Chapman, managing director, at
Macmillan
Ltd.
[about extraordinary actions committed against
me as their author in 1992]
I am
enclosing, in confidence, one of the items of
which I have become aware, and you may
understand my sense of rage at your predecessor.
I expect that as an honourable publisher you
will share my sentiments. I think it would be
undesirable, given the circumstances, for an
author to be given no recourse other than
through the courts against one of this country's
leading publishers.
K. phones, about
the new FPP Website. It is now up and
running.
 WORK
until two a.m. on CHURCHILL'S
WAR, vol.
ii, the Pearl
Harbor mystery
still. I deduce that WSC had another Tokyo despatch
before him of the "winds-message" type, which was
telexed to him via Air Intelligence and confirmed
the next day; but only the latter confirmation is
in the PRO [Public Record Office] files --
no sign of the previous day (December 7, 1941)
telex which must have reached him. A neat
discovery.
Three p.m. Dean
A. comes and stays until 7, helping me to set up
the connection to the Internet. It takes two calls
to the Service Provider, who has omitted to tell us
ninety percent of what we need to know, but we do
it. I then get sucked into the maelstrom, and sit
until two a.m. surfing. Download the Clausen Pearl
Harbor investigation from one site. Pictures from
the Smithsonian, etc. And search the world's press
for garbage
about me.
Infuriating that I cannot answer them back,
yet.
Jessica has a
major fancy dress party this afternoon, which
involves huge outlay we cannot really
afford.
Dream that only
two people show up for the Antwerp
meeting.
11:54 AM
unfriendly visit from the Inland Revenue,
threatening to seize stuff if I do not pay
immediately, which I do. An Irishman, from Cork
("Are you the David Irving?"), whose family has
been "in Revenue service" for generations. I have a
mental picture of his grandfather rowing out to a
schooner anchored in a misty Irish bay, while her
crew frantically toss barrels of bootleg liquor
overboard.
A long
discussion with A. on tactics against The
Observer. We redraft my letter to [their
lawyers]:
Dear
Sirs, -- This letter answers your letter of
January 6. It offers a counter-proposal, which
you should answer within the next two weeks
(i.e. by February 3) after which the offer will
lapse.
I instituted
these proceedings only after other approaches
failed. I have been subjected over the years to
an orchestrated crescendo of defamation, of
which your clients have made themselves the
willing executioners.
The article
complained of contained libels, which your
clients recklessly published without making any
attempt to verify them. Let me single out some
of the most serious:
- the
innuendo that I stole and/or damaged archival
materials;
- the
allegation that I cheated a colleague out of
the credit for making the initial discoveries
[of the Goebbels
Diaries
in Moscow archives];
- the
allegation that I referred to Adolf
Hitler as "our Führer";
- the
allegation that I lied to The Sunday
Times;
- the
allegation in the final paragraph
gratuitously inserted at the specific
instance of the First Defendants [The
Observer], that I am mentally
ill.
If these
proceedings cannot be compromised before
February 3, it is my intention (after making the
necessary amendments to my pleadings to include
the obvious innuendo behind the word "borrowed"
and the issue of the article's final paragraph
implying mental illness) to proceed against your
clients under RSC O.14, alternatively by way of
an application for Judgment on Admissions, in
respect of the above allegations, to none of
which you have pleaded.
You should be
in no doubt that if this action cannot be
settled I am determined to take it to full trial
to vindicate my reputation and refute in the
most public way the defamatory allegations that
your clients have made against me.
[The
letter then sets out terms of settlement which
would be acceptable. The newspaper's lawyers do not
respond. The legal battle
continues.]
WHINY
letter from Elise S Solomon, senior counsel
for Random House Inc., demanding that I identify
the libels
in the John Lukács
book
The Hitler of History, and denying that they
have any duty to identify their foreign licensee
publishers to me. She earns this reply:
Thank
you for your letter of January. I can only
repeat the position in law, as I understand it,
in this country where I shall bring the action
to which I referred if the above book is
published in unamended form. As I wrote, "It may
be that these subsidiary publishers will look to
you to indemnify them in that event, and if you
have failed (a) to identify those publishers to
me, as requested, and (b) to advise them that I
consider the book to be libellous you will be
the architect of your own misfortune."
My
correspondence with your firm will be part of my
Discovery in the action, and your house's
foreign licensees will no doubt feel most
aggrieved to learn that you were warned in good
time that the book was held to be libellous and
actionable. In those circumstances they would
most certainly be able to seek an indemnity, and
the costs of actions in the English courts are,
as you will know, not small. Your reckless, and
in any other circumstance admirable, defence of
your author will not come cheaply to Random
House, Inc.
10:21 AM phone
call from my Paris literary agent; is having
immense difficulty, as the French publishers are
all now frightened of the new laws against free
speech, etc. Can she act for me in the Moscow
markets too? Indeed she can. Ironic, isn't
it.
2 p.m. visit
from North-West Television Productions, based in
Neasden: a Mr Schwarz, of Hispanic origin,
and his Spanish lighting technician, and three
others; making a TV interview on "Islamophobia." I
can not make out which side they are on. I am not
an expert on this or any other kind of phobias,
anyway. As I sit down in my desk chair, I notice on
their TV monitor screen a big swastika behind my
head. They have re-positioned an American textbook
on the ledge behind me, taking down the family
photos for the purpose. Little monkeys.
After they film
the interview I notice that Theodor N
Kaufmann's 1941 book Germany Must Perish
is also on the ledge, and Van Pelt's book
Auschwitz 1270 to the Present.
At the Public
Record Office at 12:12 PM. The file released to me
by No. 10 Downing Street is still not in the Office
though.
On the answering
machine, a message from a Boston television
company, making a film about Fred
Leuchter.
This further
letter goes to Macmillan's
Ian Chapman:
Can I
take it that you will be making a substantial
reply to my letter? It would be good to avoid
having to issue proceedings which would bring
the whole matter (namely the steps taken by
Macmillan in 1992 to hound one of their own
authors and secretly burn thousands of his
books) out in public.
I expect that
you will by now also have completed your
inquiries into how your confidential files were
delivered into the hands of third parties with
this unfortunate outcome.
I am irritated,
incidentally, that Macmillan appear to be holding
out, without responding to my letters at all now:
evidently realising that as the documents are
privileged I am in a strait-jacket over them.
Difficult problem to work round, except that if I
take action against them those documents will be
discoverable.
 AX
FROM C., saying: "The secret's out" -- about the
Antwerp meeting. Jewish protests, pressure has
forced Holiday Inn to cancel the venue, etc. The
traditional enemy of the truth.
I send this
fax:
All
understood. I shall be arriving by car. My
driver is big, and one of us. He would like to
attend the dinner.
This fax to our
agents in Australia:
I am
currently editing through the finished
Churchill's War, vol. ii typescript yet
again, having been swamped by the release to the
archives here of thousands of new British
[codebreaking]
files which I could not ignore. We are
advertising it in a whole
page colour advert
for the book in the spring Bookseller
special supplement. however, which gives you
an indication that it is very far
advanced.
Focal Point
now has a website (www.fpp.co.uk), though
nothing on it yet. That will soon change!!
Incidentally, can you mail or e-mail to me the
names of every Australian
M P? I'm going to write them.
Message by fax
from Mishcon, summons for court January 30 to hear
their application for an extension for Discovery by
Lipstadt. Ho-ho. I shall ask for an Unless
Order.
K. comes at
10:30 a.m.; we leave eleven p.m., in his heavily
loaded Mercedes, and drive to Ramsgate.
4:30 p.m. out to
the venue, a restaurant outside Antwerp city. Big
dinner with wealthy Belgians. An Austrian woman
tells me that Fritz Rebhandl [who
organised my lectures in the 1980s] has been in
jail for two years for alleged
Wiederbetätigung, his wife is totally
shattered, suffered a collapse. Austrian communist
swine.
The dinner and
meeting are organised by the wealthy Vlaams Blok, a
really well organised function. Why cannot
something like this be done in England? Well, the
traditional enemy steps in to suppress free speech
by whatever means they can each time. 7:30 p.m.
spoke for an hour to 300-400 people. Huge response
and much enthusiasm. Many business cards pressed
into my hands.
Left
Antwerp at midday, back at Duke Street five
p.m.
1 p.m.
Rebecca Sieff and Lionel Sackville
West her fiance come for lunch. She sporting a
large solitaire ring. Both smoke as though time is
ending. She has her cocker spaniel Jasper with her.
A pleasant enough two or three hours, but must they
both smoke so much? I tell her Lionel has a real
smoker's face -- sallow, black rings round his
eyes, etc.; she does not notice it.
At High Court at
ten a.m., but Lipstadt's lawyers Mishcon de Reya do
not show. Back home at eleven a.m.
Phone calls from
Mishcon, apologising, and setting a new date,
February 3.
I send this
letter to Macmillan's
Ian Chapman:
All
rights in at least one of the volumes which made
up HITLER'S
WAR
had reverted to me before the extraordinary 1992
incident -- which included the right to expect
that a publisher would not do the dirty on his
own author behind his back! You will also find
the scurrilous Mr [Roland]
Phillips assuring me that of course I would
continue to be offered all remainders (note his
wording); not, of course, that it is true to
describe the victims of this Book Burning as
remainders -- they were sacrificed on the altar
of God Knows What, at a time when the book was
enjoying perpetual heavy sales.
To the High
Court at 10 a.m. Master Chism gave Mishcon
two weeks, a Final Order (I had asked for an Unless
Order). I must now gear up for my next
move.
Evening: fax
from Mishcon, suddenly demanding £7,500
payment.
Then a fax comes
from Davenport Lyons [lawyers acting for
Penguin
Books Ltd.,
publishers of the Deborah Lipstadt libels],
wailing at me for my ultimatum and setting a court
Time Summons to be heard on Monday 10 a.m. Another
morning to be wasted.
I do not get
much work done during the day in consequence, and
slave away at The Backlog until
midnight.
Up at 6:30 .m.,
tackling The Backlog.
 ORK
UNTIL 5:30 a.m. until I finally crack the technical
problems of creating Web pages. But find I can not
upload them to the FPP Website. At eleven a.m. I
phone the service provider, and they explained the
final snags.
I go to Court
for Davenport Lyons's time summons at ten a.m.
Master Chism grants them two more weeks,
with a Final Order, at my demand.
Work more on the
Website during the day and evening, taking no
meals, until I have also posted chapters from the
Goebbels,
Churchill's
War, vol. ii,
Apocalypse
'45 and
Morgenthau
manuscripts.
A great start. The concept is also good, if I may
say so.
R. phones
at 9 a.m., about photos of her grandfather (for the
Deavin
book).
But suggests I try M&S archives
first.
The
Australian phones: Immigration Minister
Ruddock has granted Louis Farrakhan a
visa, what do I say to that! I say, "It is
hypocrisy to let him in, giving his offensive
remarks about the Jews." The Australian then
sends round at 4:10 p.m. a photographer who shoots
a reel of film. I hope to get the newspaper to
refer to my Website, and spend the evening putting
Australian
materials
on to it.
In the evening
(at night, after I go to bed) Australian Channel 9
phones, they want me to broadcast in their "Today"
programme Saturday morning, which is late Friday
night here.
7:45 p.m.
collected by taxi, taken to Millbank Studios, for
satellite broadcast to Channel 9 Australia.
Friendly enough, about the fuss over Farrakhan
being allowed a visa (while I am not).
Up at seven a.m.
Nasty letters from Biddle and Mishcon, as expected.
And news of the German arrest of a professor
accused of having written the Auschwitzlüge
in a Latin script. Ad
absurdum.
Worked until
five a.m. on the Website. I am slimming down. About
20 pounds gone already, and the diet
continues.
Up at seven a.m.
During the last week I have found myself dreaming
during the night several times about little
Jessica. I miss her dreadfully. She was opening a
cupboard in one dream, pulling out a toy and
saying, "I need that, and I need
that!" (instead of want).
Alexis came for
six hours, and worked on filing boxes. We have
started a colour-coded labelling system for my
archives. But the flat is still littered with boxes
and files.
Post a lot more
stuff on the Website, including a corrected version
of the Münzinger
archive biography
in German.
Flood of
incoming e-mails, including some unwanted ones from
right-wingers. How to choke them off without
choking them negatively. Problem.
12:45 p.m. train
to Milton Keynes. Bank manager Chaney; nice and
affable, but I doubt he will help.
 ACK
TO London; arrive at noon, in the middle of an IRA
bomb scare in Oxford Street. Nothing
changes.
Jessica is
looking very beautiful, and inches taller than when
I last saw her a month ago. She crawled onto my lap
during lunch at Spaghetti House and was altogether
most insistent. Played with her games on the
computer, etc.
Two Japanese
journalists came at 10 am and wrecked my morning
interviewing me about Rommel as a Man of the
Century for Tokyo's Asahi Shimbun (Mr Jun
Hagitani and photographer Ken
Mizokoshi).
Newspapers full
of Chris Patten's book being dumped by
HarperCollins on Rupert Murdoch's orders.
Much talk of freedom of speech. Nobody recalls what
happened to my Goebbels in April 1996. Then a big
laugh: Macmillan
Ltd --
of all publishers -- announce that they will rescue
his book! Little does he know.
In the morning a
would-be author writing about Dr Hastings
Banda, hoping to prove Rommel survived
and went to Africa. I suggest that he not ventilate
this idea to Manfred Rommel, who as lord mayor of
Stuttgart no doubt has other preoccupations. He
really tries my patience.
Work on the
Website until midnight. I find that Nizkor, in
posting the final
Niagara Falls hearing
preceding my deportation on November 12, 1992, has
omitted all my objections, corrections, etc. The
"judge" Kenneth Thomson holds the floor,
unopposed!
Jessica is
invited to a major party at the Waldorf in the
Strand. Today. (Bought a plastic tiara yesterday).
Moving in very high circles.
Taxi to Mishcon
de Reya for inspection of Lipstadt's Discovery; New
Oxford Street is dug up, but I get there at 9:33
a.m. Very plush offices. I hand in my name to front
desk and reception, and am assured that Mishcon
knows I am here. After fifteen minutes' wait, I
walk out. Angry fax from them two hours later. I
tell them I expect greater "precision". Fix a new
date next week.
10:30 a.m. team
of four Mishcon operatives come to inspect my
documents. I remark to their Mr James Libson
that I shall be leaving the country shortly for a
while. He says, "I know -- March 26 -- you've said
so on your Website." I have not, of course: not on
the public portion, anyway.
4:48 PM phone
Barclay's manager to arrange an interview. "What's
it about?" "I want to try to screw a short term
loan out of you." "That'll be difficult --," he
says, adding, "--Joking." I don't think he is. The
Times runs my job advert; phone calls all day from
hopeful women, applying for the job.
In the late
afternoon a call from one of them, a Miss Helen
Sonnenthal, of Hendon, who is (ten pounds to a
shekel says it) highly unlikely to prove willing to
work for me. (Why did the Jews congregate near
railway stations, and in later years near airports?
An interesting sociological question.)
As an equal
opportunity employer, I would have been quite happy
to consider her along with the other applicants;
but after ten minutes enthusing about the job and
her qualifications she inquires my name and when I
tell her, there is a pause, then she gasps: "David
Irving -- the author?" Yes. "The well-known one?"
Yes. "The notorious revisionist?"
At this I say,
"Madam, I think there is not much point our
continuing this conversation further."
Alas, it means
that I henceforth have to make a little note
against the name of each applicant, that they may
be a plant. That is how the traditional enemy of
the truth works.
Next day: at
9:30 a.m. a blank phone call to the phone line that
we used for the job advert.: hangs up as soon as I
reply with the number. Sure enough, the exchange
computer says: "The caller withheld their number."
Now, I wonder who that can have been! Up to no
good, that is for certain. But there were ten good
job applicants before Ms Sonnenthal phoned, and I
shall now interview them.
In the afternoon
a Miss Sally A. phones on the other Focal Point
number, asking about the job. I ask straight away
why she has phoned that number. "But that is Focal
Point," she says simply. She says she looked it up.
(But our job advert did not say Focal Point
either.) She sounds right and well qualified; her
mother is Jewish, her father a Moroccan (or the
other way round).
7:50 p.m. call
from a Louise Israel asking for job details.
I arrange to see her at ten a.m. tomorrow, but warn
her that her friends will make it impossible for
her to take the job. She does not see
why.
Louise Israel
does not show.
 ALLY
A., the questionable applicant (a plant?), arrives
at one, a comely wench with an extraordinary
handbag, winning ways, brown hair, clean
complexion. She says almost at once, "I suppose
you're going to ask how I found out about the job."
I agree that I was, but I was going to wait until
the end of the interview.
"A friend who
applied but does not want it, told me about it."
She refuses to identify the friend other than say
that it is one of the girls I already interviewed.
For various reasons, I do not believe her (the
friend would have given her the proper phone
number). She flirts and flaunts throughout the
interview. A bit further down that road, and I
would have woken up in Rome, bound for a Mossad
prison, I suspect, like Mr "life-term-in-solitary
confinement" Vanunu. She denies she is
Jewish, though her mother is Jewish.
At 3:40 p.m.
Catherine L. comes, the best candidate yet, but
admits to smoking.
A long phone
call from my brother [a scientist]. Has a
problem: A Saudi conglomerate has approached him
for advice on designing a machine that will
automatically destroy Holy Korans without their
ashes' touching the floor. I suggest he contacts
HarperCollins or another big publisher, much of
whose time is spent destroying large quantities of
books in shredding-and-pulping machines. Or come to
that Macmillan
Ltd.,
who having destroyed thousands of copies of my
Hitler's
War in
1992, under unsubtle pressure from the Traditional
Enemies of Free Speech (without telling me), must
have developed some expertise as well.
|
I find
that the Board
of Deputies of British
Jews
in January 1993 issued this
press
release
[see panel on
right]
I also
find in my hands an immensely detailed,
and very readable, 25-page analysis of my
life and works, by an anonymous British
expert, evidently employed by the Board of
Deputies of British Jews, written after
the Goebbels
1996
débâcle;
this analyses why my works are so
plausible, hence dangerous, and adds
sinisterly: "Given this accurate
version of reality it is all the more
clear why his [David
Irving's] activities must be
curtailed, and why his alleged legitimacy
must be eradicated." Since they
escaped libel action last year only by the
skin of their teeth, the Board has been
foolish to the point of
stupidity.
In the
afternoon, a fax from Mishcon, not very
accommodating, about my protests about
Lipstadt's
insufficient Discovery.
In the
evening, around ten p.m., I find a fax
from them with a wail of rage about
documentary items that have found their
way onto the FPP Website. They demand
their instant removal, and the removal of
even the
affidavit sworn by Michael
Whine
[head honcho of the Board of
Deputies of British Jews] in which
he admits planting the "intelligence
report" about me on Canadian government
files, with global catastrophic
consequences for me, as Judge
Toulson said on November 14,
1996.
|
NAZI
PROPAGANDIST IRVING HAS FINE
TREBLED
The Nazi
propagandist, David Irving, was yesterday
fined 30,00 Deutschmarks (£12,000) by
a court in Munich, German. The sentence
was a dismissal of his appeal against an
earlier fine of 10,000 Deutschmarks,
imposed for denying the Holocaust at a
neo-Nazi youth training cap in Munich, in
April 1990.
The Board of
Deputies of British Jews notes the
trebling of Irving' fine as indicative of
legal authorities' growing recognition
that denial of the Holocaust is a moral
obscenity, designed to further the evils
of Nazism and racial hatred.
In Germany and
Austria, Irving is a hero to ageing Nazis
and mobs of sieg-heiling youths. In North
America, he is feted by Ku Klux Klan
leaders, and other notorious white
supremacists. He was recently barred from
Canada, and refused re-entry to the USA,
where he planned to address Far Right
extremists on the Holocaust. His proposed
visits in early 1993 to South Africa and
Australia have rightly outraged civil
rights' campaigners and the Jewish
communities in those countries.
|
Pending legal
advice as to the status of the Internet, and of
such affidavits, in the public domain, I replace
all three items with placeholders.
ORRY
A lot during the night about the coming US tour. Up
at 5:10 a.m. and resume work. This time I put my
entire Community
Security Trust
file on the Website. [The CST is the private
army of thugs raised and financed by the Board of
Deputies of British Jews ] Warum
nicht!
Immense fax from
Mishcon, a wail of a wail. Talking of my abusing
the documents. I shall give them a little lecture
on that word "abuse."
March
24, 1998 Sixty
years old today. At two minutes past midnight, I
think of Mother, and all she went through until her
death in October 1965. How old was she? How old was
Father
in 1967? Morbid thoughts, but I keep fitter than
either of them -- non smoking, etc. A quiet day.
Nice letter from [my twin] brother Nicky,
with a genealogy of the Irving family back to
Robert the Bruce. Other greetings come by mail,
fax, e-mail, etc., including one from George
Stern -- a cartoon in The New Yorker,
showing a man reading the obituary page of a
newspaper, with headlines like
THREE
YEARS OLDER THAN YOU. -- TWO YEARS YOUNGER THAN
YOU. -- JUST YOUR AGE. Very
funny.
Phone message
from Channel Four, want me to participate in live
debate about Enoch Powell on April 15. I
phone them, say I'm leaving for the USA tomorrow;
they can fly me back from Seattle for a day if they
wish.
The
Bookseller has published furious letters from
Anti-Nazi League booksellers, greasy types the lot
of them, protesting at it printing the adverts of
"Focal Press". That's the way they
operate.
Departure from
Heathrow at midday for Los Angeles. Crowded flight,
grab some sleep, then type until the battery gives
out.
Land at 3:33
p.m.; rent a Lincoln Town Car -- the new one is
smaller than the old one. Change!
Reach the
Pasadena hotel around seven p.m., which is three
a.m., London time. Malcolm W. has booked me in
under the name of Ghengis Khan. He believes
this will attract less opprobrium than David
Irving. He comes round for a drink. I do not
recognise him as, lost, I am ushered by a bellhop
through the corridors to the hotel lobby. Malcolm
inquires, "Mr Khan?"
I say, "I'm
sorry, no," and walk on. I realise my mistake and
swing round, calling out after him, "Yes, of
course. I'm Mr Khan."
What the bellhop
makes of this I don't know.
To Beverly Hills
for a snack lunch at the Brighton Cafe. Surprising
how little changes.
By midday I have
fixed up access to America On-line. I -mail to
Benté in London:
 Did
Jessica like the pictures she took? A Jessica's
eye view of the world [right, how she
sees her Daddy and Mummy].
This letter to
Mishcon de Reya, in response to a rude fax:
--
Do your
clients, the Board of Deputies of British Jews,
maintain that a Press
Release which
they issued to every media outlet in the country
is not already in the public domain? In other
words, have they somehow found a way to un-ring,
once rung, a bell?
From Los Gatos
mountains, I phone Benté and chat with
Jessica: "Do you know where I am?" "Yes, in
'Merica."
I tell her I'm
in a house in the jungle surrounded by bears and
tigers. She does not appear to believe
it.
12:41 PM phone
calls from Justin R. and M. about
financial problems with the Washington
State University meeting
planned for April 13. They expect six hundred
students to come, there is already uproar. I say
I'm good for the lecture theatre rental
($420).
We drive further
north. Check into a hotel on the Pacific coast at
Mondecino, surrounded by racoons, all fighting with
each other. Evidently a family.
This letter goes
to Jessica:
I am
living for two days in a house in the middle of
the woods. Just like
HANSEL
AND GRETL.
I am surrounded by bears and tigers. There are
many wild animals in the forest. The trees all
round are Redwood trees, and some of the trees
are as old as the hills. The trees are so big,
that you can drive a car right through the
middle! I took a picture of my car driving
through a tree. I have a big white car. I went
to a shop and I bought these two wooden labels.
One says B for Benté, and one says J for
Jessica. They are made from the trees.
ENTE
REPORTS that Da Capo Press Inc., the New York
paperback publishers, have phoned finally turning
down the Rommel
biography
reprint. It has taken them ten months to come to
this negative decision. All rather odd; I suspect
the hand of the ADL
again. Well, my new Website enables me to fight
back.
Set out further
north and drove all day. Beautiful Redwood forests,
rain much of the way, then brilliant sunshine, then
more rain.
These huge trees
stand like soldiers at the roadside, saluting us in
the rising mists and falling drizzle as we pass.
Drive off the freeway at Woodland, Washington, and
after turning down one or two motels as too costly,
too unfriendly, etc., find a cheap little fleapit
called The Lakeside Motel -- just right. I plug in
this computer and work on the Website for several
hours, until three a.m.
Up at 7:30 a.m.
Phoned Benté and spoke with Jessica too. Set
out at eight a.m. and drive to Seattle. Arrive at
the Shoreline community centre at north Seattle at
12. Audience starts arriving early, including many
friends from British Columbia, Canada, which is
only half an hour's drive further north. I speak
for an hour in the rather cheerless hall about
Churchill.
After coffee at
D's we leave for the Pullman Washington State
university function around six p.m., rather later
than planned. Beautiful drive into the dusk over
the mountains, and we stop at Cle Elum -- strange
name -- at around nine p.m. Snow flakes drifting
round the car when I load it in the morning. Work
some more, and leave around 11:30 a.m. for Pullman,
a 250-mile onward drive. The countryside levels out
in a way I have not expected, until finally we are
driving across open, windswept desert, with
tumbling, two-foot balls of vegetation blowing
across the freeway.
The road map
shows a connection before Sprague between I -- 90
and Route 230 which does not exist, which costs us
a 30 mile detour. We are running out of time and I
cover the last ninety miles in around an hour along
totally, but totally, deserted desert highway.
Pullman is a valley city, with several broad
streets and fine buildings. Its main industry is
the Washington State University campus (WSU)
together with the attached stadium.
The boxes are
transloaded, and taken to the Union Building where
I have rented the main lecture theatre. It is 6:30
p.m. before we begin. The hall is packed, with
hardly an empty place, around 600 students and
several academics are there. The newspapers have
been baying and braying for several days, which has
of course added to the tension. As I begin
speaking, I see about twenty people in the front
two rows rise to their feet and stand with their
backs turned to me.
GESTURE
of disrespect, which earns the comment from me: "I
do not mind. So far as I know these people, they
have their ears right next to their assholes." (A
left-over morsel from Karlsruhe, 1984 or so, when
the Communists and Leftists who had seized my
auditorium used exactly the same tactic and got the
same response: with the result that the police
colonel whose men had manned the barricade rushed
onto the stage and said, "Herr Irving -- if you use
language like that again I shall close this lecture
down!" Oi!) They then solemnly file out, to the
general betterment of the rest of the
proceedings.
I speak for an
hour on the broad scope of revisionist history, not
just the Holocaust (as I remind everybody at the
end: everybody who survived WW2 is a Holocaust
survivor; the real war crime was Innocenticide, not
Genocide, which is only a part of it; and I am not
a Holocaust historian, I leave that to the
others.)
The audience is
aloof at first, being largely "normal people."
Within ten minutes however they have livened up, as
I warm to the theme, and after half an hour they
are lively, reactive, and listening with closest
attention. Almost nobody leaves; all stay on during
the ten-minute break that I announce.
The questions
are the best part, as usual. A German girl student,
a quiet, well spoken twenty-year old, the Federal
Republic's equivalent, no doubt, of a Rhodes
Scholar: she finds it highly desirable that I
should be imprisoned, fined, excluded, and
prevented from speaking; and even more praiseworthy
that her country's government
is suppressing Free Speech
where it is used for ideas which she and they agree
are unacceptable. I listen patiently, praise her
command of the English language, and suggest with
the utmost respect that in Germany this century so
far Nothing Has Changed. There is little that the
rest of the world can or should learn from Germany
about Free Speech.
Several coloured
students are there, mostly training to become
teachers. They are bright and friendly; one tall,
doleful man who identifies himself as a Jew takes
over the floor microphone and tries to berate me
using a handbill
issued by an ADL-front
organisation.
He calls me "racist, anti-Semitic," and all the
other tired old clichés. I correct him on
these and other points, but it seems clear that
nobody believes him anyway.
A law professor
objects that while I discount the evidence given by
Holocaust survivors as "eye-witness" testimony, I
use the "eye-witness
testimony"
of General Walter Bruns. I point out to him
that, as he surely knows, the courts attach far
greater weight to evidence given against ones own
interest (Bruns) than to self-serving testimony
(Holocaust survivors); I forget the Latin tag
attached to this, and the law professor does not
volunteer it either.
One questioner
addresses the issue that I had raised in discussing
the Daniel
Goldhagen
thesis -- that if I were a Jew I would want to see
an answer to the vital question: why the Jews are
so hated within only a few years of their arrival
in each host country; he points out that the Jews
have now been in the United States in strength for
fifty years, yet they are not hated.
I reply that on
the contrary, my own perception is that they are
moving into the same positions of predominance and
influence (media, banking, business, entertainment,
and the more lucrative professions like law,
medicine and dentistry) that they held in Weimar
Germany, which gave rise to the hatreds and the
resulting pogroms; and that this being so, twenty
or thirty more years might see in the USA the same
dire consequences as happened in Nazi Germany. I
sense that this is not a popular
prediction.
For this evening
only I have marked the books down to half-price for
the student population, since I know they are even
poorer than I. The book table is thronged, and I
give several books away; in consequence we do not
cover the $420 which the university administrator
has extracted from us in cash before the function
begins, as rent for the hall! Minus the petrol for
the seven-hundred mile drive here and back
yesterday and today. Minus wages, minus car-hire,
minus, minus, minus.
We have not
expected to make any cash surplus on the day,
however, what matters is a far larger principle:
establishing, or re-establishing, channels of
communication to the thinking student population,
despite every effort of the Traditional Enemies of
Free Speech to abrogate them.
What a wonderful
audience university students make. Still eager to
learn, and curious about alternative opinions and
interpretations (particularly those they are being
"protected" from). Which in turn made me very
conscious of the need to lecture to them with the
utmost restraint.
I work on the
Website until two a.m., and send off several
e-mails.
 P
AT 7:30 a.m. This morning's Spokesman-Review,
the
Spokane city newspaper, has the improbable (and
less than accurate) headline:
WSU
SHOUTS DOWN HOLOCAUST
REVISIONIST.
Yes, the journaille: they have a lot to
answer for. I guess that some journalist wrote that
headline sometime yesterday afternoon, before the
actual lecture.
I post
yesterday's diary
on the Website.
I invites some
students over for lunch. One brings the
university's Daily Evergreen. This has the
headline story opening, "Nearly 400 people packed
into the CUB Auditorium Monday night -- some
intensely listened, clapped and even laughed at
Holocaust revisionist speaker David Irving. About
20 people, who said they purposely sat near the
front of the auditorium, interrupted Irving after
his introduction by standing up and facing the back
of the room. 'A number of people have turned their
backs on me,' Irving said to the audience. 'It
makes no difference to me because it is the First
Amendment in the United States that I, as an
English writer, most cherish.' [That's not
quite what I said: see above].
I send this
report to Benté in London:
I am
working very hard here. I worked on this Website
until past two a.m. this morning, and have been
up since 7:15 a.m. this morning. The Great
Journey probably continues today. Once again, it
is a real pity that you and Jessica do not come
on part of these immense travels.
Up at 6:30 a.m.
I do not seem to need much sleep these days, which
is a worry.
Hotel message
light says there's a fax. It turns out to be quite
serious, from
a firm claiming to hold the trade-mark
rights
to the letter F and the name Focal Point, and
demanding that we desist. Brings to mind the Story
of the Two Wells: Well, well. They
write:
The
undertakings we require are:
1.
Immediately to cease use of the name Focal Point
or Focal Point Publications and the mark "F" and
not to use any similar marks in the future
(including any name which incorporates the word
FOCAL or anything similar).
2.
Immediately to amend your Internet site so that
all references to the name Focal Point (or Focal
Point Publications) or the "F" mark or anything
similar to either are removed.
3. Within 14
days to destroy or deliver up to us all
materials in your possession, power or control
which contain the Focal Point ( or Focal Point
Publications) or the "F" mark.
It seems quite
clear now that (a) the "booksellers" writing to The
Bookseller deliberately referred to "Focal Press",
to "set FPP up" for this attack; and (b) the usual
Traditional Enemies are behind this new attempt to
destroy my publishing base. I respond robustly:
-
I have
no intention of desisting from using the
upper-case Goudy Bold letter F in our logo and,
without prejudice to any further advice I may
receive, I would point out that we have in the
ten years or more of trading as Focal Point
Publications never once received any evidence of
confusion between our trading name and those
(different) names or trademarks to which you
claim exclusive title; nor do you appear to have
taken parallel action against several other
corporate entities with similar names of which
we are aware.
I also reply to
Mishcon:
I have
removed materials which gave offence to your
clients from my Website. I do not accept that I
can be criticised for publishing any other
document especially one
which your clients deliberately issued as a
press release
some years ago, no doubt publishing it to every
newspaper in the U.K.
Set out from
Hermiston at 12:30 p.m. beautiful drive along the
Columbia river to Portland. Arrive at Portland in
pouring rain at five p.m., and go straight to the
hall, the Prairie High School library at 5:30. As I
am sitting at the book table one of the "visitors"
hands
me a document,
which turns out to be a Statutory Demand from the
Board of Deputies of British Jews, from their
lawyers Mishcon de Reya. An attempt at bankrupting
me. Why not do that in the U.K.? They know what my
dates are -- they have got this date off the
Website however.
It is a good
audience, around 100, they are enthusiastic,
educated and middle-class, and listen with
increasing volume of applause and laughter to my
one-hour talk about historiography and Mr
Churchill. I give a couple of books away to needy
elderly folk who clearly don't have the means to
buy them (and our prices are not low, by US
standards).
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