David Irving diary Record of the BBC "Storyville" interview by Nick Fraser |
UP AT 9:15 a.m. with a headache. Black cab came for me at 10 a.m. To the triangle car park in Hyde Park. Jo Lapping waiting there and Nick Fraser turned up. We walked back to Speakers Corner. (I had refused, on grounds of taste, to be filmed at the Holocaust memorial, elsewhere in the park.) Nick said the Imperial War Museum had also refused to allow me to be filmed there, muttering something about "problems" they had had after letting us hold the launch of Churchill's War, vol. I on H.M.S. Belfast in 1987. Interview went moderately well, except they sprang a minor ambush -- a Monopoly-style game board, called Pogromly (in Fraktur), with gas chambers, jackboots, and the rest, which they claimed to have bought off neo Nazis in Germany (risking arrest in the process); as they left, Customs at Frankfurt asked what it was, and, told they were fiying to England to film somebody, the officer said: "Would that be Dr Irving!" My fame precedes me. As for the board, I said it was probably manufactured by agents provocateurs, and I told him of the hired Skinheads who would troop into the front rank of my audiences in Germany and give the Hitler salute and shout Siegheil. It looked of suspiciously good quality manufacture. I also mentioned the computer game, W.W.II, which is solemnly banned as subversive in Germany because players have a chance to tweak it so that Germany wins the war. Fraser said he interviewed the head of the Verfassungsschutz [Germany's "MI.5"], who disliked me. I replied: "Can't say I like him much, either." A rollicking interview for an hour, in a biting wind, drizzle and sunshine, at Speakers Corner. I reminded Fraser that he is on a BBC contract and will say nothing to jeopardize that; while I am free as a bird, constrained only by the limits of my own courage. At the end, I said I found the Holocaust boring. "But you write about it!" "No I don't. I never have. The reason the others make so much of it is (a) they are making money out of it, billions in the last year or so, and (b) it is the only interesting thing that has happened to them in three thousand years, and they are using it as an adhesive to keep their splintering people together." He found that tasteless: so it is, but then much that is true is just that. Back to Duke Street at midday. A letter has come from the Canadians about my application for ministerial consent to enter. It's going to cost a packet. |
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October
17, 1998 (Saturday)
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