David Irving’s ACTION REPORT No.25, Jan 2004 (#6325)

No. 25, January 20, 2004 [ German translation ] Hoover Dam on the Nevada border, so clocks go back an hour: my little speaking tour has reached the Pacific Time zone. IN LAS VEGAS AT FIVE PM LOCAL time, after a six-hour drive, I thought it would take four. I like this city. Most United States cities are unintentionally vulgar, this one’s vulgarity is deliberate, and it works. Discussions by phone with Don about the alternate location.

I get calls from three mysterious new “friends,” whom I have at first to suspect of being moles. They invite me to supper however, and since they all turn out to be either steroid-stuffed, or have tattoos and shaven heads, and one even has Richard Wagner ‘s Ride of the Valkyries as a ring tone on his phone, I’m satisfied on balance that they do not include a mole, anyway. I contact Mat, organizing in Seattle: “You are leaving it very late to notify me of the location.

I must send out letters today at the latest, for Canada!” Don phones, he will now speak with the new location — which we have already announced. At 11:20 am he phones again – the restaurant is already booked for tonight. So that’s out. He becomes loquacious, and I have to curtail him. I report to Benté: “Looks like we’ve lost Las Vegas, the restaurant is having a wedding reception tonight (know what they are?). No alternative. Five hundred mile drive for nothing.”

Don says: “I am waiting for a call back from Arizona Charlie’s.” But at 12:31 PM he says Arizona Charlie’s has not got enough waiters. So I book a meeting room myself in the restaurant at my own hotel. I go over at four PM to the Hard Rock for an interview with a journalist, Jeff German (I had misheard his name as “Gammon,” which upon analysis seemed to put him in the clear). Nice enough guy, turns out to be a reporter for the Las Vegas Sun but very obsessed with the Holocaust.

He winces when I say I find the subject boring; I have never written a book or article on it, I say, and I tend to flip to a different channel whenever it comes on the TV — and I suspect that he along with 95 percent of the US viewing population reacts the same way. This is before I figure out that he is in fact himself Jewish. At five PM Don is in my hotel’s reception area. The front desk has already received calls protesting about the evening’s meeting and threatening violence.

The clerk seems unworried, and is telling the callers that the management has gone home for the day and there is nobody they can speak to. A full house of guests arrives. Three police cars stand at each end of the alley (we did not invite them). Journalist Jeff German shows up and takes copious notes.

Then Brian F comes, ever the businessman, and to my silent fury, while I am talking, he props up on a table a 1939 wreath from the German Consul in Paraguay for the funeral of the Graf Spee victims, which he wants to sell. The journalist will inevitably proclaim that “Nazi flags” bedeck the room I spoke in. NEXT MORNING I LOOK into the source of the leak. After excluding donors to the fighting-fund and people known to me for years, three suspects emerge. Let’s see what shakes out of this.

I will zap all three off my list. During the day one responds and I clear him. He was the gentleman who arrived late, he says. I now mail out invitations to my Canadian friends in British Columbia (exactly one hundred letters), and set out at eleven AM for Los Angeles. After a meatloaf lunch at “Peggy Sue’s 1950s Diner” at Yerba, in the Mojave desert, I arrive at the appointed restaurant in Sherman Oaks at four.

The manageress of this smart restaurant greets me with the words, “Oh no, you phoned in two days ago to cancel your function,” and she shows me the register. Our entry is crossed out in red, CANCELLED . I frostily explain that we have not cancelled it. The traditional enemy has; I do not advise her of that. The registration has been made in T’s name, so how they have identified it I don’t know. One rather odd event is a blank phone call at around four PM.

I phone back, and a voice identifies the caller as “Tony Roma’s Restaurant in Sacramento.” That is Saturday’s scheduled location. The voice denies having called me, despite my pointing out I have just pressed the call-back button. Why would Tony Roma’s be calling? Only one possible explanation. Fortunately the private room here at Sherman Oaks is still available, and we go ahead. We soon fill the available table space, and more seats have to be brought in.

The usual problem with the check at the end: it comes to me to pay, including taxes and tips, which people always forget. That leaves me several hundred dollars out of pocket each time. THE NEXT THREE DAYS ARE ALL major California functions: south of Los Angeles, in San Francisco, and in Sacramento. With long distances in between. And I have no help. Then a day’s pause while I just drive north to Portland, Oregon. So far, the weather has been gnädig.

Coffee with Harry, who provides a roof for the night. The Las Vegas Sun has published a good, fair story , so my trust in “Gammon” is vindicated. I reproach Don P however: “You see the problem caused when ‘people’ (i.e., you) phone the previous location to protest at their cancellation; it goes down badly, and does no good.” Harry’s two Hispanic housemaids assume that my shoes and blazer, found tossed aside in the sitting room, are his and have removed them to his bedroom closet.

It takes some time for us to find them. I notice a camera on the coffee table that is identical to mine, and comment on it. Harry says it’s probably his son’s. I am ten miles down the San Diego Freeway before I realize that the camera is mine, removed along with everything else from the blazer pocket by the maids before they hung it up.

I arrive at Mimi’s at one PM, and have lunch with Mark W, looking slightly thinner — a haircut enforced by his new lady enhances the effect — and we talk for an hour over lunch. When the waitress, a withered old retainer by whom however Mark seems disproportionately taken, interrupts to inquire if everything is alright, I say: “It was, until you interrupted our conversation. Please go away. And don’t interrupt again.” Mark is shocked.

I don’t understand these American customs, even after all these years. A call from Sacramento confirms that Tony Roma’s has cancelled under pressure. Their pretext is that the roof has caved in under storm damage. My friend there puts in a call under a different name to ascertain if they have a meeting room available for “Sunday.” Oh yes, they say.

To the traditional enemy it is a game, and they do not realize that every time they attack people’s freedom to speak, and to listen to others speaking, they are turning more ordinary folks against themselves. After locating this evening’s large function room south of Los Angeles, with somewhat greater difficulty than the US Army is having in finding Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Omar , and Saddam Hussein , I spend an hour carrying the half-ton of boxes inside. It’s like Feeding the Five Thousand.

The boxes never seem to empty. The first people arrive at five PM. Aaargh. I shoo them away and tell them to come back at six, official doors-opening time. Mark speaks for an hour, pre-empting much of what I am going to say myself; heigh ho. I then speak for an hour, and nobody dies.

He makes wind-up gestures towards the end (he later denies he did) and I do so; so the audience misses out on the peroration, which was not very good anyway. “What did you think of your talk?” he asks rather mysteriously. “Was it one of your best?” The audience of rather under one hundred is pleased anyway, and many bring in collections of my books to sign, which is nice — some going right