Real History and the Million Pound Question on RaceDocuments on the
She doggedly argues the cause of the ethnic minorities, and I produce the killer argument, one that has been silently nagging me for months
December
28, 2004 (Tuesday)
London (England)
I SCAN more old negatives. I am now up to the birth of Josephine, April 1, 1963, a darling little baby in a cot; on a table in the background of the pictures is an advance copy of my first book,
The Destruction of Dresden, and the TK1
reel-to-reel tape recorder on which I have recorded the message from the hospital: “It appears that you’ve had a little girl.” Poor Josephine, how we all miss her.
December
29, 2004 (Wednesday)
London (England)
A poor night, very wakeful; some idiot rings our doorbell in the very small hours (“Yes?” “Roger?”
— “P*** off!”), Later I hear Jessica answering the phone. A wrong number. Heavy dreams all night, very exhausting: I am climbing up from a beach to the top of a cliff, and end up on a ledge with my back to the rock, unable to go further up or down, and a sheer concave rock face beneath me, down to rocks hundreds of feet below.
I force-quit, so to speak, and make myself wake up, as the only escape.
I work all day on Apocalypse 1945: the
Destruction of Dresden, and on scanning. Over the road for supper with Jessica, but they are packed, we have no reservation, and we make do with a carry-out pizza.
Bed around 12:30 a.m.
December30,
2004 (Thursday)
London (England)
Good sound sleep. Awake at 7:40 a.m., then up at
10:15 a.m. Nice dreams, which I can’t remember: as they should be. I write to a friend in Chicago:
Just a message to let you know that
Jessica is not to be seen without her yellow
Chicago Hood. She would go to bed in it if she
could. It clearly wins hands down as the best
gift she received this year. How clever you are.
I have given her your details and ordered her to
write thanking.
This email to [–] College,
Massachusetts. “I am visiting Massachusetts in the spring and would like permission to research in the
John J McCloy papers for my Winston
Churchill biography, and in particular in his formidable diaries. What formalities are necessary please? Anticipated length of stay 2-3 days. — They reply within an hour, welcoming my visit.
I am now scanning photos of Josephine’s early months. Her baby features unmistakably those of the later Josephine.
Those were happy hours that I spent in the darkroom forty years ago with tank and reel, and I am pleased the negatives have weathered the intervening years without a stain — and escaped seizure in May 2002 as well somehow. I have also found one or two of me with Hitler’s secretary
Christa Schroeder, etc.
Phone call from a male descendant of R Steer in
Somerset; he has received my letter, knows only that their boss Colonel Michael
Murphy died many years ago, Murphy’s widow died about six years ago, and they had a son and daughter, both probably still alive. That is helpful, but it may be a dead end. Let’s see if my letter to Murphy’s old address draws a response.
Benté . . . has however begun to wear the blue night gown we bought her for Christmas, and it suits her.
I WAS about to walk across Mayfair with Jessica for supper at [a restaurant]. As we walked over there few days ago, a discussion developed between us on this country’s growing obsession with racism and race. As I told Richard Rampton QC in the Lipstadt trial, if there had been no mass immigration there would be no race problem, and the unfortunate Black teenager Steven Lawrence
would not have been murdered. Logical, right? Duh?
He seemed baffled by the obvious.
Jessica teases and says, Supposes she decides to marry a Black? I say she has more brains than that, hoping to provoke the appropriate answer. She parrots that their brains are the same, and I say they are not — they make better jumpers, runners, pugilists, and the rest, but their brains are
not the same.
I launch into an explanation of the Bell Curve theories to her: how there will always be a residue of very brainy Blacks, who will overlap with the very stupid bottom-end Whites (most of whom appear to work in the media). And that way above us all are the Asians — not those from the sub-continental Asia, but from the Orient.
Jessica of course is too clever to agree easily, and I then produce craftier arguments. In the
British broadcast media, there are now positive discrimination laws in place guaranteeing Black representation on the TV screen and elsewhere, to the detriment of Whites of equal and even greater qualifications — as witness the famous rule-of-three: if three faces are on British TV now, one has to be Black.
This is Greg
Dyke‘s undying legacy: creating a Black Hole in broadcasting where the great Lord Reith had found none to be necessary.
Jessica, bless her, is turning into a proper little tree-hugger. She doggedly argues the cause of the ethnic minorities, and I produce the killer argument, one that has been silently nagging me for months.
I am a dedicated watcher of the television quiz show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? To qualify for that, contestants must phone a computerized system which asks them three general knowledge questions. If they get them right, their names go into the draw to be among the ten contestants.
We assume that the system is random, is fair, is colorblind, and produces no systematic or methodological errors in selecting the final ten contestants each week — the television moguls would not tolerate otherwise.
So the Millionaire system represents the automated random-questioning of a huge cross-section of the country’s population, day after day.
Blacks know how to use telephones. Blacks would like to be millionaires. There are never any Blacks among the ten contestants selected each week.
Black community leaders — and these are legion in this country now — might argue that the questions are loaded against the Black intellectual horizon, that if the test questions were, for example, about hip-hop fashion, gangsta rap, freebasing, or P Diddy, then the front row, sitting with fingers poised on the keypads, would look like
The Black & White Minstrel Show each
Saturday evening.
Perhaps this is true. This is one of the blessings of having been designated “a racist” in the Lipstadt Trial by Richard Rampton QC (who of course was not racist himself, notwithstanding that his entire forty-strong team in court each day was
White) and Mr Justice Gray (ditto). I can say what I think, and ask the awkward questions that others can’t.
But here’s a puzzle also, to which I don’t know the answer: there are very rarely any Asian contestants, either sub-continental or Oriental, selected for
Millionaire either.
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David Irving