Diary: November 27, 2007

November
26, 2007 (Monday)
Windsor (England)

HISTORIC day dawns. Ishall speak at the Oxford Union tonight. I always wonder if each such day will be my last: we know today that the enemy is turning out in force. My brain is in turmoil all night as I hack out fragments of what I shall say. Then I dream I am on a ski lift, sailing aloft, over the title pages of my thirty books scattered in the snow below, starting withFeldherren, on a white sheet of paper — nothing else.

That was the book that appeared for only one day in 1975 before I myself had to ban it.
Ahead, I see two or three more, ending with
“Churchill’s War”, vol. iii: “The Sundered
Dream” — and its dirty little secret,how
Japan tried to surrender on July 13, 1945 but was atom-bombed three weeks later all the same.

Alex emails from Russia: “Just had a phone talk with
Ms Olga S. about your plan to combine these three [Churchill] volumes into one. She was very pleased and asked whether it would be possible to arrange the copyright matter and then begin translating it without waiting.”

I reply: “I have had bad experiences with
Russian publishers, as you know. Why does no
Russian publisher publish my flagship,Hitler’s
War?”

A reader emails: “Did I catch something on the news about you in Cornwall?” I recommend him to keep his eye on the Tube tonight too.

I have a sneaking expectation that the event will be cancelled at the eleventh hour.

Steve has responded to my queries on the odd
Himmler suicide marginal note he found on book in a public library –THE
ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE
GESTAPO.

I
believe it was a ballpoint pen scribbled note
at the side of a photograph of “Himmler after
taking cyanide”.

“No he didn’t, Sergeant **** hit him in the face.
I know because I was there.” I believed it to be genuine to the extent that I asked the Librarian if it was possible to get a list of past borrowers. However I was told that whenever a book was returned the record of its borrowing was deleted.

I thank him, and add: “Iam biting my nails today, as you can imagine. My brother [a blacksmith] has made a super set of balls and chains for me, really heavy stuff but with quick-release clips in case things turn nasty.”

He has an Arab slave-ball in his collection, but it is really heavy and with my prison-weakened legs I do not think it will be effective. I want the chains to clank properly, and I have prepared a scenario for the opening lines.

Right:
Gay street protestor, unimpressed
Bobbies

I DRIVE over to Oxford far too early. Just like in the old days, 1964, when I found the top-secret Cherwell papers in three olive green cabinets in the basement of Nuffield College. At the rendezvous, a car park outside the city, a black car arrives with a burly passenger, a man in a woollen cap, who is to get me into the
Union Society building. “A lot of press are already there,” he warns. “And hostiles.”

My attempts to make conversation with the back of his head fail. As the car backs at speed into the alley behind the Union Society, chased by two bobbies who reprimand his driver, the cameras begin to flash. The flashes blind me for several seconds — it is an epileptic wall of white, and shouting and shoving. I have already got the heavy balls-and-chain out of the bag, and clutch them high as I am dragged out of the car by Woollen Cap and pushed through into the open door.

It is the only showing the balls will get all evening. I just manage to gasp a few words into a BBC television microphone.

I am led up into the library and the doors at each end are placed under guard. On every other such occasion there has been a good pre-speech dinner, followed by a welcoming cocktail party, and indeed a comfortable hotel afterwards; not for us this evening. We are evidently the Bad
Guys.

Keeping company,Phillippa Neal[[email protected]], the Union’s Hon. secretary, spends most of the evening affably chatting, and scoffing crisps from a bag. Three times she asks razor-sharp questions, straight to the kill; she will make a good matador if she is not snapped up by some sharp public relations firm when she gets her degree.

The behaviour ofLuke Trylas president
[luke.tryl@
magd.ox.ac.uk] is, shall we say, odd.

The current president of theUnion Society, he stays out of the holding room for most of the evening; he has the effete’s instinctive dislike of shaking hands (this may save his bacon when the time comes — the traditional enemy have long memories, and they clearly will not forgive him for the invitation to me).

He distinguishes himself by referring to my views asabhorrentnot once, but twice, in his introductory remarks to the audience. I make no comment to him, and since he was my host it would be graceless for me to pass comment here.

AROUND seven p.m. he comes into the holding room
— it reminds me by now of The Tank in the
Vienna prison — and mentions that the BBC’sNewsnightprogramme wishes to interview me; he is against it, he says, and again I defer to him, as he is host. He and Phillippa also ask me earnestly not to use the balls and chain, which rather floors me. The apparatus must already have been mentioned in the media. They suggest that the O.U. is not the kind of forum for such trivia.

I know that at U.C.L. or at
Imperial College it would have gone down well, but on balance they are undoubtedly right.

The mob keeps up a loud chant all evening, quite a feat of stamina, but as coachloads have been bussed in from all over the country, they are being steadily reinforced. Half joking, but only half, I remark to Phillippa that as long as we don’t see the flicker of flames outside, we should be alright; the remark reminds me of the evening at Trinity College Dublin which led to a permanent ban on my ever speaking there again —
the violence was not mine, but I was the victim.

After that remark she goes to the window once or twice to check.

Left:
Nick Griffin arrives a few minutes before Mr
Irving

The street outside the building is wedged full of protestors, and police are unable to clear a path for most of the ticketed audience to get in. Berkeley 1994 all over again.

Toward
9:15 pm, by which time I have been inside the building for four hours, other students come and tell me that the evening is to be split, since some of the audience is in one building, and the other in the main debating chamber, and for policing reasons the two halves can not be brought together.Nick Griffin— whom I have never met and do not meet even now — will speak to one audience, and I to the other in the main chamber.

It sounds odd; I consider the wordchaotic, reject it forshambolic, chew that over once or twice — in the absence of anything else to chew — but decide that it is their function, not mine, even if it is a pity to allow the scum to dictate events to that degree.

The debating chamber is a large oak-paneled hall, with a bare oaken floor. The audience sits in tiers of seats at one end, the speakers are on leather-padded benches in a semi circle at the other, and there is a thirty-foot space of open floor in the middle — enough to spoil anybody’s aim, I quietly reflect.

The Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, DrEvan Harris, who admits that he is
Jewish, speaks well, virtually without notes, and with great force and coherence. He concedes that even in a world of free speech, it is proper to enforce laws of defamation; but he would otherwise afford wide scope, and emphasizes the need to include the element ofintentin any new laws related to public speech. There has to be an intent to provoke disorder, or hatred.

In Germany this is already the case, but prosecutors there seldom bother to prove intent, and Iwould have thought that unless the perpetrator pens a note saying that his intention tonight is to cause violence, affray, and general hatred all round, the element of intent, while a worthy plank in the law, would be difficult to nail down in practice. (The other speaker, journalistAnne Atkins, speaks no less forcefully after me, and generally adopts many of the points I make.)

TRYL — the name is of Ukrainian origin — calls on me to speak, again dissociating himself in advance from myabhorrentviews, and he pleads with the audience to give me a quiet hearing. This is totally unnecessary, as I pride myself that I can command even the most fractious audience within two minutes unless, as in Birmingham in the 1980s, organised troublemakers have infiltrated in large numbers and maintain a steady and deafening chant.

So at last, after thirty years, at around nine-fifteen p.m., I step onto the large open space in front of the large audience in the main debating chamber of the Oxford Union.

I apologise that they have been kept waiting so long, but I have also been kept waiting, thirty years, for this moment: seven times the O.U. has invited me to speak, and seven times the invitation has been withdrawn, most recently under the presidency ofAmy Harland, who kept strong until twenty-four hours from the date, and was then forced to cancel.

The chanting from outside continues, but the audience can hear every word I say.

Luke Tryl’s strictures on my planned opening have partly skewed my mentally prepared speech.
I find myself fumbling my overture (“I am D J C
Irving — D for despicable, as theOxford
Studentwrote; J for Jew-hater; C for —
well, I don’t know what, but equally untrue”).

But within seconds I am into my stride as I set out the main points: the importance of the written word, The Book — I cite the case ofMiklos Vásárhelyi, who was moved by readingGeorge Orwell’sAnimal Farm, as he told me, to risk his life and the well-being of his family to join the anti-Soviet uprising in Budapest in 1956 and become one of the doomed prime ministerImre
Nagy‘s revolutionary ministers; and from that I move to the need

to protect every author’s freedom to research, write, print, publish, and distribute what he finds.

I remind the audience of the coachloads of demonstrators they have had to make their way through this evening: “Who pays for the coaches!
Those things don’t come cheap.”

Tryl is still nervous. He asks me at one point to keep to the theme (I am explaining briefly what it is inHitler’s WarandChurchill’s Warthat the traditional enemy are anxious to suppress: the proven revelation that in 1940Britain was never seriously at risk of Nazi invasion, that we bankrupted the Empire for no real reason, that our journey was “not really necessary” to use war-poster language: and thatWinston Churchilland

his gang maintained the “Nazi invasion” scare for their own personal reasons of power politics.)

Right:
Masks, but no balls and chains.

I sit down to total silence, which is disconcerting. It reminds me ofDavid
Frost‘s tactic on his television shows in the 1960s and 1970s: his audiences were instructed by an illuminated signSILENCE – NO APPLAUSEat the appropriate times. I can’t see one here, though.

Hear
David Irving speak in British
cities. Register
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citiesLiverpoolandHalifax: buffet and talk 7-10
pm

Tryl throws the discussion open to the floor.
Every single question is directed to me, and I move forward to the middle of that open space.
One student asks, “What is more important, Truth or Happiness?” It is a Buddhist question. I reply that Churchill once defined that the job of an historian is to find out What Happened and
Why. It is up to the individual writer how close he wants to get to the truth.

Absolute Truth is exponentially difficult,i.e.impossible, to achieve for any writer: you approach it, you approximate to it; the more time and money that you spend, the closer you inch towards to it; but it is an absolute which you can never really touch.

An attractive student at the rear ofthe chamber asks again what is the subject that the establishment are trying to suppress, and I repeat it briefly, while I sense Tryl glowering from his dais behind me.

“Nothing to do with their Holocaust,” I emphasise: “I find that topic boring, and I flip to a different channel when it comes on TV.”

Born in 1938, I continue, I regard the Empire as Britain’s great achievement, and from 1940
onwards we squandered these two centuries of work for no good reason.

If the war had ended in the summer of 1940, if we had accepted Hitler’s peace offer — as half the ministers in
Churchill’s Cabinet, and certainly HMQueen
Elisabethherself, desired, then Britain would not have ended up now as a vassal of the
United States: and of course the Holocaust, whatever it was, could not have happened, as it began in earnest after 1940.

I thank the audience for their bravery in coming, and in a brief peroration I repeat that this evening has marked the highest pointin my career — it is an evening to which I have looked forward for thirty years, and I shall cherish the moment for the rest of my life.
Again no applause. I then realize that it is a tradition at the O.U. not to applaud, just as well-bred concert audiences do not render applause at the end of thePathétique.

As for Luke Tryl:Abhorrent? That young man should go far.

11
p.m. With a wave to demonstrators, David Irving walks out of the Oxford Union and says goodbye — for the time being.

EVIDENTLY the early news reports have latched onto the balls-and-chain. “You certainly are a man of your word,” I find one correspondent has written when I get back to Windsor at midnight.
“I just caught the latest on the internet about your Ball and Chain! Hope you get back safely.
It’s going to be a very dull day when are no longer around! … Your torch will be a hard one for the next one to carry — hang on in there. Verity needs you!” I wonder — who is
Verity?

Contribute once | regularly [Previous
Radical’s Diary]

David
Irving issues a warning letter: “I shall
without further notice issue a Claim in
Defamation”

BBC
report on the event – an Oriel undergraduate,
said most questions were addressed to Mr
Irving.He
said: “I think it was a very balanced
argument and both sides did really
well.”|Guardian|Independent

In
The Guardian,

Max Hastings writes:Students
need to know what sort of dangerous people
are out
there|Protesters
force their way into Oxford
Union| but
David Irving spoke without interruption (more
later)

Pressure
mounts:

href=”http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23422978-details/riot+fear+as+holocaust-denier+david+irving+and+bnp+leader+nick+griffin+invited+to+speak+at+oxford/article.do&#8221>Evening
Standard: Riot
fear(Irving:
“I do not plan rioting myself”)|Son
of only recent Brits, Trevor Phillips (left)
tells OU to cancel even
now|

href=”http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=496301&in_page_id=1770&#8243>Daily
Mail’s outrage
mounts| The Observer (London) weeps buckets:Row
as Oxford Union votes to hear
Irving

Der
Spiegel’s spin on this: SPIEGEL ONLINE,
25.11.2007:Debattierclub
in Oxford: Holocaustleugner auf Podium
eingeladen:
[Politiker sind entsetzt, tausende
Bürger empören sich: Die Oxford
Union

hat den Holocaust-Leugner David Irving
und den rechtsextremen Politiker Nick Griffin
eingeladen. Trotz massiven Protestes soll die
Veranstaltung Montag über die Bühne
gehen. Die Polizei rechnetmit
Ausschreitungen] |

Jewish
world:tickets
to the event have sold
out|Oxford
University in crisis:student
vote was overwhelming: They wanted to hear
David Irving speak

./../../../homepage.html”>David Irving