David Irving |
Documents on the International Campaign for Real History
Posted Saturday, October 20, 2007
© Focal Point 2007
Of course if they keep coming at me with their fists, then I may yet turn against them.
October19, 2007 (Friday)
Windsor (England)SUN streaming across the lawns when I get up. A beautiful, but chilly, day.
I get a call from Oxford about their forthcoming event. Lord Janner has phoned them, pleading with them not to invite me, shrieking that they are all anti-Semites, and horrified that Oxford would even contemplate it. Janner had said they were causing a major crisis in the University, and even called them "anti-Semitic."
Now I laugh out loud, and I say it is odd that that nasty old pedalist Greville Janner should accuse me of anti-Semitism too, as he was the chief of the odious Board of Deputies of British Jews for years; they should tell him to check the Board's secret 1992 report on me, which I found in Canadian Government files, which said that I was probably not an anti Semite -- as did the ADL's early Intelligence about me -- that I cannot be called an anti-Semite.
Of course if they keep coming at me with their fists, then I may yet turn against them.
B. tells me her newsagent has again set aside a copy of today's Jewish Chronicle for her. It is not her regular reading, which normally barely reaches from Hello! to the Mail -- but I am all over it again. What is it with these people?
At Hammersmith I go online, and sure enough, half a dozen people have sent me the links to today's JC. I wrote them a pretty standard letter last week warning that, as more than one statesman has said in the past, my patience is exhausted, and if these Schmierfinken continued to refer to me glibly as a "Holocaust denier" -- the phrase I went to war with the Lipstadt woman over -- then one or the other will find himself where she was.
As I told Bernie Josephs at the JC (or was it the news editor of Cherwell?), I cannot legally stop a journalist saying that a High Court judge referred to me as a Holocaust denier nearly eight years ago. One day perhaps we will find out why Mr Justice Gray ruled the way he did. As Mrs Merton said to the pretty young bride of the balding, ageing conjurer Daniels, "What was it about this multi millionaire that made you fall in love with him?"
If however a journalist writes now that I am an active HD, that is a new kettle of gefilte. Again I still cannot stop him writing it -- we live in a country of free speech, this is not Germany or Austria -- but he must face the consequences, and as I said to New York Times writer Don Guttenplan in 1999, the year before the Lipstadt-Fest, when he asked the question: Why her? She was, I said, just the one unfortunate enough to be picked out of the line to be shot.
Well, shot she was not, but she and her pals got quite a pasting: they limped out of Court having poured thirteen million dollars of their Hollywood money into of King Pyrrhus of Epirus seem overwhelming by comparison; but that smear-marmalade is spreading pretty thin now, and they'll have to think up something else.
Waiting for that late hour, I settle down on the sofa in the drawing room overlooking the rose garden, and read Bernie Joseph's latest. How can I get out from under their skin?
At the end of one article, he writes:
Auschwitz survivor Trude Levi recalled encountering Irving when she worked in London-based Holocaust resource the Wiener Library in the early 1960s. "He was coming in to do research," she recalled. "He was good-looking, very well spoken and very polite, but for some reason we all had an uncanny feeling about him. Then, when his book came out about Dresden, we realised he was in love with Hitler."That is nice: here is what I drafted last year in prison in my memoirs about the Wiener Library:
The Library proved an immensely helpful resource, despite itself. Its then director C. C. Aronsfeld had all the looks but little of the good nature of Sergeant Ernie Bilko (Phil Silvers). He appeared initially helpful, but years later I realised how deceptive appearances can be, as he began even then agitating against me behind the scenes.Thirty years later I discovered documentary proof that he was hand-in-glove with a certain secretive Board in London, which did not intend me to prosper as time went on. After Dresden appeared he began a letter-writing campaign, both in private and in the Press, attacking my works. While Aronsfeld developed an austere antipathy toward me, this Gentile user of their resources, it was fortunately not shared by his ladies downstairs in the library. As years passed, the Library became less helpful. While I have never hesitated to assist historians, whatever their religious background, its current director Dr David Cesarani refused all access to documents when we were fighting the Lipstadt legal action in 2000. I have perhaps unkindly christened him "Ratface" for his looks. Even-handedness is not their forte. Es gibt sotte und sotte, as the Swabians say; not all folks are alike.
The JC's main article is quite wrongly headed, Why Irving regretted his days in court. I did not, they were exhilarating. They were the first time that the Holocaust industry had been put on trial and required to prove what it had been whining about for fifty years.
The three authors state straight away that I was "comprehensively shredded" by the Lipstadt Trial -- well that is true, rather as the puny might aver that the reputation of the German armed forces was shredded at Stalingrad: yet they carried on against the weight of the entire world for two and a half more years, because they believed the battle against Judeo-Bolshevism was important to humanity and worthwhile.
The JC editorial dips deeply into the pot of Schmiertinte which journalist Arthur Pottersman first flipped open against me in April 1963 (and whatever happened to him?); Roget's thesaurus lying ever-helpful at their side, the write of me as a self serving, widely discredited, former convict, with no reputation, desperate, suffering abject humiliations, distasteful and cynical, a historian whose "career has been built upon shaming the memory of the six million" -- a sentence which puzzles me, as I have written not a single book or play or article let alone produce a Hollywood movie or, like that New York fraudster, finance a ballet about the tragedy.
However, the warning letter makes my point. When the JC contacted Richard Rampton, Lipstadt's clever trial QC, his response indicates that he has grasped it: "There is no question," he claimed, evidently never having read my books, "that from 1988 onwards he [David Irving] was a persistent denier." He would remain so "if he is still denying the facts about Auschwitz". Now that's an odd restriction to apply: is Auschwitz the be-all and end-all of "the Holocaust"? Whatever is found to have been faked there, nobody must say it?
The article continues: "Another member of the defence team, James Libson [that's him, behind Lipstadt's right shoulder] stressed that "Holocaust denial can be to accept some but to deny other aspects [of the Shoah]. Irving has a history of trying to accept aspects in a bid to rehabilitate himself."What he is saying to the JC is that historians now have to buy the whole Holocaust package, just like Tylenol: that's what capital letters are for. You are not allowed to open the box, let alone query one of its contents. If you do, you are a denier, and in short order after that self serving, widely discredited, bereft of reputation, desperate, abject humiliations, distasteful, yadder, yadder, yadder, and if they have their way eventually a "former convict," too.
Evidently writing history in future is going to call for some pretty fancy footwork around the stepping-stones. Libson did most of the trial legwork (Anthony Julius spoke literally only one word) during the trial. A clever but sinister young Jewish lawyer, Libson told me had had been brought up in a fanatical Zionist seminary.
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Next city Birmingham , October 26, 2007, buffet and talk, 7-10 pmThe JC Schmierfinken write of "The sheer unthinkable scale of the Auschwitz death machine."
Well, some of us, even post-Stalingrad, can still think, and one question jitterbugs around inside my head. It concerns the Richard Korherr report - commissioned by Heinrich Himmler, in secret, from Korherr his chief statistician, as an overview of the Final Solution's first ten years. I think I am the first author ever to have used it, in my 1977 Hitler biography. It gives an impressive total figure of Jews "subjected to special treatment" in the Reinhardt camps by January 1943 (1,264,166, identical to the figure in the controversial decoded Höfle telegram).
Himmler, interestingly, commands Korherr to rewrite his report more concisely for the Führer, and to change that murky phrase to read, "channeled through the camps to the East" instead of "subjected to special treatment in" them.
Quite an impressive document in the Holocaust Industry's hands, but for one thing . . . it makes no mention of Auschwitz, where, according to them, the biggest massacre of the lot was going on. The deaths at Auschwitz were evidently statistically insignificant at that time. Now that omission really does bug me as an historian, far more than what the JC Schmierfinken can write.
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