David Irving |
Documents on the International Campaign for Real History
Posted Saturday, March 8, 2008
© Focal Point 2008
What's with the badge, rabbi, I'll say, gesturing to his six-pointed star ornament. You the Sheriff of Dublin City?
March 7, 2008 (Friday)
Windsor (England) - Dublin (Ireland)No word from Dublin yet on whether they need me tonight, which is rather inconvenient.
Der Spiegel runs a story on the Amber Room. I post it with a commentary on the website.
9:47 a.m Jamie Macken, a researcher at RTÉ [Irish National Television], confirms that they are going ahead, and I will fly over this afternoon to Dublin. I phone my brother to ask if I am right in believing that our father got married in Cork. He confirms, yes, in 1921, and he had a pistol in his back pocket because of the Sinn Féiners, and his best man was captured soon after by the Sinn Féin and tortured. I may mention that piece of local colour in Monday's debate at University College Cork (UCC),
As I am about to open the gate the mail comes. It contains a totally unheralded gift from an unknown Canadian for [a large sum], to do what I want with [. . .]
I catch the 3:25 flight by British Midland airways to Dublin. The crew want to charge me £2.50 for a paper cup of instant coffee. Um, no. At six p.m. I check into the Radisson Hotel at RTÉ's expense and go online. Monday's debate in Cork has been cancelled. Quoi de neuf. The students email: "Mr. Irving--
Since extending you an invitation to the speak at the UCC Philosophical Society, we have worked hard to provide a fair and secure forum for the intended debate. At the time of our last communication we believed that we had been successful in securing this. However, in recent days we have faced intensifying, potentially violent, opposition to the debate. This, combined with a lack of support from both college authorities and the police force, means that we are no longer in a position to guarantee either your safety or the safety of anyone who might attend. Therefore we will be unable to accommodate you on Monday next. We very much regret being forced to make this decision.It is irksome, but not disastrous. I decide to act stupid, and I reply: "You write, 'We will be unable to accomodate you' -- I am not sure whether this means you will be unable to "accommodate" me -- we have made accommodation plans -- or whether you are canceling the whole event? Sorry if I am appearing dense."
Of course this evening's live television appearance, so far not cancelled, is of far greater value to me for public relations. At 6:34 p.m. UCC confirms:
Apologies for being obscure. I am afraid we won't be able to have you to speak at the meeting. Once again, we very much regret this turn of events.I would still like to speak to my supporters in Cork, however, and I ask UCC: "You mean the meeting is going ahead but without me? The Irish Times is asking. Will the air ticket still be honored?" [After hemnming and hawing, the students inform me that they are cancelling the ticket too.]
AT NINE p.m. a limousine drives me round to the RTÉ building a mile away. RTÉ phones the driver en route, diverting us to the back gate, as Rent-a-mob demonstrators are forming up in front.
I sit in the Green Room for a couple of hours, as they juggle the programme, the popular and long-running Late Late Show, to provide more time for me at the end. There is a lot that they are not telling me. The producer explains that I will no longer be doing a one-on-one with the presenter, as they had intended, because they have been coming under pressure all day, and there will now be two opponents, a Jew and a German historian from Dublin University -- the pressure having come from Jewish quarters -- quelle surprise: initially they demanded that I be cancelled, but RTÉ have stood firm, and this is a compromise.
On my way to makeup I am escorted past the other Green Room and I catch sight of a middle-aged gent wearing a large yellow metallic Star of David badge on his left breast, evidently the Paradejude who is to be set up against me. I mock to the producer: "Evidently not a very religious Jew, or he would have had to come here on foot, and even then he can't use a television, let alone appear on one: It's been the Sabbath since sundown."
"Well," prompts the producer happily, "that did strike us too. Why don't you bring it up!"
That's encouraging. I decide that these folks need ridicule, not respect, for their comic rituals and paraphernalia: "What's with the badge, rabbi," I'll say, gesturing to his six-pointed star ornament. "You the Sheriff of Dublin City?"
There is a live audience of some 200 Dubliners, so it'll be kind of touch-and-go; it reminds me of the day in Vienna prison two years back when I was pushed into that holding cell, and as the door slammed shut I found it held only Black criminals -- sixteen of them. "Sorry," I shouted above their jungle hubbub. "I think there's been a mistake. Where's the waiting room for Whites?" Loud laughter all round.
AROUND eleven p.m. -- the programme's audience is now topping out at close to one million viewers in both northern and southern Ireland -- I am led into the arena. The presenter is a well-spoken and moderate man, who speaks a lovely Dublin brogue, and who knows what the audience wants.
A young German historian Dr Robert Gerwarth (right) sits to my right -- he is teaching conformist history at Dublin University. I chat with him for a couple of minutes as we wait for the cameras to go live again. His English is remarkably good, and the usual battle of wills begins to see whose language prevails between us: eventually my German vanquishes his English. Triumph of the Will.
He tells me he is writing a book on Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler's right-hand man until 1942, and his knowledge is formidable, but like all Germans he takes no risks. He mentions Himmler's famous October 1943 speech in Posen to the SS generals, but he has not spotted what I have -- that the page where Himmler makes his damning admission about killing the Jewish women and children too is a retype, done on a different typewriter, on different paper, by a different typist. As even Johnny Depp would say, "Now that's interesting."
After the television cameras come on, he claims that over ninety-nine percent of German historians support the conformist line, and that I am in a tiny (and by implication despised) minority. I tease him: "What happens to the one per cent who disagree? That's why the ninety-nine percent roll over and agree." He appears to know nothing about the prison sentences handed out by German courts to the unruly thinkers.
At one point he adopts pure bluff, or ignorance, and claims that in the Wannsee Conference ("of January 20, 1942", I remind him and the audience), Heydrich explicitly talks of killing the Jews; I state quite flatly that there is no such language used in the document.
He then mentions Hermann Göring's role, in signing the authority to Heydrich ("in July 1941," I add), as an accomplice. Wrong again. I know these documents off by heart, and educate the million viewers: in that document Göring talks only of a Gesamtlösung, an "overall solution," and there is no talk of killing.
In fact I detected, when I was the first to use Göring's 1941 handwritten diary for my biography of the man, that Heydrich had secured just a ten-minute interview with the Reichsmarschall on that date, July 31, 1941, at which he put before the no doubt harassed Göring the one-paragraph authority (Vollmacht) to sign; it is not even on Göring's headed paper -- that too had been typed by Heydrich and his staff. I do hope that Gerwarth gets these things right before he puts his biography to print. Or perhaps he won't. I hear that German prisons are somewhat less comfortable than the Austrian.
Gerwarth is shocked when I tell him that my loss of liberty was not a slap on the wrist, a couple of days in an open prison, but four hundred days of solitary confinement in a six foot square cell, locked down all day, in the heart of Vienna As I put it to the producer in the Green Room: by imprisoning me, my opponents shot themselves in the foot. "Whom will the public more willingly believe -- the historian who has been imprisoned for what he writes, or the rivals who roll over and conform?"
March 8, 2008 (Saturday)
Dublin (Ireland) - Windsor (England)A SNATCHED breakfast and then by RTÉ limousine to the airport, chatting with the driver; his views are similar to mine. I suggest that a permanent solution to the Irish problem would be to reunite the country within the United Kingdom but under an all-Irish government, with the prime minister of this new united Ireland being constitutionally also the deputy prime minister of Britain, with full ministerial responsibility for all-Ireland affairs. The Irving Solution to the Troubles.
We agree however that the northern and southern Irish will never stop fighting each other, it is swilling around "in their blood" -- a deadly amalgam of testosterone, Guinness, and religion. He says that Dubliners have nothing but contempt for Gerry Adams, who has done so much harm to his country.
The BMI plane lands very heavily at 1:15 p.m. at Heathrow. I drive straight back to the manor house in Windsor, brew a cup of tea and phone B.. The Australian High Commissioner has sent a pleasant letter, confirming he has forwarded my letter to their new prime minister.
Around three o'clock B. calls me back for a long chat. [. . .] I remind her softly that in a few days' time it will be sixteen years that we have been together, and that sixteen years is a long time, and I curse myself at once for having said it [. . .]
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