David Irving |
Documents on the International Campaign for Real History
Posted Thursday, October 9, 2008; entry for Oct 7 added Saturday, October 25, 2008
© Focal Point 2008
A Norwegian journalist phones, has the Norwegian Literary Festival contacted me today?
October 7, 2008 (Tuesday)
Windsor - London - Windsor (England)I BONE up on the Celebrity Big Brother format and personalities on the Internet.
From 1 to 2:30 pm at the Kensington Hilton with the producers. They seem very keen, pleased that I am so up front, open and uninhibited. Comes easily to me.
October 8, 2008 (Wednesday)
Windsor (England) - Budapest (Hungary)AT 9:14 am I read the overnight mails. Very unexpectedly [a major New York publisher] seems interested in publishing a US edition of Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich. "So we would like to see the book or the manuscript," he writes. "I seem to like to piss everyone off."
9:29 a.m: I reply to him, "Just off to Budapest this morning for six days....
But I will mail the book to you this morning first class airmail. It is literally my only copy. At that time [1996] there were only six copies on US soil, in the hands of SMP. Nobody had seen it. The attack was on me, not the book. It was spearheaded by Deborah Lipstadt, hence my lawsuit against her.I complete the Windsor mail-out, and mail everything from Eton at ten a.m.
AT 10:15 a.m a radio journalist of Norwegian Broadcasting phones for a ten-minute interview. There is uproar in Norway because of the official invitation to me to speak as keynote speaker at Norway's Festival of Literaure in May. He says that the festival authorities are now claiming that they have "invited you as a liar".
Startled somewhat, I reply that they have picked the wrong person. If they wanted to invite a liar, they should invite Tony Blair or George W. Bush, or even John Howard of Australia, not me. Their lies spilled the blood of half a million innocent Iraqis.
He asks for details of the invitation, and I read the pertinent words to him, and the letter from the Royal Norwegian Embassy in London, formally welcoming my visit:
The festival is one of the main literary festivals in Norway and attracts a lot visitors from Norway and abroad. You should have no difficulties whatsoever during your stay there and we hope you will be able to accept the invitation to speak there. All the best ...He says that there is uproar in the Norwegian press, and "neo-Nazis" from all over Europe plan to attend. I reply that I cannot help that. If I am banned from speaking in other countries, people will come from those countries to Norway to hear me perhaps, and I cannot judge who they will be. It will not affect what I say. (Realistically, I now assume there is little point in further preparing my speech). -- He asks can they send a television reporter to interview me, and I agree, but not today. He: then, after your return from Budapest.
At 10:08 p.m I email to Endemol: "I enjoyed our chat with the producers yesterday; please keep me informed of the progress of your approach to Channel 4. My mobile works over here (at a price)."
AT MIDDAY the housekeeper comes to drive me to Heathrow; all well there, and I take off for Zürich (change planes: I had nearly bought a ticket via Frankfurt in Germany!) and Hungary.
Seven p.m. at Budapest airport, Réka is waiting for me. Spot on. [She was the Hungarian who visited me once a month in prison in Austria]. She drives me to her apartment, and we have a long chat. She is devoted to her little boy Hunor. After she leaves I go online around nine p.m., and write to a friend in the United States, who will be working for me next month: "Tomorrow may be a problem as all Bp streets are closed for some NATO conference." I add:
You're going to have a really interesting time. When you come and have refreshed, we will have a talk about your major job, and throw ideas back and forth. I hope by then they will have reconnected my landline phone,-- I had another screech at their engineers yesterday before I left -- because you'll be phoning USA a lot.Each afternoon we drive into Eton to the post office: a lovely one and half miles, across the flat "common" where the cattle graze, with the very ancient Windsor Castle dead ahead on its mound, very pretty. It's one of the few post offices in England where there is never any line. (English: "queue"). Eton is full of a thousand boys and young men in tuxedos, waddling around like swift penguins, all from very, very rich parents, and all even more arrogant and snobbish than you.
Nothing wrong with arrogance, I might have added. But I do point out: "Many of the houses we pass on the way are older than the United States!" Might as well lay it on thick and rotten for our visitors from the colonies.
October 9, 2008 (Thursday)
Budapest (Hungary)REKA phoned, will come over with little Hunor; dinner with Aunt Clara this evening. That's nice. But then the trouble begins.
At 10:05 a.m, a Norwegian journalist phones, has the Norwegian Literary Festival contacted me today? -- No, say I. He: There will be a press conference at midday held by the Festival organisers. They really have not contacted me? "If" they withdraw the invitation to deliver the keynote speech, what are my comments? None at all, I stolidly reply; if they do not have the courage of their convictions, that does not interest me. He: will phone again after the conference. [Lapsing into German, as I sometimes do within the privacy of my skull, I think: meinetwegen.]
I go online for five minutes and browse the Norwegian press. Oddly, when I input the search engine Google.com it defaults immediately to the Hungarian Google.hu -- I wonder if that is proof of the same kind of search-engine tampering that the German government has imposed on Google.de?
There is certainly a lot of noise in the Oslo press, and the tone is ugly. I at once send this message to the organiser, Stig Saeterbakken: "Dear Stig
- A Norwegian journalist has informed me a few minutes ago that your Festival is holding a press conference at midday. I have not been informed about this.
- I have been told that there are a lot of lies in the Norwegian press about me, and that I am being constantly defamed by your country's journalists. I hope that your organisers remain strong, and have the courage of their convictions, as we say in England.
- Do not allow the libellers to dictate to you. I had already prepared a major speech on truth -- on Real History, as I call it -- for the festival: I was going to highlight the manner in which the Norwegians, in return for soft treatment by the Nazis, collaborated with Hitler.
- For example, the Norwegian police arresting British commandos and turning them over to the Gestapo for execution in November 1942. That is real history, and it explains much. I do not write "pretty" history, I write about things as they really were.
I send copies of this to other Norwegian journalists who now contact me.
Réka comes round at midday to cook lunch for me, and I interrupt my writing briefly to play with her little boy Hunor: he is fascinated by computers, and of course finds my Mac much easier than his mother's PC.
At one-fifteen p.m. Norwegian radio phones to tape an interview -- the news being that the Norwegian Literary Festival has cancelled its invitation to me, and that the Artistic Director Stig Saeterbakken has resigned, no doubt in protest. I can only say that this is the first I have heard of it; I express regrets that the Festival organisers have surrendered, but the radio journalist explains that there have been demonstrations (he says "riots"); I suggest that he and his colleagues ponder who are the people behind these riots -- who puts up the money for them, and why? I add that my books have been published by the country's most respected publishers and given very honourable reviews.
Why this worldwide need to silence me? What is it that I am saying that is against the vested interests of these wealthy opponents, the people I call "the traditional enemies of free speech"? He phones again a few minutes later -- there was a sound error, the recording was blank, and would I repeat it all?
I do. I have had to say it often enough before -- I tell him that I regard every such ban imposed on me as another feather in my cap: a tacit admission by my enemies that they are incapable of free debate against me. I have no idea of what arguments have been marshalled against me, as the festival's organisers have not had the courtesy even to inform me that the invitation has been withdrawn. So much for their Festival of Truth, the chosen topic for the May jamboree. The liars have prevailed.
Norwegian Radio phones from Oslo, they want me on their main programme at six p.m. this evening with other guests live. I give them this Budapest apartment phone number.
Then another Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten, phones. My cell phone balance is dwindling. We speak for 15 minutes, and she asks what I am doing here in Hungary. It looks like I am going to have to stay near the phone all day, I reply.
1996 outcry as St Martin's Press under pressure from the the traditional enemies cancels plans to publish David Irving's biography, "Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich", which Doubleday Inc have just nominated as their Book of the Month
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