David Irving |
Documents on the International Campaign for Real History
Posted Wednesday, December 17, 2008
© Focal Point 2008
If Hitler had had the wit to put his Panzer and SS divisions in blackface, they would now be welcomed in Britain with open arms and copious handouts from the public social services
December 6, 2008 (Saturday)
Windsor - London - Windsor (England)AT ONE p.m. we are in Bloomsbury, and at two I speak to a New Right meeting at The Plough in Museum Street, with eighty people packing into the room, says J.
December 7, 2008 (Sunday)
Windsor (England) - Paris (France)WE NOTE the little red Citroën's mileage reading, leave Windsor at noon for Dover and sail over to Calais with the three p.m. car ferry Pride of Dover. A good lunch at the Langan's Brasserie on board, and we arrive in Paris around nine p.m. I was last here in 1987 with SS-G.
Jae does not drive with a manual gearbox, and does not do interstates in the USA either, so I am doing all the driving.
Foolishly, I forget that I have left my Macintosh, carrying my life's work, on top of the van outside while I chat in the hotel with guests who have come to meet me. I dash outside after two hours and find it still on top of the car, its little pilot light blinking invitingly to passers-by.
The rooms here are icy cold. The beds hard and unwelcoming.
December 8, 2008 (Monday)
Paris (France) - San Sebastian (Spain)WE drive all day down to San Sebastian in Spain, arriving there in a downpour after heavy traffic through the mountains, around seven p.m. Supper with Niall McD who has flown up from Saudi Arabia. He picks up our hotel tab, buys a stack of books and invites us to supper too.
December 9, 2008 (Tuesday)
San Sebastian - Madrid (Spain)We briefly visit the San Sebastian seafront in pouring rain, and then carry on at midday onwards to Madrid through snow-covered mountains and roads, with snow ploughs standing by. Gabriela phones from Lima, Peru, just as we are driving into Madrid. I call in at my daughter's apartment around seven p.m. and send this email to Peru:
Sorry we lost the connection when you telephoned. I was just driving ... through snow and ice into Madrid in very heavy rush-hour traffic, so after chatting with you I handed the phone to J. to continue the conversation for a few seconds and then we lost your connection almost at once.Kevin H. has emailed:
I'm just back from the Royal Society of Arts Screening [of Bloomstein's movie An Independent Mind]. Very good and well attended. Some Anti-Nazi scum outside, which was a shame as it's an awfully cold night and they seemed to miss out on the nice refreshments. These people never seem to wash or shave -- strange that. [The film producer Rex] Bloomstein was there to talk and answer questions at the end... Questions generally favourable about your inclusion and the film as a whole. It was all perfect until M. went off on some insane rant. Doc has a copy of the slime being handed out. It is offensive and defamatory. Usual sh*t about the BNP coming round for tea and scones at Duke St etc.A pleasant dinner with [one of my daughters and her son] at Arco's in downtown Madrid. J., a quasi-vegetarian, reluctantly chooses a chicken for her supper. I drive them home, and give the boy the Nesquick we have brought from Sainsbury's, and fifty euros pocket money.
December 10, 2008 (Wednesday)
Madrid - Conil de la Frontera (Spain)During the night the chicken comes back to haunt J. with some violence. Perhaps the food was badly cooked, or contaminated. Shades of poor John Costello [British historian, died in agony of botulism food poisoning on a mid-Atlantic flight returning from Madrid to Miami]. ... She at once has to sit, very white-faced and looking most unwell. For most of today's long drive south to Cádiz she sleeps, curled up uneasily in the passenger seat. Fortunately I have brought a pillow from Lake End House.
It is eleven a.m. before we leave Madrid, and the drive through Córdoba and Seville takes me eight hours. Today I give the van a power-wash at a roadside gas station, which it really enjoys; it has been behaving very well indeed. We reach Conil at seven pm, the van's mileage being 1,653 miles since London. I phone P's number and hang up at once as instructed. Unfortunately the apartment building in which he has given us rooms has no Internet. I take supper with him at our usual seafront restaurant down on the otherwise totally deserted Atlantic promenade.
December 11, 2008 (Thursday)
Conil de la Frontera (Spain)From an Internet café I email to Pedro about tomorrow's fixture:
Please tell me where the function in Valencia will be and a171208.htmlt what time. Also Barcelona and Madrid.Almost at once Valencia turns out to have been less a fixture than I thought:
Los organizadores en Valencia han cancelado la conferencia alli por razones que desconocemos.The usual pressures applied, I suspect. But Sunday's big fixture at the Hotel Velazquez de Madrid is still on.
With a free day now, I spend the afternoon with J. strolling, or rather limping -- the Vienna prison damage is still there -- around Conil, and then along the promenade and the beach; the sun is bright and the sky virtually cloudless all day, but it is not overly warm. We sit on a seafront bench and watch the sun's glowing orb go down into the Atlantic. For its last few seconds the whole disc vanishes in a rush, while I count the seconds from just one to ten or twenty.
I am not sorry to have lost tomorrow's meeting. It would have been a long haul, over five hundred miles, to Valencia. Instead we shall drive more slowly up toward Barcelona, the next location -- if that is not mysteriously cancelled too. I remind J. that this means that we lose any book sales we would have had in Valencia, as well as the unexpected hotel costs.
December 12, 2008 (Friday)
Conil de la Frontera - Gibraltar - Benidorm (Spain)NO function today, thank goodness; perhaps we shall visit Count K. on the way? I prepare this email:
Since my Valencia meeting tonight has been cancelled, I am driving today Friday rather unexpectedly to Alicante and Barcelona where I speak tomorrow evening. Would you like to have lunch with us in Málaga? I'd really like to shake the hand of such a great benefactor as you have been.
Since we have time on our hands now, J. suggests we pull into Gibraltar for the afternoon. I tell her that the last time I was here was July 4, 1967, researching for my book Accident. We cross the airfield from which General Wladyslaw Sikorski's Liberator plane took off exactly twenty-four years before that date only to crash into the Mediterranean after a flight of less than 1,700 yards. In 1967 I stood at the eastern end of the runway, at precisely the right hour, trying to gauge the weather and visibility conditions. Mysteriously, I found that the page of the control tower logbook for July 4, 1943, was missing, ripped out.
The building has now shifted northwards to the Spanish side of the runway -- a further encroachment on the neutral ground defined by the Anglo-Spanish agreement. But the Utrecht Treaty (July 13, 1713) which ceded Gibraltar (and Minorca) as colonies to Britain also laid down in Article 10 that the British would not allow any Jews into the colony ("And Her Britannic Majesty, at the request of the Catholic King, does consent and agree,
that no leave shall be given under any pretence whatsoever, either to Jews or Moors, to reside or have their dwellings in the said town of Gibraltar") -- and no sooner do we sit down at an English pub than we see first one, then a whole bunch of Jews, wearing yarmulkes, strolling down the main street in front of the Convent, the Governor's residence.
Treaty violations Britain solemnly swore in 1713 never to allow Jews into their new colony, Gibraltar. Today these illegal settlers scuttle past residents and tourists alike, perhaps unaware of the Treaty forbidding their presence.
Beneath a dirty and twisted Union flag, one of many Gibraltar businesses that do not seem to be wholly AryanA Manchester man behind me, who has taken up residence in this tax-free colony, tells me in a loud and perhaps disapproving voice, "There are seven synagogues on the Rock." Until ten years ago the colony's chief minister was (for twenty-three years) Sir Joshua Hassan, and he was a Jewish lawyer. So much for Britain abiding by her treaties, as Adolf Hitler might have mocked.
Plucking the fifteen-pound parking fine off our windscreen, we drive off this British Rock and back into Spain, finally finding a hotel in the deserted coastal resort of Benidorm, north of Alicante. The hotel is the Hotel Alone, a weird name not seeming to commend itself to couples, let alone its busloads of Spanish pensioners.
December 13, 2008 (Thursday)
Benidorm - Barcelona - Lleida (Spain)LIKE most other cheap Spanish hotels this one has no Internet, so I am unable to update the website. Breakfast is a "very thin gruel" indeed, to quote Winston Churchill's famous November 1941 message to Franklin D Roosevelt; dried slices of stale cheese and ham are laid out, and no butter, just Margarine alone. Hence, perhaps, the hotel's name. We drive north-east all day to Barcelona while J. exercises her brilliant smile.
About half way along, and after a lunch which includes a lot of raw onions, my vision begins to play up just as it did in Vienna's prison where, perhaps fortuitously, raw onions also formed a large part of my diet in solitary confinement. A blind spot forms in the centre of the field of vision, turning into a clear patch which becomes coarsely pixellated, like an image seen through a glass plate with a patch of clear liquid on it; since the defect is identical in left and right eye, it is perhaps an optic-nerve problem rather than retina problem. The patch is shaped like a crescent moon, and soon rotates to affect the left segment of the vision instead of the right.
We arrive at Barcelona around five p.m. already very tired. A major football match with Madrid is beginning, but the police now have me on their hands. As we haul into the city centre I see once again waiting lines of police trucks near the speaking location, called in because of my arrival. We count eighteen of the trucks on one stretch of the Paseo de Gracia boulevard alone. The police are once again cordoning off the area where I am to speak.
Pedro tells us by phone to park where we can, and he comes to fetch us. He says the Jewish organisations have again been loudly agitating; they have called for a ban on my speaking, and a judge has again ordered an official police video made to see if I break any of their anti-free-speech laws.
About fifty people pack into the tiny room behind Pedro's bookstore, and about as many press and television newsmen. It is an awkward milieu in which to talk Real History, and my Spanish is flagging today. I hold them for about an hour and then answer questions. J. is evidently weary too, as she makes little attempt to sell the books we have hauled thousands of miles from Windsor. As the audience melts away I see she has even put on her overcoat -- and how many sales staff at Harrods do you see wearing overcoats?
The room is cold, that is true; and Pedro has warned me that Spaniards cannot afford our prices, which is fair enough, but Gabriela would have done better. She would have vanished into the ladies' room and remerged minutes later wearing a dress that would have had the customers buzzing like bees around her book table. J. has to learn all this.
Police inform us that a big Communist mob has gathered and is bearing down on us in the streets outside. Not much new there. I have no doubt that the police forces I saw will hold them off. The air is filled with police and ambulance sirens.
Pedro has reprinted the old Planeta edition of Hitler's War in Spanish; it arrived from the printers today, and has already had to brave a confiscation order from the authorities. He has adapted our edition's cover to include a line about the "Holocaust", which is not helpful.
Tomorrow in Madrid may be better, but I fear not. On the hundred mile onward road trip up to our hotel it is pelting with rain; the highway is empty but fast, curved, and dangerous. Thus we start our long haul via Madrid back to Windsor.
December 14, 2008 (Sunday)
Lleida (Catalonia) - Madrid (Spain) - en route through FranceUNFORTUNATELY this hotel's Ethernet connection does not allow me to access my website. It must be blocked at the server somewhere.
We set out for Madrid around eleven a.m. Some of the mountain passes on the A-2 are quite steep, and our still heavily laden van slows to a crawl; J. and I, we cheer it on, like the children's pantomime audiences watching Peter Pan, shouting "We do believe in Citroën!" and applaud loudly, and the van responds and is promptly christened Tinkerbell.
We get to the evening's Madrid location at five pm. It is now 2,920 miles since we left London. A large crowd is already pouring in. I count 270 chairs, and most are filled. The audience is very friendly, and after a lengthy introduction by Pedro, with the usual scary ranting about the Jews, the economic crisis, and Zionists -- why cannot he learn to tone down his remarks! -- I enter to a pleasing ovation and speak for about an hour.
Mr Irving enters the Madrid hall to applause from the audience. He has many friends in Spain, it turns out.
I start by telling them that we are all derechistas, right-wingers, and that there is no shame in that. I end my peroration by quoting a definition by Winston Churchill, "The job of an historian is to find out what happened and why." To which I add that I consider my job as a Real Historian to find out what really happened, and the real reasons why. My Spanish is better than the last time, says one member of the audience, not appreciating that this meant that the last time it was worse.
A journalist of El Mundo interviews Mr Irving in Madrid
A large Communist mob has now gathered outside, as police instruct us.
After a brief and ghastly meal in a cigarette-smoke filled cafeteria at Chamartin station, we set out at once to northern Spain. I drive all night. Over the Somosierra Pass the snow begins to fall more heavily, and the further north we get, the worse the blizzard becomes. The highway empties as the night draws on, and I keep up a steady ninety miles an hour. The headlights attract endless skeins of fast-moving snowflakes; we seem to be driving into a dizzying funnel, beyond which is only darkness.
December 15, 2008 (Monday)
en route through France - Paris - Calais (France) - Dover - Windsor (England)THE little Citroën hums on happily along the endless French autoroutes and toll roads. By four p.m. we are pushing up into the southern outskirts of Paris. As we drive clean across the city, from south to north, along the Rue de Sebastopol etc., we sight many, many Blacks and Asians. The city is even more overrun by the Third World than London. The once great imperial capitals! The empires have struck back, or at any rate imploded. If Hitler had had the wit to put his Panzer and SS divisions in blackface, they would now be welcomed in Britain with open arms and copious handouts from the public social services.
Heading north on the A-1, toward Lille, I espy a road sign which still puts 257 km between us and Calais. With only ninety minutes to go, this unexpected news briefly puts a blight on the rest of the trip; I increase our speed to ninety, then one hundred miles an hour, having tanked the little van with the better diesel grade.
Thin mists drift across the lightly-travelled freeway. We draw into the Calais docks ten minutes after the last permitted check-in time for P & O's six p.m. boat. We slide past however and park on the bottom car deck of the ferry. The saloons upstairs are very full, mostly with the oikiest of the English and a chocolate-box mix of every other scummy nationality on earth heading for our Mother Country. Still carrying that pillow from Lake End House, I sleep with no difficulty at all until the white cliffs are in view.
We are back home in Windsor at ten p.m. The gates swing open and we putter in and park by the front door. I have driven 4,062 miles in the eight days since December 7. I give the Citroën's nose a grateful pat. The house is bitterly cold, and the housekeeper has left a dim light on somewhere. I switch on the boiler. My head is swimming and swaying from the long motor trip and sea crossing, and it is rather unpleasant. -- J. opens and reads the mail; very few cheques, she says. I would have patted her nose too. She tries to take a shower, but the boiler has not yet caught up with us. Tomorrow she returns to the United States. Within two minutes of her stalking off to her room I am fast asleep.
Jaenelle Antas: page and photo gallery 2008-2012
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