David Irving |
Documents on the International Campaign for Real History
Posted Sunday, April 4, 2010
© Focal Point 2010
I have long consigned the whole dirty inside story of the Lipstadt trial to my memoirs -- as yet unpublished -- so that I can move on.
Sunday, April 4, 2010 (Easter Sunday)
Windsor (England)The late television news last night reported that Blacks have murdered the Afrikaner leader Eugène Terre'Blanche, or as he spelt it Ter Blanche. He was bludgeoned with a knobkerrie and hacked to death in his farm at Ventersdorp in South Africa yesterday. No prizes for guessing the colour of his assailants -- two farm workers who, says the S.A. press, "allegedly had an argument over unpaid wages". So that's all right then.
Since January 1994 the address of his movement the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, has come top of my own address list but for no other reason than that it is alphabetical: A W B, Post Office Box 274, Ventersdorp 2710, South Africa. It was the address on an unsolicited appeal for funds (to which I never responded). I guess our own beloved South African emigré Peter Hain will not weep over Ter Blanche the same kind of tears that he did when delivering the eulogy at the funeral of the convicted Pretoria terrorist and murderer John Harris, hanged in 1965.
The cowardly murder of Ter Blanche, nearly seventy, looks dreadfully like the beginnings of a repeat "Rhodesia" scenario, with the government-inspired massacre of the White settlers and farmers whose brains made South Africa what it is, or rather was. Only a few days ago important Black leaders in the country were calling for the massacre of White farmers, calling them "thieves and rapists" -- an exact copy of the exculpatory logic of Heinrich Himmler's death squads who referred to the Jews killed in Operation Reinhardt as "looters and plunderers" (which most of them weren't).
South African's new Black president, Jacob Zuma, has appealed for calm, and has condemned the murder as a terrible thing. His appeal for calm might seem unnecessary; true, after my friend Clive Derby-Lewis arranged the 1993 assassination of the Black Communist murderer-in-chief Chris Hani, Black mobs rioted for days and seventy people died. But I can't imagine White crowds doing the same -- or is that just a racist viewpoint of society? We folks just don't seem to have the gene in us that says Go Forth and Riot and Burn and Loot and Kill -- even after Manchester United's worst defeat. It is yet another genetic anomaly.
MY mind goes back to the evening in 1992 when I last saw Ter Blanche. I was on a speaking tour of South Africa, and my Johannesburg hosts invited me to go hear him that night. We drove out into the bare hills and parked on a deserted patch of ground, an hour or two early, and watched the dusk fall and the vast canopy of stars opening up overhead -- a spectacle denied to those of us doomed to inhabit the northern hemisphere: it is the Milky Way, viewed edge-on, and the infinite eternity beyond.
For a time it was pitch dark; but after a while other dots of light began to show, as automobiles and bakkies wound their way up the lanes to this bare mountainside where Eugène T. was to speak. Their headlights formed a makeshift stage illumination. He arrived on horseback, and spoke for an hour or so in Afrikaans to the huge crowd. It was near enough to Dutch and German for an Englishman like me to get the gist.
The deep rasping voice boomed the mystic name, A-a-afrika, many times. It was a speech of more style than substance, the characteristic of the demagogue: in one shape or another he had delivered it many times before, and it reminded me of the oratory of Nye Bevan and Sir Oswald Mosley (right), both of whom I had heard in Trafalgar Square in October 1956 and May 1962 respectively. Our cops were White then, and I do apologise for the photo on that account.
Tempers in the country were running high. On March 12, 1994, a Saturday, all the world's newspapers carried photographs of the previous day's incident in Bophathatswana, South Africa, in which a Black policeman had "executed" three of Ter Blanche's AWB members in cold blood. I wrote:
Not very nice. Critical study of last night's TV coverage of the incident and today's pictures and stories make plain that the whole episode must have been filmed (possibly even provoked by) the television journalists, who were annoyed at a drubbing given to two journalists including the representative of the ineffable Christian Science Monitor earlier by other Whites; television news showed the three White men begging for their lives, then -- a brief view -- lying dead on the ground.What were the TV cameramen doing during this ghastly [summary execution] incident? Pointing their cameras the other way and filing their fingernails? Not if I know them. But their editors evidently refused to use their pictures, because of the way it would tilt the world opinion against the Blacks.
It reminds me of two other episodes in history where the incriminating film has been withheld from public viewing. Famous colour footage taken by an American GI officer shows the liberation of Dachau concentration camp in April 1945, the surrender of hundreds of German soldiers and, oddly, most of them lying dead at the foot of a long wall afterwards. The summary execution of 540 German soldiers by GIs must also have been filmed by the man, yet it is never included in the footage shown.
Then there is the footage that Juanita van R. got for me from the Soweto archives in 1987 -- ABC [American] television had calmly filmed from two yards away as a Black girl of about twenty was dragged from her hut, bound with barbed wire, then set on fire with petrol and burned alive; her last twitching movements were an attempt to pull down her skirt with her hands, tied behind her back with barbed wire. The murderers wore the yellow T-shirts of the "Rev." Allan Boesak's movement. [Boesak, a half-caste or Coloured demagogue, later got his come-uppance in the courts.] But the TV crews were just as guilty in my view. Strange that they just "happened" to be there.
Ter Blanche was involved in an unfortunate libel action brought against British newspapers and Channel 4 TV by a former admirer, Jani Allan, a model and Sunday Times journalist: she had seemingly fallen under his masculine spell. I recall that the visual appearance of his bare white butt, viewed by a sordid defence witness through a bedroom door keyhole, played a part in the trial. (Human memory has a habit of whittling such stories down to their most trivial but often vital details.)
George Carman QC acted in that libel action. In 2004 his son, Dominic Carman, told me that his late father considered the savage Judgment of Mr Justice Gray (left) against me, in the 2000 Deborah Lipstadt case, to be flawed.
Well so did I, and so did a host of other legal experts, and elements of the courts of appeal agreed; but all that is water that has washed under the bridge already ten years ago, and I have long consigned the whole dirty inside story of the Lipstadt trial to my memoirs -- as yet unpublished -- so that I can move on.
As a leading libel Silk, Sir Charles Gray QC was an old friend and sparring partner of Carman, of course -- whom he privately accused of never completely reading his briefs. Perhaps more significantly he was also a good friend, before his elevation to the Bench, of Lipstadt's very able (and expensive) defence counsel Richard Rampton QC; in fact Rampton's junior, Heather Rogers, had actually been Gray's own junior in the famous Nicholas Tolstoy libel action.
It was also Gray who represented Jani Allan in her libel action. It's a small, small world, isn't it? Perhaps Ter Blanche is well out of it. 'Nuff said.
South African White Nationalist Murdered
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