David Irving on Freedom of Speech

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IN HIS WORDS of introduction, Victoria barrister Mr Douglas Christie remarked that historical research may in some cases lead to unpopular conclusions. "We know that those unpopular conclusions can cost a great deal to anyone who relies upon the media of communication for their livelihood, as does every historian, in effect." He then read the dedication on the plaque which they were about to present to their guest, Mr Irving:

GEORGE ORWELL FREE SPEECH AWARD To David Irving, Historian, of London, England: For his courageous defence of freedom of speech in historical inquiry. For his fearless practice of freedom of speech in the search for truth in matters of world importance. For his relentless exposure of history to the analysis of scientific inquiry - we offer this award as our tribute. Canadian Free Speech Association, October 28, 1992

"David", he continued, it is an honour to be able to present this to you in person."
"In spite of the government in Canada, here he is, live, to accept this award. [Laughter and prolonged applause ] I think we must all understand that the government of Canada has made it necessary for Mr Irving to risk his liberty to be here in this country to accept this award".

DAVID IRVING:

IT IS a very great honour indeed to accept this fine plaque, this award from the George Orwell Free Speech League here in Victoria, British Columbia.
As my good friend Douglas Christie said, it has involved a certain personal risk for me to come here at the beginning of my cross-Canada tour of 1992: the traditional enemies of free speech have undertaken everything they can to prevent my coming. When I was in Los Angeles two weeks age, addressing a conference there, I received a package delivered by courier from The Canadian government's immigration department, which specifically enjoined me from coming to Canada, threatening that if I nevertheless attempted to come, then I would have to suffer the consequences under the Immigration Act, because I had been declared to be a member of a "prohibited group" -- the two groups which they specifically set out in the letter were those who have a criminal record, and those who might be deemed, in the opinion of the minister, to be likely to commit a criminal offence if they did come to Canada.
I was deemed to fall under both these categories, because I have a "criminal record" now, of which I am quite proud.

I must admit to having had a certain sense of dismay upon opening this Federal Express package. I was on the point of coming to Canada. I had spent five months planning this tour because, of course, when you prepare a tour of this magnitude, you don't do it overnight: I began the planning five months ago; I sent boxes of books of materials out around the world. This particular tour, as you can see from my poster here, swings across Germany, France, Belgium, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. It spans the entire globe. The Planning goes on month after month, because it is an International Campaign for Real History, one which I have been waging now for two years.
The thought that all of this planning, not only by myself, but by people like Douglas Christie and his friends here, and by Eileen Pressler and her friends in Salmon Arm and all away across Canada -- that all of this planning might be rendered nugatory by some minister who has undoubtedly neither read a book, nor heard a lecture, by me, who has probably never even seen me on television, but who has come under pressure -- as he himself admitted to the Toronto Globe and Mail -- from the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

Now, what kind of country is this, where a Minister of the Crown, here in Canada, takes advice from aliens in another country upon whom his countrymen can invite to lecture them in a private meeting like this? This is what I ask myself.
I discussed their letter, of course, with my friends in Ontario. Ernst Zündel, whom Douglas mentioned earlier, said in this inimitable way, "David, this is the best thing that could happen to you! Come across the frontier, get arrested! You might be held in prison for three or four weeks -- that is great publicity!"

That is the difference between Ernst Zündel and myself...I am not cut out to be a martyr the way that Ernst Zündel is. There flashed before my eyes the cartoon which appeared in the London, England Evening Standard at the time of the Salman Rushdie affair: There was Mr Rushdie galloping across the desert as fast as his little legs could carry him; some distance behind him was a horde of ten thousand Muslims wielding scimitars and various other implements of death, and between this Muslim horde and Salman Rushdie was his agent, his literary agent, running after him and shouting: "Salman - Salman boy, I tell you, you can't buy publicity like this".

I know how he feels!
We have in England a very useful aphorism which runs as follows: He who learns to run away/lives to fight another day. We have frequently has cause to use this device in our history, as you know -- for example at Dunkirk in 1940, the first and the last time in our history that the British beat the Germans to the beaches; we frequently use that aphorism, and I have to admit it, it makes sense.
Thus my first instinct was to take this on the chin -- this letter from the Canadian government -- and to decide to cancel the Canadian tour. Upon mature reflection however I decided that to do so would be an injustice. Why should we take it lying down?
I consulted lawyers, both in California and here in Canada, and we decided that the law was on our side: the Canadian Immigration Act spells out quite clearly that for a man to have a criminal record which would justify his banning from Canada, the criminal offence which he has committed must also be a criminal offence under Canadian law.

THE "criminal offence" which I have allegedly committed is however not an offence anywhere in the world except Germany. In Germany this year I was fined for uttering an opinion -- a sincerely held opinion, an opinion, I would venture to add, which I hold as an expert historian on the Third Reich; I have spent thirty years now working in the archives in London, in Washington, in Moscow -- in short, around the world. If I express an opinion it's probably a reasonably accurate opinion which I have arrived at, over a period of years, and without fear or favour to either side, and certainly not as a result of being bribed, or corrupted, or intimidated.
I was first fined by the German government for having this opinion a year ago, fined six thousand Deutschmarks, which is the equivalent of about four thousand Canadian dollars. We appealed, and our appeal was heard on May 5 this year in Germany.
The appeal hearing was strangely reminiscent of the Nazi people's court; the judge wore jeans and sneakers under his robe -- I saw him in the canteen afterwards -- a young fellow of about twenty-eight. He announced that he was going to increase the original fine from six thousand to ten thousand Deutschmarks, which is about seven thousand Canadian dollars, because I was obstinate about it - "hartnäckig".

I was not changing my mind. Why should I? Nothing that that judge had said was calculated to make me change my mind: He had refused to hear the witnesses; he had refused to allow our evidence. When the hearing came to an end, in that packed courtroom in Munich, I delivered a speech to the judge Herr Stelzner, the closing speech to which I was entitled before he handed down his verdict (I have a tape-recording of it here.) I said to the judge, I know what you are about to do: You are going to find me guilty because you have to -- because German law says you have to find me guilty, guilty of "defaming the memory of the dead". (This is in itself an artificial device, because I hadn't defamed any dead people, I had just stated an opinion. The specific statement was, "In my opinion the gas chamber which they show to the tourists, the gas chamber at Auschwitz which they show to the tourists, is a dummy built by the Poles after the war". You may think this is an outrageous statement, and you are entitled to your opinion. It happens to be a true statement. The Poles themselves admit it*, which makes it even more ironic -- that I was fined that colossal sum for expressing an opinion that was a true opinion.)
"You and I," I said to the judge, "we both have the same function: It is our job to find out the truth -- you as a judge, and I as an historian. The difference between us is this: You are young, you are at the beginning of your career, which may well be a promising career; while I am old, and I am approaching the end of my career as a historian. I can afford to speak the truth, you cannot!"

This is very much my attitude now to historians around the world. As an independent historian, I am proud that I cannot be threatened with the loss of

my job, or my pension, or my future.
Other historians around the world sneer and write letters to the newspapers about "David Irving, the so-called historian", and they demand, "Why does he call himself a Historian anyway?" "Where did he study History?" "Where did he get his Degree?" "What, No Degree in History, then why does he call himself a Historian?"
My answer to them is, Was Pliny a historian or not? Was Tacitus? Did he get a degree in some university? Thucydides? Did he get a degree? And yet we unashamedly call them historians -- we call them historians, because they wrote history which has gone down the ages as accepted true history.
That, I venture to say, is how my books will go down in history as being true history -- Real History, history based on the records of the era.
I don't care whether people fine me seven, or ten, or even fifteen thousand dollars (because we are going to appeal this decision to higher and higher courts and it is going to get more and more expensive each time).
The unfortunate detail -- which I have to confess I didn't realise at the time -- is that having a "criminal record" gave the chance to all the snivelling cowards at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles to write letters to the Canadian government pointing out that therefore I should be excluded from Canada as a criminal! Excluded, because I express a true opinion: excluded from Canada, although I have been coming to this country now for twenty-five years.
Since my first visit here back in November 1967 when I attended the television programme "Front-Page Challenge" as one of the challengers, for twenty-five years I have been coming to Canada without committing one single criminal offence. So how can the minister now declare that he thought it likely that I might now suddenly commit an offence on the twenty-sixth year? of course, they need no reason.
They were so anxious to kow-tow to the dictates of this Los Angeles-based lobby that they leaned over backwards to send that letter, by Federal Express courier, down to me in Los Angeles in case I decided to go ahead with the tour.
And that is why I decided to go ahead with it. I won't tell you how I came into Canada, except to say one significant fact: I came in legally, and I have a legal stamp on my passport, no doubt some immigration officer is going to have to explain that.

For me, the interesting question is, how far will I get with my tour across Canada now, as I head eastward toward Ontario. Already, I hear, a storm is brewing there, but I don't mind, because the main thing is that I will show that I cannot be intimidated by these methods.

YET I MUST admit a certain sense of sadness for this my beloved country, Canada.
How is it that I can be excluded as a criminal for expressing an opinion, and yet nobody in Ottawa or Toronto decided to exclude the likes of Nelson Mandela or the odious Winnie Mandela? Were they not criminals? are their criminal records not of a nature which we can all shudder at and find repugnant -- the crimes of Winnie Mandela, a party to kidnapping and murdering fourteen year old infants like Stompie Seipei because she disapproved of their "politics"; the crimes of Nelson Mendela, a convicted terrorist who

rightly served twenty years of a life sentence for planning a bloody insurrection and confecting two hundred and fifty thousand land mines and hand-grenades with which he was hoping to kill tens of thousands of his fellow countrymen (the Blacks, not the Whites, of course -- the Blacks were the ones who were going to die).
These were real crimes, felonies which are held to be crimes by all nations around the world, regardless of race, of colour, or religion, or creed. These are real crimes and yet the Canadians allowed them in.
The last time I was here, speaking across Canada, I was astonished to find a communist called Dennis Goldberg speaking on television as a honoured guest of the Canadian government, although he was on the run as a convicted terrorist in South Africa, with the blood of innocent Black citizens on his conscience; he was paroled, broke parole, fled from South Africa with a price on his head, took refuge in Israel, then went to England -- and here he was in Canada, being fêted on television by C.B.C. as a "civil rights activist"! Some civil rights! What about the civil rights of those whom these people murdered?
You see, there is a certain hypocrisy at work here in Canada, a certain hypocrisy, so I don't know how far I shall get with this tour.

WHAT I AM talking about this evening is freedom of speech. I am not going to lecture to you on the reasons why I have fallen foul of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. I am not going to talk about the Holocaust; for me as a historian the Holocaust is a mere footnote to history. I write about world history; I write about Real History, and I am not going to talk at any great length about something which is far more obsessive interest to other historians, revisionists, or whatever.
I try to keep a level head. It is not easy to keep a level head when you are standing in the middle of a battlefield, with shot and shell falling all around you; but I try to keep a level head, and a sense of proportion, and I try to avoid obsessiveness.
Let me tell you a story about a man who became obsessive in his exercise of free speech. After I published my first book THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN in 1963, I remember moving house to a new apartment in Paddington near the centre of London, and one evening there arrived on the doorstep a meek, mild man wearing wire-rimmed spectacles -- a typical civil servant type of man, probably in his sixties at the time. I can't remember if his wife was with him or not -- it was that kind of couple.
Going over it in later years, trying to remember that extraordinary episode that evening, this visit by a man who introduced himself as Mr H. W. Wicks. I can't remember if a Mrs H.W. Wicks was there or not; anyway, a kind of shadow was a his side, which may have been his wife. This quiet, mouse like couple invited themselves into my living room. "Mr Irving," he said, "Can I come in and talk to you about something quite important? It's about something that happened to me thirty years ago -."
He was obsessed about something that had happened to him thirty years before, a fight about freedom of speech. You see, he had taken out some kind of insurance policy with the Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada. He had paid his premiums religiously and regularly to this insurance company until the time came for him to make a claim: the Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada, which had gobbled up his premiums as regularly as he had

paid them, now told him: "Piss off, little man! We don't need you any more, and as for paying out, we are not going to! You are a little man and we are a gigantic multinational company, and we don't deal with people like you."
Little Mr H.W. Wicks, back in 1935 decided to fight back! In a way he has been a lesson to me, a lesson in obsessiveness, because he had fought back in the only way a small man could: he stood outside the headquarters of the Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada in the City of London with a placard around his neck, describing how that big company in the building had swindled him, how they had welched on the payment to him; he handed out pathetically typed leaflets to passers-by as well.
You might think, what has this got to do with freedom of speech? Well, a great deal. In England we had, and we still have, a law define Criminal Libel -- criminal libel, unlike the civil offence which libel normally is: it's a tort, not a criminal offence at all; it's a civil suit by one person against another, tried before the High Court. But criminal libel is where a man can make a case to the police that because of that guy out there saying something, there is a danger of public disorder.
The law of criminal libel has been applied only twice this century in Britain. The first occasion was in the nineteen-twenties, I think, when Mr Winston Churchill successfully caused Lord Alfred Douglas to be sued for criminal libel (Alfred Douglas, as some of you may know, was the boyfriend of Oscar Wilde.) Lord Alfred Douglas was sent to prison for one year for handling out leaflets alleging that Mr Churchill had made a fortune out of the Battle of Jutland, which is probably untrue -- in fact, it is almost certainly untrue. The other case was my new friend Mr H. W. Wicks! Because of his handing out leaflets outside the headquarters of the Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada in the City of London, he was sent to prison for five years! It ruined his life -- not only because he was a decent civil servant, a gentleman at the outset of his professional career being sent to jail for five years: It ruined his life because he felt a tremendous sense of grievance and injustice.
This was why he was at my doorstep thirty years later, still looking for justice. I listened to his story politely, I made a mental note about it, and I ushered him out into the darkness a couple of hours later, and I never saw him again.
But that was not the last I heard of Mr H.W. Wicks, ladies and gentlemen. I was at the beginning of my writing career. It was 1963. For the next thirty years, I went into the archives around the world, and the ghost of H.W. Wicks hounded , wagging its fingers, whispering: "here I am, don't let this happen to you, don't become obsessed, whatever you do, in the way that I became!" In the British Public Record Office, in the collection FO. 371, the Central Office files of the Foreign Office, I came across a letter from H. W. Wicks to Anthony Eden, complaining about what Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada had done. In the records of the Führer and Reichkanzler Adolf Hitler in Berlin -- a letter from H.W. Wicks complaining about what the Sun Assurance Company had done to him. In the private papers of Robert Menzies, when I was working in the National Archives of Australia in Canberra -- a letter from H.W. Wicks to Menzies complaining about what how this Sun Life Insurance Company had ruined his life. In the Archivio Centrale dello Stato outside Rome, in the private papers of Benito Mussolini

-- a letter from H.W. Wicks! And so it went on, at intervals of three and five years: in the archives, oh boy, another letter from Wicks! In the Schriftguverwaltung of Heinrich Himmler, the private archives of the Reichführer of the S.S. -- a letter from H.W. Wicks, complaining about
Of course he had written them all about the same time, but it took me thirty years to tickle these letters up. You couldn't write a book about Himmler, or Rommel, or Mussolini, or Robert Menzies. In Wellington Street in Ottawa, the Public Archives of Canada, in the private papers of William Lyon Mackenzie King -- a letter from H.W. Wicks!

He was obsessed! Not one of these people had given him justice, of course; not one of these people had done justice to him. But there he was for thirty years, a little warning figured tapping on my shoulder saying: "See what it did to me! Don't allow it to happen to you, Mr Irving!"
That is the reason he had visited me; he had wanted justice from me, just as he had wanted justice from Himmler, from Lammers, from Mussolini, and Mackenzie King and Robert Menzies and the rest of them. Not one person had given this poor little man, this insignificant figure in the sand of time, even one grain of justice.
He'll get justice in my biography, when I write it, because I shall devote a chapter to this tragic figure. For twenty-five years after that I used to get a christmas card from him, a minutely executed water-colour, which he had painted himself, but they dried up about five years ago; I think he has passed on to a place where, no doubt, he is getting some justice after all.
I often think about H.W. Wicks when I work in the archives. I wonder when I shall come across the next letter from him.
It is a warning to keep a clear head. That is what is difficult when you are writing history.

THIS PARTICULAR FIGHT which I am conducting now, this International Campaign for Real History, has become uglier and uglier as the "war" has gone on.
Since I last saw you here in Victoria, I have been down to South Africa. I spent February and March there lecturing on the same topic that I have been lectured on here in, uh, Victoria. I spoke in some fifteen cities in South Africa, sometimes to very large audiences indeed. In Pretoria we had an audience of about a thousand people. At the end of that tour I received a letter -- I was staying at George at the Indian Ocean, I had rented a house at the sand dunes there, and was carrying on writing my next book -- I received a fax from a journalist on the Cape Times:
Journalists, I am sad to say, are often the enemies of free speech. It has to be said! They are like the historians who had the university chair. Journalists, they don't know that they are being censored, but the truth is, they are like a kind of auto-pilot: they know what to write if they are to keep their job.
For example, you have seen it in Canada during the last week [in the run up to the constitutional referendum ]. All the journalists knew they had to write Yes. Until, of course, the day after October 26 -- then they realised their ghastly mistake, because Yes wasn't what Canada wanted at all. Yes, was what Mr Brian Mulroney wanted: Mulroney had this kind of belief that Canada was a woman -- she might say No, but she really means Yes!

Mulroney has now learned his lesson in the hardest possible way, and I must say I don't feel very sorry for him: It couldn't had happened to a nicer guy!

I have to be careful here, of course, because I am a guest of this fine country and it would be injudicious, not to say impolite, of me to cast aspersions on the government of this country. So I shall not be doing so at this point.
No sooner had I left South Africa, than I received the usual letter from the South African government saying: "The exemption from the visa requirement as laid down in the Aliens Control Act, 1991, which you enjoy, has been withdrawn."

"Should you in the future arrive at a South African port of entry without a visa you will not be permitted to enter." So, of course this meant that they wouldn't give me a visa. I realised this next to the South African newspapers -- one of two friends I have got on the South African newspapers; it very soon came out that it was the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre who had put pressure on the South African government, through various channels that they do operate, to ban me in future from South Africa. [I have managed to get myself unbanned, but it has been a difficult task.]

I WAS TALKING about the journalists in South Africa. I addressed a big meeting in Cape Town on about March 9 this year, in a suburb of Cape Town called the Goodwood. About a thousand people came to hear me speak. This is what my rivals really hate, our traditional enemies: they hate the fact that, instead of watching television, a thousand people turn out to hear me and I tell those one thousand people my sincere opinions about certain things in history, which they thought were all cut-and-dried and agreed long ago.
I don't just tell them my opinions: I back them up with all my evidence and the data that we have in British archives and so on. I say, it is my opinion that, in a few months time, no one is going to believe these legends any more. The legends are collapsing with disastrous consequences for certain countries in the Middle East over the next few years. The audiences like this, because they find it plausible. At the end of this meeting in Cape Town, I got a fax from this journalist, her name was Claire Bisseker:

Dear Mr Irving, the Cape Times would like to have your
response to the following allegations made by a Captonian
who attended your meeting at Goodwood on March 9. The
course said, that the meeting was of neo-Nazi nature complete
with Nazi banners and Nazi salutes --

Like this evening ladies and gentlemen: no doubt it'll be in the Vancouver Sun or in the Toronto Sun or one of the other Sun newspapers that there were Nazi salutes here this evening too.

We would appreciate very much if you could fax back
your response to us as soon as you are able.

So what do you do -- fax back a denial and say that it is totally untrue? That's your first instinct. Or do you fax back saying, "I am not going to

comment?"

WHEN BILL DUNPHY of the Toronto Sun telephoned this evening and accidentally found himself connected to me -- he has been trying to get me for fifteen days to get an interview on this whole business -- he said, "You are David Irving, aren't you!" I replied, "I am not going to comment on that." He said, "Well, I want to interview you."
I said: "Mr Irving -- I m sure if you spoke to him -- would say that he is not going to give interviews to give interviews to somebody called Bill Dunphy who last published in the Toronto Sun only a few days ago an item headlined 'Nazi sympathizer banned from Canada', so he probably won't want to speak to you, will he, goodbye!" And I put the phone down: this is the way to treat journalists.
I refused to comment, if I refused to reply to Claire Bisseker's letter then she would write: "Questioned about the neo-Nazi nature of his meeting, with neo-Nazi banners and flags, Mr Irving refused to comment." If I say it is untrue, She will still write: "Questioned about the neo-Nazi nature of the banners and the flags, Mr Irving denied it."
Of course, the sting is in the question, and not in the answer. It's the old have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife kind of situation. Nothing you say will tell the readers and get it across.
So I sent back this letter -- I thought you would like to hear it as a tip on how to deal with journalists.

Dear Claire, Thank you for your fax and I appreciate your inquiry. Yes, you do have excellent sources. NeoNazi nature, Nazi banner, and Nazi salutes, the lot! As I marched in an orchestra struck up the Slave's Chorus from Verdi's opera Aida. Later the orchestra played the first bars of Franz Liszt's Les Préludes, and it concluded with Liszt's Les Préludes, and it concluded with Liszt's opus 53 string quartet. (All this music has a certain meaning for history buffs!) Meanwhile searchlight batteries stationed around the Goodwood Civic Centre lit up, their crystal beams joining in a cathedral of ice ten thousand feet above the site. A thousand hands were once more flung aloft in the Holy Salute, and a thousand throats roared the Horst Wessel Anthem. A video is available, directed by Leni Riefenstahl. I hope the above material suffices for what you have in mind.

Now, that's how to treat journalists. Of course, it doesn't do me any good with journalists. My name now stinks around the world, several times over, because journalists are a kind of freemasonry: they pass the word around. Get Irving! Again and again, and they try to get me and they can't! What really gets them is that I outsmart them again and again.
For example in June this year I found in a Moscow archives the sixteen hundred glass microfiches with the long lost diaries of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister. The Russians didn't know they had these glass plates. They were actually made in 1945 -- the original Nazi glass slides, all the missing diaries of the most important minister on Hitler's staff from 1923 right to the end of the war.

I did a deal with the Sunday Times in London, the most prestigious English newspaper.
They weren't happy about dealing with David Irving, of course: their Chief Editor Andrew Neil -- I suppose it is fair to say here that he is the only man I know who has his pubic hair on his head --

Andrew Neil said: "David, we didn't really want to do this deal with you. Members of my staff hate doing a deal with you: they haven't forgotten the 'Hitler's Diaries' scandal."
"Neil, boy," I said "Andrew, don't forget! I was the one who told the Sunday Times [In a letter in December 1982] that the 'Hitler's Diaries' were fake. You still went ahead and published them" [in April 1983].
"well, it wasn't me," he said, "it was my predecessors, and I do appreciate that -- that you were the one who said they were fakes."
"Anyway," I said, "These Goebbels Diaries are genuine. They are pure gold. I am giving the Sunday Times a chance to rehabilitate itself!"
You can imagine how they hated that.

So Neil did a deal: the Sunday Times signed up a contract with me for $200,000 for the Goebbels Diaries which I had found in Moscow.
They published them for three weeks. Our traditional enemies went absolutely berserk: they defaced the posters, they sent out ten-man gangs to rip the posters down, and deface them with slogans, and even write my name on the posters. They staged violent mass demonstrations outside my apartment in London; they ambushed me and beat me up in a restaurant.
As they themselves admitted in their own newspapers -- in the Jewish Chronicle in London and in equivalent Jewish newspapers in the United States -- they put pressure on the Sunday Times, in letters which they quoted, saying: "You have done the worst thing possible: you have given this man Irving not only reputation, but money! Before you go any further it is vital that you break any contract with him and don't pay him any more money."
With the result that the Sunday Times did just that: they published all the materials I had provided them with, then wrote me a letter on July 19 saying that they were paying me no more money -- that they were going to break the contract.
IT IS AN extraordinary situation. The enemies of Real History are trying to prevent us Real Historians from finding out the truth about the greatest episodes of the twentieth century; and they are trying to prevent us Real Historians from publishing the truth. But we are fighting back.
Our opponents are not fighting just in that particular way. They are trying to smash us: Fred Leuchter -- the man who directed the crucial forensic tests on the "gas chambers" in Auschwitz -- he has been professionally ruined; his livelihood destroyed.
Several other people -- I won't mention their names, because I don't want to damage their future -- several people have suffered the same fate. I am sufficiently farsighted to see that it could well happen to me too. But I plan not just months, but years ahead. So when I produced the new edition of Hitler's War, which is the flagship of my entire writing career, bring the three volumes under the same roof so to speak, I took the decision to publish it myself: not because nobody else would publish it -- the book had already

been published by Viking Press in the United States, it had been published by Macmillan's in Britain, it had been republished by Macmillan's in Britain, it is being published around the world -- but it was such a successful book that I decided to publish a super deluxe edition of the book in my own publishing house, which I would then set up so that when pressure was put on my other publishers to "dump Irving" I would have a lifeboat.
I am not being paranoid about the pressure, because in their own newspapers my traditional enemies have announced that they are frantically trying to do it: headlines such as "Macmillan's refuses to cut Irving off authors' list" are a commonplace now in Britain, and the same kind of pressure is being put on my publishers around the world because they realise that I am probably the most dangerous enemy they have as a historian with my version of Real History -- which I agree may be wrong History!
I am not so arrogant as to say "thou shalt have no other version of history but mine." But as the Globe and Mail rightly said in an editorial only a few weeks ago in connection with Ernst Zündel -- actually quoting a sentence of mine from a speech: "freedom of speech means the right to be wrong". Think about it: freedom of speech means the right to be wrong.

We cannot say, and in fact it is immaterial for the purposes of the argument, whether Ernst Zündel or Jim Keegstra or any of the other controversial characters in Canada, whether any of them is right or wrong; this is immaterial. Nobody has the right to stand up and say, only my version of history is right: all other versions are wrong: and nobody has the right to propagate alternative versions.
That is what freedom of speech is about. The Globe and Mail rightly took this sentence out of one of my speeches and used it as a heading for their editorial a couple of weeks ago. And that's what I say about my book Hitler's War; it may be right, it may be wrong! But it is certainly a magisterial work. We have published it ourselves in our own imprint, Focal Point, with sixty colour photographs, a book which makes my rivals livid with envy and rage.
I only mention it, because it is indicative of what they are doing now. They have begun, admittedly belatedly, a campaign to smash my new publishing firm before it gets of the ground: they have visited every book shop in Southern England, all away along the coast, persuading them to take this book off the shelves if they could. In Portsmouth, things went so far that they persuaded the bookshop chain called Volume One not only to take my book off its shelves but to destroy them!
Doesn't that sound a bit familiar? Haven't we heard something about book burning in the past? Not only book burning: there are other echoes reminiscent of recent history, because my press clipping service has begun sending me clippings from all the local newspapers -- here are some of them -- revealing that in the Midlands in Britain a campaign of window smashing has begun against every bookshop that was stocking this book -- which, believe me, is not what you would call revisionist history at all, it is a staid, stable, traditional look at history from primary sources with magnificent photographs; it even published a two-page photograph of Auschwitz, a photograph from the air.

NO, THEY WERE trying to destroy the prospects of my new publishing

company, and so they were going round smashing the windows of every bookshop that was stocking the book. Here is one typical report:

A Nottingham bookshop has withdrawn a book by David Irving after its front window was shattered by a brick last weekend. A spokesman from Waterstone & Company said that local Jewish and anti-racist are complaining about the sale of Mr Irving's book "Hitler's War". "We have acute problems in Nottingham, and because of the strong opposition to the book, we have decided it was appropriate and prudent to withdraw it." No one is claiming responsibility for the attack. However, the spokesman emphasised the book was still available on request.

It is only in the provincial newspapers, again a very interesting thing. I have drawn this to the attention of many journalists on the national newspapers in Britain, and I have sent them photocopies of the clippings, but none of them has dared to touch the story, although of course it is "The Night of Broken Glass", it is Nazi methods.
They are calling me the Nazi: they are calling us the bigots: and yet these people are the enemies of free speech.

The Night of Broken Glass in 1938. So is history coming around in a full circle? And, I have to ask myself, why me?
Why are they doing it to me, and why are they doing it to us? Well, the answer is I think -- and I am rather proud about this -- they are picking on me because I am their worst nightmare: I am the champion of free speech, and I am the champion of Real History; and Real History and Free speech to these people are like the sign of the cross to the vampire

Country after country is closing its door to me. You must think this must be very depressing, dismaying, and distressing for David Irving. But it is not! In a kind of perverse way I feel a sense of pride!
I flew from Moscow to Münich, and the next day I flew down to Rome to address an audience at the invitation of a university professor there. This was on June 13 this year; I flew down to Rome Club-class.
As I got off the plane at Rome's Fiomicino airport there were ten police cars waiting at the foot at the steps. Armed policemen, carabinieri. "Mr Irving -- Mr Irving!"
I stepped -- this is embarrassing, ladies and gentlemen, I mean, picture yourselves: You have flown down in great comfort from Münich -- and you are given an armed police escort. Your luggage is taken away from you, that goes in that car, you go in this car. The car speeds across the runways to the main airport building.
This is embarrassing! You try nonchalance, you pretend that this is your V.I.P. escort. You are held at the airport incommunicado. Okay, you are English.
"What have you come for?" they say. "What have you come for?" They interrogate you, they go through all your property, they tip it out onto the

floor: "What have you come for?"
I say, "I am a British citizen, a citizen of Britain, and a citizen of the European Community, and I have no intention of answering your questions!"

VERY WELL, WE are not going to let you into Rome this time anyway. We have been requested not to let you in."
"Okay," I said, "if that is your decision." This is all through an interpreter, because I had made out that I couldn't understand a word of Italian; but after a while they brought in that man who had come from the university to meet me, and we had an improvised conversation in Italian, much to the rage of the Italian officers.

"Don't speak -- donta speaka! here silencio!"
"Where does it say silence?" I asked in this beautiful brand-new modern airport police station. "Don't speak, total silence here!" "Well," I said. "Where does it say silence? If there was a sign up here saying 'Silence' I would be silent. But there is no sign. So I am going to talk to my friend." "There is no sign saying silence?" I said, "no." He grabbed a felt pen with a half-inch tip, he turned round, and he wrote on the wall, shouting: "S-I-L-E-N-Z-I-O."
"SILENZIO"

I was put on the next plane back to Münich -- which is again difficult, because I am "banned from entering" Germany. (On March 9, 1990, the German government allegedly ordered a ban on my entering Germany. Of course, it is difficult for the Germans too, because they are very pernickety about details and wording, and the ban is on entering Germany, not on being in Germany.)

Once I am in there, they can't get me out, and I have been in Germany very many times since the "ban". [laughter] Eventually the German authorities, the "Office for the Protection of the Constitution" -- which I suppose is what you are going to have next in Canada -- stated in their next annual bulletin: "We placed a ban on March 9 on Mr Irving entering Germany. Unfortunately he has repeatedly managed to enter Germany, because he wasn't recognized by the border officials." This is found even more insulting!

I said to this great audience in Passau -- about seven thousand people -- which I addressed in March this year: "I am sure there is a number of people in plain clothes sitting here scratching their heads, saying , 'Gott-im-Himmel, he's got in again. How did he get in?' "Let me give you a clue," I said: "In Germany there is a ban on me entering -- but there is no arrest warrant. In Austria there is an arrest warrant out against me -- but there is no ban on entering. So now you sort it out between your two governments!"

(I thought let's lay a few false trails there.)

IF THERE IS an arrest warrant in Austria, it's because I expressed an opinion again.
And if you wonder why I am proud that I was "banned" from Germany, and "banned" from South Africa, and "banned" from Austria, and "banned" from Canada -- this is incidentally why there is no G.S.T. on the books you but this evening: because I am not here, am I, so --

-- so if you wonder why I am proud about it, it is because of this: It means that in Germany, in Italy, in Austria, and in Canada, the Jewish community has had to admit defeat, admit that they have no single person who is capable of standing up to me in open and in free debate.
I have offered it again and again. I have said: "Here is the microphone!" In Ottawa, where I spoke in the Congress Centre two years ago, there was a very respectable gentleman in the audience who, when question time came, stood up and came forward with very plausible arguments why I might be wrong.
After a few minutes, I said "I like your style and I think your arguments deserve to be heard by the entire audience. Please come up and use the microphone for as long as you want, and I shall answer you afterwards." That is the way to do it.
The Congress Centre in Ottawa has now had the usual pressure put on it and it has informed us that I won't be able to use their hall again. This is the only answer they have, and it is an admission of total defeat; it is an admission by all my traditional enemies that they cannot answer my arguments. The only solution they know is what I call "West Bank" tactics. They only know the solution the fire bomb, the brick through the bookshop window, terror, and - intimidation.
When I spoke all the way up the Californian coast [from October 91], first in Los Angeles, and then in Berkeley, and then in Oregon, every time there was one of our traditional enemies in the audience standing up, calmly taking photographs of all the members in the audience sitting around. It happened in Atlanta, Georgia, too. Finally I said to the man there, "Mr Levitas," -- that was his name, Daniel Levitas -- "Mr Levitas, would you mind telling me, in front of all the television cameras here this evening, why are you talking photographs of my audience if not to intimidate them? And would you mind telling me who told you to do it, because it surely isn't coincidence that audience after audience during these last two weeks has been subjected to exactly the same form of intimidation; you have obviously received a central directive from somebody to do this."
He refused to answer this. So I said: "Here is the microphone; you have one minute's use of the microphone and you can tell my audience -- whom you have just been photographing -- why you have been photographing them. Tell them what you are doing. Otherwise you are a coward."
He wouldn't do it. They are cowards, because they think they have got protection. But they haven't.

THE PROTECTION IS gradually melting away. These frantic steps that we see them taking now -- you wonder why suddenly your Canadian Government is trying to ban historians from visiting Canada; you wonder why they are taking these extraordinary steps around the world to prevent me and other people from speaking.

You wonder why they waste millions of dollars of Canadian taxpayers' money on these absurd trials of people like Keegsta and Zündel and the rest; they may for all I know be the most objectionable guys under the sun -- I don't know -- but that is not what free speech is about.
To my mind the answer is that our traditional enemies have the fear of God in them. They are on the point of being exposed. They are on the run. It is the Endkampf for them, and in the Endkampf phase of any war people become desperate; desperate people do desperate things!
This is why we should gain renewed courage and resolve, looking at these steps which our enemies are taking. Individuals amongst us suffer -- who knows, I may be arrested this evening, or tomorrow night in Vancouver, or the day after tomorrow in kelowna or salmon Arm. All the way across Canada I am going to worry about what is going to happen to me and my family and the rest of us if I am thrown into jail for defying the will of Mr Bernard Valcourt [Canadian immigration minister] by coming here to express my opinions to you this evening. I don't think I have broken any laws this evening, have I?

I have not whipped up any hatred; I have not referred to the "holocaust" in any detail. I have just been talking about freedom of speech, and you have been listening with the freedom to which Canadian citizens are entitled. And that. ladies and gentlemen, is what we have been here for this evening, to prove that freedom of speech is an important right to which every free citizen is entitled; it is like the ancient rights of time. It is like a right of passage, it is like a right a way across the countryside. If these rights aren't occasionally and repeatedly exercised, then they fall into disrepair and decay, and gradually they are trampled on by people who have an interest in curtailing these rights.
We have therefore to assert our rights. And that is why I have come to Canada: to assert my right to free speech.

The hall, it shortly turned out, had been quietly surrounded by police. A few minutes later while he answered questions from the audience, six officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police invaded the room, arrested Mr Irving, and took him away in handcuffs to Victoria City Jail.