Of
late, I seem to be getting no answers from
anybody I write to: Christmas season, or
what?
|
December
14, 2004 (Tuesday)
London
(England) 
I SEND this email to Keele University's Evidence in
Camera project: "For my original 1963 book
The
Destruction of Dresden (William Kimber,
Ltd) I obtained from the Master Bomber in that raid
(Wing Cdr Maurice Smith) and reproduced with
HMSO permission damage-assessment photos taken five
weeks later on March 22, 1945. I have copy
negatives, but for a revised and updated reprint of
this book which is to go to press this month I
would prefer to use original rather than second- or
third-generation copies, and would like to purchase
from your service a good quality 300 dpi or higher
digital scan of negatives K.3742, K.4020 and
K.4171."
Let's see what response if any I get. Of late, I
seem to be getting no answers from anybody I write
to: Christmas season, or what?  I
work until 1 a.m. scanning more photo items from
1979. My interview of Sandor Kopacsi,
left, the Budapest police chief during the
Hungarian Uprising of 1956, living in exile in
Toronto.
Gary S. Redish [[email protected]],
the obnoxious Jewish lawyer of the Winne Banta
Hetherington & Basralian law firm in New Jersey
(the one who
gloated that he imagined I was now living in a
cardboard box in The Strand) has emailed me
asking, What are you so busy doing? Writing
books no one will publish and no one reads and
no one reviews, or planning the litigation you
will never file in New Zealand, because you are
living off the donations? Your comments on the
Prime Minister's picture are beneath even your
usual standards. I don't normally reply to Redish, but this time
he gets just this, tout court: "Glad I am
getting under somebody's skin." He snaps back: "You
always get under mine. . ." Yes, what does keep me busy? Beats me.
Out at 7:40 a.m., and take Jessica to school. The
daily school run, a high point, twice a day. The
bus to South Kensington is crowded and I stand the
whole way. Three French families board the bus, all
regulars like us; two of them recognize me and say
bonjour as they crowd in, on their way to
the Lycée, where my first four daughters
also learned their bit (I have been paying school
fees for nearly forty years now). I pay for the daily bus pass, though I am old
enough to qualify for free travel; Jessica is still
just young enough to travel free. Paying is part of
my single-handed fight against the passing years --
like not drawing any pension either. I murmur to Jessica, "We're surrounded by
Frogs," but she affects not to understand. She is
very politically correct. With luck, I catch a No. 74 almost at once on
the way back, and I am back home in Hertford Street
by 8:45 a.m. A benefactor in Belgium has given me a
set of Mozart discs, and the maestro's piano
concertos fill the room all day, though not so loud
as to disturb Benté below. He too relied,
not always successfully, on sponsors to complete
his works without financial worry. -- An order
has come for seven autographed copies of Hitler
and Churchill.
That's nice. Customer wants to send them as
Christmas presents. 
DON P. has emailed from Nevada: On your outlink -- Tony
Blair lights a menorah at No.10, welcoming
those who used to "light a little candle in
their heart" each time a British soldier was
murdered in Palestine -- you must enlarge
your comments a bit from your personal
experience. I lecture him: "No. Part of the fun is the art
of the 'private joke.' As a public speaker I can
tell you the greatest pleasure is when only half
the audience gets the point and laughs, and the
rest are baffled." The point here [I continue] was
that Mr Menachem Begin, who God knows
would have won few beauty contests even in his
home land (whatever that was*), uttered the
famous remark ("I light a little candle in my
heart each time a British soldier is killed")
when Jewish settlers hanged the hostages they
had taken, two young British army conscripts, in
an orange grove in Palestine, as a revenge act
after the British mandate forces tried and
hanged two Irgun terrorists for murder in the
Zionist attack on the jail at Acre. Not much gratitude there for the British Army's
liberation of Europe, defeat of Adolf
Hitler, and ending of the Holocaust (whatever
that was). Some people in Britain have long
memories, and they are the half of my audience who
will who utter a chuckle of recognition. Okay, it
makes it tough on the less well briefed in Nevada,
but ... as said, that is the luxury of the "private
joke."
* In fact Begin came from that same insidious
corner of Lithuania, and the same sub-tribe of
the illustrious Jewish peoples, which produced
the likes of Joe Slovo and other
unlamented lovelies in recent world history.
I GET stuck into the day's business: regularly
enriching and updating our website, scanning
photographs for four books being prepared for
reprinting, and checking the Rommel
reprint page proofs. IHR's Mark Weber reminds me I owe him
$409.89 for his air fare to Cincinnati. Check made
out. That just wipes out the amount for the books
sold this morning. I reply: "Check will go to you
today." -- Despite many supporters, we are still
not covering costs on the Cincinnati function.  9:33
am With my other hand, so to speak, I am digitizing
old photographic collections. I find myself
scanning 1978 photographs of the Gold Dunhill
cigarette lighter which the adulterous Winston
Churchill Jr, MP, gave to his mistress. He
called me a "lunatic" in the press (because I had
just revealed that his grandfather the prime
minister did not deliver all his own speeches on
the BBC but used a Children's Hour actor, Norman
Shelley, instead); I always thought the
lighter-snapshots might come in useful, but they
never did.
The Dunhill's recipient was Alexandra "Gully"
Wells, a comely young lady (editress?) who
toured the UK for a week in 1977 managing me on
behalf of Weidenfeld's during a Rommel
book-signing tour. At the end of the day's
bookstore signings, in our hotel in Birmingham, we
had just seen Winston confessing on television that
he had never even seen the book on the Waffen SS
that he was objecting to (Hitler's adjutant, my
friend Richard Schulze-Kossens, was in
London promoting it). I guffawed loudly at Winston's discomfiture.
Gully said, "Oh he's not all bad, you know," and
she fished a Gold Dunhill ciigarette lighter out of
her pocket. G--W was engraved on one end. He had
given it to her after imposing himself upon her
person -- how otherwise can I put it (as indeed he
may have said to her)? -- during his wife Minnie's
absence from London. Rather cruelly, I pointed out
that the hyphen engraved between their respective
initials G and W was rather small, and left it at
that. Or not quite: aided by the photographs, I went
to the trouble of procuring a replica lighter,
which I intended to carry around and produce
casually from my pocket during a likely future TV
confrontation with young Mr C; alas, the global
British embargo soon enforced against me on UK
television programmes checkmated that little
gag.  The
replica Dunhill lighter went the way of everything
else when my archives and private possessions were
seized in May 2002. As for "G", she is now a
deservedly big fish in New York publishing society.
I guess I always took the marriage vows more
seriously than the Winston Churchills and David
Blunketts (right) of this world.
[Winston
Churchill Jr. died on March 3, 2010, aged
69]
A FRIEND emails me the latest news
item on the mysterious links between Israeli
agents in the Pentagon and whiter-than-white AIPAC
in Washington DC. I respond: "Thanks for that very
useful link, which I will post; getting
interesting!" 10:48 am a German publisher informs me that
Arndt Verlag in Kiel is widely publicizing in their
catalogue a German edition of our Apocalypse
1945: the Destruction of Dresden. But they
do not have the rights, as they failed to complete
the contract. They even stopped the cheque they
sent to Parforce. This is thieving, piracy, pure and simple. We
instruct a lawyer in Kiel to stop whatever Arndt is
up to: "Das ist ja scheußlich, was der
Arndt Verlag sich jetzt erlaubt, wie aus dem
Schreiben eines anderen befreundeten Verlags zu
ersehen ist. Der Arndt Verlag hat ganz
offensichtlich die Absicht, unser Buch
Apocalypse 1945: the Destruction of
Dresden in Übersetzung herauszugeben,
obwohl er dafür kein Groschen gezahlt hat,
den Scheck storniert, und dadurch nur Schaden in
der Branche verursacht. Das können wir uns
nicht gefallen lassen. Bitte lassen Sie das
nicht zu lange, man muß sofort dagegen
wirken. So etwas wie eine verspätete e.V
gibt es nicht." A small online contribution from Paul S,
of Alabama, who writes glowing words about
Nuremberg,
the Last Battle which he is reading, and sends
$20. I write a proper letter thanking him. Four
Parforce UK Ltd contracts go off to a Moscow
publisher for four lesser books. (The Soviet Union
once published my PQ.17
book, omitting the little detail that Soviet
destroyers had their main armament pointing to the
rear.) They also want Hitler
and Churchill
but Parforce UK Ltd agrees they will not let them
go for peanuts. 11:59 am this email goes to my barrister: "Sorry
to bother you, but I have received no date yet from
the Court; I filed the application [against
Deborah
Lipstadt] with them on Friday ten days ago.
Is there a number there I can phone? Your clerk
presumably would have this at his finger tips."
IN the mail, a rather irritating message from AmEx,
freezing my non-existent card account with
them. Somebody playing pranks again, I suspect.
Larry M has moved to Ireland, and sends $100
contribution. Somebody also emails, "I just saw
Churchill's War Vol. II and Hitler's
War for sale on Amazon.com." Keeping tabs of things, I ask my American
colleague: "Is this us selling the books on
Amazon or some pirate? Just to put my mind at
rest." He replies: "Yes this is us, we need to do
the same in the UK." I reply: "Yes I agree. We need capital all the
time. I have no time to handle that side
myself." G. emails from Peru, wants to assist on my next
US tour, in the spring. Will I phone? So the day wears on. At 1:14 pm there is a
further grumpy letter from a belligerent American,
Bill, about my website's policies on Iraq. I
replied at length yesterday and now do so again,
telling him that he lives inside the American media
bubble, whereas the rest of the world does not, and
in consequence of their regime's illegal war
against Iraq and other policies, the Americans are
rapidly becoming the Second Most Hated Nation on
earth. -- Rolf Hochhuth once advised me
never to reply to fan mail, as that just encourages
fans to write again. Bill fires off half a dozen
more letters during the day. He has more time than
I have on his hands; I bet he draws a free bus pass
too. During the afternoon the television news reports
that British National Party leader Nick
Griffin has been arrested by West Yorkshire
police, after the BBC television broadcast in July
remarks he made at a private dinner. They used a
hidden camera. I put this straight on the website.
He apparently said that in his view Islamists were
a violent, extremist sect. Duh. Off with his head.
What if, on the basis of Falluja Episode I (April
2004) and Falluja Episode II (November 2004) we
were to say the same about our transatlantic
friends, the Americans -- violent and extremist.
Don't even go there. At that rate, perhaps the French ambassador who
referred to that other "sh*tty little country in
the Middle East" at Barbara Amiel's private
dinner party in London could also be prosecuted --
except there was no hidden BBC camera present to
make a furtive record of his remarks. As Mr Griffin's men have today said, it is the
BBC who should be arrested: they were the ones who
published the private remarks, not he. In fact
David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, has
evidently ordered the arrests because Nick
Griffin is planning to stand against him in his
own constituency at the next election, which would
wipe out Blunkett's political career for good.
Labour is turning this country into a police state
-- a multi-racial police state. Hope I haven't
offended anyone saying that, in the privacy of this
diary.  I
digitally scan more negatives, from my 1980
research visits to the Soviet Union (right)
and to the still-communist Hungary, simultaneously
with handling the day's correspondence which
arrives around midday. The mysterious
government-appointed interpreter Erika
László and her husband Bela.
Etc.
The Key West printers report they have not
received our last payment of $1,000 yet which I
mailed. At 3:22 pm I reply: "Final check follows in
seven days. We experienced some trouble with mail
to KW; a $1,000 check that we deposited by mail
with First State Bank has vanished" -- that was the
contribution from [---, a well known newspaper
columnist]. It is almost as though our
post-office workers know what mail to look for. The day is only half done. What is it
that keeps me busy? At 3:30 off by No. 74 bus to
South Kensington, to get Jessica, and back home at
4:25 pm. A one-mile forced march at each end again,
with Jessica's warm paw stuck in mine: I tow her at
speed like a minesweeper past the Lycée
Français, scattering other parents and their
children blocking the sidewalks. Two teenage schoolgirls from the Lycée
sit next to me on the bus, one from Brooklyn, the
other French, chattering actively, and lapsing into
fluent French when they don't want strangers
listening; I eavesdrop shamelessly. What fun
languages are! A pity Danish (and Hungarian) are so
bafflingly different. I complete parceling up the books and signing
letters; thank God for Mr Pitney Bowes and his
franking machines. I set off with the heavy parcels
of books on the two miles walk to our nearest Post
Office, in Berkeley Street, but manage to intercept
the post office van nearby at 5:30. Food shopping for the family, and back home at
6:15 pm. I phone Lima, but there is no reply; I
dictate a message in Spanish on the machine, to say
that I called. In the evening, Benté shows up briefly
from downstairs, but goes missing-in-action again
after half an hour. I continue work on scanning
photos in the background, and simultaneously
formatting Rommel in PageMaker for the
reprint. Total emails dealt with today, around
270. Not much forward writing done today, but keeping
the books in print is no less important than
creating new ones. The first page-pulls of Nuremberg have
arrived by courier. I scrutinize them, and email to
the printer: "Thank you for letting me see proofs
of the final printed result; they look fine, and I
am glad to see they print a bit darker than
Hitler's War, which was more faint and
attracted criticism for that. Plantin is a heavier
typeface than Minion, and when we come to print the
next items, which are in Minion, we shall have to
watch the inking for that reason. I will send you
the final disc of the Dresden jacket today
or tomorrow, to sink your teeth into, and the
picture section of Nuremberg the day after
that. The Dresden book itself is in Quark
XPress, which (to me) is a nightmare to work in and
expand. Right now I am importing Rommel into
PageMaker 7, with which I am much more comfortable
(although it has bugs; e.g., it makes more
sense to import into 6.5 and then convert -- the
diacriticals, hard spaces, etc., go berserk
otherwise)." One-thirty a.m., downstairs to bed. Yes, one
might say, a comparatively busy day. [Previous
Radical's Diary] | 
David Irving