She
doggedly argues the cause of the ethnic
minorities, and I produce the killer
argument, one that has been silently
nagging me for months
|
December
28, 2004 (Tuesday)
London
(England) I SCAN more old negatives. I am now up to the
birth of Josephine, April 1, 1963, a darling little
baby in a cot; on a table in the background of the
pictures is an advance copy of my first book,
The Destruction of Dresden, and the TK1
reel-to-reel tape recorder on which I have recorded
the message from the hospital: "It appears that
you've had a little girl." Poor Josephine, how we
all miss her. December
29, 2004 (Wednesday)
London
(England) A poor night, very wakeful; some idiot rings our
doorbell in the very small hours ("Yes?" "Roger?"
-- "P*** off!"), Later I hear Jessica answering the
phone. A wrong number. Heavy dreams all night, very
exhausting: I am climbing up from a beach to the
top of a cliff, and end up on a ledge with my back
to the rock, unable to go further up or down, and a
sheer concave rock face beneath me, down to rocks
hundreds of feet below. I force-quit, so to
speak, and make myself wake up, as the only
escape. I work all day on Apocalypse 1945: the
Destruction of Dresden, and on scanning. Over
the road for supper with Jessica, but they are
packed, we have no reservation, and we make do with
a carry-out pizza. Bed around 12:30 a.m. December30,
2004 (Thursday)
London
(England) Good sound sleep. Awake at 7:40 a.m., then up at
10:15 a.m. Nice dreams, which I can't remember: as
they should be. I write to a friend in Chicago: Just a message to let you know that
Jessica is not to be seen without her yellow
Chicago Hood. She would go to bed in it if she
could. It clearly wins hands down as the best
gift she received this year. How clever you are.
I have given her your details and ordered her to
write thanking. This email to [--] College,
Massachusetts. "I am visiting Massachusetts in the
spring and would like permission to research in the
John J McCloy papers for my Winston
Churchill biography, and in particular in his
formidable diaries.  What
formalities are necessary please? Anticipated
length of stay 2-3 days. -- They reply within an
hour, welcoming my visit. I am now scanning photos of Josephine's early
months. Her baby features unmistakably those of the
later Josephine. Those were happy hours that I spent in the
darkroom forty years ago with tank and reel, and I
am pleased the negatives have weathered the
intervening years without a stain -- and escaped
seizure in May 2002 as well somehow. I have also
found one or two of me with Hitler's secretary
Christa Schroeder, etc.  Phone call from a male descendant of R Steer in
Somerset; he has received my letter, knows only
that their boss Colonel Michael
Murphy died many years ago, Murphy's widow died
about six years ago, and they had a son and
daughter, both probably still alive. That is
helpful, but it may be a dead end. Let's see if my
letter to Murphy's old address draws a
response. Benté . . . has however begun to wear the
blue night gown we bought her for Christmas, and it
suits her. 
I WAS about to walk across Mayfair with Jessica for
supper at [a restaurant]. As we walked over
there few days ago, a discussion developed between
us on this country's growing obsession with racism
and race. As I told Richard Rampton QC in
the Lipstadt trial, if there had been no mass
immigration there would be no race problem, and the
unfortunate Black teenager Steven Lawrence
would not have been murdered. Logical, right? Duh?
He seemed baffled by the obvious.
Jessica teases and says, Supposes she decides to
marry a Black? I say she has more brains than that,
hoping to provoke the appropriate answer. She
parrots that their brains are the same, and I say
they are not -- they make better jumpers, runners,
pugilists, and the rest, but their brains are
not the same. I launch into an explanation of the Bell Curve
theories to her: how there will always be a residue
of very brainy Blacks, who will overlap with the
very stupid bottom-end Whites (most of whom appear
to work in the media). And that way above us all
are the Asians -- not those from the
sub-continental Asia, but from the Orient. Jessica of course is too clever to agree easily,
and I then produce craftier arguments. In the
British broadcast media, there are now positive
discrimination laws in place guaranteeing Black
representation on the TV screen and elsewhere, to
the detriment of Whites of equal and even greater
qualifications -- as witness the famous
rule-of-three: if three faces are on British TV
now, one has to be Black. This is Greg
Dyke's undying legacy: creating a Black Hole in
broadcasting where the great Lord Reith had
found none to be necessary. Jessica, bless her, is turning into a proper
little tree-hugger. She doggedly argues the cause
of the ethnic minorities, and I produce the killer
argument, one that has been silently nagging me for
months. I am a dedicated watcher of the television quiz
show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? To
qualify for that, contestants must phone a
computerized system which asks them three general
knowledge questions. If they get them right, their
names go into the draw to be among the ten
contestants. We assume that the system is random,
is fair, is colorblind, and produces no systematic
or methodological errors in selecting the final ten
contestants each week -- the television moguls
would not tolerate otherwise. So the Millionaire system represents the
automated random-questioning of a huge
cross-section of the country's population, day
after day. Blacks know how to use telephones. Blacks would
like to be millionaires. There are never any Blacks
among the ten contestants selected each week. Black community leaders -- and these are legion
in this country now -- might argue that the
questions are loaded against the Black intellectual
horizon, that if the test questions were, for
example, about hip-hop fashion, gangsta rap,
freebasing, or P Diddy, then the front row, sitting
with fingers poised on the keypads, would look like
The Black & White Minstrel Show each
Saturday evening. Perhaps this is true. This is one of the
blessings of having been designated "a racist" in
the Lipstadt Trial by Richard Rampton QC (who of
course was not racist himself, notwithstanding that
his entire forty-strong team in court each day was
White) and Mr Justice Gray (ditto). I can
say what I think, and ask the awkward questions
that others can't. But here's a puzzle also, to
which I don't know the answer: there are very
rarely any Asian contestants, either
sub-continental or Oriental, selected for
Millionaire either. [Previous
Radical's Diary] | 
David Irving