The
Roosevelt cottage and furniture are
remarkable for their homely simplicity:
stark wooden furniture, tin bowls,
homespun bedding. I wonder what George W
Bush sleeps in?
|
February
7, 2005 (Monday)
London
(England) TO SLOANE SQUARE AT eight-fifteen with Jessica;
the last of her entrance examinations for an upper
school. She has become quite blasé about
them. Each school has now told us she has done very
well indeed in the exams: the world may yet be her
oyster. I have applied no pressure, of course, but
I do tell her if she fails, she can always get a
job at Burger King. Three school runs a day for the last week or
two. The buses are swamped by immigrants. Tony
Blair says he welcomes them. Not a vote-winning
remark, I would have thought. I have meanwhile
continued scanning-to-disc old negative
collections, and I have come across the pictures I
took in 1994 of the cottage at Warm Springs,
Georgia, where Franklin D Roosevelt died in
April 1945 (I was under contract to Random House at
that time, to write a biography of FDR: they
quietly annulled that contract in April 1996, under
the same pressure as St
Martins Press who cancelled my Goebbels
biography: and people still ask me why I took
legal action against Deborah
Lipstadt and her gang of long-haired
louts). The Roosevelt cottage and furniture are
remarkable for their homely simplicity: stark
wooden furniture, tin jug and wash basin, homespun
bedding. I wonder what George W Bush sleeps in?
 I
have always regarded the FDR administration as one
of the greatest the country has produced, and I
have yet to find any hint of corruption at the top
among his papers. The
last, unfinished, painting of
FDR, done at the cottage 
BIT by bit my forthcoming speaking
visit to the United States is taking shape. The
Americans are my favourite people on earth -- but
not their current Government, I might add. One day
they will get it right again, I hope. I am still
wondering what chicanery brought a man of Senator
John Kerry's calibre to the top of the
Democrat wormheap in the last election. He spoke
like a loser, thought like a loser, looked like a
loser, and fought like a loser.
I shall be down at the Show of Shows in
Louisville, Kentucky, but a day late -- a planning
mix-up has saddled me with a ticket I cannot
change. After that I speak in Elvis country, then
on to Birmingham, Mobile, New Orleans, and Baton
Rouge. My hope is to show the new German movie,
Downfall, to early comers, then lecture on
The Real Adolf Hitler of History -- the man
described to me in close and often intimate detail
by the men and women who worked with him for the
last ten years or more. Eventually I intend to
write a book just about these people, like his
secretary Christa
Schroeder. They kept very much to
themselves. After N'Orleans, I shall head west to Houston
and then return through Dallas and Shreveport or
Texarkana or Tulsa to Kansas City -- it is
twenty-five years since I last spoke there, to an
audience of some ladies' organisation; and then on
via Des Moines, reaching Minneapolis-St Paul in mid
March and then travel on to either Madison or
Milwaukee to Chicago, where I shall stage a small
exclusive dinner at the same location we selected
last time. This is only the first of three loops;
the second will head eastwards, touching Nashville,
Tennessee, on the weekend of March 25-26 where I
will be at the Militaria Relics Show, and then a
bookstore at Havre de Grace on the east coast; then
back through Chicago to a string of locations
across the south-west and west coast. A lot of
Canadian friends always come down from British
Columbia to hear me when I speak at Seattle.
SPEAKING of Canada, following Vice President
Dick Cheney's "wardrobe malfunction," during
the solemn Auschwitz
celebrations, a Canadian friend has today sent me a
report which suggests that there is some kind of
curse on those who go on all-expenses-paid junkets
to the notorious camp -- and I am not referring to
the "up to 300,000" victims who died at Auschwitz
from all causes in WW2, according
to the war crimes court in Krakow in 1947. The Asper-owned Calgary Herald, in
Canada, carried an op-ed piece from Canada's
Governor General Adrienne Clarkson in its
Saturday edition two days ago. In it, Her
Excellency -- our own Queen's illustrious
representative -- recalled her recent excursion to
Auschwitz, to mark the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of the German concentration camp by
Soviet forces. I have always pondered that word "liberation",
by the way -- why did nearly all the inmates, given
the choice, around January 17, 1945, of staying in
the camp to be "liberated" by the Red Army or
walking or being transported hundreds of miles in
the freezing snow westwards with their no less
unlovely Nazi captors, choose the latter? Among
those who preferred not to be "liberated" were
Otto Frank and his small family -- Anne
Frank and her sister Margot,
Elie
Wiesel, and a bunch of other clear-sighted
notables. Anyway, Canada's own Generalgouverneur
(-euse?) wrote: "In
the bus on the way to Auschwitz, Queen Juliana
of the Netherlands, the Grand Duke of Luxemburg,
the president of Poland and Russian President
Vladimir Putin spoke of what we were
remembering. Everybody was aware of the role
that Canada played in the Second World War and
we did not have to explain, especially not to
the Queen of the Netherlands, how much we had
sacrificed." Oops. No royal observer has come such a cropper
since the 1950s, when "Crawfie," the old nanny and
retainer of our Royal Family, described in her
regular Woman's Own column a magnificent
Trooping of the Colour, referring in touching
detail to Her Majesty's beautiful dress and horse,
and her stately demeanour. The piece had been
written and printed in advance. QE was indisposed
that day, and did not attend the Trooping. Crawfie
was sacked. Queen Juliana of Holland -- actually Queen
Mother at the time -- died last year, on March 20,
2004. As for "remembering," QJ's health is reported
to have been in decline since 1998; with several
observers suggesting Her Majesty's frequent memory
lapses were caused by her struggle with
Alzheimer's. My friend tells me with great glee that the
Governor General's illiterate op-ed was printed in
several Canadian dailies owned by the Aspers'
CanWest Publications monopoly, including the
Victoria Times-Colonist and Vancouver
Sun. A note at the bottom of the piece reminds
readers that "In a gesture of appreciation for this
contribution, CanWest Publications has made a
charitable donation in the name of the Governor
General to the cause of literacy." [Previous
Radical's Diary] 
Deutsche
Stimme interviews David Irving at length (in
German) about Dresden, Auschwitz, World War II
and history: "The
German spirit is still enemy-occupied
territory. . ."-
Apologies all round
Outrage
of Auschwitz survivor because Canadian
Television included interview with Prof Norman
Finkelstein | and Mr
Irving's comments
-
Auschwitz:
The
Barber's Story -- CNN interviews Pole who claims
to have witnessed Everything | Our
readers comment dismissively
-
Our
big Auschwitz file
|
David Irving