Herewith the conclusion of David Irving's run-ins with the ever-present censors. Here he talks about what happened recently as he arrived for the 13th International Conference put on by the Institute for Historical Review:
ALL OF this brings me to what happens here, on my arrival in San Francisco from London in May 2000. The officers are scrutinising this mystifying file. They go away, they consult, they make print-outs, they return.
I am taken to another waiting room, where some rather down-at-heel Asians and South Americans are sitting. And among them, invisible, is sitting my Glücksgöttin too. The final INS officer, the top banana, the one who makes the decisions, turns out to be an Irving-fan.
"I've got some of your books," he says proudly, and volunteers that he owns Hitler's War, though only in the cheap paperback edition. What rotten luck for the traditional enemy, the senior officer on duty, is somebody who knows the truth about what I write. Just as it is rotten luck for Judge Gray, that while hundreds of young journalists have laboriously copied out the gratuitous slime in which he has marinated his (in my view) perverse Judgment in the Lipstadt case, there are literally millions of wiser folks around the world who have my actual books in their shelves and have read them -- like this American officer in front of me, five thousand miles from my writing desk in London.
Here in San Francisco, I have meanwhile fished out of my case that letter written to me by the US embassy in 1993 -- the letter apologising for the "little problem" at Washington's airport, and promising that now that the computer file has been purged of the spurious entries I shall not have any further problems.
This letter proves doubly useful now. Irving-fan goes away, studies the Tecs II print-outs with his back to me, scratches his head, comes back again; questions me some more. After ten or fifteen more minutes of questioning, he stamps the passport and waves me through, handing back to me the letter and my sheaf of other papers as I leave, and wishes me a nice day. I am finally through around 4 p.m. I pick up an Avis rental car and head south down 101 to Stanford, where I am going to work for a few days in the archives of the Hoover Institution on War and Peace.
As I unpack my things, I find a little surprise: Irving-fan has given to me the entire confidential print out of my Tecs II dossier. God Bless America, land of free speech.
<end>
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A little plug to help the David Irving Defense Fund:
The diary excerps reproduced (are) the property of David Irving. Passages have been edited as to tenses, grammar, styles, spelling, and names. The diary's depiction of courtroom exchanges are from memory, and are not intended to replace the official transcripts posted on Mr Irving's website at
www.fpp.co.uk/docs/trial/transcripts.html.
The official transcripts are being corrected for later publication by FPP as a CD-Rom. Mr Irving,s Closing Speech is published in full by FPP, available for $10.00, from P O Box 1707, Key West, FL 33041, USA.
email: focalp@aol.com
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Thought for the Day:
"Great artists do great things but it is their human figures that make them in the history books - their still lifes go along for the ride."
(Sent to the Zundelsite)
Back to Table of Contents of the July 2000 ZGrams