ZGram - 1/8/2002 - "Leave it to Irving"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

January 8, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

My readers ask again and again about David Irving - what he is up to, how
he is handling the Lipstadt debacle, if he is still so brash and
self-confident as he has been throughout his legal ordeal.

I can only tell you that I don't know more than what he has posted on his
website, http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/index.html - and here he is, taking
Jessica, age 7 or so, to the Movies:

[START]

Posted Monday, January 7, 2002

Monday, January 7, 2002

 (London, England)

AT 2:10 p.m. a somewhat distraught Jessica tackles me in the office.
Tomorrow she returns to school, and she has discovered that today is her
last chance to see the mega-movie Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
at the Odeon at Marble Arch. A check of the newspaper shows that the final
showing is indeed at 2:15 p.m. It is 2:30 p.m. as we arrive, breathless,
and pack into the half empty theatre.

 The film is spectacular, and needs little commentary from me as most
people have already had a bellyful over Christmas of the J K Rowling good
luck story, her secret marriage, the books she writes, the billions she
earns, and all the rest. The film is pure joy: Eton College meets the
Wizard of Oz.

 Jessica however has read all four Potter books twice through already and
is beginning a third reading. She is a Harry Potter expert.

 I have been writing until five a.m. and look forward to putting at part of
the three hours in cinematic darkness to good effect, but the noise of the
movie destroys all such dreams: There is spectacular Dolby surround-sound,
coming at me from every angle, as the screen fills with ghosts, cats,
trolls, bats, and a three-headed slavering giant Rottweiler called Fluffy.
I had forgotten moreover how hard it is to stretch my legs in a movie
theatre. An Odeon has less leg-room than a standard American Airlines
flight (though it is somewhat safer).

 I keep half an eye on the movie for all the wrong reasons. As a High
Court-authenticated and fully-fledged anti-Semite and racist I am alert to
all the movie's undertones -- like the beautifully crafted Goblins who are
the bank tellers and cashiers in the Gringott's Bank sequence, with their
evil, leering faces, shifty eyes, and pointy ears.

 What pleases me most surprisingly, being of vintage 1938, is the moment
when Harry dashes magically through the King's Cross Station brick pillar
which is the entrance to "Platform Nine and Three-quarters" and finds
himself on a secret railroad platform boarding a train hauled by a genuine
old 4-6-2 English steam locomotive; it took me straight back to being a
four-year old at Mrs. Hall's kindergarten in Shenfield, clinging to the
playground railings each lunch hour and marveling as the Gazelle, or
Springbok, or Flying Scotsman thundered past.

 Most pleasing of all, at least to my ear, are the 100 percent pure
southern English accents of the schoolchildren in the movie.

 Every British television and radio channel now feels obliged to dumb-down
and use provincial, preferably Midlands or even Newcastle accents for its
announcers. But in the entire Harry Potter movie it is all pure English
elocution, and there is not an American accent to be heard.

 Has Hollywood at last tired of using English actors only to portray the
Klaus von B=FClows, the cunning villains, and the Nazi mass-murderers? I hea=
r
from one of Jessica's friends, who goes there, that many of Harry's fellow
pupils in the film were recruited, like Harry himself, from Sussex House
school in Sloane Street, just round the corner from Harrod's, and the
shameless sloaniness of their English voices is a delight for unabashed
court-certified racists like myself to hear (even if the script does have
Harry say at one time that Hermione "has gone to the bathroom" where any
real English boy would have said "lavatory").

 Talking of which, however, it is laughable to observe how this movie's
producers belatedly realized that they ought to plant a few token Black
faces among his fellow-pupils, just like the obligatory Blacks who now
people southern English television screens: certain scenes have obviously
been shot or reshot and pasted into the movie at a relatively late date, as
the boys and girls are entirely White throughout the rest of the movie.

 Indeed, as something of an expert on such tampering, I readily detect that
in one of the closing sequences a Black girl's face has been grafted
digitally into one crowd-enthusiasm scene, using the same techniques that
put Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump into the 1960s presidential photo-call (and
for all we know the Rev. Osama bin Laden into those recent videos).

 When, I wonder, as Jessica clutches my hand and steers me back out into
the Hell that is sales-time Oxford Street, will producers be able to make
films freely again, without this kind of "positive discrimination" Diktat
from political-correctness advisers?

 That is one of the advantages of the absurd labels with which Mr. Justice
Gray qualified (or rather disqualified) my private opinions as an
Englishman, in his perverse judgment on the Lipstadt libel case: I am now
free to express them, where others who feel the same way aren't; and
express them I do.

[END]

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

Thought for the Day:  (Advice to Deborah Lipstadt, perhaps...)


"You're not the only pebble on the beach."

(Harry Braisted)