Defense Documents

David Irving: A Political Self-Portrait: Electronic Edition

1.5 International Jewish conspiracy

[1.5/A]'Well, what got into Churchill in 1920 [Referring to an anti-Semitic article by Churchill] got out of him in July 1936. (Laughter). At a dinner in north London...on July 22nd, 1936, it was put to Winston Churchill by various influential businessmen - again I'm not going to go into detail about who they were - that they might finance him. One of those present was the Vice-Chairman of the Board of Deputies, Sir Robert Waley[-]Cohen. His biography was published in an authorised version by Robert Henrique[s]; he quite openly boasted that at this dinner they put up £50,000 to finance a secret group to keep Churchill afloat, provided he turned his magnificent oratory, his brilliant writing talents away from his targets at the time, which were India and Defence, and direct his cannon squarely upon their enemy, Nazi Germany. Imagine that in terms of 1990 currency! The secret pressure group was called The Focus.' [P's speech to the Clarendon Club: 'We have lost our sense of Destiny', 1990: K4, Tab. 10, p. 23 ]

[1.5/B]'Why in God's name did we get into the war in 1939? Because we gave a guarantee in March 1939 to the Poles. We have the records now. Neville Chamberlain was tricked into giving the guarantee by people like Ian Colvin, of the News Chronicle a newspaper heavily financed by the kind of people I have [been] talking about earlier. And here's Ian Colvin, their young Berlin correspondent, getting an audience of the prime minister in March 1939 1and [sic] telling Mr Chamberlain, on the instructions of The Focus, that Hitler has given orders to invade Poland almost immediately. Chamberlain is panicked into issuing that fateful guarantee - the guarantee of March 31st, 1939, that if Poland was attacked, then Britain would stand by her side. That was the hidden moment which first saw the British Empire beginning to fall apart. And it was all done by these mysterious forces behind the scenes, who for ruthless reasons of their own wanted war in Central Europe.

What should we have done, if we had had politicians who were statesmen for Britain, through and through, and who knew only the red [ - ] white-and-blue flag of our forefathers, and who weren't in foreign pay? We should have said to the Poles: so, you've got a squabble with Herr Hitler? You've got a squabble with Germany? - Sort it out yourselves! Our Empire is more important to us. (Applause). And if we had had true blooded English statesmen at that time, then they should have said to the immigrants and refugees who flooded towards our shores...they should have said to them: You are guests. So long as you are our guests here, then you do as we English decree! But we are not going to be led astray by you. We should have said to these people: so, you have a squabble with the Nazi party? - sort it out yourselves! Because it was a squabble: these people had started an international boycott of Germany as soon as the Nazis came to power; four, five or six years before that they had been fighting a war, from inside the police stations and inside the newspapers in Berlin and Hamburg and Munich against the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Any historian could tell you this. It was a fight between these two forces in Germany. And it was fought with the cudgel and the cosh and the dagger in the darkness. And what had it got to do with Britain or the British Empire? Nothing whatsoever. (Applause). But there we were, encouraged to interfere, because these people who came flooding toward our shores found that their friends were already here in the media. And the situation has become progressively worse over the decades since then. You only have to look at the concentration of British media power in the hands of a foreign-born executive like Mr. Robert Maxwell to realise the danger that the British people, as a proud entity, is now in.' [P's speech to the Clarendon Club: 'We have lost our sense of Destiny', 1990: K4, Tab 10, p. 24]

[1.5/C]'We were [In the 1940s and 1950s] proud of our traditions. Britain was a haven of thriving industries, of intelligent and forthright people whose word could be trusted. But now it isn't. Britain has become a nation where some people's rights have to be specially protected by law, instead of by one's own natural Christian instincts; a nation where the newest newcomer is given preference over the people who have been here, with family and forefathers and ancestors for centuries. [...] Everything has been stood on its head. And we are baffled and perplexed and confused by it all, because wherever we turn, we English and Scots and Welsh and Irish - wherever we look we cannot find any political party or any force or any faction that is prepared to stand up for us. Where are the Englishmen in office? Mrs Thatcher? We know whose pocket Mrs. Thatcher is in. She's in the pocket of her constituents (Laughter and applause). Well, Britain is a "democracy" and it is right that the Prime Minister should be in the pocket of her constituents, if these constituents are a representative cross-section of the English people. I should be interested to know how many of those constituents had their parents or their grandparents in Britain in the 1930s and the 1940s. Take Mr. Martin Gilbert, my great rival as a historian. He was not even in Britain during the war: from the wealthy and the influential family that he came, he was immediately shuffled overseas to Canada, so that no harm should come to him. Perhaps he could not dispose otherwise. Meanwhile we English sat here and sweated out what the other people had inflicted on our country.' [P's speech to the Clarendon Club: 'We have lost our sense of destiny', 1990: K4, Tab. 10, p. 25]

[1.5/D][A Japanese magazine published an article on the Holocaust under the title 'The Greatest Taboo of Postwar History: There Were No Nazi Gas Chambers'. Irving described that the magazine was ordered to close by the Japanese government when] 'the international Jewish community wagged its bejewelled finger'. ['Wiesenthalers Zap Jap "Crap"', P's Action Report, number 9, May 1995, p. 11: K4, Tab 10, p. 51 (at 1)]

[1.5/E]'When grovelling apologies were not forthcoming the Israelis, proving once again that no, they are not part of an international conspiracy, put pressure through their foreign cohorts, minions, and henchmen at whatever level on every major company currently purchasing advertising space in every weekly and monthly publication in the Bungei Shunju corporation, telling these companies to cancel their advertising contracts.' ['Wiesenthalers Zap Jap "Crap"', Action Report, number 9, May 1995, p. 11: K4 Tab. 10, p. 51 (at 2)]

[1.5/F][Commenting on a police raid on Anthony Hancock's printing works in England at the request of the German government] 'It seems that having failed to burn this print works down, the traditional enemy of the truth is now putting pressure on Germany to inflict her bigoted methods on the freedom-loving British.' ['The Very Whale of a Wail', P's Action Report, September 1994, p. 12: K4, Tab. 10, p. 35 (at 1)]

[1.5/G]'And in September 1941 when Churchill was still being obdurate, Churchill was promising to deliver the goods to [Chaim] Weizmann, but still not actually signing on the dotted line. Weizmann wrote a letter, which I have found in Weizmann's private papers because I was given access to his papers in the State of Israel, in return for the kind of horse trading that the Israelis and so on are pretty good at. And they delivered these papers to me and there was this letter in which Weizmann said 'You've got to remember that we are the biggest independent community in the United States". At this time we were still trying to lure the United States into World War II remember, we were still trying to lure them in and President Roosevelt couldn't swing round American public opinion Pearl Harbour hadn't happened, Churchill was having a hard time throughout 1941, the battle of the Atlantic was in sight and Weizmann said "You've got to remember the Jewish community in the United States. We are the largest cohesive body in the United States, which is on your side, on the British side, don't ignore us. We did it before in World War I, and we can do it again now, we can drag the United States into the War. "We did it before and we can do it again."

[...]

But okay the scales have tilted against us, we can't always complain the battlefield isn't level, we win by other means, we win mainly because we have the people on our side, because we have the archives on our side, because we have the documents on our side and that's why we keep on winning. So they dragged us into two World Wars and now for equally mysterious reasons they are trying to drag us into the Balkans' [P's speech at Bow Town Hall, London, 29 May 1992: K4, Tab. 4, pp. 6-7]

[1.5/H]'...and I never used to believe in the existence of an International Jewish Conspiracy and I am not even sure even now if there is an International Jewish Conspiracy all I know is that people are conspiring internationally against me, and they do turn out mostly to be [unintelligible]. [Applause].' [P's speech at Bow Town Hall, London, 29 May 1992: K4, Tab. 4, p. 16]

[1.5/I]INTERVIEWER: When one reads your speeches one has the impression that Churchill was paid by the Jews, that the Jews dragged Britain into the war, that many of the communist regimes have been dominated by Jews subsequently, and that a great deal is control over the world is exercised by the Jews.

IRVING: Right these are four separate facts, to each of which I would be willing to put my signature. They are four separate and unrelated facts. When you string them together like that you might be entitled then to say: "Question five David Irving, are you therefore an anti-Semite?" This may well have been... [Cut off]

INTERVIEWER: No this wasn't my question.

IRVING: But the answer is this, these are in fact four separate facts which happen to be true, in my considered opinion as a historian. And I think we can find the historical evidence for it. [P's interview for 'This Week', 28 November 1991: K3, Tab 12, pp. 7-8]