Dunkerque, les souvenirs d'un fils

Pour une fois, un article de la presse anglaise où quelques vérités sont dites sur la tragique évacuation de Dunkerque.

Adrian Hamilton: 'A great escape? Dunkirk was actually a humiliation for British forces'

The Evacuation of Dunkirk, which began 70 years ago, was no military miracle. It was a humiliation for British forces, writes Adrian Hamilton, whose father was there

My father was at Dunkirk. Only 21, newly married, a local reporter in Newcastle who had left school at 17, he'd joined the Territorials when war threatened and was called up at the beginning. I don't think he went with any great dreams of glory. But, ambitious and determined to do his bit, he sought a commission and to show his mettle.

A couple of months after being sent to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force, 2nd Lt Denis Hamilton was part of the beaten and outmanoeuvred army that retreated chaotically to the French coast to clamber aboard the little ships that took them to the bigger ships to take them back from whence they had come. "I came back with more men than I went out with," he later told me. "We kept picking up stragglers; some had been deserted by their officers."

If Dunkirk has gone down as a heroic defeat, it wasn't like that to those who took part. It was a shambles, in which a poorly trained and under-equipped army was totally outflanked and outfought by two superior German armies invading France through Belgium towards Antwerp in the north and, completely unexpectedly, through the Ardennes in the south. The battle started on 10 May 1940, the German tanks burst through the Ardennes on 14 May and by 26 May the British Expeditionary Force and the French First Army were cornered in a narrow corridor around Dunkirk awaiting evacuation.

My father, in the Durham Light Infantry, never elaborated about officers deserting their men. Indeed, like so many veterans, he never talked much at all about the experience of battle, limiting himself to the more humorous stories and some caustic judgements about the British armed services. What he did describe was the amateurishness of the British effort compared with the German one, and his surprise at how many of the soldiers, when they came to the beaches and stood out in the water waiting for the boats to pick them up, couldn't actually swim. The experience, and above all the loyalty of the Durham men to each other, convinced him to turn down all later offers of a staff job and to stick with the frontline troops. To the end he remained what he had begun as – an infantryman, although much promoted.

His way out of Dunkirk was on a minesweeper to Margate, blown up by German aircraft on its return to the beaches. To this day, my mother (they had married as war broke out) keeps framed the telegram he'd shouted to a Salvation Army member from the train he boarded at Margate, saying simply: "Landed tonight safely see you soon." His biggest surprise was the reception that the defeated and bedraggled troops got on landing in Margate. "There were thousands of people cheering us," he later recorded in his memoirs. "I felt desperately humiliated that we had done so little and yet were being greeted as heroes."

It was the cheering, not the battle, for which Dunkirk was remembered. In strictly military terms, the "miracle of Dunkirk" was not the evacuation but Hitler's decision to hold his forces back from the kill for a precious three days in which the British and French were able to gather in their forces and regroup around the beaches. Hitler later implied that he'd done it almost as an act of charity, in the hope that the British would now come to terms with him, as several members of Churchill's newly formed War Cabinet were advising him to do. Modern historians tend to dismiss this, preferring to see in the decision the advice of the senior German commanders, worried that their advance had overstretched their lines of supply, their minds switched to defeating the main French forces to the south and their concern that boggy Dunkirk was no ground for tanks. To the Germans, an army penned in by the sea was an army with its back to the wall – there for the destruction from the air. For the British, the sea is a route out and a route home.

That didn't make it any easier for the troops on the ground, bombed and shelled day after day as they queued for the boats back. Nor is it to denigrate the extraordinary efforts and skill of the Royal Navy and Air Force in rescuing more than 330,000 Allied troops where our generals had thought a few days before that the best that could be achieved might be 40,000. If the French complained that the Navy gave the British preference, that was unfair. Nearly a third of the rescued were French. The Navy was sent back on Churchill's specific order for an extra day so that the last of them could be saved. It was not his fault that the bulk of the rescued French were returned via the Breton and Normandy ports to rejoin a French army that capitulated barely had they arrived.

Out of this feat of human salvage (the guns, tanks, vehicles and ammunition were left behind), the British forged a propaganda triumph. It is something that the country, for all its martial qualities, has been good at. From the Battle of Hastings to the retreat at Corunna, we make as much from our defeats as our victories. Out of disaster was woven the image of the "Dunkirk spirit", most assiduously by Winston Churchill with his great rhetoric of determination and defiance. "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender," as he told the Commons on 4 June while the last of the evacuees were lifted from Dunkirk. Never mind that Dunkirk was a reverse greater than the Norwegian fiasco which had brought down Neville Chamberlain and made Churchill Prime Minister less than a month previously. Never mind that several of the senior members of the Cabinet were then ready to make peace with the German dictator. Never mind the fact that Churchill, even after Dunkirk, was ready to send off a second British Expeditionary Force to help the French farther south, in an expedition that could have ended just as badly had the generals (Alan Brooke in particular) not knocked some sense into him.

Churchill was the man of the hour and the man with the words, and those words (as he knew well) came to embody the spirit of British resistance as France fell and the US remained on the sidelines. It was Britain and her dominion troops that now stood alone and were to do so until the Japanese launched their attack on Pearl Harbor and brought in the US in December 1941.

And yet to the British, and to people like my parents, there was something more to this "Dunkirk spirit" and the romantic notion of lonely defiance that Churchill promoted. He, like others in the government, was actually afraid that Dunkirk would lead to pessimism and defeatism in the public and set up public-survey schemes to test the popular mood. In fact, they found that most British people, although sobered by events, remained convinced that we would win the war eventually, only that it might be a long haul before we did so.

Was this grimness, the silence that several noted on the beaches of Dunkirk and the undemonstrativeness of the people at home, the result of simple shell shock? Churchill thought so, opining that there was only so much the human mind could take on board and that people shut out big events.

I don't think that was the case, certainly not with my parents. If there was a Dunkirk spirit, it was because people understood perfectly well the full significance of the defeat but, in a rather British way, saw no point in dwelling on it. We were now alone. We'd pull through in the end. But it might be a long, grim wait...

For those who went through the year and a half of island isolation, and particularly the young forged by that first taste of war, there could never be quite the same sense of trust in America that came once they joined, and the tide of war was changed. Seventy years later, I don't really see how we can understand what Dunkirk and its aftermath really meant to them. The glory of war was certainly not part of it.

What was special about Dunkirk was partly Winston Churchill. It's difficult to appreciate now just what his honed eloquence meant at the time. It wasn't that people naturally warmed to this figure from the Edwardian past or shared his vision of Britain's "greatness". But they did appreciate what he was doing. Churchill's rhetoric was directed to try to embody the national mood and to lift it. It's a gift no one has repeated since. Perhaps television makes it impossible. Perhaps only extremity makes it workable. But one wonders why, in this age of economic crisis, politicians are so reluctant to try to talk for the people as a whole.

It is the same with the Dunkirk spirit. Elevated emotion has gone out of fashion since the war. But if you regard the spirit as basically determined realism, it may yet be underappreciated as a British characteristic. Certainly the recent election campaign showed an almost universal belief by politicians that the electorate was not up to facing the truth about the country's condition. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps the opinion polls do suggest a reluctance by the British to accept reality, as Churchill had feared after Dunkirk. But it wasn't the case then, and maybe politicians should have more faith in it now.

Further reading: Denis Hamilton: 'Editor-in-Chief, Fleet Street Memoirs' (1989); Max Hastings: 'Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord' (2009); 'Winston Churchill's Greatest Speeches' (BBC Audio)

La race blanche n'existe pas !

L'universitaire Nell Irvin Painter.

La race blanche n'existe pas. C'est seulement une construction de l'esprit.

Ce sont les stupéfiantes conclusions de Nell Irvin Painter, une universitaire noire américaine dans un livre qui suscite de nombreux débats aux Etats-Unis : The History of White People.

Voici un compte rendu très indulgent de Precious Williams (elle aussi noire) dans les colonnes du Independent qui n'hésite pas à dire des énormités. Par exemple, elle rappelle que l'ADN des êtres humains appartenant aux différents groupes raciaux est commun à plus de 99,1 %. Elle en conclut que l'universitaire a raison en affirmant que du point de vue scientifique l'la race blanche n'existe pas.

Ce qui est faux. L'ADN humain et celui de certaines espèces de singes est également identique à 99 %. Peut-on en déduire que d'un point de vue scientifique qu'il n'existe pas de différences entre l'homme et le chimpanzé ?

Je n'entre pas dans le détail des erreurs de cet article, mais vous invite à le lire pour avoir une idée plus précise du contenu d'un ouvrage qui est le reflet d'une dérive préoccupante d'intellectuels noirs américains.

Race under fire: Is being white something you can learn?

What does it mean to be white? An explosive new book by an American academic argues that whiteness isn't biological at all – in fact, it can be learned. Precious Williams disagrees
It is tempting to tell ourselves that we're on the verge of an inclusive, multicultural new age.

An era where colour doesn't matter all that much, where race doesn't define us. After all, society is changing. Radically. The Conservative Party's first-ever black female MP, Helen Grant, has just been elected. And across the pond, there is a black man in the White House. Or is there?

A controversial new book, The History of White People, claims that Barack Obama is, to all intents and purposes, white. Not because he had a white mother but because of his educational background, his income, his power, his status. The book's author, the eminent black American historian Nell Irvin Painter, has written a fascinating, sprawling history of the concept of race, looking specifically at the idea of a white race and at why and how whites have dominated other, darker-skinned races throughout recent centuries. The conclusion of Painter's book – which has taken more than a decade to research and write – is explosive. Race, she argues, is a fluid social construct, entirely unsupported by scientific fact. Like beauty, it is merely skin-deep.

Technically, she has a point. The $3bn Human Genome Project revealed in 2003 that every human being has a unique DNA sequence which differs from that of any fellow human being by just 0.1 per cent, regardless of ethnic origin. Thus, all humans beings are 99.9 per cent the same and, from a scientific viewpoint, there is no such thing as racial difference.

And now along comes this weighty history of white people, written by a 67-year-old black woman, telling us that the white race has never really existed. Unsurprisingly, America's far-right are furious. On the white supremacist group Stormfront's internet forum, one member complained that the book: "will likely win a Pulitzer – just look at how they patronise and indulge these negroes". Another member said Painter "is just jealous of our history and of the beauty of white women".

Painter remains unfazed by the criticism: our perceptions of race are expanding, she claims, and she herself is, she says, effectively white – by virtue of her lifestyle (she's a Harvard-educated former Princeton history professor currently pursuing a master's degree in painting).

Being "white" in America is perhaps like being upper-class in Britain, except in America a wealthy, well-connected black person can become "white" and a disadvantaged white person could lead a life that's "black".

Historically, the entire classification of 'whiteness', Painter argues, was in no small part a philosophical justification of slavery. The white-black thing was about economics. Whiteness came to represent freedom and nobility, while black-skinned peoples were now cast in the role of the underdog. Prior to the transatlantic slave trade, white-skinned people were not routinely held to be more elite than blacks. In medieval times, it was largely whites who were the slaves. During the 1300s there was a dearth of labour as a result of the Black Death, and Christian kingdoms in the Mediterranean enslaved more and more white-skinned people – hailing from Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria. It was another 200 years or so before the growth of the sugar industry demanded more and more slave labour. White-skinned Europeans began to enslave Africans to work their plantations. The transatlantic slave trade flourished. White-skinned slave owners, enjoying the financial fruits of this new slavery, started to deify themselves, self-identifying as inherently superior to blacks – morally, socially and intellectually. Suddenly blacks were held by their white 'owners' to be only three-fifths human. The widespread worship of 'whiteness' had begun; to date it has not ended.

Here in the UK we may be inclined to dismiss this book as the latest emblem of America's never- ending obsession with race. We might imagine we are so integrated here that we are beyond needing to discuss race and unpick it and re-examine it. But we would be wrong. Whiteness may only be a social construct but it is still a powerful one, and the concept of whiteness continues to represent a social holy grail. In her book, Painter presents the idea of non-whites moving onwards and upwards to become virtual whites as pure social progress. I beg to differ. I see this as quite a step backwards. In fact, it takes me back several decades.

When I was born in the early Seventies, my mother – an African-born black woman – decided to try turn me white. Not by bleaching my skin but by sending me to live with a white family, so that I would be fully immersed in white culture, pretty much from birth. My mother, who had grown up under British colonial rule in Nigeria, wanted to make me as white as possible so that once I was grown-up I would, she was sure, thrive and prosper in her adopted country, England.

The idea was that I would begin absorbing white privilege right from the start, before I was even old enough to talk. My mother wasn't alone in this way of thinking. At that time, thousands of other African-born, recently migrated parents were paying white families to raise their babies and children. They

presumed that white culture would rub off on us and open doors for us. To give us the best of starts in life, they felt it necessary to separate us from our blackness.

To hear Painter tell it, race is about "us" and "them". To be one of us is to enter the hallowed elite of 'whiteness'. Everybody else is one of them. In my case, I was the nobody caught in between, acceptable to whites to a degree simply because I was always there. I didn't feel black. When I looked in the mirror I saw nothingness reflected back at me, I did not see myself as black. I was praised (by my birth mother) for having such a white accent that anyone speaking to me on the phone would have no inkling I was black. Until they saw me in person.

In the end, as I began to grow up, race – even if it is merely a social construct – became the elephant lurking in every room. Supposedly, by becoming an honorary white I had arrived; but all I felt was a sense of loss. It was like I had had something stripped away from me. Later, in my mid-teens, I opened my eyes and found that society had now become my mirror, and I saw myself reflected back at me – a black person, whether I liked it or not. And I learnt to like it a lot.

Of her book, Painter says, "We think, or we used to think, until I wrote my book, that race was something permanent inside you, but ...[this concept] changed." She adds, "I am what my parents made me ... I am not my biology." I disagree. If I was what my foster parents had made me I would surely still be self-identifying as white.

Race as I see it is something you carry from your ancestors – it's your lineage and your cultural heritage; it's about where you originally came from. Even if you've not experienced the land your ancestors hailed from, or met the parents you were born to. I am African and I am also British. But no "enlargement of whiteness" is ever going to result in me being labelled English. And why should it? That race, or the concept of race, exists is something to be celebrated, not swept under the carpet.

Race is everywhere, lurking beneath the surface – or not. It's there in the silent assumptions we sometimes make. If we really are a post-racial society, why do we have Operation Trident, the Metropolitan Police unit set up in 1998 to investigate so-called 'black crimes'? Why do we have those higgledy-piggledy 'Black Interest' shelves in Waterstone's and WH Smith, bringing to mind the 'COLOUREDS ONLY' signs in pre-Civil Rights America and crammed with anything from gangsta-lit to Toni Morrison? I wonder if that's where Painter's book will be shelved.

The perception within this country and the perception of this country among other nations is that Britain is largely "over" race. An African- American friend recently told me he thinks the UK is fabulous and extremely liberal "because you all accept each other over there. There is no race." Actually, race has always been here. Historically, non-whites were referenced according to their creed or nationality. It wasn't until around 1625 that the word "black" in Britain came to be used when referring to a person of African origin. Before then, a white man with black hair might be described as "black" or "a black", while Indians were often labelled "hindoos" and Africans were frequently called "Moors" or "Ethiops" (Aethiopia was an early European word for Africa).

At a recent dinner party I mentioned that I was reading Painter's The History of White People. A friend sitting opposite me casually remarked that she feels very proud of her family history – and of her race (she is white). There was a stunned silence among those seated around the table. The subject was swiftly changed. Later, one of the other guests (also white) leant over and whispered to me, "I hope you're not offended. She's not usually such a bigot."

So, merely admitting that you like being white makes you a social pariah? What's wrong with liking being white? Or black? Or both? Or something else?

The incident reminded me, in reverse, of an episode from my childhood, when I was around seven or eight. There I was, still a black girl in an all-white environment. My foster family loved me and just wanted me to somehow, miraculously, fit in as naturally as they did into our white working-class surroundings. It was never going to happen and I think perhaps I'd just realised this. I'd heard, on a TV show, a man singing a mantra that both puzzled and delighted me: "Say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud". James Brown. I burst out with it, repeating his words to my foster mother. I watched the confusion and disappointment descend over her face.

I had been taught it wasn't the done thing to talk about being black. If I had to talk about my race at all (and I was largely discouraged from doing so) I was trained to refer to myself as "coloured". Any references my white peers made to my blackness were furtive and apologetic and usually prefaced with the phrase, "I'm not being funny or nothing...."

Today, you can talk about being black but when black is reflected back at you via the media, it is almost always in a negative light. Headline after headline reports that black people are more likely to knife each other, drop out of school, get STDs and fail to get jobs. Meanwhile, if you are white, and you like being white, it's considered taboo to admit as much. Unless you are a member of the BNP.

Is this progress? Race may not technically exist, but surely the last thing we should be doing as a nation is lulling ourselves into believing that the concepts of whiteness and blackness do not exist or matter. Must we chip away vital pieces of ourselves in order to be non-offensive? Denying the existence of differences inhibits us from celebrating our diversity in all its glory. Multiculturalism is surely about far more than merely enjoying a chicken korma or liking Dizzee Rascal. It's about not being expected to apologise for who you are, whoever you are.

Precious Williams's memoir, 'Precious', is published by Bloomsbury on 2 August. 'The History of White People' by Nell Irvin Painter is published in hardback by Norton (£19.99). To order a copy for the special price of £17.99 (free P&P), call Independent Books Direct on 08430 600 030, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk

La Kriegsmarine se rappelle à notre bon souvenir

Un abri pour les sous-marins de la kriegsmarine à Saint-Nazaire.
La base de Lorient se visite aussi.

Les victoires sous-marines de la Kriegsmarine n'ont pas permis au IIIe Reich de gagner la guerre mais elles ont des conséquences durables sur la vie des océans.

De nombreux cargos coulés emportaient dans leurs cales des produits chimiques ou du carburant qui, au bout de quelques décennies de corrosion, finissent par s'échapper de leurs contenants et fuitent dans la mer entraînant des pollutions chroniques.

Les autorités maritimes britanniques ont réuni dans une base de données la trace de 9 905 épaves de navires coulés depuis 1870 dont un tiers a été perdu durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. A l'autre bout du monde, les Australiens ont comptabilisé 8 500 épaves.

La question se pose de savoir à qui revient le travail de sécuriser les épaves qui le requièrent. selon une enquête australienne, 51 % des épaves sont britanniques et 16 % américaines. En toute logique, c'est aux nations dont le pavillon flottait au mât de ces bâtiments que revient la charge de la dépollution.

Je parie qu'il se trouvera un esprit bien-pensant qui affirmera haut et fort qu'il revient à l'Allemagne de payer l'addition.

Voici un bon papier d'Andrew Johnson dans les colonnes de l'Independent traitant de ce sujet.

Qu'en est-il des épaves de la Première Guerre mondiale ?

Out of the depths comes war's lethal legacy

Vessels wrecked by the elements, scuttled, or sunk by submarines are emptying their dangerous cargoes into the world's oceans
Environmentalists are becoming increasingly concerned that some of the thousands of wrecked ships around the globe, many of them along Britain's coastline and dating back to the Second World War, are ticking time bombs that could be about to wreak one final act of havoc.

Many of the vessels, which have lain almost forgotten at the bottom of the world's oceans for decades, were destroyed by enemy action or scuttled after the war. Some were oil tankers or supply ships packed with aviation fuel and ammunition. More than half are believed to be British. And now, as they rust away, they are starting to leak.

Earlier this year the Royal Navy's auxiliary ship Darkdale sprang an oil leak, prompting a ban on fishing in the area of the South Atlantic where it lay. The vessel was torpedoed by a German submarine as it lay at anchor off Jamestown Harbour in the British territory of St Helena in 1941. It sank with the loss of almost all hands and its cargo of 3,000 tons of fuel oil, 850 tons of aviation gasoline and 500 tons of diesel and lubricating oil.

The former Defence Minister, Quentin Davies, announced earlier this month that a team would be sent to the wreck to determine whether the removal of fuel, oil and ammunition is the most appropriate course of action.

"Before the survey work can begin, a risk assessment is being carried out based on current knowledge of Darkdale and the recent oil leak. This will determine the nature and degree of risk involved in carrying out the full survey," he said.

The Chief Secretary of the island said: "The Governor of St Helena has written to the Secretary of State for Defence seeking assistance to deal with the oil spill in James Bay and consider options for dealing with the wreck of the Darkdale in future. The MoD is currently considering the St Helena government's request."

Such is the concern about war wrecks that the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) and Ministry of Defence have just completed compiling a database of every ship wrecked in Britain's coastal waters – they extend 200 miles out to sea – since 1870. Of the 9,905 wrecks catalogued, around a third are thought to be from the Second World War. Each is now to be individually risk assessed, Beccy Tye, the agency's deputy recorder of wrecks, said.

"There are still sections of the database to complete," she added. "So far it comes up with 12 per cent of the wrecks coming from the Second World War, but I think that's quite low. A lot of wrecks were unknown or unrecorded at the time. I would think the number is nearer to 30 per cent."

Kevin Colcomb, a scientist with the MCA who worked on the database, added that many countries are starting to follow the UK's lead.

"We are ahead of a lot of other countries on this," he said. "The Australians are just starting to do it and the Americans." He said that because many of the ships were "blown to smithereens" not every wreck presents a risk.

The environmental consultancy group Sea Australia, which specialises in pollution, disagrees, however. "As these ships start to corrode it is only a matter of time before their cargoes start causing marine pollution," said consultant Rean Matthews.

Sea Australia has more than 8,500 Second World War wrecks on its database. The Pacific is thought to be at particular risk. In 2008, scientists warned that the pristine lagoons of Micronesia were at risk from oil slicks originating from sunken ships.

Ms Matthews added that one area of concern is the establishment of responsibility for the wrecks when they lie in international waters.

A 2004 survey by Sea Australia found that 51 per cent of wrecks across the globe were owned by the UK, with the next highest, 16 per cent, belonging to the United States.

The MoD said it is only responsible for wrecks in British territorial waters. Sea Australia disagrees.

"If you own the ship and you own the cargo, then are you not also responsible for the cargo causing pollution in somebody else's waters?" asked Ms Matthews. "The short answer to that is 'yes'."

Les drapeaux, symboles et objets graphiques

Un drapeau qui respecte la règle de la limitation du nombre de couleurs. Comptez bien, il y en a moins de huit.

Intéressant article ce matin dans les colonnes de l'Independent sous la plume de Michael McCarthy sur le rôle des drapeaux dans les sociétés modernes.

Identity parade: What do flags say about nations – and human nature?

National pride? The St George's Cross has been adopted by the far right but has also become a symbol for England football fans. Experts say its simple design is an example of good flag design

So out it pops today, as always in the last week of April, waving in the wind like some great blowsy red-and-white spring blossom which has suddenly emerged: the Cross of St George. But while blossom is universally welcome, the red cross on white of England, hoisted in its homeland on this St George's Day, 23 April, arouses contradictory and dangerous emotions: enthusiasm on the one hand, contempt and distrust on the other. Can there be a national flag anywhere which is so potentially divisive in the very country it symbolises?

The reason of course, is simple, and troubling: in the last 60 years Britain has become multicultural, and for some people, especially on the far right, the Cross of St George, and indeed the Union Flag of Britain itself, have come to symbolise aggressively the white identity of the country pre-immigration; and so they have understandably become objects of suspicion to ethnic groups and the political left.

In recent years, however, the Cross of St George has made a comeback in terms of familiarity and acceptability, which most people date to Euro 96, the European football championships that were held in England that year. England fans adopted it when they played Scotland at Wembley, at a moment when waving the Union Flag seemed inappropriate (it contains the saltire, the Cross of St Andrew, and belongs to the Scots as much as the English) and from there it boomed. During the last World Cup, in 2006, the whole country was covered in red and white.

Some people worried about this; others took a quite different view, saying it was time to "reclaim the cross from the racists", and the opprobrium that once clung to the flag seems to have slackened. Whatever view you take, you had better be prepared for another explosion of red and white crosses this year, with the staging in June of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Le schéma du drapeau australien.

Strange that a country's principal emblem should come to represent its divisions, when in virtually all of the rest of the world the national flag, at least ostensibly, stands for the union of the nation, and is respected as such. In England, by contrast and almost uniquely, there is very little flag respect; it has been replaced by flag distrust, which may be healthy democratically, but which has gone so far, especially on the radical left, as to make all flags seem suspicious to some, just as all nationalisms can seem suspicious. A few years ago a radical comedian wrote a piece on flags which finished with a paean of praise to flag-burners everywhere, encouraging the burning not just because protesters might disagree with something the country in question was doing, but because flags should be burned for being flags – "and flags are rubbish".

Well, maybe they are. Yet we can't get away from them. Ask yourself a question: if you were designing a country from scratch, one named after yourself, Great Smithia, perhaps, or Jonesland, would you ignore the idea of a national flag? You can be perverse and say "yes", but I bet you a pound to a pinch of snuff that in reality it would be one of the very first things you would think of, and you would agonise over it endlessly – does the red stripe appropriately represent my struggle? Do the green dots properly symbolise Auntie Maureen's Irish background? – just as much as you may have already agonised over your eight records for Desert Island Discs (for when you make it, and you finally get that call from the Beeb).

It's about who you are, and that can't be ignored. Emblems of identity are an essential part of being human. They have often been brightly coloured, down the centuries: think of the purple stripe on the Roman toga, the bright blue woad on the ancient Briton's face. In fact, such indicators are far older than humans, being hugely prominent in the natural world: think of the colours, and the colour patterns, in flowers, butterflies and birds, each belonging specifically to a particular species. Why do you think they're there?

Once upon a time the answer was that the Good Lord had put them there for our delectation. No longer. Now we know that, on the contrary, they have evolved as identity emblems with ruthlessly specific survival purposes, to attract pollinators, to win mates, to blend into backgrounds, to warn predators that you are poisonous; in short, to let you survive, and get your genes into the next generation (which evolutionary biologists would say was the principal purpose of existence).

Yet paradoxically, although they may be merely functional in their origin and purpose, colours in nature can also spark tremendous delight, tremendous elation in human spirits; and as someone who writes about the natural world and was pondering this paradox, I was led to flags, as a way of trying to understand how colours and combinations of colours affect us.

The point was, colours in nature had unconsciously evolved through the greatest of all designers, Natural Selection; but colours and colour combinations in flags, which in some ways were very similar, had been put there by human designers, quite consciously. How did they choose them? Why did they choose this one rather than that one? What was the trick? Did they have a secret, arcane knowledge of which colours would affect people in certain combinations, and why?

What's in a flag?

I decide to seek instruction in vexillology, which is the scholarly study of flags. (The word comes from vexillum, a banner carried by the Roman legions.) Vexillology is a sort of much younger brother of heraldry, the system of designing and registering knights' coats of arms which began in medieval Europe and still flourishes today. Heraldry, however, concerns itself with the emblems of individuals, or societies, or cities, but not with the flags of nations, largely because at its beginning, the nation-state was virtually unknown. But in the last century and a half, nation-states have sprung up across the world, from the unification of Italy in 1861 and Germany in 1871, to the plethora of new states in Africa, the Middle East and Asia which emerged from the old colonial regimes after the Second World War, and the new countries formed after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Now there are 192 member states of the United Nations, and though flags may indeed be rubbish, not one of these countries thinks it can do without one.

Un drapeau simple que des enfants peuvent dessiner très bien.

Vexillology as such came along a little more than 50 years ago, invented by a young American political scientist, Whitney Smith (he coined the term in 1958). Dr Smith is still a professional vexillologist, consultant, adviser and designer of flags, publishing The Flag Bulletin from his Flag Research Centre in Massachusetts. There was clearly a need for the concept, for the idea quickly caught on around the world, and 1967 saw the founding of the Fédération Internationale des Associations Vexillologiques (FIAV), which now does for flags what Fifa does for football or FIA does for motor racing. Organised vexillology was formally brought to Britain by William Crampton, a flag-mad-from-boyhood adult education organiser who met and corresponded with Whitney Smith and who in 1971, with Captain Edward Barraclough, the then editor of the standard British reference book, Flags of the World, founded the Flag Institute.

Considering it has been in existence for fewer than 40 years and it is no more, constitutionally, than a membership society of interested people, and has hardly any public profile, the Flag Institute has achieved a remarkable position of acceptance within the establishment in Britain; it is now principal advisor and designer of flags to Her Majesty's Government, and as such is more or less on a par with the College of Arms, the venerable governing body for heraldry, which was founded by Richard III in 1484. It is has a lot of naval links and is based in the Naval Club in Mayfair, and it is there I go to seek enlightenment from the institute's current chief vexillologist, Graham Bartram, and its president, Captain Malcolm Farrow.

Bartram, author of British Flags and Emblems ("Foreword by HRH The Duke of Edinburgh") is a cheerful,well-padded 46-year-old Scot, and probably now the leading vexillological expert – did you say that correctly first time? – in the country. He is someone the tabloids might label "Britain's Mister Flags". He has personally designed the flag of Tristan da Cunha, the flag of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, a flag for Antarctica and the symbols of the UK Border Agency, among other various commissions. How does he go about deciding what he puts in a flag?

There were six basic guidelines, he says. The first is, keep it simple. "The flag should be simple enough that a child can draw it from memory." The second is to use meaningful symbolism: the colours or patterns should relate to what the flag symbolises.

The third is about colours: don't use too many. "Don't use eight colours; that doesn't work." There should be two or three, but no more, and they should be from the standard colour set, which is red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue, black and white, and to a lesser extent, purple. There's not much use for brown, or grey, or pink in the flag world. In fact, I ask him if he knows of any pink flag, and he responds instantly, with what I come to realise is encyclopaedic expertise: "The old flag of Newfoundland." I look it up later and there it is, a rather charming tricolour of green, white and rose, flown in the 19th century but now long fallen out of use. And very much an exception.

There is another important point about colours, Bartram says, which comes from the rules of heraldry: the difference between "metals", which are gold and silver, and by extension, yellow and white; and "colours", which take in everything else.

They should alternate. (The reason is to get contrast.) Metals should not be placed on, or next to, other metals; colours should not be placed on, or next to, other colours. The pattern should go, colour, metal, colour, as in most tricolours: red, white, blue; green, white, orange. Otherwise it won't work. "And the flag that proves the rule that it doesn't work is the flag of Cyprus, which is a gold island on a white background [metal on metal]. It's quite hard to tell what it is." I look it up, and I agree with him. Then an example of colour on colour which doesn't really work, he says, is the flag of Bangladesh, which is a red circle on a green background. I look that up too, and I agree again. "Neither of them work particularly well," Bartram says.

There is, however, an exception to the rule of don't-use-too-many-colours, one which does work, and one which he and Farrow, a retired naval officer who served in the Falklands, enthuse about, and that is the modern, post-apartheid flag of South Africa, the rainbow Y on its side, which is a specific heraldic device, a pall.

Designed in 1994 by the South African state herald, Fred Brownell, there are six colours in it: black, yellow, green, white, red and blue. It was meant to be a temporary flag for the first post-apartheid election, but it was so popular that Nelson Mandela kept it. "The South African flag breaks the rules – it has far too many colours in it, and logically, it shouldn't work, but it does," Bartram explains. "It sums up the country. It works culturally."

"It's completely unmistakable, and it achieves the main function of a flag, which is to be an identifying symbol," adds Farrow.

On that basis, they both enthuse about the flag of the United States. "The Stars and Stripes is a fantastic flag," says Bartram. "It's immediately obvious what it is." "It's terrific," chips in Farrow. "It's completely startling. It stands out against any background."

Standing out again a background is important, they say, which is one of the reasons why there was not a lot of green, for example, in flags in Europe, where the background itself is largely green: green trees, green hedges, green fields. In the Arab world, however, where the background is largely yellow – the sand of the desert – green is much more in evidence, and it reaches a climax in the flag of Libya, which is a plain green rectangle. And that's it. A tad on the boring side, perhaps? "It is the only national flag in the world with just one colour, and no design," Bartram says. "It's fine in Libya. But if you flew it in England, it would be invisible."

If you take an interest in flags, says Farrow, you begin to take an interest, not only in history and society, but in colour itself. "Red, yellow and orange are warm; blue and green are cooler. That's across the human race, not just in northern Europe. Greens and blues give a cooler feel. The sea is cooler than the desert; the trees are cooler than the rocks. That's not something learned from a book. It just comes from where you are."

Red, white and blue are the colours most commonly used in flags because of the terrific contrast they accord. The obvious example is the tricolour of France, supposedly created by the Marquis de Lafayette, commander of the National Guard during the French revolution, by bringing together the colours of Paris, which were red and blue, separated by the white of the French monarchy. Now tricolours, both vertical (France, Italy, Ireland, Belgium) and horizontal (Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Spain, Russia), are among the most popular of all national flags, so much so that some are very similar: the horizontal red, yellow and green tricolour of Ghana is the flag of Ethiopia, upside down; while the blue, yellow and red vertical tricolours of Romania and Chad are, in fact, identical.

There are three more rules for designing flags, Bartram and Farrow explain. The fourth one is avoid using writing or lettering on the flag. This is because, unless the flag is double-sided, the lettering will be the wrong way round, seen from the the back; and not all of it might be visible when a flag flies, as it doesn't fly as a rectangle. "If you have a message saying Do Not Kill, a lot of the time it might actually read Do Kill," Bartram says.

The fifth flag guideline is, be distinctive; and the last one is, remember the wind. The design must remain recognisable both when rippling in a stiff breeze, and when hanging limply in still air.

The Cross of St George, it seems to me, fulfils all six conditions. It's simple: any child could draw it. It's meaningful: it carries the symbol of England's patron saint. It uses only two colours, red and white, a colour on a metal background. It's free from lettering. It's very distinctive. And you can always tell what it was, in a gale or in a calm.

Is that the reason why so many people respond to it? "Absolutely," believes Bartram. "It's a very clean, powerful, straightforward image." But he reminds me that even though the Cross of St George is something we associate with England, it belongs elsewhere too. It is the old flag of Montenegro, it is the flag of Genoa, and of Milan, and it is the basis of the flag of Georgia, where the red cross is surrounded by four more red crosses in each corner. Beyond that, it is found of the arms of numerous countries, provinces, cities and bodies who have St George as their patron, from Beirut to Barcelona, and from Aragon to Moscow. So if you see it today and you're one of those people who feel it's just the symbol for an exclusive national identity, you've got hold of the wrong end of the flagpole.

L'importance du Codex Sinaiticus

Dans les colonnes de l'Independent de ce matin, le journaliste Paul Vallely explique l'intérêt de ce manuscrit de la Bible.

What is the Codex Sinaiticus, and what does it reveal about the Bible?


Why are we asking this now?

It is the oldest Bible in the world. The 4th-century book is considered to be one of the most important texts in existence. Until this week, no one alive has seen all its 800 pages together in one place because in the 19th century the document was split into sections and is now in four different locations – London, St Petersburg, Leipzig and Egypt. But the creation of an online virtual Codex Sinaiticus permits anyone to see the manuscript in its entirety at www.codexsinaiticus.org.

Where did the Codex Sinaiticus come from?

No one is sure but it was handwritten in Greek uncial letters at about the time of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great more than 1,600 years ago. The work of four scribes, it was written on vellum parchment made from the skins of donkeys or antelopes. It was preserved for centuries by the dry desert air at the 4th century Monastery of St Catherine at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt, the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery, which has the greatest library of early manuscripts outside the Vatican City. The Codex was discovered at the monastery in 1844 by the German biblical scholar and archaeologist Constantin von Tischendorf (1815-74), who brought sections of it back to Europe on three separate trips. Von Tischendorf claimed to have found pages of it in a wastepaper basket but the monks deny this. There is a dispute too about whether he stole it or was given it. Von Tischendorf had a deed of gift dated 11 September 1868 signed by one of its archbishops. The biggest portion of the codex ended up in St Petersburg, where it was bought by the British Museum in the 1930s out of fear that the Communist regime might destroy it.

Why is the Codex so important?

To secular scholars it represents the turning point in literary history when the scroll gave way to the book. The parchment was arranged in little multi-page booklets called quires, which were then numbered in sequence. It is thought to be the oldest, large, bound book to have survived. "The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the world's greatest written treasures," says Scot McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts at the British Library. To Christian scholars, it offers key insights into which ancient religious texts were brought together in the unit we now know as the Bible. In earlier centuries there were all manner of documents in scroll form of gospels, epistles and other Christian writings. As time went by, some were judged to be authoritative and included in the canon; others were deemed to be apocryphal or errant. The Codex Sinaiticus as it survives is incomplete – originally it would have been about 1,460 pages long – but it includes half of the Old Testament, all the New Testament, and two early Christian texts not found in modern Bibles. It offers the first evidence of the content and the arrangement of the Bible, and includes numerous revisions, additions and corrections made to the text between the 4th and 12th centuries, making it one of the most corrected manuscripts in existence, showing how the text of the Bible was transmitted from generation to generation down through the ages.

Why has it never been reunited before?

Partly because the holders of the various bits were covetous of their prized pages, and partly because the pages are too delicate to be moved. So the work of digitising the pages had to be carried out in all four locations. Leaves of the Codex were first treated by conservation experts to ensure they were sufficiently stable to undergo the photographic process. Each page had to be photographed from several different angles to get a strong, readable image of the text but also to convey the natural undulation of the parchment. The result is so accurate that high-resolution digital images even show up insect bites in the skin of the animal made before the creature was slaughtered to make the vellum.

How does it differ from modern Bibles?

The version of the New Testament has some few interesting differences. It includes two works which have since been dropped from both Catholic and Protestant Bibles – "The Shepherd of Hermas", a heavily allegorical work full of visions and parables and "The Epistle of Barnabas", which contains highly-charged language about the Jews as the killers of Christ. It also includes entire books which, after the Reformation, Protestants decided to drop from their Bibles: the Old Testament books of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, Maccabbees 1&2 and large chunks of Esther and Daniel. And the running order of the books is different, reflecting subtle shifts in the priorities of the believers over the ages. The Codex omits the words which Protestants add to the end of The Lord's Prayer, and Catholics omit: "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever (Matthew 6:13).

Other differences include it saying that Jesus was "angry" as he healed a leper, where the modern text says he acted with "compassion". The story of the stoning of the adulterous woman – "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" is not there. Nor are Christ's words about his executioners from the cross: "Father forgive them for they know not what they do". And its Gospel of Mark ends abruptly after Jesus's disciples discover his empty tomb – omitting the 12 verses on the appearance of the resurrected Christ – and leaving the disciples exiting in fear. The Codex leaves an unusual blank space where the verses should be. "That's a very odd way of ending a Gospel," says Juan Garces, the curator of the Codex Sinaiticus Project.

Does all that have any real significance?

The New Testament scholar, Bart Ehrman, has claimed the persecution of the Jews down the centuries might have been far worse had the Epistle of Barnabus remained canonical. "His blood be upon us," Barnabas has the Jews cry. But that overlooks the fact that the Gospel of Matthew contains something very similar, if not worse: "His blood be on us and on our children!" And though the Resurrection is missing from Mark, it is there in the Codex's other gospels.

Will this undermine the fundamentalists' views?

You might suppose it would upset those who believe the Bible is the inerrant, unaltered word of God, since the Codex shows there have over the centuries been thousands of alterations to today's Bible. But they can counter that there are earlier, individual manuscripts of almost all the books in the Bible; the Codex just pulls them together into a single volume. In any case, fundamentalists have long been adept at ignoring the evidence of historical biblical scholarship.

Will it change mainstream Christianity?

Scholars of the New Testament have been using this Codex for years for textual criticism, so don't expect anything very new. The creation of a virtual Codex Sinaiticus will permit the rest of us to see the manuscript as a whole as never before, but no one is expecting anything very dramatic.

p.vallely@independent.co.uk

David Irving, l'avocat de Hitler

David Irving photographié chez lui pendant son entretien avec Johann Hari.

Le journaliste Johann Hari a publié hier un étonnant article dans les colonnes de l'Independent consacré à l'historien britannique (anglais) David Irving qui est probablement un odieux personnage mais aussi un curieux mélange de spéléologue des archives et de bon connaisseur de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Ces indéniables talents sont hélas compromis par une détestation du genre humain en général et des Juifs en particulier.

Sa misanthropie explique probablement pourquoi, dans ses livres, il prend plaisir à rédiger à contre-courant, hérissant les plumes des historiens universitaires, non seulement en affichant des opinions marginales, mais en s'appuyant sur une exploitation directe des pièces d'archives souvent inédites, citons sa biographie de Winston Churchill.

Dans cette méthode réside à la fois la force et la faiblesse de David Irving. Rédigeant directement à partir des documents qu'il extrait des archives, il a tendance à écrire des ouvrages dans lesquels on trouve beaucoup de pages sur les points où abondent les sources et fort peu là où elles manquent. Ses biographies de Goebbels ou de Goering illustrent les limites de sa méthode.

Autre exemple frappant, dans son Hitler's War, Irving s'appuie sur le fait qu'aucun document des archives allemandes des années de guerre relatifs à la tragédie des Juifs d'Europe dans les camps de concentration et de meurtre de masse ne porte la signature du Führer pour en conclure que Hitler n'y est pour rien.

Avec cette hypothèse, David Irving s'exonère à bon compte de toute tentative d'explication pour ce qui demeure un problème historiographique difficile à résoudre et que des chercheurs aussi différents que Jean-Claude Pressac ou Raul Hilberg ont tenté de résoudre à leur manière.

Ce qui apparaît à la lumière de cet excellent profil biographique de David Irving est à quel point l'historien autodidacte est fasciné par son sujet d'études. Je ne crois pas qu'il affiche des opinions aussi indulgentes au sujet de Hitler par le seul besoin de choquer son monde et jouer les enfants terribles de l'histoire. David Irving semble être devenu un admirateur sincère de Hitler mais en conservant assez de lucidité pour percevoir les contradictions quand elles le touchent à un niveau personnel. C'est ainsi qu'il doit reconnaître que sa propre fille aurait été la victime du programme d'euthanasie de son cher Führer.

Quoi qu'il en soit, avec ce papier, le journalisme britannique de gauche nous donne un superbe illustration de l'indépendance d'esprit et de qualité professionnelle.

David Irving: 'Hitler appointed me his biographer'

Hitler wasn’t anti-Semitic, and the Holocaust wasn’t his fault - David Irving’s take on Nazi Germany has made him many enemies. Johann Hari meets an unapologetic apologist

Blind faith or mischief? 'One hundred years from now, Hitler will get a very decent hearing,' says David Irving

“Hitler appointed me his biographer,” David Irving says. He is not laughing. He is announcing that the Fuhrer – the man he has revered since he was a child – saw him coming. Yes: Hitler prophesied Irving as the man who would clear away the smears and bring The Truth at last to an unwilling world. Irving discovered this prophecy when he was writing a biography of Adolf Hitler, but he is only prepared to disclose it baldly now. “I made a great point of tracking down all Hitler’s surviving doctors,” he says, “and I identified Erwin Giesing as the doctor who treated Hitler after the bomb attempt on his life in 1944.” He tracked him down in the 1970s to Aachen in West Germany, and when Irving called, he claims Giesing said: “Yes, I’ve been expecting you.”

Irving arrived at Giesing’s surgery and, he says, was immediately handed a 400-page file. “Giesing said it was his diary [of his time with Hitler]. ‘That’s what you have come for,’ [he said]. I asked why, why me? Why haven’t you given it to Jacobson or Hilburg or any of the other great historians?” Giesing said the answer lay on page 385. Irving flicked to this page, and, he says, “it is August 1944 and he is treating Hitler – cauterizing his eardrum – and he says, ‘Mein Furher you realize that you have the same illness now in your inner ear that the Kaiser had?’ Hitler said ‘Yes that is true, how did you know that?’ And Geesing said he had read it in the biography of the Kaiser written by an Englishman, J D Chamier.” And he says Hitler replied: “One day, an Englishman will come along and write my biography. But it cannot be an English man of the present generation. They won’t to be objective. It will have to be an Englishman of the next generation, and one who is totally familiar with all the German archives.”

Irving sits back with an expression of beatific calm. “So [when] I phoned the doctor and he said ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ the Messiah had come. The one he had been waiting for all these years. And of course all the other historians hate that because they don’t fit.” I stare silently for a moment. To clarify: you actually think Hitler wanted you to be his biographer? “Yes. Yes and I am not ashamed of that. Hitler knew that. Hitler himself said that for fifty years they won’t be able to write the truth about me.”

And I realize this interview isn’t about history; it’s about pathology.

How did this happen? How did a clever boy abandoned by his father in wartime Essex – as Nazi bombs fell all around – end up as the last man entranced by Adolf Hitler? How did a historian feted, for a while, by the English right end up in jail in Austria under laws banning the reconstitution of the Nazi Party? How did the father of a disabled daughter end up believing the great killer of the disabled was spiritually guiding him? And how did it end here, with this?

I: Swinging the lantern

David Irving has limped to the door of his large Berkshire country house, and is standing by a Christmas tree, waiting. I trudge up the drive, wondering how a recent bankrupt can afford all this, when he beckons me in with a rather severe look. As we walk into his kitchen, he explains his awkward movements: “If you spend four hundred days in prison, your muscles turn to Marmalade jelly. We were allowed to walk around once a day in a yard smaller than this room –” he waves his hand around the kitchen – “seventy men, walking clockwise. At my age,” seventy, “the muscles don’t come back. I have to crawl like a cockroach up stairs.”

He begins to make coffee and bleak chit-chat. He says that two days after he was released from prison, he fell over in Swiss Cottage tube station. “A woman came up to me and said ‘What’s happened to you?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve been in prison for 400 days?’ and she scuttled away.” While the water boils, he takes me on a tour of the grounds. There are acres of rolling greenery, lapping over private tennis courts and spurting fountains. He lives here alone. His former partner – or “concubine”, as he calls her – Bente Hogh ended their relationship when he was imprisoned, and he is single now. Their teenage daughter Jessica visits sometimes. As he shows me the foliage proudly, he explains that he used to live half the year in Florida, but now immigration is “a nightmare.” He adds with a wag of the finger: “If you go to Florida, don’t go with a woman. Florida is very humid, and she will blame the humidity on you. It will be your fault.”

We settle in the living room looking out over the grounds, and our photographer begins to snap him. He mentions that the white coffee-cup Irving is holding works well against the green, and Irving says: “Well, it is an Aryan cup.”

A picture of his father, John, stares out from the mantelpiece. “I saw him very little,” Irving says. “The rumour in the family was that when he found out that my mother was expecting twins – me and my brother – he turned and fled. [That was] 1938. There were various attempts, sporadically, at reconciliation. In those days families didn't divorce. He came back once from Wales where he was living, and I've got a vague memory of him being there for three or four days and then kicking over the traces and going again. I remember in those two or three days, I went to Brentford school happy, nonchalantly mentioning that I was going to be having a chat with my father that evening. But then he was gone again. Then some time in the 1950s he came back for about another week. He tried and also failed.”

He only got to know his father in the last year of his life: 1964. John said he fought in the Battle of Jutland, so Irving got a contract for him with his publisher to write a book about it for the anniversary. But his mother warned him he would only be let down again: the book would never arrive. So Irving drove to Wales and took his father back to London to live in his flat. “I sat him at that table and I put out an old tape recorder in front of him and I said you dictate and I'll spend all afternoon typing [it] up. Between us we finished the book.”

He suspects now his father was a fantasist. He said he fought in the war and was invalided out after being on HMS Edinburgh, but “after a time, when you get to know your father, in retrospect you think – I wonder if that was true? My sister has done a lot of research and says, ‘You know David, a lot of what daddy told us wasn't exactly true.’? Oh, he was full of stories. He affected a mock Welsh accent when he told them.” Then he adds: “In the navy they call this make-believe and exaggeration ‘swinging the lantern.’”

Are you like your father, David? “Oh, everyone spots similarities between me and my father? In fact my first wife, Pilar, got on very well with my mother, and at one point [she told her] I was being just the same as my father. I know how he behaved.” How was that? “Oh, probably some chauvinism. I've got pronounced views on women. They're very useful but they have their place.” And he thought that? “Oh, I'm sure he did. When he died, his brother sent me a twelve page letter telling me what a rotter my father had been.”

David was left alone with his mother and his siblings in the village of Ongar, in Essex. She rose them alone, making money by drawing sketches for the Radio Times. I ask how she explained that their father didn’t return. “Oh, I take always with a pinch of salt what women say about how their husbands behave. I've heard equally bad stories about her having complained to the Admiralty about him, which didn't do his career any good.” Nonetheless he says she raised her four children “absolutely impeccably. She managed to get us all into public school in Brentwood.” But it was a tough wartime childhood. He says: “You're very indignant you've got no toys. Our toys were made of broomsticks and wood. My older brother John had a Hornby train, the only reason I've ever wanted to have a little boy was so I would have an excuse to have a Hornby train.”

And this is where Adolf Hitler first enters David Irving’s story.

II: That Man

“I was told you don't have toys because of that man Hitler,” he says, sipping from his Aryan cup. “He was called That Man. [In the newspaper cartoons] there were Nazis parading around – Mr Hitler with his crinkly boots and little toothbrush moustache, and there was Dr Goebbels with his club foot, and fat old Goering with his medals. And I thought – because of them I've got no toys?” He snorts. “You split away from your parents at a very early age. They tell you things and you nod and say ‘yes mummy,’ but at the back of your brain you think, well, I'm probably being sold a bill of goods. You make a little mental check?. I said to myself, if they’re such ludicrous people, then why are the Germans doing it for them?”

His twin brother, Nicky, remembers David at six years old running towards bombed-out houses after a Nazi air-raid, shouting “Heil Hitler!” Irving shakes his head. “Untrue, untrue,” he mutters. His infatuation began, he says, a few years later, when he was sent away to school. He got hold of a copy of Hitler’s Table Talk, and he would read it at night, allowing himself only a few pages at a time so it would last longer. “I don't know if you've read Hitler's Table Talk, but it's [in bites of] two or three page describing in the first person what Hitler said at lunch or dinner, from 1941 to 1944,” he says. “It’s fascinating to read what Hitler was thinking. A lot of it made sense.” Like what? “Oh, about women? Women have very special minds. They are superficially similar to us and they speak a very similar language to us but they are also rather like ants. They can communicate with each other, without actually [using] a language that you can hear? More than that I'm not going to say, I've got enemies enough already.”

What could be more taboo in the Britain of the 1950s than to embrace Adolf Hitler, the man the country had united to defeat, as an alternative father-figure? It was the most absolute and shocking way to reject everything around him. “I was beaten solidly throughout [school]. It was a very sadistic process? Our house master was the gym teacher, which meant he was very muscular? There was an umbrella stand with ten different bamboo canes of different calibre with a cushion next to it, which he would try them out on first” – he makes a repeated thrashing noise – “and he would say right come with me, follow me.” It was ritualised, I say. “Oh, absolutely, it was sadistic. And I wouldn't have missed it.”

When he was in his mid-teens, he won a school prize. He could choose a book to be presented to him on Speech Day by the Deputy Prime Minister, Rab Butler. Irving asked for Mein Kampf. “I arranged for all the local press to photograph the deputy prime minister giving a copy of Mein Kampf to Brentwood schoolboy David Irving,” he says with glee. “I stood there holding the book up long enough for all the people to get their focus and flash and I sat down. I looked at the book and it wasn't Mein Kampf, it was a German-Russian technical dictionary. They got their own back.”

After Brentwood he went to Imperial College, London to study science, but he believes he was thwarted by a “Communist” professor and had to drop out. He headed for Germany. “I was the only foreign labourer in the whole of the Ruhr,” he says. Working in the steelworks, he began to hear whispers of another taboo. “Dresden was a word which just didn't exist in the English vocabulary then,” he says. But the Germans told him their city – filled with civilians, with little military role – had been firebombed by the Allies. “The whole of the city centre was cordoned off while they were cremating the bodies, ten thousand at a time on the city square,” Irving says, shaking his head.

So he wrote his first history book, a densely researched account of the firebombing of Dresden. Suddenly he was an up-and-coming historian, acclaimed across continents. But he remained within the historical consensus: the book condemns Nazi atrocities. When I remind Irving of this now, he says these passages were inserted into the book without his knowledge. “My publisher William Kimber? felt very deeply about the Dresden air raid and he put in certain lines into my Dresden book without telling me. Okay?” He only realised this, he insists, “years later.” I must look incredulous. You didn’t see the proofs? “No.” Why would he do that? “Political correctness. Don't raise your eyebrows in great shock, this happens. You'd be surprised if you knew how many people have a hand in a book before it's finally published, lawyers, publishers, editors' sisters and wives.” Ah yes, women.

By telling the story of Dresden from the perspective of the Germans, he suddenly found another door opening – to Hitler’s ghost.

III: The Magic Circle

Scattered across Germany, silent and shamed, were Hitler’s secretary, his personal guard, his doctor. They were, he says, “a small circle of very frightened people who had had a very tough time. When one of them [died], they would meet at the graveside.” They had never spoken to anyone. Irving was the first outsider to penetrate this “Magic Circle”. Otto Gunsche had been Hitler’s personal adjutant, the man who burned his body at the end – and he liked the Dresden book. After a series of meetings, he led Irving to the rest.

“They were all very nice people,” he says. “This was something that impressed me from day one – these are people who've been to staff college, they've been to university, they're educated, upper-middle class people, chosen for their qualities and their abilities? and they all spoke to me in private in terms of glowing admiration of the Chief. And I thought to myself – there must be two Hitlers, there's the Hitler we're told about by Hollywood and Madison Avenue and there's the Hitler that these people worked for.”

They told him about a Hitler who was kind to children and animals. He recounts a very long story about how Hitler once noticed that two stenographers were cold, and insisted they be brought heaters.

When I suggest that all dictators have a loyal clique who like them – it means nothing – he keeps dodging the question. Eventually, he responds by arguing dictators are often misjudged: Idi Amin gets a unfair press, for one. Irving says he owns a medallion that belonged to the Ugandan dictator, and he likes to wear it secretly below his clothes when he is delivering a lecture. But, I respond, he ethnically cleansed the Ugandan Asians. He shrugs: “Expelling people is something that's been going on for a long time.”

From within Hitler’s circle, Irving began to develop an elaborate theory that “the Chief” was innocent after all. After the barrage of unanswerable evidence presented at his trial, Irving now concedes that the Holocaust happened – and there were “some” gassings at Auschwitz – but he insists Hitler had no idea it was going on. It was orchestrated by the evil Joseph Goebbels and his staff. They deliberately hid it from Hitler, because he was “the best friend the Jews had in the Third Reich.”

Eva Braun “suckered him”, and Goring made him look anti-Jewish when, in fact, by 1938, Hitler “wasn’t anti-semitic at all.” Hitler wasn’t anti-Semitic? If you look at his career, both in detail and in general, Hitler was the person who protected the Jews,” he continues. “But he was repeatedly outsmarted by the Heinrich Himmlers, the Martin Bormanns.” When I start listing Hitler’s many genocidal rages against Jews, he says he was just “playing to the gallery.” Of course, to maintain his view that Hitler knew nothing, he has to tamper with historical documents – changing words, and deliberately ignoring all the contrary evidence, as was shown ad nausem at the trial. I am more interested in teasing out why Irving should contort himself to believe this.

If a raddled, aged Adolf Hitler appeared at your door now, what would you say to him? “I would switch on my tape recorder.” And after you had heard everything he had to say, would turn him in? “Then I would base my decision on what he told me he had done and I would adopt a very harsh measure on that. In the case of Herman Goerring, for example? a lovely, enjoyable buffoon but he was undoubtedly a hanging case. He committed murders, and in my mind if you commit one murder you're for the rope.” So you think it’s conceivable that Adolf Hitler could not have committed even one murder? “With his own hands?” No, not with his own hands. He goes off on a long side-track about how Winston Churchill did kill people with his bare hands. I have to drag him back to Hitler. “Oh, he's technically responsible, he's constitutionally responsible, but what interests me? [is] you find out again and again he's been duped, he's been duped by Eva Braun, he's been duped...”

The last time he saw his mother, she disowned him because of this Hitler-love. She had come to visit his new baby, Josephine, and she was sitting with the child when Irving tried to read her a passage from one of his books. In revulsion, she asked: “What is this viper I've nurtured to my bosom?” Irving says: “She wasn't interested and I said, ‘You just want to play with Josephine, you don't want to listen to what I'm [saying], you've just never been interested in anything I've done, have you!’ Afterwards you kick yourself that those are the terms you have parted company for ever.” But still he cannot stop. He says: “One hundred years from now Hitler will get a very decent hearing. Not so much his underlings.

IV: The Enemy

There were no Jews in the village where David Irving grew up, and he used to think there were none at his school. “But let me tell you a horrible little anecdote?” he says, leaning forward. “Immediately after the Lipstadt trial I flew to Florida so they couldn't touch me? On the plane a man came down the aisle towards me, and said ‘You're David Irving aren't you?’ I said no you're mistaken, and he said ‘I know you're David Irving, and I know why you're denying it.’ I said no you don't. Whoops!” But when he got to Florida, the man told him angrily: “I know who you are! I went to school with you and you made life unbearable for me and another Jew. I was a boy at Brentwood school, you called us filthy little yids, you screamed at us!”

Irving looks bemused as he recounts this story. He assured the man there were no Jews at his school, and he must be mistaken. But he was so shaken he got the man’s name from the checkout desk. (He claims the airline staff reassured him: “Them Jews, them Jews, they all want to have suffered.”) He checked with his old school and “I got all the details. He was a year behind me, two years behind me. Well, I don't know if you know anything about public school, but you never, ever, ever speak to boys in the year, or two years behind you. They don't exist, they are lower than low. No way would I have spoken to him.”

This story is, to Irving, yet more evidence of Jewish wickedness. He offers the old racist rote: the Jews organised “most” of the wars of the twentieth century, and sneer at “the goyim.” Who were the first Jews you knew? “At university. Mike Gorb. He was my flatmate in Kensington, very, very nice guy.” He is now uncontactibly dead, after a mountaineering accident. “John Blok, he was a kind of mentor for me at the university? Jaqueline Gross we employed and she was very nice, very jolly girl and she thoroughly enjoyed working for us. That was in 1982 or 1983 or something.” He insists these Jews were nice people – but when at a lecture a few years ago a Jewish man asked him if he was saying the Jews brought Auschwitz on themselves, he responded: “The short answer is yes.”

How were Mike and John and Jacqueline bringing on their own gassing? He shifts in his chair. “I know that I'm not liked and I know why I'm disliked and I know what I could do to become instantly liked. The Jews have never asked themselves, so far as I can see, over the last three thousand years why they are not liked.” But there is a vast literature by Jews trying to figure out why anti-Semitism happens. He backs off for a second. “I'm not familiar with Jewish literature, because I don't read it. But do they ever reach an objective and useful conclusion?” he asks ingenuously. Plainly is a mass hysteria, like the witchcraft craze – a long, mad search for a scapegoat. “Maybe you're right, I hope you're right, but then why would holocausts happen, why would the German people have turned a blind eye?” he says. When I don’t respond immediately, he exclaims: “Gotcha! Gotcha! Gotcha!”

Do you think every persecuted group in history brought it on themselves then? Did the “witches” cause their own murder? “Indirectly, yes, by not creating a society in which this wouldn't, couldn't happen.” I run through a long list of persecuted groups in history, and finally come across a few he thinks were just the victims of “mass hysteria.” So couldn’t anti-Semitism be a mass hysteria? “No.”

He believes Jews are responsible for their own persecution because they do not “police their own community,” and begins talking about the fraudster Bernie Madoff as an example. He believes Jews let him get away with it – even though a preposterously small proportion of Jews could possibly have been aware of his crimes. So if your Jewish researcher or your Jewish flatmate was to be killed by anti-Semites, they would be responsible because they didn't stop Madoff? “Or the Madoff of their days, yes.”

He seems incapable of seeing Jews as individuals for long. The faces of Mike and John and Jacqueline soon disappear into the amorphous monstrous mass existing only in his mind known as The Jew, which – intriguingly – suffers from many of the characteristics Irving’s critics ascribe to him: it is attention-seeking and greedy and brings about its own destruction.

Yet he insists that, like his Hitler, he is only saying this for the Jews’ own good. “I'm a great friend of them? I'm saying this in their own interest. I'm trying to stop it happening again, whether it's in America or wherever else the Jews flee to. They don't recognise the fact that it's just possible that they are the architects of their own misfortune, to use that wonderful phrase. They are so arrogant, they won't accept this. Every time some rich Jew dies, [they say in his obituaries he was] the noted philanthropist. He won't go down in history as being a noted philanthropist, he'll go down in history as being a Jew, and the non-Jews see the Jews and say ‘well how have they made all their money? From us.’ And that's one reason to dislike them. It's human nature.”

There will, he reckons, probably be another Holocaust in thirty years, when we realise we have been conned. Oh, and if the Jews are lucky, there will be a David Irving or an Adolf Hitler there to protect them.

V: Josephine

In a box in the corner of this room, there sits the ashes of a girl Hitler would have murdered. It is Irving’s eldest daughter, Josephine. Like in a moralistic Victorian parable, this Hitler-devotee ended up with a severely disabled daughter – and I want to know how he dealt with the dissonance.

“In 1981 she became schizophrenic and it was a terrible shock for us,” he says, his voice dropping from its confident strut. She had been getting into trouble at school for a while, but Irving assumed it was normal teenage turbulence until one day she left an exam and walked home. She told her father: “Oh, the devil was sitting in the road just in front of me.” Irving looks into the middle distance. “You hear your own daughter saying things like that and it begins to become very frightening. You don't realise what's going on.” A Harley Street doctor diagnosed her with latent paranoid schizophrenia. “It is not curable. It can be treated, but for the benefit of the rest of society,” he says. “My wife vanished for three months. She couldn't take it, left me with the children to look after. I can't begrudge her that, it was a terrible shock and it took a long time to sink in.”

He remembers walking with Josephine on the anniversary of her diagnosis, and he said she had been ill for a year “She turned those blue eyes to me and she said, ‘Oh no daddy, I've been ill for many more years than that.’ Imagine your oldest daughter saying that? For the next 18 years she struggled with this appalling affliction which got worse and worse. She heard these voices which speak with enormous compulsion. The voice that tells you to stand back from the edge of a platform as an express train rattles through, with equally the same cohesion tells schizophrenics to do the exact opposite.”

In 1996, he tried to commit suicide by hurling herself from a building, and ended up “a complete cripple”, as Irving puts it, with a broken back and both her legs amputated. She secretly married another seriously disabled man who “had a bad, bad brain,” but after three years, she attempted suicide again – this time successfully. The hospital staff, he says, told him “she must have been a very determined suicide indeed to pull herself out of a window, a fifth floor window, in that condition.” Their son is now grown up, and fighting in Afghanistan.

He says the experience has changed him. “I find myself becoming a lot more human towards people who have a disability?. Now if I find a Down Syndrome child or someone a paraplegic or somebody with some other obvious disability wheeled past me I will go out of my way to go over to them, to smile, to say hello because you realize that they are humans too.”

You do realize, I say as gently as I can, that Hitler would have killed Josephine? “Yes, Hitler had one of his own cousins killed, this is one of the appalling things.” He then quickly goes off on another tangent, talking about a radio programme he was once on, and I have – for once – to draw him back to the Hitler. I can almost see the conflict within him, as he veers back and forth from admitting Hitler did something wrong. “Hitler had the very best of reasons, if I can put it very oddly like that.”

He claims the first case of euthanasia authorized by Hitler was of “a child who had been born hideously disfigured in some way, and the doctors and the parents wanted to put the child down for its own sake? That was the kind of reasoning behind it, and then [Karl] Brandt [Hitler’s physician] came to Hitler and said of course this isn’t the only case, there are many many more cases like this, but this was the foot in the door. [It] provided a lawful basis for termination of people who were medical misfits and it became ever wider. When war broke out people said well, we need the hospital beds now for people who really need them, and gradually the field became broader and broader.”

And so he concedes with a sigh: “Had we been in Nazi Germany then Josephine would have been swept up in that procedure.” But then he adds quickly, in a sentence that uncharacteristically dissolves into meaninglessness: “Except of course that we now have drugs” to treat schizophrenia, “so I am not sure that [Hitler] would have [killed her] because, as I say, just at the end, by that time the drugs would have been there which would have made it possible to...” He stops and collects his thoughts.

“The way the Nazis did it was always in the nicest possible way,” he says at last. “The parents were told ‘oh she has succumb to pneumonia’, something like that. [It was] evil with good intentions.” Where were the good intentions? “The parents would not have been told.” But the child would know that they were being killed, and the parents would still have a dead child. “I don’t know, it is very difficult when you get into these fields, a what-if, a hypothesis.” It’s hardly a wild what-if: it happened to tens of thousands of real people just like you. He is silent.

So you really think the murder of people exactly like your daughter was an act committed “in the kindest possible way”? “Oh, I am quoting that television gentleman? what is he called? he crossed his legs all the time and wore a beard.” Kenny Everett? “Kenny Everett. I’m, uh, just quoting his catchphrase. The Nazis did these things, but they didn’t do it, they didn’t do it, they did it in a concealed way so that parents only later on found out to their horror what had actually happened.” Does that make it any less horrific? He clams up. “I think this argument is so stilted I don't want to get entwined in it.”

He looks over at the ashes, and then looks down, speechless for the first time in our interview.
VI: Silenced

In 1989, Austria’s Chancellor Franz Vranitzky said publicly: “Should Irving ever turn up here again, he’ll be locked up immediately.” His lectures had breached the country’s laws banning denial of the Nazis’ crimes and rebuilding a Nazi movement – and the punishment ran to twenty years in jail. Yet in 2006, Irving chose to return to the country, knowing there was a warrant out for his arrest. Was he seeking a confrontation? He shakes his head. “No, but I was prepared for it? I can't allow people to silence me forever. One day I shall have to go back to Germany. I have to continue research there, but I'm banned from Germany. I can't allow people to silence me or to stop my research.”

He was put on trial, and blames his conviction on the fact the fact that eight members of the jury were “stolid, slab-featured, middle-aged Viennese Hausfrau type women, with a bus-stopping range of perhaps a hundred yards or more.” But prison, he insists, was wonderful. “I thoroughly enjoyed it,” he says, pushing out his chest. He says it’s great for a writer to have all the distractions shut out. He quotes Evelyn Waugh approvingly: “Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.”

But is this true? This was the first time he was forced into close contact with black people, a group he believes are inferior. He says America used to have a “nicely stratified system, with the white on top followed by the coloureds followed by the blacks and the slave labour on the bottom,” until the Jews decided to shake it up with the wicked civil rights movement. Yet he says he made friends with a “young Black” called Momo, and with “lots of them. There were Africans in the prison from Nigeria of course. I suppose it's even racist to say of course, but I mean the Nigerians, blacks are going to be largely criminal. I spoke most of their languages, French or Spanish or whatever and so they came to me.”

In his new book about his time in jail, ‘Banged Up’, he describes an odd incident in which he “accidentally” drank detergent, saying he mistook it for lemon juice. Did you try to kill yourself? “Lord good Lord no!” he says with a great forced guffaw. “No, I would never commit suicide. Suicide is partly congenital like alcoholism. If you want to be an SS officer, which probably you don’t...” – he laughs – “one of the forms that you had to fill in looks at if there is a history of suicide in your family or a history of alcoholism then that is a black mark.” He then describes an elaborate scenario in which detergent and lemon juice became interchangeable.

As I get up to leave, his daughter Paloma, who is visiting from Madrid, wanders in. She asks our photographer nervously: “Did he behave himself?” Irving takes me around the house for one last time, proudly pulling himself up the stairs. He was declared bankrupt in 2003 – so how does he afford this gorgeous house? “I'm not going to talk about money very much, but I have an income.” I heard you were supported by a Saudi prince. “I tried it, oh I tried it,” he says. He claims that in 2003 Prince Salman Fahd – son of the Saudi king, and then Interior Minister – promised him £800,000, just before he died of a sudden heart attack. “I would say eighty percent of my income comes from the United States? It's very enjoyable showing that despite every effort the enemies make to smash me, provided my heart holds out, then I'm okay. I can survive.”

VII: The scamp

As we stand by the Christmas tree, with the door open and the cold wind blowing in, I wonder –does David Irving believe what he says? Does he actually think Adolf Hitler ordained him as his defender when he was just a toddler in Essex? His twin brother, Nicky, has said: “I’ve never been entirely convinced that, deep down, David really holds these ridiculous views. It’s possible that he was simply doing what we did when we were children – anything to get attention. It’s almost a sickness with him.” His former partner Bente agrees: “I never really felt he believed a lot of it. I still don’t really. He enjoys being provocative. He’s an extraordinary attention seeker, always has been.” Is he just swinging the lantern, like his father?

He laughs at this suggestion. “I am a scamp, yes a scamp,” he says. “Ever since school. I like to have one piece of mischief on every page I write so you go to turn the page and are thinking, well, what was that page about?” And he closes his eyes tightly in the freezing air. For one moment, it seems as though he is back at Brentwood School, asking for a copy on Mein Kampf for speech day, and thinking all this – all this hate, and all this hard work to rehabilitate the worst genodical killer of the twentieth century – is only a jolly, jolly jape.

For a forensic rebuttal of the holocaust denial myths, go to http://remember.org/History.root.rev.html

Johann Hari

Signalons qu'en avril 2008 Johann Hari avait gagné le prix Orwell du journalisme indépendant pour sa dénonciation du rôle de la France en Centreafrique.