Dieudonné and David Irving, their struggle (with reality).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25927003

Dieudonné M'bala M'bala - popularly-known as Dieudonné or 'Dieudo.' 

(Dieudonné can be translated as 'God's Gift').

Update Jan 28th 2014 -Today, French law enforcement agents raided several properties as part of an ongoing inquiry into whether Dieudonné has made a fraudulent declaration of bankruptcy to avoid paying fines totalling 65 thousands Euros. He is also suspected of money laundering and of abusing company assets. Almost 600 thousands Euros in cash was recovered during the raids. Not surprisingly, these events have been systematically-portrayed by Dieudonné's most-fanatical supporters as a character-assassination plot - part of global Jewish/Zionist conspiracy to suppress the truth.

Dieudonné M'bala M'bala (b. 1966)

Recently, several English people have asked me for my opinion of Dieudonné M'bala M'bala. Essentially, these enquirers want to know if Dieudonné has instigated a cult?  However, Dieudonné's activities are neither original nor unique and, consequently, they cannot be fully-understood in isolation.

'Ridicule alone isn’t enough, you’ve got to be tasteless about it. You’ve got to say things like More women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.'

David John Cawdwell Irving (b. 1938)

In this article, I compare the reality-denying, public performances of Dieudonné, to those of David Irving. Indeed (although the pair are apparently not directly linked) they are evidently both living in essentially the same intellectual bunker with the door firmly shut.





Classically of narcissistic personalities, Irving and Dieudonné received a temporary boost to their inflated egos (as well as a temporary boost to their inflated bank balances), by reflecting, and peddling, the existing delusions of fellow bunker-dwellers as reality, whilst provoking outsiders. Their public denial, and/or trivialising, of the Holocaust and defence of Hitler, was guaranteed to attract the usual receptive minority and to make many usually calm people (and particularly, usually calm Jewish people) boil with rage.

Prior to 1997, Dieudonné was a popular and talented comic (a national celebrity in France) whose stage partner, Elie Semoun, was Jewish. Dieudonné (whose mother was from Brittany and father from Cameroon) also dabbled in politics - standing as a way-to-the-left of centre anti-racist, anti-French National Front candidate.

Although he now professes to be a 'Muslim,' to date, no one really knows who, or what, might be lurking behind Dieudonné's sudden, radical personality transformation. There has been a lot of wild speculation, for up until very recently, Dieudonné has been appearing on stage in what he insists are 'comedy shows,' but these pay-to-enter gatherings (43 Euros per ticket) have been used to dissimulate a form of abusive/extremist political meeting in which Dieudonné plays the innocent victim whilst acting out a complex 'Zionist/Jewish' global conspiracy theory as though it is reality. Like David Irving, Dieudonne has attempted to hide behind laws protecting free-speech. However, his heartless, and outrageous, mocking of Holocaust victims has led to him being convicted of defamation, incitement of hatred and racial discrimination. Although his fines now total approximately 65 thousand Euros, so far, Dieudonné has avoided being held to account, because (on paper) he is bankrupt.

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In 2012, Dieudonné's home was bought for approximately 500 thousands Euros by 'Les Productions de la Plume' - a company held by his wife, Noémie Montagne.

http://www.lematin.ch/monde/europe/garde-dieudonne-levee/story/13603427

Last week Dieudonné was questioned by Gendarmes concerning his role in a violent incident with bailiffs seeking to collect his unpaid fines. As the bailiffs left Dieudonné's home, they were fired on with rubber/plastic bullets from a 'Flash-Ball' gun, but they were unable to identify who had pulled the trigger. A criminal complaint was filed and the weapon (similar to the one pictured above) was subsequently recovered from Dieudonné's home.   

Certain French commentators have already concluded that Dieudonné is the charismatic focus of a new form of unifying extremist political cult, because his adherents comprise diverse groups of persons who usually are sworn enemies.

Dieudonné receives support from the former leader of the French National Front, Jean-Marie le Pen.

Dieudonne with Jean-Marie le Pen .

Dieudonné has had everyone, from members of the French National Front to Islamist sympathisers, swallowing his unoriginal act.

Other people seem to come along wanting to see just how far Dieudonné is prepared to go with his reckless provocation of authority.

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Dieudonné's tour of 'comedy shows' has recently been closed-down in France at the request the current French Government, and particularly, Interior Minister, Manuel Valls, who received the backing of the French courts. 

http://www.20min.ch/ro/news/vaud/story/18964303

Dieudonné's tour also has dates in Switzerland, and these are still scheduled to go ahead, starting next week in Nyon. The exterior walls of the theatre have already been liberally sprayed with slogans protesting Dieudonné's appearance, and the Swiss authorities have announced that security will be tightened. Due to the increased demand from travelling French fans, ticket prices to see Dieudonné in Switzerland are reported to have exploded from 150 Swiss francs (approximately 125 Euros) to 500 Swiss francs (approximately 400 Euros).

Manuel Valls  has been deliberately targeted and provoked by Dieudonné and his supporters.

The French riot squad was in attendance as a precaution, when, at the last minute, Dieudonné's show was forbidden to go ahead in Nantes - 6000 tickets had previously been sold (totalling more than quarter of a million Euros) 

The extraordinary measure of banning Dieudonné from performing in France, was taken on the grounds that the continued anti-Semitic content of Dieudonné's message (despite his previous convictions) reveals his deliberate intention to flout the law, and represents an ongoing threat to public order.

Preditably, banning Dieudonne's 'shows' in France has, so far, only attracted more visitors to his facebook page and Website.

When faced with the threat of closure, Dieudonné initially claimed to have toned down the most-provocative content of his stage act and his attorney even announced that all previous fines would be paid if his client's shows were allowed to go ahead as planned in France. However, Dieudonné evidently feared an investigation by the French authorities into his real objectives. In brief, Dieudonné already stood-accused by the press of deliberately faking his own bankruptcy and of setting up an unlawful labyrinth of corporate structures (held in the name of his wife and members of his family), in order to export the mounting profits from his growing-notoriety out of the reach of the French taxman, and effectively-isolate himself from liability for his criminal acts of provocation. 

It has been widely-reported that 400 thousands Euros has already been laundered through a company, 'Ewondo Corp.,' held by Dieudonné and his son, in Cameroon. Whilst another 600 thousands Euros (in cash) has recently been recovered, after French law enforcement agents raided Dieudonné's home and other properties in France .

'Quenelle' (which once meant a type of dumpling in French cooking) is now a French registered trademark owned by  'Les Productions de la Plume' - a legally-registered commercial company which (on paper) is run by Dieudonné's wife, Noémie Montagne.

'Quenelle' T shirts, 20 Euros a piece.

'Les Productions de la Plume' was the company organizing, and selling tens of thousands of tickets to, Dieudonné's abusive performances, and it is also behind an on-line shop, http://www.dieudosphere.com/boutique.html selling all-manner of provocative merchandise. 

Other ourageously-provocative Dieudonné publications and recordings are available. 

Dieudonné's trademark 'quenelle' salute has been described as an inverted 'Nazi' salute (a combination of the French bras d'honneur and the German zeig heil). French professional footballer (and Dieudonné's long-time friend), Nicolas Anelka, who currently plays for West Bromich Albion, is to be charged by the English Football Association with making a racist gesture ( the 'quenelle') to celebrate scoring a goal in a recent Premier League match. Whether he was fully-aware of what lies behind the 'quenelle' or not,  the fact remains that Nicolas Anelka was used (and, in turn, used his employers and the British media), in what appears to have been a planned-attempt to open up a new international market for Dieudonné's abusive business.

Anelka's involvement has (temporarily) brought even more attention and profits to Dieudonné. However, ironically, the so-called 'quenelle,' in fact, originally comes from the classic 1964 Stanley Kubrick black comedy film, 'Dr. Strangelove.'

Readers will perhaps recall that Stangelove (a comically-gruesome former 'Nazi' scientist, played by the late Peter Sellers), gets so excited by the prospect of a nuclear holocaust, that he loses control of the non-rational, right half of his body. Strangelove then keeps attempting to strangle his involuntary 'Nazi' salute to the comically-naive US president (also played by Sellers) with the rational, left half of his body. This classic scene of a former 'Nazi' struggling with reality, is what is actually being replicated in the so-called 'quenelle' - it is a gesture originally designed to ridicule deeply-deluded worshippers of a pathetic little narcissist, Adolf Hitler.

78 rpm gramophone recordings from the 1930s

At this point, I would remind readers, that Hitler became one of the wealthiest people in the world, via the sale of copyright recordings of his performances, books, esoteric accessories and tickets to his live performances in which he acted out a complex global Jewish conspiracy theory as though it was reality. For years, Hitler also avoided paying tax by pleading poverty whilst hiding his growing mountain of cash behind a labyrinth of corporate structures.

Typically, Diedonneé claims his quenelle gesture to be anti-Zionist and anti-establishment and not anti-Semitic.

The so-called 'quenelle' is, in fact, none of these things and all of these things, because it all depends on what is/was the real intention of the person(s) making the gesture.

As previously-stated, Dieudonné's activities are neither original nor unique. The tragicomic story of David Irving ought to be a salutary lesson for him.

On November 11^th  2005, the controversial British author and self-styled ‘WWII historical researcher,’ David Irving, was arrested in the southern Austrian State of Styria on charges of ‘denying the Holocaust’ under a warrant issued in 1989. Since the end of WWII, it has been a criminal offence to deny the Holocaust (in public) in numerous European democracies liberated from rule by the closed-logic ‘Nazi’ myth of ‘Aryan Supremacy.’ Although Irving was fully-aware that he had been barred from entering Austria (where he risked 10 years imprisonment), he did not seek to hide his presence. According to his Danish partner, Bente Hogh, Irving had gone there as ‘a bit of fun, to provoke a little bit.’ In other words, the notoriously litigious author had deliberately sought confrontation with the law, and it was particularly shameful that Armistice Day should have been chosen to stage this narcissistic self-publicity stunt.

Soon after his arrest, Irving issued a precisely-worded statement (via his lawyer, Elmar Kresbach), in which he acknowledged ‘the existence of Nazi-era gas chambers.’ Irving seems to have convinced himself that this empty gesture would be sufficient for him to dodge prison.

From the mid-1980s (when he became associated with the California-based, Holocaust-denying ‘Institute for Historical Review’), Irving has descended into the stale darkness of an existing intellectual bunker whilst steadfastly preaching the good news of Hitler’s innocence to a host of receptive far-right groups. In 1988, he sealed the door of the bunker when he appeared as defence witness for another Holocaust-denier, Ernst Zündel, in Toronto and stated (on oath):

‘I don’t think there was an overall Reich policy to kill the Jews. If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of survivors.’

In 1991, Irving was recorded in Canada, strutting his stuff before a flock of fellow bunker-dwellers.

On the above tape (after approximately 10 minutes), Irving says: 'Ridicule alone isn’t enough, you’ve got to be tasteless about it. You’ve got to say things like More women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chamber at Auschwitz. (laughter applause) Now you think that’s tasteless? What about this? I’m forming an association especially dedicated to all these liars, the ones who try to kid people that they were in these concentration camps, it’s called the Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and Other Liars, A-S-S-H-O-L-E-S.’ Can’t get more tasteless than that, but you’ve got to be tasteless because these people deserve our contempt.’ 

Irving himself was first convicted for ‘defaming the (Auschwitz) dead’ by a German court. He was fined $6000 and barred from entering Germany in 1992. He immediately appealed, but compounded his offence by declaring:

‘There were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, I will not change my opinion.’ (His appeal was declined and he was fined an additional $12 000).

Later, in 1992, Irving was also barred from Australia, Canada and South Africa. This led to him being deported from Canada.

David Duke

In 1994, he was the star-turn at a rally organized by the leadership of the ‘American neo-Nazi’ movement and attended by the former, self-appointed leader of the ‘KKK,’ David Duke. 

In 2004, Irving was refused entry to New Zealand on the grounds of his 1992 German conviction and because (at various times) he’d been deported from (and/or refused entry to) Canada, Italy, the USA and South Africa. However, this didn’t stop Irving from staging yet another stunt in which he tried (unsuccessfully) to board a Quantas flight from LA to New Zealand.

On February 20^th  2006, Irving appeared in Vienna’s largest courtroom charged with denying the Holocaust in two speeches delivered to far-right groups in Austria in 1989. Although he pleaded guilty, under Austrian law (at the request of the State Prosecutor, Michael Klackl) Irving’s trial was allowed to run its course. Klackl explained that Irving had declared the gas chambers at Auschwitz to be a ‘fairytale’ and death camp survivors to be ‘psychiatric cases.’ Judge Peter Liebtreu asked Irving if he still held these views. Irving now claimed that he’d ‘made a mistake in saying there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz.’ He was ‘not sure how many people had died in Auschwitz,’ but he still believed that ‘Hitler protected the Jews’ and ‘tried to put off the Final Solution.’

Irving’s Lawyer failed to convince the jury that his client was just a harmless old man with a 12 year old daughter and sick wife to support. He was found guilty and sentenced to 3 years imprisonment. Judge Liebtreu described him as ‘a racist, an anti-Semite and a liar.’ 

Judge Liebtreu referred to a previous trial in which Irving had maliciously sought to suppress, a book, ‘Denying the Holocaust,’ written by an Jewish / American academic, Deborah Lipstadt. In this, Irving was not only identified as a ‘Holocaust denier,’ but also as a ‘falsifier and bigot’ who ‘manipulated and distorted real documents.’ 

In 1998, Irving sued Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin Books, for libel in the English High Court. Lipstadt and Penguin were represented by the noted English barrister, Anthony Julius, who produced Richard J. Evans (Professor of Modern History, Cambridge University) as an expert witness. Prof. Evans and his research assistants took 2 years going through Irving’s published works with a fine tooth-comb. They came up with a stack of distortions, and irrefutable evidence that Irving had also knowingly included material sourced from forged documents. Prof. Evans made the following statement to the court:

‘Not one of (Irving’s) books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he talking or writing about… if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.’

During the English trial, Irving represented himself, and (largely ignoring the evidence against him) concentrated on what he insisted was his ‘right to free speech.’ He claimed that for three decades he’d been the victim of an international, mostly Jewish, conspiracy. At one point in Irving’s closing speech (March 15^th  2000) there occurred a surreal moment, again reminiscent of ‘Dr Strangelove.’ He seemed to address the Judge, Charles Gray, as ‘mein führer.’ Irving lost the case and his later attempts to appeal were denied. He was ordered to pay an estimated $6 millions costs. Finally exposed as a dangerous manipulator living in a paranoid delusion of his own absolute moral and intellectual authority, Irving filed for bankruptcy. Judge Gray had concluded that:

‘Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in a favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is an anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.’

In 2006, Irving was detained in the Josefstadt Prison in central Vienna, where he waited for yet another pointless appeal to be heard. In a BBC Radio 4 interview (recorded in Josefstadt prison and broadcast on February 28^th 2006) Irving sounded quite rational, but what he said was anything but. He calmly asserted that the world’s historians have all lied about the Holocaust because, if they told the truth, they too would be sent to prison. Interestingly, Irving described his prison cell as ‘paradise for a writer.’ He stated that he would spend his time finishing his memoirs, ‘Irving’s War.’ It’s not difficult to guess from whom he copied this latest career move, but how could Irving ever have come to identify with a megalomaniacal psychopath, Adolf Hitler? For that matter, how could he have overlooked the mountain of quantifiable evidence proving the Nazi regime’s systematic manipulation, cheating, dispossession and destruction of millions of innocent men, women and children? To anyone who has researched cultic groups, Irving’s own story is frighteningly familiar.

David John Cawdwell Irving was born in March 1938 in Hutton, near to Brentwood, Essex. He was one of twin boys with one older brother.

By a cruel twist of fate, in the week of David Irving's birth, the keel was laid for a brand new Royal Navy Cruiser, HMS Edinburgh. 

John James Cawdwell (Jack) Irving 

David Irving’s father was a middle-aged, Royal Navy Lieutenant-Commander, Jack Irving, who had survived the (8000+ death) battle of Jutland during WW I, and who went on to serve aboard HMS Edinburgh during the early years of WW II. 

On April 30^th 1942, the Cruiser was escorting a homeward-bound Russian convoy, QP-11, in the icy waters of the Barents Sea, when she was hit by two torpedoes from a German U-Boat. Two days later, a partly crippled HMS Edinburgh was attacked by German Destroyers off Bear Island and torpedoed again. This time, she was abandoned and later sunk by HMS Foresight. Although 58 crew members perished, Irving’s father was again amongst the survivors. Deeply traumatised by this experience, Lieutenant-Commander Irving abandoned his family, dying (two years after his wife, Beryl) in 1967.

Beryl Irene Newington Irving (1953)

David Irving was brought up by his mother, Beryl , an illustrator. He attended St Anthony Brownes’s Grammar School, Brentwood, where he was considered to be well above average academically. He later attended the London School of Economics and Imperial College London, where, whilst studying physics, he wrote articles for the student journal, ‘Phoenix,’ and he edited the London University magazine, ‘Carnival Times.’ 

As a child, Irving had already exhibited the desire to attract attention by being provocative, but, in 1959, he wrote and published a supplement to ‘Carnival Times’ containing racist cartoons, a defence of apartheid and Nazism and an accusation that the British press was controlled by Jews. Not surprisingly, Irving (aged 21) found himself in the headlines. He was branded as a self-confessed fascist and fan of Hitler by ‘the Daily Mail.’ Deprived of money, he was obliged to quit University. He tried to take-up his deferred National Service. Rejected by the RAF as being medically unfit, Irving went to Germany, where, whilst learning to speak German, he worked as a labourer at the Thyssen steel works in the Ruhr.

He soon married and moved to Spain to work on an airbase in a clerical capacity (eventually, Irving and his wife, Pilar, produced 4 daughters, one of whom died in 1999). 

During 1962, a series of 37 articles by Irving were accepted by a right wing German magazine. In 1963, these were used as the framework for his first book, ‘The Destruction of Dresden’ — a fully-illustrated account of the carpet bombing of Dresden during February 1945. The morality of the WW II allied bombing campaign was already the focus of a fierce debate in Britain, Germany and the USA. Throughout the 1960s, Irving’s book (in which he described the Dresden raids as ‘the worst single massacre in European history’) featured on best seller lists in numerous countries, and for a long time he was recognised as an authority on the subject. However, the first edition of ‘The Destruction of Dresden,’ in which Irving (aged 25) estimated the number of German deaths at between 100 000 and 250 000, and subsequent editions, in which he reduced his estimate to between 50 and 100 000 deaths, are discredited. It is now a matter of public record that Irving’s figures were bogus and that between 25 000 and 30 000 people actually died in the Dresden raids.

Irving would later use the fact that he had (in March 1962) interviewed the wartime chief of RAF Bomber Command, Air Marshall Sir Arthur Harris, to support his published claims.

During the 1960s, Irving also brought out: ‘The Mare’s Nest’ (1964) and ‘The Virus House’ - accounts of Nazi secret weapons projects; ‘The (translated) memoirs of Field Marshal Keitel’ (1965); ‘Accident, The Death of General Sikorski’ (1967) - in which Irving implied that the exiled WW II Polish leader had been murdered at the direction of Churchill and other Allied leaders; ‘The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17’ (1968) - in which he libelled Commander Jack Broome RN. 

 David Irving with Jack Broome

In 1970, Irving and his publisher were sued for libel by Jack Broome. They were forced to pay him £48 000 damages + approximately £500 000 costs and withdraw the offending-book from circulation.

David Irving with Hitler's Armaments Minister, Albert Speer

With Hitler's secretary, Christa Shroeder 1976.

During the 1970s, Irving was introduced to various surviving members of Hitler’s entourage via German far-right groups. He was immediately recognised as a kindred spirit and was given access to private diaries and documentation. Irving then published ‘The (translated) Memoirs of General Gehlen’ (1972) and ‘The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe’ (1973) - a biography of Air Marshall Milch. Although his books were particularly well-written, and packed with incidental information which appealed to the general public, Irving was shunned by professional historians.

In 1977, Irving (aged 39) suddenly brought out ‘Hitler’s War,’ a reality-inverting portrayal of the ‘führer’ as an innocent politician whose only crime had been the desire to increase the prosperity of the German people. At this time, Irving had not yet begun to deny the Holocaust. However, he did claim that Hitler had no knowledge of it. 

‘Hitler’s War’ was quickly followed by ‘The Trail of the Fox’ — a revisionist biography of Rommel, in which Irving portrayed the Field Marshall as a loyal supporter of Hitler, framed and forced to kill himself by the architects of the plot to murder the führer. Irving condemned the members of the plot as ‘traitors, cowards and manipulators,’ and, thus, sought to justify the barbaric treatment they, and their families, received at the hands of the 'Nazi' regime (after torture, and show-trial, some were skewered-alive on meat hooks - these executions were filmed for Hitler's pleasure).

In 1978, Irving published ‘The War Path’— a reality-inverting account of the period immediately prior to WW II. 

Irving's books were commercially successful, but now, for obvious reasons, he was being openly criticised as a ‘Nazi apologist’ by the press and by mainstream academics. He didn’t care, he was living the high-life with a apartment in Mayfair, a Rolls-Royce and a string of attractive, young, female ‘research assistants.’

Following his divorce in 1981, Irving brought out ‘The War Between the Generals’ - in which he again attempted to distort history. This time he ditched his lofty style and descended into the gutter. He described savage disputes which he claimed to have taken place between the military leaders of various nations comprising the Allied High Command during WW II. Irving also dug-up lurid rumours concerning the private lives of various Allied Generals.

Irving then published ‘Uprising’ an analysis of the 1956 Hungarian revolt, in which he made absurd claims that the Soviet regime was controlled by Jews and that the Hungarian people had actually risen up against these Jews not against the Soviets. Irving was now dismissed as a crank and both these books were commercial failures. 

When he published ‘Churchill’s War, Volume I’ (1987) - in which he portrayed Britain’s heroic wartime leader as a racist, coward, womanizer, alcoholic and puppet of ‘international Jewry,’ and a biography of Herman Göring (1989) - in which he attempted to convince us that the Reichmarshall was really a fun-loving guy who’d opposed the Nazi persecution of the Jews, the world had almost ceased taking notice of David Irving.

Desperate to maintain his lifestyle, Irving staged his most-notorious self-publicity stunt (i.e. his failed libel suit against Lipstadt and Penguin) which briefly-worked, but then, spectacularly back-fired. 

Currently, Irving's readership mainly comprises the adherents of far-right groups, upon whom he depends to peddle his remaindered back-catalogue and latest (self-published) tomes. Prior to his bankruptcy, Irving was accused of stealing valuable historical documents and trying to sell them, and of refusing to refund advance payments for books which he had never produced.

Who knows what David Irving might have achieved with his life, had his daddy come home from the War?

David Brear (copyright 2014)