THE DENIAL OF THE DEAD: ON THE FAURISSON AFFAIR
Fresco, Nadine
Had he been able to attend the meeting of the First Civil Court on June 1, 1981, at the Palais de Justice in Paris, Hitler would undoubtedly have been overjoyed. Close to 40 years after the...
...Four months later, Thion's book Vedic' . .. appeared...
...The I.H.R...
...Who was this new evangelist...
...It was this that caused the confusion about the gas chambers...
...Le dossier de raffaire Faurisson: La question des chambres gaz (Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1980), p. 93...
...This view has ruled Western opinion since 1945 and earlier, and I was no exception in accepting the essentials of it...
...See also Note 27...
...On December 28, 1978, Le Monde finally published the good news that the evangelist was burning to offer poor humanity...
...In the space of one century, Isidore Ducasse [alias Lautreamont] succeeded in mystifying some of the greatest names in literature, criticism, and scholarship, both in France and beyond...
...1, Spring 1980, pp...
...his most influential advisers, Baruch and Weizmann, were too...
...Faurisson the outsider, Faurisson the apolitical man, now turns out to be a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of the Journal of Historical Review and lecturer for the Nazis...
...Rassinier is an author unjustly "reduced to being published by the extreme right"—he, too, then—and who "wrote before his time...
...24-25...
...we want them to know the facts...
...1972: the appearance of Faurisson's doctoral thesis, entitled "Has One Read Lautreamontr3 There is a decided need of eyeglasses in France...
...September 1979: at Northrup University, near Los Angeles, the first Revisionist Convention, sponsored by the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), is held...
...What wins Georges Wellers such critical honors is not what he says in the article but, rather, the fact that he "finally opens up a discussion of a scientific nature between two historical schools...
...the Nation, December 28, 1981...
...He most assuredly has a precise idea about this place "farther East" where the Jews disappeared...
...And "the refusal of intellectual taboos" 81 is sacred to Thion, Guillaume, and the others...
...One, therefore, asks questions...
...It was, in fact, explicitly and exclusively an analysis of the methods employed by Faurisson and a denunciation of the flagrant dishonesty that he represented...
...68 If it is true, as the American Mercury claims, that the international Zionist movement refuses to participate in a census of the world's Jewish population—what an admission!—thereby rendering it impossible, I can hardly see how else one could discover the truth...
...The File of the Faurisson Affair...
...Memoire en defense, p. 34...
...Kremer recounts, on October 18, 1942 that, for the eleventh time, he was present at a "special action" (Sonderaktion...
...Faurisson is a man of the right and, to be even more precise, a sort of right-wing anarchist...
...A third is to take place in November 1981 at the Arrowhead Conference Center of the University of California...
...6 Defense de l'Occident, June 1978...
...46 Verne...
...38 Ibid., pp...
...77 Los Angeles limes, May 3, 1981...
...The transfer was duly accorded, undoubtedly with the hope that such a measure would, little by little, help people forget the turmoil caused by the indelicacy and ingratitude with which the results of almost 20 years of work had been met...
...Let us keep the word in mind...
...should one believe these?] where the Jews tell us that from earliest childhood they participated in all kinds of illicit activity or resistance against the Germans...
...26 See Searchlight, no...
...What was projected on French screens was indubitably sad, but it all happened, thank God, far from us...
...T. G. Bever and H. S. Terrace (New York: Warner, 1973), pp...
...A few months later, it was this same Himmler's turn to learn a lesson in camouflage from General Pohl, chief of the WVHA (the central economic and administrative office of the SS), concerning the camp at Sobibor...
...Some, however, like Maurice Bardeche (already...
...the only revolutionary attitude possible . . . . is the subversion of all war propaganda . . . . We will, perhaps, never possess "scientific" proof of the nonexistence of the Hitler "gas chambers...
...How do I know this...
...Page 328: same scenario...
...Bardeche published Rassinier's Le veritable proces Eichmann ou les vainqueurs incorrigibles [The Actual Eichmann Trial, or the Incorrigible Victors], in which the author wrote that "there is almost nothing [written about war crimes] except the two admirable books by Maurice Bard6che, Nuremberg ou la Terre Promise [Nuremberg or the Promised Land] and Nuremberg II ou les Faux Monnayeurs [Nuremberg II or the Counterfeiters...
...But the punchline, the moment one laughs, is (3) the Jews, who pretend to be the victims, are actually the victors...
...p. 187...
...April 1980: La Vieille Taupe [The Old Mole], a publishing house recently founded by another militant of the ultraleft, Pierre Guillaume, publishes a book by Serge Thion, Verite historique ou verit e politique...
...Hitler was concerned perhaps less with the Jewish question than with ensuring the security of the German soldier...
...he "hardly" believed it...
...We are thus told of the existence of a revisionist school anxious to open discussions of a scientific nature...
...This was particularly unfortunate since, if he had been able to appear before the judges, he would clearly have told the truth— a Nazi, like a revisionist, always speaks the truth...
...p. 30...
...Circulars, articles, supplements...
...20007...
...to anybody who could prove that people were actually killed in Nazi gas chambers, see the New York Times, March 4, 1981 and the Los Angeles limes, May 3, 1981...
...This visit is mentioned in the bulletin of the National Alliance, which usually is reserved for party members but, with a little wiliness, can be had...
...Le Matin, January 19, 1981...
...They pitied, in retrospect, the fate of the unfortunate Jews handed over to the Nazis by a few bad men...
...5, 1942, Kremer writes: "In the evening at about eight o'clock, I again witness a special action [Sonderaktion] with people from Holland...
...47 The fundamental rule of revisionist argumentation is very simple: any evidence of massive extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers is unacceptable...
...a political argument ("an apology for nazism") or even a sentimental argument ("outrage to the memory of the dead...
...The revisionists loudly call for "a debate about historical technique...
...If the Faurisson affair did not become a rights issue in France, it was for the simple reason that it wasn't one...
...Make an accounting of the millions of marks paid by the Germans, in the name of reparations, for the millions of Jews who were not exterminated...
...One could, thus, comfortably begin again to pity the Jews and condemn the Nazis...
...May 1979: a tract circulates in Paris, entitled "Are the Gas Chambers Indispensable to Our Happiness...
...But feigning to be dead, they are innumerable—that is, one cannot count them...
...Faurisson, who can't be had and who, like no one else, knows how to decipher a text, decides that this "special action," which the exterminationists insist on taking for a mass gassing, refers very simply to the executions of those condemned to death...
...Mystification...
...Moland, XIX, pp...
...All the women in this convoy, we are told, were gassed on the very day of their arrival...
...On the basis of this colossal lie about "gas chambers" and "genocide," they succeeded in their incredible swindle, the greatest of all time...
...And (2) "I don't know enough about his [Faurisson's] work to determine if what he is claiming is accurate or not Recall that what Faurisson "claims" is very simply that the "explosion" did not occur...
...The purists of the Communist Program, the French disciples of Amadeo Bordiga were the first to introduce in France the peculiar revolutionary idea of Auschwitz ou le grand alibi [Auschwitz or the Grand Alibi...
...Since that calm seemed decidedly difficult to regain, the unfortunate professor was compelled, in May 1979, to request of the secretary of education a transfer to teaching correspondence courses...
...72 Ibid., p. 14...
...Rather, I think that such a response would have been met with justifiable contempt...
...69 P. Rassinier, Le drame...
...A former member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, among others, recounted how he had actually seen with his own eyes a gas chamber...
...In his turn, Serge Thion writes about his escape from the lierd of dupes: "The general populace undoubtedly believes as I believed for a long time that we possess a vast number of documents and verifiable information on the politics of Nazi extermination...
...One certainty emerges: a person is not born a revisionist...
...And if some day the German archives were to reveal documents— ordering the construction of gas chambers for any other purpose than extermination—one never knows, with this terrible scientific genius of the Germans—one would have to admit that their utilization in certain cases was the result of one or two madmen among the SS...
...A document dating from immediately after the war is inadmissible because it dates from those years...
...Caldron or not, one will say what one wants...
...Draw your own conclusions...
...clearly, Hitler never ordered (nor permitted) that someone be killed for racial or religious reasons...
...The note consists of a biographical reference: "'Auschwitz as Seen by the SS,' published by the Museum of Oswiecim [the Polish name for Auschwitz], 1974, p. 238, note 85...
...Pages 327-28 of Thion's book provides the 479 astounding and incontestable proof that the alleged dead are still alive...
...Le Matin, December 26, 1980...
...Clearly obsessed with the problem of cleansing, Faurisson writes about this entry that he is "in a position to specify" that this special action consisted in a "cleaning of railroad cars, either 3rd-class or of the kind in which the new prisoners had just arrived...
...It caused a little stir when the journal Bizarre offered its readers an article, at first anonymous, entitled "Has One Read Rimbaudr2 Writing about one of Rimbaud's sonnets, Faurisson demonstrated to a skeptical literary world that if Verlaine and François Copp& had already "gotten wind of a mystification" on the part of the adolescent poet, only he, Faurisson, had This text is a revised and abridged version of my article "Les Redresseurs des Morts" that appeared in Les Temps Moderns in June 1980...
...Le dossier de raffaire Faurisson...
...60 I am surprised that Serge Thion, who in his book is so quick to give moral lessons to professional historians, omitted mentioning this book by Rassinier in his bibliography of revisionist literature— which, he says, "is almost inaccessible in France for various reasons...
...He therefore commited "suicide...
...Condemned by whom, when, why...
...But literature was soon to appear too narrow a field for Faurisson's demystifying fever...
...he becomes one...
...78 During the demonstration that followed the bombing in front of the synagogue on the rue Copernic in Paris (October 3, 1980), a tract was distributed signed by diverse factions of this fragmented ultraleft—The Social War, The Young Mole (sic), The Friends of Potlach, The Commune Group of Kronstadt, and so forth...
...from the Bug River, which formed the farthest Eastern border of the territories occupied by the Nazis...
...How does he know this...
...62 Here is a sample of what Rassinier wrote before the time was ripe...
...But what does Faurisson understand the exact meaning of "the Final Solution" to be...
...Nevertheless, one must also remember that until the beginning of this affair, many of his students and colleagues took him to be a man of the left...
...In effect, the court was called upon to pass judgment on works of a new evangelist (literally, bearer of good news), Robert Faurisson...
...24 Verne...
...Darquier had been general commissioner of Jewish Affairs from May 1942 to February 1944 and had personally overseen the successful operation tactfully called "Spring Breeze," better known as "Rafle [Roundup] du Velodrome d'Hiver...
...by marriage she became Simone Veil and she today presides over the European Parliament...
...With a moving sobriety, Robert Faurisson described those 20 years in a letter published in Le Monde on January 16, 1979: Up until 1960, I believed in the reality of these tremendous massacres in the "gas chambers...
...61 Write . . . , p. 341...
...finally "arrived . . . at the simple and complete elucidation of an enigma that [now in 1961] has lasted 89 years...
...Instead, he offered figures that the reader is all the more easily able to accept for not having understood any of the scholarly mix that produced them...
...Cordell Hull of the State Department is married to a Jew . . . . From the moment of his election, President Roosevelt accepted—first tacitly, then more openly—all the postulates of the Jewish policies...
...30 Preface to Memoire en defense, p. xv...
...p. 22...
...42 But let us not misunderstand this generosity...
...If, as is the case, not one of them denied the existence of gas chambers, it is not because the gas chambers existed (a feeble exterminationist thought), but because the witnesses believed that if they assisted the victors, the judges would reward them with clemency...
...First of all, from Hitler who always spoke the truth, whom I must understand literally, and who prophesied with great clairvoyance in his speech of January 30, 1939 that "If international Jewry succeeds in precipitating a world war, the result will hardly be a bolshevization of Europe and a victory for Judaism but the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe...
...The deportation and concentration of millions of people are not limited to an infernal idea of the Nazis...
...Someone mentions "rights...
...28 By way of introduction, this group reminds its readers that this eminent university professor is to be numbered among the many revisionists who neutrally devote themselves to historical truth, while "German Zionists and Jews" (sic), panic-stricken before the inexorable march of the truth, attempt in vain to perpetuate the abominable myths of crimes imputed to the Nazis...
...But the demands of politics made it inconvenient that he be heard by the court...
...The gas chambers were part of the propaganda of war...
...Hegel is turned on his head...
...There one used the famous Zyklon B about which such a fantastic myth has been constructed...
...The first two phases of the story of genocide in the image of a caldron are, then, (1) the Jews are responsible for the horrors they impute to the Nazis, and (2) these horrors never existed...
...4) This lie, essentially of Zionist origin, permitted a gigantic politico-financial swindle whose principal beneficiary is the State of Israel...
...At present, it [the report] should be neither published nor communicated...
...After which the region is declared judenrein gemacht (cleansed of Jews) orjudenfrei (free of Jews)a successful "Bereinigung der Judenfrage" (clean-up of the Jewish question...
...But how to prove this...
...And so he defended himself...
...There are a great many things that Faurisson doesn't bother with...
...He demonstrates that it is utter dishonesty to present . . . as homicidal "gas chambers" sterilizers that were actually intended to disinfect clothing with gas...
...62 Ibid., p. 165...
...This is a principle applicable to all the Nazis who were tried...
...Faurisson's right to teach was not withdrawn...
...59, April 1978, p. 8. 34 First sentence of the petition for Faurisson, see Note 9. 35 Not possessing this book, I do not know which of Rassinier's following works is translated here: Le veritable proces Eichmann (Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1962...
...The sonnet, he affirmed, "has no sense if it is not an erotic one" and rests entirely on a "mystification...
...54 With the very words used by the Nazis themselves, let us now return to our Faurisson analysis of the texts...
...Here, Rassinier explains that they [the Jews] are not today a race so much as a type of life and of aspiration, and it is not a racial problem that they pose but—as the state 472 of Israel proves only too well—an economic and social one . . . they intend to establish a commercial empire that, as was already indicated, would cover the entire world...
...9 Supporter of civil rights and free speech, and a friend of Serge Thion, Noam Chomsky signs this petition with, if I may say so, his eyes closed...
...There was a lamentable debate about all this, a strangely chauvinistic exchange, as ridiculous on the one side as on the other, between Chomskywho, breaking with his usual pattern, praised the traditions of American support for civil liberties—and some Gallic cocks defending their homeland...
...This is the crux of the revisionist program: to prove that something did not take place, that a crime was not committed...
...17 Le Matin, January 19, 1981...
...P.O...
...Chotard explains: "Had the gas chambers not existed, they would constitute the perfect image of the unacceptable extermination of those who were deported to death camps...
...There is nothing so striking to the imagination as to note at the end of a book on historical truth that a poor young Jew alleged to be dead is in fact alive and rich...
...The first of them, Rassinier, with a scholarly mixture of quotations, calculations, reasoning, deductions, cross-checking, collations, etc...
...Democracy, p. 88...
...They were, in fact, the first to declare war on Germany...
...Liberation, December 23, 1980...
...66 His conclusions: some industrial gassings plus the horrors of war— altogether around a million Jewish victims...
...11, April/June 1960...
...In Les responsables de la seconde guerre mondiale, he explains how the Jews organized the war against Germany: A Democrat, President Roosevelt was also a freemason and, consequently, his relations with the Jewish world were numerous and intimate...
...He severely criticizes certain inexact accounts by prisoners and deduces from these that, if there were exaggerations or even inventions with reference to the gas chambers at Dachau, the same might be true of other accounts...
...Le Mensonge d'Ulysse, ed...
...29 It is the new Jew, the lonely, flouted outsider, the hero of a segment of the French ultraleft: Robert Faurisson...
...2) after the war, he emigrated to Israel, the country par excellence of the hoax of the 20th century...
...71 Verne...
...171-172...
...His entourage was Jewish, at least the 477 greatest number of his most important advisers...
...64 Ibid., p. 78...
...The proof that they are not dead, as the good sense of Rassinier, Faurisson, Thion, and Co...
...45 On the first page of his Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Arthur Butz writes: In common with virtually all Americans who have had their opinions formed since the end of World War II, I had, until not very long ago, assumed that Germany had given the world a 473 particularly murderous outburst during World War II...
...that they were unable to see of what Robert Faurisson's alleged solitude really consisted...
...73 The Nation, February 28, 1981...
...Faurisson finally had an audience...
...79 First published in Programme communiste, no...
...There were some, although not so many as is thought...
...2nd ed., La Vieille Taupe, 1970...
...The text of the petition: "Dr...
...And since so generous a movement would hardly wish to be hindered by borders, a petition soon circulates in American universities that "claims for Faurisson the right to continue his research without impediment...
...Neither of them was French...
...Ibid., pp...
...159-171...
...But also mystifications and counterfeiters...
...31 National Alliance Bulletin, October 1979, P.O.B...
...And Petain's ashes that were, it appears, finally to have been transferred to Douaumont, site of heavy combat during the First World War, remained discreetly piled in their little corner...
...The ordinance continued: The total . . . elimination of millions of Jews established in the European economic area is a forced imperative in the struggle that is being waged by the German people to assure its very existence...
...The same social warriors explain that their objective "is not to cause the greatest possible number of people to doubt the existence of the 'gas chambers' " but, rather, "to desacralize that which, in any case (my emphasis), has taken on mythic proportions," ibid., p. 20...
...But doubt does not prohibit research...
...Chomsky, who does not know if what Faurisson says is the case, explains elsewhere "we don't want people to have religious or dogmatic beliefs about the existence of the Holocaust...
...32 Dietrich Eckart, Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin, Copyright 1966 by Dr...
...The one and the other are the "socialism of imbeciles...
...And so, from the moment of their arrival the majority among them were directed to the Badanstalten (bathhouses...
...65 And Himmler explained to him that to stop the typhus epidemic in the camps, the Nazis had been obliged to burn a large number of corpses, for which reason they had constructed the crematoria...
...Perhaps this can be explained by the fact that he was very ill and that his sickness made him dependent on his wife who was, even more fiercely than he, devoted to the cause of the Jews . . . 63 As for the Nazis, they found it entirely normal to view the Jews as foreigners in Germany since they behaved like foreigners...
...so strangely short-sighted Serge Thion, Pierre Guillaume, La Guerre Sociale, & Co...
...Faurisson has served as a respected professor of 20thcentury French literature and document criticism for over four years at the University of Lyon-2 in France...
...He never mentions, for example, the depositions taken during the various trials from the survivors of the Sonderkommandos (special commandos), who were responsible for emptying the gas cham476 bers, transporting the corpses to the crematoria and burning them, and cleaning the gas chambers for the next operation...
...Imagine what someone like Chomsky, for example, would have to say about such . . . rationality...
...Poor Chomsky, blinded by the short-sightedness of others...
...We strongly protest these efforts to deprive Professor Faurisson of his freedom of speech and expression, and we condemn the shameful campaign to silence him...
...Rassinier had understood everything: to find who profited from the crime that was not committed, one had clearly to search in the camp of the alleged victims and prove the gigantic plot that is at the base of such a swindle...
...90505...
...therefore, it did not...
...Les responsables de la seconde guerre mondiale (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1967...
...At Auschwitz, as Darquier explained, only lice had been gassed...
...How then to recognize the Jews...
...Although I can understand the reasons for this action, I wholly disagree with the referral of such a matter to the judicial authorities...
...Armed with the "simple good sense" that he shares with Thion, Faurisson takes the texts "for what they are" and the Nazis at their very word...
...September 14, 1979: Before returning to his studies in France, Faurisson, whom Chomsky characterizes as a "relatively apolitical liberal,"30 makes a short visit to the East Coast to give a lecture at the headquarters of the National Alliance (the American neoNazi party) outside of Washington...
...But, in a letter dated July 15, 1943, the chief of the central office, on which all the Nazi camps were dependent, responds that they must continue to designate Sobibor a transit camp...
...will find novel ways of defending the solitude and apoliticism of the "respected professor of 20-century French literature and document criticism...
...challenged the estimate of the number of victims arrived at by the exterminationists...
...I cannot help but be annoyed (in a manner entirely irrational) by the fact that in this Faurisson affair, which, admittedly, has a little something to do with anti-Semitism— except for those with the piercing eyes of old moles 19—Chomsky chooses as a model someone who in 1745 wrote about the Jews: "You will not find in them anything but an ignorant and barbarous people who have for a long time combined the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition...
...This Mr...
...So he set out on the thankless task of discovering what was true and what was false...
...Everything was back in order...
...53 Ibid., p. 74...
...To remove lice has nothing to do with a world view...
...In his journal entry for Sept...
...Q.E.D...
...On the other hand, simplicity and common sense...
...Write , p. 89...
...Faurisson clearly explains that the Jews with the star were like paroled prisoners...
...Someone says "freedom of speech...
...Marxism cannot account for extermination...
...But not yet the Jews...
...An associate professor at the University of Lyon when the affair began, Faurisson had previously been a teacher of literature at a girls' high school...
...One cannot pretend to establish a science whose only ethic is suspicion, where distrust is the only certitude...
...51 Unfortunately for the Nazis, the rumors about the treatment of the Jews deported to Poland were already circulating in Germany, clearly without foundation...
...What would you have done in his place...
...If someone had, I would have regarded him with the same contempt that those who denounce the petition in favor of Faurisson's civil rights deserve, and for the same reasons.22 470 • 1972: in an article entitled "The Fallacy of Richard Herrnstein's IQ," Chomsky wrote, Imagine a psychologist in Hitler's Germany who thought he could show that Jews had a genetically determined tendency toward usury (like squirrels bred to collect too many nuts) or a drive toward anti-social conspiracy and domination, and so on...
...65 A. R. Butz, The Hoax . . . , p. 205...
...And in fact, in France, ever since October 1978, on the radio, in the newspapers, on television, everything seemed to be about us...
...The revisionists, who are experts in distinguishing the true from the false, do not believe for a moment that the Germans had recourse to an administrative language intended to camouflage their enterprise of extermination...
...Chomsky about Thion: "a libertarian socialist scholar...
...the Nation January 28, 1981, etc...
...You, Noam Chomsky, believe in the existence of the gas chambers: but is this mere opinion or respect (the opposite of contempt) for facts...
...99 "De l'exploitation dans les camps a l'exploitation des camps" [from the exploitation in the camps to the exploitation of the camps), La Guerre sociale, May 1981, p. 13...
...Faurisson writes, Let us take as an example convoy #71 which arrived at Auschwitz on April 16, 1944...
...58 Chaim Weizmann was never president of the World Jewish Congress...
...Conscious of the fact that the circulation of this extreme right-wing magazine was rather limited, Faurisson was careful to send his text to a number of important people, appending the following supplement: Conclusions (from thirty years of research) of revisionist authors: (1) Hitler's "gas chambers" never existed...
...See Note 19...
...Some day, I will cite my sources but I contend today that if we employed computers, we would without a doubt soon know the real number of deaths...
...Thus, when the statistician Korherr, in his report to Himmler in the spring of 1943, uses the expression Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) to speak of the million and a half Jews already durchgeschleust (processed—literally: passed through the locks) in the camps, Himmler responds: I find this report very good as regards documentation for the future, that is to say, as camouflage...
...Faurisson is an expert in the investigation of truth and falsehood...
...they call "resurgence of nazism" or "falsification of history" what is only a just return to the concern for historical truth...
...The mystification will have lasted a hundred years...
...in the domain of intellectual morality and scientific integrity, it is a fake...
...I found a man desperate and on the verge of withdrawing into a paranoid delir- • ium—a reaction that was, however, altogether understandable...
...he signs...
...59 Rassinier, undoubtedly more aware of the labyrinthine ways of politics, explains the entire affair at length in a book that appeared in 1967 entitled Les responsables de la seconde guerre mondiale [Those Responsible for the Second World War...
...No one ever raised an objection...
...61 Thion writes that "it will be necessary, one day, to rehabilitate Rassinier...
...he signs...
...2 La Bibliotheque Volante (Paris: J. J. Pauvert, July 1971...
...But his first article, published in 1961, was about literature...
...Since the vermin may offer some resistance to this salutary enterprise, the operation must be effected with riicksichloser Hiirte (relentless severity...
...So old and short-sighted the mole...
...Proof: Himmler, according to Butz, sensing the wind change, had made contact a little before the end of the war with a representative of the World Jewish Congress...
...henceforth only the rational is real...
...Verik . . , p. 89...
...V One can easily imagine, I think, that if documents dating from the war years reveal so little proof of the extermination of Jews by the Nazis, then documents originating after the German capitulation are hardly likely to reenforce the already tenuous position of the exterminationists...
...There were also exterminations by this method, although not so many as is claimed...
...Udo Walendy (who was a member of the Executive Committee of the NPD, the German neo-Nazi party...
...As for the testimonies and depositions of some hundreds of Jews who pretended to be survivors of the genocide, they are inadmissible because given by people who could only be instigators or, at best, accomplices in the rumor that led to the swindle from which they benefited...
...Faurisson, who has understood the Nazi mentality as well as that of the pseudovictims, does not believe that the Germans felt any need to camouflage their language and has decided that for the Nazis, as for him, a spade is a spade...
...Faced with the exterminationist Vulgate and the ensemble of traditional ideas that encumber contemporary thought, these people are skeptics just as others are believers...
...Once public, such revelations could hardly avoid calling forth immediate reactions...
...Exterminationist" is Faurisson's expression for those who persist, often for very bad reasons, in rejecting the good news...
...But this last suggestion "within such a context has the effect of a kind of stylistic coda...
...As many Jews as can be found in a region are put into railroad cars and transported Eastward for Evakuierung (evacuation), Aussiedlung (displacement), or Umsiedlung (resettlement...
...103117...
...They were young women, in good health, but despite this their prayer was not granted and the SS who participated in the action shot them on the spot...
...4 Serge Thion, Verite historique ou Write politique...
...It is without a doubt for this reason that Faurisson has, until now at least, neglected to examine the testimony of the survivors...
...What a noble enterprise has directed him these many years, over numerous and difficult paths...
...79 The demystifying madness of Faurisson could not, perhaps, find a better ally than the rationalist madness of these deep minds who take Marx at face value...
...57 But I also know it from Faurisson and Rassinier...
...21 L. Poliakov, Histoire . . . , p. 106...
...37 In any case, there is no proof...
...All this had begun with the interview with Darquier published in I 'Express, 5 to which Faurisson alluded...
...Le Drame des juifs europeens (Les Sept Couleurs, 1964...
...38 The welcome accorded Rassinier's ideas, at the end of the war, was not the warmest...
...10 R. Faurisson, Memoire en defense: Contre ceux qui m'accusent de falsifier rhistoire (Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1980...
...469 Poor Chomsky, innocent victim of a quasiPavlovian automatism...
...And then, surprise of surprises, a man climbs to the rostrum to great applause to give a scientific lecture on "The Mechanics of Gassing...
...Auschwitz vu par les S. S., pp...
...See also G. Wellers, Les chambres a gaz ont existe (Paris: Gallimard, 1981...
...32 The National Alliance publishes the monthly National Vanguard, whose "purpose is to propagate the fundamental truths of race and natural order,"33 and which, in its booklist, refers to Mein Kampf as the "story of Germany's struggle for freedom and the philosophy behind it...
...and, finally, last but not least (too bad for the Dadaist-Stalinist amalgam that many will not fail to notice), David McCalden, alias Lewis Brandon, editor of the Journal of Historical Review: "I'm a detached cynic, a libertarian with a small '1...
...The article is reprinted in his work Les Juifs, la mimoire et le present [The Jews, Memory, and the Present] (Paris: Maspero, 1981...
...It is all in the family...
...Can one imagine a more scrupulous concern for reference, precision, and scientific rigor...
...But (1) he was Jewish and thus had every interest in accusing the Nazis of imaginary crimes...
...Certainty" was to come only four years later (see above...
...A wanderer, perhaps, but with "the agility of the merchant by calling"—and Rassinier goes on: Today [his book appeared in 1964] it is, to speak in metaphors, the gold in Fort Knox that is eyed...
...One cannot claim to be motivated solely by the need for a scientific deontology and at the same time devote oneself explicitly and entirely to the task of denunciation...
...On "Lewis Brandon" and the bogus $50,000 award offered by the I.H.R...
...The EndlOsung der Judenfrage (the Final Solution of the Jewish question) is therefore only a cleansing operation on a European scale...
...And it is unnecessary to say what one should think of that...
...For the next 15 days, France lived with the biweekly tale of the genocide...
...The deposition of a Nazi at his trial is inadmissible because it is a deposition from a trial...
...Emphasis mine...
...39 Le veritable proces Eichmann, p. 43...
...Robert Faurisson, who has the obvious advantage of working at the end of a century that increasingly resembles a computer, arrives at more scientific conclusions: 478 My view is the following: (1) the number of Jews exterminated by the Nazis (or victims of "genocide") is, happily, equal to zero . . . . I have rather good reasons to think that the number of deaths at Auschwitz (Jews and nonJews) was around 50,000 . . . . As for the number of deaths at all the concentration camps from 1933-34 to 1945, I think it had to be 200,000 or at most 360,000...
...But it is important to emphasize that the Faurisson affair is not an issue of legal rights...
...It is a question of cleanliness...
...3) he has since died and Faurisson is thus unable to meet with him...
...Good news that it would be wrong to keep hidden any longer...
...12 Preface to Memoire en defense, p. xiii...
...This sign designated them for him...
...3 Paris: Gallimard, 1972...
...1980: in his preface to Memoire en defense, Chomsky writes, I have frequently signed petitions that, in fact, were very extreme, in favor of Russian dissidents whose points of view were absolutely abhorrent, for instance, supporters of American slaughter exactly at the time it was ravaging Indochina, or of a politics favoring nuclear war, or of a religious chauvinism reminiscent of the Middle Ages...
...If one scans the list of books and articles published by the revisionist school, one discovers there one example after another of Faurisson's painful obsession with falsehood, masked by "that insistence on the love of truth that characterizes all the falsifiers""— The Lie of Auschwitz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, The Six Million Swindle, The Actual Eichmann Trial, The Myth of Auschwitz, The Truth for Germany, etc., etc., not to omit Thion's Historical Truth or Political Truth, which explicitly picks up the title that Rassinier had used in 1961 for a series of lectures...
...I think not...
...At the time—we will return to it—the good news with respect to the gas chambers was already waiting, as it were, in the anteroom of his mind...
...36 Paris: Gallimard, 1974, p. 99...
...Arthur R. Butz's book would then have been unnecessary...
...I would not hesitate to say that it is the indispensable conceptual key for those wishing to understand Faurisson's thought...
...The irrefutable proof that this was in order that they might take a shower, and not to asphyxiate them with gas, is that the areas intended for this action clearly displayed the signs " Wasch u. Disinfektionsraume (wash & disinfection rooms...
...74 Svenska Dagbladet, March 5, 1981...
...22 Preface to Memoire en defense, p. xii...
...Faurisson announced some time ago what was to constitute the credo of his doctrine: "Hitler never ordered (nor permitted) that someone be killed because of race or religion...
...Noting that this doctrine [the Nazi doctrine] would help extricate a people of 70 million from their financial market, all the Jews of the world, instead of seeking a compromise, which was easily attainable given the fact that Hitler sought one, enflamed the argument by declaring themselves . . . in a state of war, not only with Nazi ideology— which would have been perfectly legitimate and would, at worst, have generated only an academic discussion—but with Germany, which implied a military intervention...
...25 Deutscher Arbeitskreis, Witten (Germany), 1978...
...4) the detailed description he gave of the functioning of the gas chambers was part of his deposition of October 17, 1963 at the Auschwitz trial—and we know what we should think of Nuremberg and subsequent trials...
...24 In your opinion, Noam Chomsky, who in the end deserves the contempt of decent people...
...One will have already guessed that the Jew today is none other than Robert Faurisson...
...The debate is raised to the level of a historical discussion, One finally breathes the free and invigorating air of orderly battles, far from subterranean plots and subjectivities encumbered by affect...
...Beginning with the territories of the Reich and moving on to the other European countries involved in the Final Solution, the Jews are transported to the East, to large camps—in part still to be built—where they are either assigned to work or sent farther East...
...Ulysse trahi par ks siens (1st ed., Paris: Librairie Francaise, 1961...
...Rassinier's work is of primary importance for those who want to understand the functioning and subtleties of revisionist thinking...
...Second part of the caldron story: War is war, but nothing more...
...52 J. Billig, La solution finale de la question juive, Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, Paris, 1977, p. 77...
...This done, I proved in practice that I was ready to follow Faurisson to the end . . . . Feeling thus supported, Faurisson began to eat normally and his paranoid symptoms disappeared completely...
...See Note 35...
...it is the gassing of buildings to exterminate the vermin...
...511-541...
...Faurisson explains that "in the person of Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, 58 and future first president of the state of Israel, the international Jewish community declared war on Germany on September 5,l939...
...On the other, there is the likelihood that even opening this question and regarding it as a subject for scientific inquiry would provide ammunition for Goebbels and Rosenberg and their henchmen...
...A second Revisionist Conference was held in California in August 1980...
...On the one hand, there is the alleged scientific importance of determining whether, in fact, Jews have a genetically determined tendency toward usury and domination (as might conceivably be the case...
...If there was a myth, which I do not believe, it would be a metaphor" (Le Monde, June 11, 1981...
...Unfortunately for Faurisson, I have the book...
...The rest, the alleged gas chambers, are only "the keystone of a politico-religious fabrication," an "official and vengeful" delirium, 80 composed of taboos and myths...
...R. Faurisson: "The deportees died of hunger, cold, sickness . . . . To all these horrors is there any need to add that, much more abominable and perfectly demonic, of the gas chambers...
...After the war, the Jews fabricated thousands of falsehoods," by which "they intoxicated the entire world...
...After fourteen years of personal reflections, then four years of assiduous research, I became convinced, like twenty other revisionist authors, that I was confronting a historical lie . . . . In vain I searched for a single deportee capable of proving that he had actually seen, with his own eyes, a "gas chamber...
...Nuremberg and the other warcrimes trials that have taken place since then are, therefore, according to Faurisson, in every way akin to the infamous witch trials of the Middle Ages...
...It is a question of cleanliness...
...Bressanes, 1948...
...77 And then at the far end of the left—in France at least—there are the theoreticians, the hard and pure revolutionaries, the earthly representatives of a faultless rationalism: an ultraleft in the process of decomposition, abandoning for a time interfamilial anathemas and curiously trying to recompose itself on the basis of Faurisson's theories...
...Box 1306, Torrance, Calif...
...And when the three state-controlled TV channels refused to acquire the American series Holocaust, the unrest caused by the Darquier interview brought a reconsideration of this decision by the Second Channel...
...He knows that, different from Americans, Communists, Jews, etc., the Nazis did not lie...
...This time, the photograph is of Simone Veil...
...As a swindle, it's not a bad one...
...76 Preface to Memoire en defense, p. xv...
...36 Passage de la ligne, ed...
...75 Le Monde, December 24, 1980...
...69 The chapter immediately following these lines, very naturally, is entitled "The Jewish Migration' or 'The Wandering Jew'" and begins with these words: "To better understand the movement of the European Jewish population between 1933 and 1945, a rapid historical overview of Jewish migration on a worldwide scale seems to me indispensable: in short, the history of 'The Wandering Jew.— To understand what happened to the alleged victims of the Second World War, one must go back, as Rassinier does, to the 18th century B.C...
...In the middle of this tract, a sentence: "Professor Faurisson is a man alone...
...Close to 40 years after the masterful—albeit incomplete— realization of his attempt to annihilate the life of the Jews, there were new zealots at work to annihilate the death of the Jews...
...Sobibor was located only 3 km...
...But I would wager that Georges Wellers was flabbergasted when he saw what Thion had made of his text...
...and signed by "persons without qualities...
...they are shot...
...Nuremberg ou la Terre Promise [Nuremberg or the Promised Land] was written by Bardeche in 1948...
...79 Ibid., p. 129...
...14 Le Monde, December 24, 1980...
...Movement Against Racism and For Friendship Among People), and several associations of people who were deported and in the Resistance...
...Why, then, did the Nazis build gas chambers...
...The areas are, thereby, henceforth clean...
...Hoping no doubt to have established the official recognition of the revisionist school, Thion adds, prophetically and somewhat menacingly perhaps, "Nothing and no one will be able to evade much longer the debate that we hope will be carried on with the greatest calm possible...
...18 Preface to Memoire en defense, p. xii...
...The paradox was that this broadcast went a long way toward appeasing consciences...
...There is no example, it seems, of a literary mystification so serious and long-lived...
...23-32...
...6) The tremendous power of the media has, until now, assured the success of the lie and prohibited the freedom of expression of those denouncing the lie...
...When one is committed to the method routinely used by Faurisson, one sees quite easily what can be expected of the depositions of such people...
...First with respect to the Nazis...
...47 In Memoire en defense, one can find the development of Faurisson's analysis of Kremer's journal...
...67 Verite...
...2) The "genocide" (or the "at468 tempted genocide") of the Jews never took place...
...Again one who was supposed to have been gassed is found to be alive—and rich too...
...66 On Rassinier's computations, see G. Wellers, La solution finale et la mythomanie nio-nazie (Paris: Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, 1979), and P. Vidal-Naquet in Esprit, pp...
...8 On the back of the book, Thion is described as "having entered political action during the Algerian War and having participated, in a concrete and critical fashion, in numerous other anticolonial activities...
...If the operation succeeded—it would suffice for the American arm of the international Zionist movement to exert pressure on Wall Street for it to be so—the Israeli port of registry of the Diaspora would become not only the commercial Center of the Atlantic world but, with oil being the energy source par excellence of its development and Jewish control of it being totally assured from the Middle East to Texas, also the command post of all its industry . . . . then . . . the appelation "the Chosen People" to which the Jews lay claim would take on all its significance 70 Is it the author of these lines that Thion hopes to rehabilitate...
...At best he could claim that he is faced with a conflict of values...
...Emphasis mine...
...71 But after 1945, the wearing of the star was discontinued...
...Enough of anti-fascism...
...37 Le Mensonge d'Ulysse, rev...
...78 See the articles of Jacques Baynac, "La gangrene," Liberation, October 25-26, 1980, and "Querelle d' Allemands...
...In the standard edition of Freud's Collected Works, vol...
...This sentence is accompanied by a very impressive note that indicates the seriousness of Faurisson's work...
...13 Le Matin, January 19, 1981...
...3) The alleged "gas chambers" and the alleged "genocide" are one and the same lie...
...Anyway, the English title that was chosen (by whom...
...At Lyons, there were displays of antipathy and Faurisson was lightly molested by Jewish students...
...Hence the need for an organization of universal scope, propaganda . . . and so on...
...See Note 44...
...Noam Chomsky about Noam Chomsky: "a kind of libertarian anarchosyndicalist" 75 ; Chomsky about Faurisson: "a kind of relatively apolitical liberal...
...partially translated into English in Democracy, April 1981...
...And note 85 on page 238, which reports the official transcript of Kremer's testimony in 1947, indeed indicates that three Dutch women were shot on that day...
...Returning from Buchenwald and Dora where he had been interned for 19 months, Rassinier immediately set to work denouncing— in Passage de la ligne [Crossing the Line], Le Mensonge d'Ulysse [The Lie of Ulysses], Ulysse trahi par les siens [Ulysses Betrayed By His Own]36—the behavior of the Communist prisoners, to whom the SS had delegated some power inside the camp...
...I met Professor Faurisson at the end of November...
...That was in 1974...
...The reaction attested to a partisan sensibility that appeared unusual in a place traditionally devoted to the calm and respect that the evangelist thought he had every right to expect...
...has the merit of not being burdened with linguistic subtleties...
...Le Monde, December 20 and 24, 1980...
...I believed it...
...Arthur Butz (author of the reference work of revisionist thought, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century," which was first published by the Historical Review Press in Richmond, England, the publishing house of the English fascist party, the National Front 28...
...p. 197...
...He writes, "Among the condemned are three women who arrived in a convoy from Holland...
...20 Of course, Voltaire added, "One should not, however, burn them...
...8-52...
...And now he quotes abundantly from an article in the journal American Mercury...
...The press seized on the event," and I leave to others the delicate pleasure of pinpointing the ambiguities and contradictions that run through Chomsky's comments about the preface...
...467 If I have taken this somewhat unusual detour, via Lautreamont and Rimbaud, en route to the good news about the gas chambers, it is because there, already, we can see the two panels that form the theoretical diptych of Faurisson's thought...
...But how demonstrate this...
...W. Pierce...
...To preserve Marxism, then, it is necessary that the extermination not have occurred...
...It makes no difference...
...35 The advertisement goes on to describe the author as a socialist, pacifist, anti-Nazi, pro-Jewish [sic] historian and geographer [who] was captured in late 1943 and interned by the Nazis because of his activities with the French Resistance...
...20 Dictionnaire Philosophique, "Juif," in Oeuvres Completes, ed...
...In the view of this confirmed fascist, the testimony of a member of the Resistance and a prisoner was of inestimable value...
...Contrary to Faurisson, Himmler believed that the Nazis needed to camouflage what they were doing...
...On Faurisson's error, see Vidal-Naquet in Esprit, pp...
...International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism), the M.R.A.P...
...That already makes two survivors...
...But the reward had its flip side...
...Every revisionist owes it to himself to go back to this critical analysis and radical condemnation of an unjust trial—perpetrated on the vanquished by the victors—whose aim was the greatest profit for the "amateurs of the promised land...
...57 L. Poliakov, Breviaire de la haine (Paris: Calmann',ivy, 1951...
...Fearful officials have even tried to stop him from further research by denying him access to public libraries and archives...
...Everything, then, accords perfectly: evacuation, cleansing, and transport farther East...
...Thion generously characterizes this text, entitled "Un roman inspire" [An Inspired Fiction], as "a document of great importance...
...But then perhaps Faurisson thinks it would be rather surprising if readers of Le Monde had access to such a book, published so far from France and behind the Iron Curtain...
...To where, therefore, could the Jews coming from this camp "transit...
...Today's social conditions are clearly not those of Nazi Germany but what is it that allows Chomsky, when he speaks of "the old antiSemitism that is presently exploding with violence" (Preface to Memoire en defense, p. xiii), to claim, in a peremptory manner, that Faurisson's thesis "has no political or human consequences" (Liberation, December 23, 1980...
...For it is known that, unfortunately, their transport to the East did not always occur under the most hygienic conditions...
...p. 14...
...His books have not been the object of either seizure or censure...
...Then, upon reading Paul Rassinier, ex-deportee of the Resistance and author of Le Mensonge d'Ulysse [The Lie of Ulysses], I began to have doubts...
...53 But Himmler states precisely that one should not speak of Sonderbehandlung, and that the term should be replaced by the word Transportierung (transport...
...For the first time [continues Thion] a specialist of the official school [read: "the exterminationists" 43] publicly confronts the arguments of the school called revisionist . . . . For the first time, a historian shows himself dissatisfied with a teleological argument ("where does this lead...
...But Himmler committed "suicide" in a British prison...
...Up to that point Sobibor had been referred to in the correspondence as a Durchgangslager (transit camp...
...He goes even further with the famous preface (which is not really a preface, although it strangely resembles one) to Faurisson's book Memoire en defense [A Memoir in Defense...
...The suit against him is a private litigation...
...My opinion about the gas chambers...
...reasoning like that one does not find just anywhere...
...39 Rassinier, renewing his confidence in his fascist publisher, gave him his new manuscript entitled Le Drame des juifs europeens [The Drama of the European Jews], which appeared in 1964...
...Robert Faurisson or the loneliness of the long-distance investigator . . . . In France, then—and the particularity is not without interest—it is a segment of the ultraleft that generously comes to the rescue of the solitary, oppressed new Jew...
...His name: Dov Paisikovic...
...He concludes, with a rather dubious logic, that those responsible for the atrocities and deaths were not, therefore, the Nazis but the Communists...
...I know that sometimes one thinks that six- to fifteen-year-old children could not constitute a danger and that they should not have been subjected to wearing the star...
...Were this hypothetical psychologist to disregard the likely social consequences of his research (or even his undertaking of research) under existing social conditions, he would fully deserve the contempt of decent people...
...p. 89...
...Himmler himself said as much when, on April 24, 1943, he explained to the SS officers that it is the same with anti-Semitism as with delousing...
...I now hardly do...
...Box 1306, Torrance, etc...
...He is, by all standards, a man alone...
...After the war, however, Rassinier could not conscientiously justify by his own experience the horror stories of many of his fellow concentration camp inmates...
...The Nazis are not guilty of the crime of which the pseudovictims accuse them...
...But I have confidence that the rhetorical talents of Serge Thion (and of Chomsky...
...31-36...
...It took another ten years for a repeat performance...
...ed., 1979, p. 170...
...I also found a man who thoroughly knew his subject (200 kilos of documents, representing the analysis of several tons of texts) and whose works were of the same general persuasion as, but went much further than, those of La Vieille Taupe . . . . As my own character was not strong enough for the task (I myself was on the verge of breaking)—it became vital for the development of the situation to gain support and, thus, to obtain everyone's agreement on a unified statement, with neither concessions nor second thoughts...
...60 P. Rassinier, Les responsables . . . (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latine, 1967...
...Emphasis mine...
...40 La Vieille Taupe, which had until then only published a few brochures, transformed itself into a publishing house in order to reprint Rassinier's works: Le Mensonge d'Ulysse [The Lie of Ulysses] in 1979 and Ulysse trahi par les siens [Ulysses Betrayed By His Own] in early 1980...
...Despite his advanced age, Darquier had lost none of his antiSemitic vitality...
...VI In his Wit and Its Relations to the Unconscious, 56 Freud recounts an old story: A borrows a copper caldron from B; when he returns it, B complains that the caldron has a large hole that renders it useless...
...The German soldier would otherwise have been unable to distinguish the Jews from the non-Jews...
...The following passages from the tract entitled "Our Kingdom is a Prison" speak for themselves: It is the constant need of our class societies to propose to the oppressed populations false enemies, fabricated horrors in place of the true ones . . . . Enough of anti-Semitism...
...But the text of the note to which Faurisson refers reads: "At the time of the special action which I described in my diary on October 18, 1942, three Dutch women refused to enter the gas chamber [emphasis mine] and pleaded for their lives...
...They ask that efforts be made to "expand the sources" and "to publicize the results of studies, without, however, giving them a character of official truth...
...They move all the time, they are behind the Iron Curtain, they disguise themselves as common Americans, they change their names...
...A document dating from the war is inadmissible because it dates from the war...
...These Jews who dare to pretend to be dead and demand reparation are in truth alive...
...59 Verite...
...The rumors of the alleged genocide of the Jews that circulated in Europe and the United States during the last years of the war constituted the principal evidence in the case for the prosecution...
...The address of the group behind all these endeavors, the Legion for the Survival of Freedom, happens to be P.O...
...p. 63...
...But for the hoax to work, to hit pay dirt, so to speak, it is absolutely necessary that the true victors continue to pass for the victims...
...p. 126...
...The essential thing for me is, now as before, 475 that . . . as many Jews as is humanly possible be transported to the East...
...Clearly unable to acknowledge that he has made a mistake, Chomsky chooses to confuse everything with such remarks as these: (1) "In one of my books, Peace in the Middle East, published in 1974, I wrote that it [the Holocaust] was the most fantastic explosion of insanity in human history...
...Himmler himself would have proven the hoax...
...21 What appears absolute in Chomsky's political thinking is contempt...
...I would have been satisfied with even the slightest proof...
...40 Le dame des juifs europeens, p. 8. 41 Verne . . . , see Note4 . 42 Ibid., p. 336...
...Le Matin, December 24 and 26, 1980, January 19, 1981...
...would have it, is that they are alive...
...5 November 4, 1978...
...On page 13 of the catalog published in January 1978 by the Department of Literature and Classical and Modern Civilization of the University of Lyon-2, one finds the following: "Robert Faurisson, associate professor of 20th-century French literature...
...of both, Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1979-80...
...55 The basic rule of revisionist argumentation is that all evidence of extermination is by definition inadmissible...
...How do these doubts work...
...It seems to me that, on the contrary, there is always a choice between seeing oneself published by fascists and not being published at all...
...Liberation, December 23, 1980...
...37-38...
...But the very expression "revisionist school" makes no sense...
...Rewarded for his perseverance, he saw his text finally published in Le Monde under the title 'The Problem of the Gas Chambers' or `The Rumor of Auschwitz...
...56, 1980...
...There is not an author in the pack who does not recognize and acknowledge him as a father...
...Two months earlier, Faurisson had addressed a circular to several newspapers that began with these words: I hope that some of the statements recently attributed to Louis Darquier de Pellepoix by the journalist Philippe Ganier-Raymond will finally lead to the public's discovery that the alleged massacres in the "gas chambers" and the alleged "genocide" comprise one and the same lie, unfortunately endorsed until now by the official history (that of the victors) and by the colossal power of the communication media.' "I definitely find that they're talking about us too much at the moment," a friend said to me about that time, adding, "that's never a good thing...
...52 The Nazis, it would seem, were already at this period worried about combating "the rumor of Auschwitz" that Faurisson so firmly denounces today...
...IV Several revisionist authors preface their writings with autobiographical comments that are strangely similar...
...9 Write , p. 163...
...Specialization: criticism of texts and documents, investigation of meaning and counter-meaning, of the true and the false...
...27 Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Torrance, Calif.: The Noontide Press, 1977...
...A capitalist phenomenon among others, 480 nazism—according to a strict Marxist theory— would hardly want to exterminate a human group that represents so much manpower...
...On the anti-Semitism of Voltaire, see Leon Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisemitisme, III: De Voltaire Wagner (Paris: Calmann-Livy, Paris: 1968), pp...
...On the one hand, received ideas, prejudices, conformity, dupes, the establishment...
...55 L. Poliakov, Auschwitz (Paris: Julliard, 1964), pp...
...Now this young woman actually returned to France...
...whose director is "Lewis Brandon") publishes the Journal of Historical Review (whose editor is "Lewis Brandon...
...This "us," which included me, meant "us Jews...
...Himmler then writes to Pohl to propose that the camp at Sobibor be henceforth called a Konzentrationslager (concentration camp...
...Chomsky wrote in a style that is as classic as it is regrettable, attacking "the durable impact of Stalinism and doctrines of a Leninist variety, the strange Dadaist character of certain currents of intellectual life in post-war France," and describing the "hysteria and irrationality" of the "totalitarian involvements of the French intelligentsia," and "the contempt for facts" that characterizes "French intellectual discussions...
...15 Ibid...
...And this explains how reviewers here could have seen Chomsky's defense of Faurisson's rights as irrelevant— or as implying that, in Chomsky's opinion, Faurisson's work had a legitimate claim on public and scholarly attention...
...26 Speakers include some of the stars of revisionist science: Austin App (editor of The Voice of German Americans, and author of several pamphlets of high moral tone such as Can Christianity survive when the Jews control the media and the money?, also Kosher Food Racket Exposed, and The Six Million Swindle—all on the booklists of Liberty Bell Publications, publishers of Nazi books...
...What is relative is the object of this contempt...
...The story consists of these elements: First, it is the Jews who are the cause of the Second World War...
...211 On the National Front, see M. Billig, Fascists: A Social Psychological View of the National Front (New York: Academic Press, 1978...
...p. 189...
...It was during that period, some time between Darquier and the Holocaust series, that Faurisson entered the public scene...
...Bressanes, 1950...
...This interview caused quite an uproar and, for some time, the French talked about the collaborators and those who were given amnesty, about Touvier, Leguay, Bousquet...
...As Butz explains, he dedicates his book (The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, see Note 27) to proving the hoax, that is, to a demonstration of what did not happen...
...5) The principal victims of this lie and swindle are the Germans and Palestinians...
...Among them figured the name of a certain Simone Jacob, born on June 13, 1927 in Nice...
...8 On page 2 Thion writes, One can certainly say that Mr...
...He certainly does not think that the expression "sent farther East" could be a euphemism of the Amtssprache, the administrative language used by the Nazis in their direction of the Final Solution...
...A defends himself thus: first, I returned the caldron in good condition...
...What I found instead were many false proofs, worthy of a witch trial...
...If this uncontestably audacious claim seems not to bother either American, English, or German revisionists, it did provoke grumblings among some of Faurisson's defenders in France...
...As Pierre Vidal-Naquet writes, "In Faurisson's own chosen domain, that of philological exactness and translation, his interpretation is a misconstrual...
...228-229...
...they distort the meaning and nature of revisionist research...
...44 Vidal-Naquet, speaking of Faurisson in his excellent article "Un Eichmann de papier" [A Paper Eichmann], Esprit, September 1980, pp...
...He has not been denied access to public libraries or archives...
...But, as we just witnessed, this categorical refutation of a method has miraculously been transformed, by the rigorously deontological pen of Thion, into a discussion of an argument...
...Consequently, the president of the university chose to suspend his classes...
...23 Social Policy, May/ June 1972, reprinted in Human Behavior, ed...
...And also detection, scouring, demystification...
...5° H. Himmler, Discours secrets (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 204...
...6 Faurisson's defenders explain that he had no choice but to appear under the banner of Bardeche because no one else would publish the text...
...Of course, scientific curiosity should be encouraged (though fallacious argument and investigation of silly questions should not), but it is not an absolute value...
...He was not, after all, going to turn the other cheek...
...Journal of Historical Review, I, no...
...The times are decidedly difficult and it is surely with great reluctance that these evangelists find themselves compelled to tamper with facts in order to carry on their worldwide conversion...
...63 P. Rassinier, Les responsabks . . . , p. 205...
...7) The supporters of the lie now know that it is about to be uncovered...
...And what are we to think of the linguistic subtleties of Yvon Chotard, one of Faurisson's lawyers...
...Thus Thion about Faurisson: "a kind of anarchist of the right" 72...
...Pierre Guillaume, head of La Vieille Taupe Publishers, in a letter sent to the newspaper Liberation and not printed— but, fortunately, included in Thion's book—discusses the torments that he as well as his friends experienced because of Faurisson's famous statement...
...it has to do above all with the lack of manpower needed by the war machine that made it [war] a necessity . . . . The deportees who did not return are dead because of the war...
...34 On the first page of Spotlight (a publication of the Liberty Lobby) of September 24, 1979, dedicated to the revisionist convention, an advertisement announces the book Debunking the Genocide Myth by Paul Rassinier...
...Clearly, such is not the case...
...How count them...
...Faurisson obtained this good news he is so eager to communicate to us from the Jewish Chronicle of August 11, 1978...
...The readers of Maurice Bardeche's magazine Defense de r Occident [Defense of the West] had already been privileged, as of June, to read the complete version of this document...
...482 S4 R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Franklin Watts, 2nd ed., 1973), p. 619...
...Since he began making his findings public, Professor Faurisson has been subject to a vicious campaign of harassment, intimidation, slander, and physical violence in a crude attempt to silence him...
...2nd ed., 1979), p. 35...
...on the contrary," Verne...
...But within the context of this military logic, there exist enough accounts and memoirs [how now...
...I would have the future archivists of revisionism note that the formula474 tion, as Guillaume puts it, differs from the original credo...
...Faurisson had first been heard from two and a half years earlier with an article in Le Monde that concluded with the following words: "The nonexistence of 'gas chambers' is good news for poor humanity...
...The revisionists' real difficulty was to prove this void, this lie, this absence of the, dead...
...31 471 The National Alliance was founded and is directed by William Pierce, former member of the American Nazi party and translator into English of a brochure entitled Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin...
...VIII...
...An ordinance of November 9, 1942 announced by the Chancellery decreed that "in order to counter the development of rumors about this subject .. . the following commentaries are provided as information about the actual situation...
...Cited hereafter as Vérite...
...I do not know if Himmler would have understood Faurisson, but Faurisson understood Himmler...
...VII I n these troubled times, when one is no longer very clear about who is on the left (or right) of whom, a new pastime has emerged for the happy few who award themselves and others political marks whose common character the discerning reader will not fail to notice...
...That proof I never found...
...483...
...Morgenthau, his Secretary of Treasury, was Jewish...
...49 Admit that it would have been a shame to lose such a text...
...Reprint from the Spring 1966 issue of National Socialist World...
...If he were criticized for even undertaking these studies, could he merely respond that "a neutral commentator . . . would have to say that the case is simply not settled" and that the "fundamental issue" is "whether inquiry shall (again) be shut off because someone thinks society is best left in ignorance...
...Never mind...
...23 Replace the psychologist by Faurisson, the genetically determined tendency toward usury by the enormous politico-financial swindle that the lie about the alleged "gas chambers" represents...
...How respectably such things are said . . . . Serge Thion, who expresses himself in this way, indeed concludes his book most judiciously by reproducing an article about Faurisson by Georges Wellers, director of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (Paris), that had appeared in Le Monde on February 21, 1979...
...138-139...
...who became his publisher, were overjoyed...
...33 National Vanguard, no...
...Personally I believe that the gas chambers existed...
...He explained that the only thing gassed in Auschwitz was the lice...
...91 Verne...
...Translated from the French by AUDRI DURCHSLAG q Notes A case brought against Robert Faurisson by the L.I.C...
...second, it already had a hole when I borrowed it...
...Another form of gassing in fact existed in the German camps...
...92 "De l'exploitation...
...They no longer wear the yellow star, thus it is difficult to spot them at a glance...
...Page 327: the little boy from the Warsaw ghetto, with his overly large cap, his frightened look, his arms raised before the German machine guns—how he caused the dupes to cry . . . . But rejoice...
...June 1978: Robert Faurisson, on University of Lyon stationery and "in my position as Associate Professor at the University of Lyon-2," has an article published in German by the Deutscher Arbeitskreis [the German Work Group]—a neo-Nazi faction—an article entitled "There Were No Gas Chambers...
...It was all simply a matter of getting rid of the vermin...
...64 The Jews declared war on Hitler...
...La question des chambres a gaz [Historical Truth or Political Truth...
...It would be especially regrettable if, on that day, the books neglected by Thion were not included...
...Since 1974 he has been conducting independent historical research into the 'holocaust' question...
...This statement had, therefore, to integrate the famous sentence that seemed to render Faurisson indefensible: "Hitler never ordered the execution of a single Jew solely because of the fact that he was a Jew...
...Wishing to teach the intolerant French a lesson, Chomsky incessantly refers them to their own classics," specifically to Voltaire...
...it specifically lacks the words "or permitted," which Faurisson seemed to insist upon.] The statement held that Faurisson's claim was, strictly speaking, true even though Hitler could not have cared less about what actually happened to the Jews...
...In the same way exactly, anti-Semitism did not constitute for us a question of a world view...
...June 1979: a faction of the ultraleft, La Guerre Sociale [The Social War], prints a poster-tract with the headline "Who is the Jew...
...A curious documentary point: the address of this journal is the same as that of the Institute for Historical Review, organizing body of the Revisionist Congresses...
...In his letter to Le Monde on January 16, 1979, Faurisson cites the diary that Johann-Paul Kremer, SS doctor, kept during his tenure at Auschwitz...
...3535, Washington, D.C...
...16 Liberation, December 23, 1980...
...What should we make of this "in any case...
...82 But we have not finished seeking the reasons that (in our world and in their minds) push certain people—among them a good number of Jews—to persist in this business of "demystification," in this need to claim that the millions who disappeared are alive, this need tirelessly to denounce the trickery of others, this need to dedicate themselves to the peculiar role of deniers of the dead...
...Systematic doubt, pushed to its extreme, has become healthy and legitimate...
...19 In French there's the expression, "as short-sighted as 481 a mole...
...Why does he refuse to see to what extent the one (the thesis) nourishes and rejuvenates the other (the "old" anti-Semitism...
...third, I really never borrowed the caldron from B. Let us see how the genocide is nothing but a Talmudic story about a caldron...
...And "all this converges toward a set of doubts that includes, yet goes beyond, the single question of the gas chambers...
...51 Verne . . , p. 172...
...67 In La Drame des juifs europeens, Rassinier had denounced the dishonesty of Hilberg, Poliakov, and other Zionist agents who used all their Talmudic resources to arrive at the convenient and sacred number of six million...
...Faurisson's obsession with demystification is his calling card...
...People confront each other with arms worthy of the highest demands of a faultless deontology...
...We strongly support Professor Faurisson's just right of academic freedom, and we demand that university and government officials do everything possible to ensure his safety and free exercise of his legal rights...
...The Question of the Gas Chambers...
...The thesis begins with the following words: A hundred years...
...Once free of the so-called evidence extorted from the vanquished, only that advanced by the alleged victims remains...
...it was a question of getting rid of the vermin...
...this little boy who, according to the exterminationist myth, was supposed to have died in a gas chamber in Treblinka, Faurisson explains, is today a very rich man living in the suburbs of London...
...Jan Myrdal about Faurisson: "an anarchist of the liberal right...
Vol. 28 • September 1981 • No. 4
