On the occasion
of my 75th birthday, each of you contributed to this booklet a piece
for which I cannot thank you enough. My gratitude goes first of all
to the two Scandinavian authors who, I am told, had the idea of this
initiative, and then to Germar Rudolf and Robert H. Countess, who
took up the task of gathering these texts and publishing them
alongside photographs, some of which are new to me.
I hope that none
of the other contributing authors will hold it against me if I say
that the article by Arthur Robert Butz has particularly captured my
attention. I appreciate its discernment, keen insight and balanced
character. It seems to me that his essay sheds light on my efforts,
with regard either to their successes or their failures, a light
that will let the reader better understand the intellectual
adventure on which I have found myself carried off, as it were,
since the 1960s and, especially, from 1974.
At this late
hour in my life, the time appears right to draw up, with
forthrightness, an appraisal of revisionism. I shall therefore
expose here my feelings on what, not long ago, I still used to call
“the great intellectual adventure of the late 20th and early 21st
centuries”, an adventure that seems to me to be approaching
defeat, at least a temporary one.
In the past I have
never nursed illusions on revisionism’s chances. Not for an
instant have I ever believed in its imminent victory, and especially
not in 1996 when, in the midst of the Abbé Pierre-Roger Garaudy
tomfoolery, a weekly magazine, although quite hostile to us,
announced on its cover “The Victory of the Revisionists”.
Already in 1993, Serge Thion had produced in his Une
Allumette sur la banquise (“A Match to the Ice-floe”) a book
whose title was free of ambiguity. The ice-floe was that of the
dark, immense, cold block of generally accepted ideas, the match
that of his own revisionist work. S. Thion thought then that neither
the light nor the heat of his match risked illuminating or melting
that huge mass of ice. For me, what was true of his attempt was also
true of all other revisionist writings. But, in my scepticism, I
still did not go so far as to imagine the degree of disrepair that,
in these last few years, the revisionism of the “Holocaust” has
reached, especially in Europe.
In the early 1980s, Wilhelm Stäglich had confessed to
me his pessimism regarding the future of our common endeavour. That
upright man, a judge by profession, was mindful not to mislead
anyone on the subject, above all not his close friends. It must be
said that being German, he was well placed to take full stock of his
country’s defeat and of the victor’s hold on things. He
considered that the pitiless victor had annihilated not only a
political regime — like all regimes a transient phenomenon — but
also the very soul and substance of the great Germanic community.
Today
Germany
,
disgraced, insulted and with whom still no peace treaty has been
signed seems to take a growing delight in recalling her alleged
crimes. In truth, the people themselves can find no pleasure in the
practice but no one asks for their opinion. In Germany and Austria
the repression demanded by the Jews is so fierce and so meticulous
that I do not see how revisionism proper might have any chance of
success in those forlorn countries, which find themselves under even
fuller submission to the Jewish thought police than the State of
Israel itself. From this point of view, an intellectual or a
historian is far freer in Tel-Aviv or in
Jerusalem
than in
Berlin
,
Munich
or
Vienna
.
I shall give
only a broad sketch of the current state of revisionism in the rest
of the world. Not one of the countries freed from the Communist yoke
has an active revisionist author.
In
Russia
people are often anti-Jewish, but revisionism has not moved a single
author to call into question the greatest myth of our time, that of
an alleged “Holocaust” of the European Jews; from his vantage
point in
Moscow
J. Graf may easily note this fact. Spain has had no more
revisionists since Enrique Aynat, her most brilliant, withdrew from
the arena.
Greece
no longer has any.
Italy
has only one revisionist author worthy of the name: Carlo Mattogno.
Belgium
has hardly any, for Siegfried Verbeke has withdrawn from the fight
and other revisionists are stricken by age or illness.
The government of
Switzerland
,
where revisionism had nonetheless experienced a revival in recent
years after Mariette Paschoud’s abandon-ment, has employed the
most radical means to kill it off.
The
Netherlands
have never really had any revisionists.
The Scandinavian countries have but a handful and in
Stockholm the heroic Ahmed Rami is more and more isolated in the
face of the forces of repression; following complaints and actions
taken by Jews, several of his website addresses have recently been
eliminated from the Internet.
Britain
no longer has any revisionists, and certainly none in David Irving
who, in recent years, has more or less rallied to Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen’s theory according to which the Germans have a natural
propensity for evil, which would explain their responsibility in the
so-called “Hitlerite crimes” (see Adelaide Institute Online,
December 1996, p. 17). During his lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt
he did not wish to call on revisionists for help, and that cost him
dearly: with a rather weak grasp of the subject, he lost his
footing; he made manifold concessions; to give yet another pledge of
good faith to his adversary, he invoked, as usual, the “Bruns
document”, a text devoid of the slightest testimonial value;
physically robust, D. Irving gave the display of a fragile man.
“And in
France
?”,
one may ask. The answer is that in the
land
of
Paul
Rassinier
,
there are now no more than three or four of us involved in the
business of research or production. If the father of French
revisionism were to return to this world, he would be dismayed at
seeing that he had admirers, of course, but barely a handful of
followers ready to repeat after him, clearly and without the least
ambiguity, that the Nazi gas chambers and genocide of the Jews made
up one and the same historical imposture. Still in France, it may be
noted that the vile antirevisionist law, labelled “Fabius-Gayssot”,
no longer sees a single political personality apt to denounce it:
Bruno Mégret has just let it be known that he believes in the
“gas chambers” and Jean-Marie Le Pen, for his part, no longer
calls for the repeal of a law that he formerly termed
“freedom-killing”. According to the latest reports, the law is
set to be reinforced and J.-M. Le Pen dare not censure this impudent
repeat offence against the freedom of thought and of research.
In the Arabo-Moslem
world, whatever the Jews may tell us, revisionism has not found a
lasting resonance and I am still waiting for a single Palestinian
demonstrator to be allowed by his fellows to wave, instead of the
inept placard with “Sharon = Hitler”, a banner reading: “The
‘Holocaust’ of the Jews is a Hoax!” or: “Gas Chambers =
Bogus!”
Australia
’s
lone real revisionist is Fredrick Töben.
New Zealand is persecuting, as if he were still active,
a half-Jewish semi-revisionist who has long since done penance.
South
America
has no more active revisionists to speak of.
Central
America
has never had any.
The
United
States
remains the only country in the world where revisionism meets with
some success, but not without many setbacks as well.
In
Canada
,
the foremost revisionist activist, my very dear friend Ernst Zündel,
is in a high-security prison, held in conditions worthy of
Guantanamo
Bay
.
In
Japan
,
virulent Judeo-American interventions have cut short revisionist
endeavours.
Communist China should hardly be
expected to allow revisionism: the regime there fosters the myth of
the Chinese as being a sort of “Jew”, victim of Japan, a country
formerly allied with Germany; it expects Japan in future to pay
indemnities to China as Germany pays indemnities to the Jews, that
is, by the billions and till the end of time; in harbouring such
hopes it is asking for disappointment for, since in the eyes of the
international community, only the Jews really suffered during the
war and, on that account, only they have the right to bleed a
defeated country white or to steal the lands and belongings of
others, as they do in Palestine.
I shall perhaps
be accused of defeatism. Some will remind me of revisionism’s
presence on the Internet, asserting that our fiercest adversaries
are alarmed at the progress of revisionism there, a fact that, they
will tell me, ought normally to give me solace.
On the subject
of the Internet, I reply that the merits of this communication
technique are undeniable. In future, it is in this quarter that the
revisionists, chased out of all other forums, will have found their
last refuge, although this area of freedom might well, under
pressure of Jewish censorship, shrink away before long. But it must
also be admitted that the Internet, in keeping with the consumerist
society, is something of a lure to ensnarement. It tends to give the
illusion of activity both to those who manage websites and to those
who visit them. It snows one under, it lulls. It keeps one glued to
the screen. It numbs. Or else it incites to chatter. Too much
daydreaming is done whilst gazing into the electronic aquarium.
People give themselves the illusion of doing a lot for the
cause but, ensconced at the desk, they are above all enjoying
comfort. They find refuge behind the screen or they drown in it.
They no longer take the risk of going before the prison gates or
into the courtroom to support a revisionist in trouble. They no
longer distribute fliers or put up posters. They no longer venture
out where — not without physical risk, it is true — more could
be learnt about the adversary, in the flesh: that is, at the
congresses, conferences and demonstrations held against “Holocaust
denial”. They open their wallets for revisionists in need all the
less as, on the Internet, they have made the effort of asking others
to open theirs.
Thousands of e-mails carry the call for a general
mobilisation outside a revisionist’s jail, but the number of
demonstrators in favour of E. Zündel near Toronto amounts, the
first time, to a total of twelve (organisers included), and the
second, to fifteen.
As to our
adversaries’ mad imaginings of the revisionist “beast” which,
they claim, is steadily rising up and spreading its tentacles all
the way to the primary schools and, in particular, to the younger
generation of Moslem background, I reply that one must not be taken
in by the show.
The Jews have always been adept at crying wolf or at warning
against monsters. As a habit, they lie about the numbers, the wealth
and the power of those whom they hate and would like to see dead or
in prison. For them, the revisionists are the most unpleasant breed
of being and, consequently, in more or less good faith, the Jews
claim to detect the presence of the revisionist spectre in the
slightest verbal divergence, the slightest noise, the slightest
encounter.
In December 2003 two Jews, Alex Grobman and Rafael Medoff,
published the results of their inquiry into what they call
“Holocaust denial in the world”; in appearance, they have taken
in a rich harvest; in reality, an attentive reader will become aware
that the two authors have included the least hint and the least
sprig of information on the subject: using anything that might come
to hand, they have presented a picture of current revisionist
activity worldwide that is largely devoid of substance and fact
(“Holocaust Denial: A Global Survey 2003” at www.wymaninstitute.org).
In this respect the example of
Lyon
is eloquent. That city, with
Paris
,
is the only one in
France
where revisionism has ever shone with any lustre (Nantes got talked
about only with regard to the Roques affair which erupted in 1986).
A perusal of the
Lyon
press in early 2004 might lead one to believe that
France
’s
second city was currently in full revisionist commotion. The local
media constantly bring up the supposed indulgence shown by the
Universities Lyon-II and Lyon-III (especially the latter) to their
“Holocaust-denying” (“négationniste”) professors. But a
close look will reveal that the number of these professors amounts
exactly to nought.
In reality the anti-Holocaust-deniers, taken with a
near-volcanic fever, and having, for some time now, no longer had
any Holocaust-denier to sink their teeth into, are calling one
another deniers and tearing themselves apart. The spectacle is, at
bottom, quite informative: it demonstrates the extent to which, with
the help of the media, monstrosities can be fabricated from nothing,
not even an inception of existence.
Observe how today in Lyon revisionist bogymen are created and
you will see how it was possible to forge the myth of the magical
Nazi gas chambers, universally present in the mind and strictly
absent from concrete reality. In Lyon academics, journalists,
politicians, in the face of repeated bursts of anger on the part of
the activist Alain Jakubowicz, himself a lawyer, tremble at the
thought of appearing suspect in the eyes of certain associations,
Jewish or non-Jewish.
Perpetually on the hunt and ever in a rage, this individual
cries out incessantly against the scandal of Holocaust-denial and
describes the state of things as if the city, former “capital of
the Resistance” (which it never was), had suddenly become the
“capital of revisionism” (which it assuredly is not). And a
whole array of imitators lend their voices to a choir of upholders
of the law.
In
this choir one or two rightwing professors sing especially well: in
the past, upon finding themselves being called “revisionists”,
they protested vehemently, brought lawsuits, won them, gloried in
the success and now would just barely stop short of proclaiming
themselves to be former soldiers in the anti-Holocaust-denial
struggle. In the entire
Lyon
region one may detect the presence of a sole revisionist, Jean
Plantin. He by no means works at the University and leads a
particularly reserved existence.
His main crime is to have earned, in the early
1990s, degrees in contemporary history which, following a public
campaign, were taken away a decade later but which, nonetheless, had
to be restored at the end of a legal battle finally won in January
of this year. It remains, however, that J. Plantin has been
convicted for the publication of revisionist writings (a press
offence!) and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment without
re-mission, a sentence that he will have to serve if, one day not
very far off, the Cour de Cassation in Paris denies his final
appeal.
When he had to go to court for his last hearing, we
tried to find some young people in Lyon who might serve as escort.
In a city of 1.2 million, we got hold of only one volunteer who,
without giving any warning, pulled out at the last minute, on the
very day of the hearing. His place had to be taken by a
sixty-year-old. Who could fail to see here yet more proof, material
and flagrant, that revisionism is in tatters? I shall refrain from
relating other examples, just as disheartening.
I
do not claim that the revisionism of the “Holocaust” is dead; it
will never die. But its present state is worrying. The disaster
appeared before me in its full extent in June 2002, during the last
conference of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) in
Los
Angeles
.
Nine months previously, the Americans had had the traumatic
experience of September 11th, 2001. At one blow, it seemed that the
whole world had entered both the third millennium and a third world
war. Simultaneously, as in a gigantic tracking out, the second world
war gave the impression of having abruptly vanished from the
horizon. Historical revisionism, whose principal object was
precisely that war which had then become so remote, seemed in its
turn to be stepping aside, at least in part. A few months later, the
IHR entered the final phase of a crisis which, one must admit, had
long been endangering its existence.
Other
revisionists have picked up the fallen torch. To all of them,
without distinction, I wish success. They will have my support.
Whether they are called, for example, Germar Rudolf, Walter Mueller,
Horst Mahler or Heinz Koppe, they will find me at their side. But on
the one condition that they fight for a revisionism like Paul
Rassinier’s, that is, forthright and whole.
The various forms of
degenerate revisionism or of compromise do not interest me. I
recognise that some of those among us practise a revisionism
inspired by caution, tactic, strategy or by what they call the sense
of responsibilities; but, for me, all that is only a kind of salon
revisionism, pursued in comfort or in fear. Some other revisionists
care too much about what the Jews may think of them; should they in
passing come across a Jew claiming to be familiar with the
revisionists and who goes so far as to offer them his services, they
nearly swoon:
“O behold the wondrous Jew! The precious
intelligence! The boundless courage! Whatever we do, let’s not
irritate this oh so exceptional Jew and, if he says he finds it
futile to look into the reality or the non-reality of the gas
chambers or the genocide, above all we mustn’t contradict him but
rather emulate his reserve!”
Still other revisionists (?), finally, set
their heart on relatively inoffensive points of the history of the
Second World War and its wake and imagine that they can write about
individuals (Churchill, Pétain, Pius XII,…) or events (terrorism,
the war waged against civilians, the deportations throughout the
world, the trials organised by the victors…) without approaching
the basic question of the reality or the non-reality of the
“Holocaust”.
To these semi-revisionists I shall no longer be offering my
participation. There remains one last category of revisionists,
those who find consolation in noting that previously
little-discussed topics are now the subject of widely selling books;
this is the case, for instance, for the positively atrocious history
of the Anglo-American aerial bombardments in Europe and Japan; it is
also the case for the abominable acts committed by the Allies during
the segment of history that they have named “the liberation of
nations” and that was nothing other than brutal occupation,
enormous looting, immense deportations, a concatenation of massacres
and a purge that goes on to this day, nearly sixty years after the
end of the war.
But this type of literature, interesting though it may
be, does not undermine the Great Taboo of the “Holocaust”. On
the contrary, it has thus far only performed the role of a firebreak
for the taboo and, moreover, does not run its practitioners the risk
of finding themselves in a high-security prison. Here again, let us
not talk fiction to each another; we must not be put off the scent,
and must avoid alibis.
“Adolf Hitler’s weapons of mass destruction (the alleged
homicidal gas chambers and gas vans) cannot have existed any more
than Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, for both are
the stuff of one and the same fabrication initiated in 1944 by a
Jewish front group (the War Refugee Board) and recycled in 2002 by
another Jewish front group (the Office of Special Plans): same lie,
same liars”. There you have the firm and plain stand, brought into
line with the present circumstances, that I think a Paul Rassinier
of today would adopt. As long as Germar Rudolf, Walter Mueller,
Horst Mahler, Heinz Koppe and other revisionists clearly choose this
attitude and stay the course, I shall be at their side.
The current calling into question of Saddam Hussein’s
alleged weapons of mass destruction gives them the unhoped-for
occasion to renew the denunciation of the alleged Destruction of the
European Jews (title of Raul Hilberg’s mendacious magnum opus).
Those true revisionists have a right to their own political or
religious convictions just as I have a right to be apolitical and an
atheist. They are free to choose their means of leading the struggle
just as I have chosen mine. I ask no one to follow my example. I
preach no doctrine and do not see myself as the custodian of any
orthodoxy.
On the other hand, what I expect of them is that, without
compromise and without misrepresentation, they serve the cause of
historical revisionism with the same clarity and courage as Paul
Rassinier. On that condition, I shall continue with them the combat
to which I have already devoted at least thirty years of my
existence.
I am not a defeatist for, on the contrary, I prescribe an
attack vigorously centred, or re-centred, on the Mother of all lies
of our time: the imposture of the “Holocaust” or “Shoah”.
Jean-Paul Sartre debased himself in lying about Communism: it seems
he did so because he did not want to leave “Billancourt” (that
is, the French working class) bereft of hope. Personally, I am not
anxious to know whether what I write encourages or discourages my
reader. What interests me is being and staying as exact as possible.
Such
is the taste or the desire for historical exactitude: it persists
even in the final hours of life, even whilst one is hoping for a
tranquillity that one has never known and even when all seems to say
that it would be more reasonable to abandon a one-sided fight.
Note on
some minor points:
1) I shall remind A.R. Butz that I
published, in 1980, a Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui
m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire, a book with a foreword by
Noam Chomsky;
2) I shall tell F. Töben that his
anecdote of the restaurant (p. 106) shows more of the talent of a
novelist than the circumspection of a historian;
3) I shall remind R.H. Countess
that, for my part, I have never said: “No holes? No gas
chambers!” (p.128), but rather: “No holes ? No
‘Holocaust’!”, since, simply enough, if the alleged Nazi gas
chambers, keystone of the edifice of lies, never existed, it follows
that the alleged “Holocaust” of the Jews cannot be real;
4) I shall point out to
E.
Zündel
a slight error in dates: the physical assault of which he speaks (p.
130) happened, in fact, a year after the 1988 trial.
Alan
James Responds - alain_j@bigpond.com
28 February 2004
Professor Faurisson could perhaps be accused of acquiescing
in the Jewish desire to place their own historical experience (or
historical fantasy) at the centre of human history. Of course, their
current trump card is "the holocaust", and no doubt it is
very important that independent historians continue to investigate
all the anomalies in this essentially religious dogma. Professor
Faurisson seems to be despairing that not enough independent
historians are accepting the handing over of that baton.
One could equally argue that the intellectual argument over
"the holocaust" is essentially won. A few extra footnotes
may need to be added, but the outline is now clear - to anyone who
chooses to examine the subject with an open mind.
Some of us may think that now is the time to stand up for our
right NOT to have an alien people dictate to us that we must grovel
to their interpretation of what history is all about. Every day
there are hundreds of examples in the media of Jews trying to make
their own historical (or fantasy) experience central to the
collective experience of all the rest of us. Some of these examples
are trivial, compared to what Professor Faurisson has been so
eminently concerned with. But all of them serve the same purpose: to
create a Judeocentric vision of humanity's past. In contrast to
Professor Faurisson's pessimism I think we are now living in an era
when we really can - and should - challenge every distorted claim of
the Jews and their suborned culture-distorters, no matter how
trivial.
Here is one
example. In The
Weekend Australian of
21/2/04
someone called Norman McGreevy (of the heavily Jewish
Melbourne
suburb of Malvern) wrote that:
"Tasmanian
Labor MP Harry Quick (20/2) has chosen his words poorly in his
quoted comments on Jewish critics of Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ. 'For the Jewish lobby to say it is
anti-Semitic is a bit beyond the pale,' Quick said. A quick
historical refresher. Tsars confined Jews to the 'Pale of
Settlement', 25 provinces of the Russian empire. To live 'beyond the
pale', a Jew needed special permission from the notoriously
anti-Semitic authorities - and inside thousands of Jews were starved
and beaten to death. Quick is correct in that the film 'had villains
and heroes' but he is clearly no expert on what is offensively
anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic."
No doubt poor Harry Quick is just some political hack
from
Tasmania
,
and we don't need to consider his feelings overmuch. But note the
Judeophile arrogance of Mr McSweeny! He invokes some experience that
Jews may or may not have had in Tsarist
Russia
in order to demand that Mr Quick not use an expression that was part
of the English language in the time of Shakespeare. Luckily, another
reader of The
Australian cared more about our own linguistic heritage
than about some alien "footnote in history", and replied
as follows:
'Norman McGreevy (Letters,
21/2) needs a history lesson.The word "pale" was used in
Shakespeare's time to signify a district or territory subject to a
particular jurisdiction. The term was common enough in that sense
for Shakespeare himself to use it allegorically in The Winter's Tale (iv, iii). From as
early as 1547 a published source tells us that "Irland ... is
deuided in ii part, one is the Englysh pale, & the other, the
wyld Irysh" [original spelling]. The inhabitants of the English
Pale had to pay the Irish what were called "Black Rents" -
essentially, protection money. Hence anyone "beyond the
pale" was perceived as potentially wild, lawless, dangerous,
and generally unacceptable. Despite Mr McGreevy's haste to take
offence, Russian Jews were not confined to their "Pale of
Settlement" until 1792 - and our common English phrase
"beyond the pale" was in use centuries before that time.
Tasmanian Labor MP Harry Quick therefore does not deserve Mr
McGreevy's censure. Mr Quick used the phrase in its traditional, and
correct, sense. Good luck to him for choosing his words wisely!
- Alan James,
Carlton
,
Vic'
That response was published in The
Australian on
Monday
23/2/04
.
My feeling is that the great holocaust gas-libel is teetering
so much that all their other minor lies can now be refuted in the
mass media, if any so-called "activist" can be
bothered to push the envelope. The traditional enemies of truth are
rattled. Now is the time to rout them on any and every peripheral
issue, just like a football team pushing the ball down the wing and
the flanks and thereby ultimately besieging the opposition goal.
The momentum has passed to us. Not on the main issue (as
defined by the Jews), of course; but to us anyway. As the Yanks say,
"It's time to kick ass!"
