“You can ask Robert”, says Dieudonné
On May 29, 2015 Jacques Vecker distributed, under the title “‘You can ask Robert’, says Dieudonné”, a vibrant tribute to professor Robert Faurisson. At the time that brief text had not been duly registered. Here it is in English translation (17.01.2017).
Never will enough tribute be paid to this French university professor who, throughout his lifetime, has been seen fearlessly, irreproachably and often daringly brandishing the torch of justice, honesty and attention to exactitude. By dint of perseverance he has become the leading figure of historical revisionism in our country – the honour of thought. He has followed in the footsteps of the religious reformer Martin Luther, of Paul Rassinier and of Alexander Solzhenitsyn; today it is perhaps he who inspires the Julian Assanges or Edward Snowdens of the world.
There is nothing nobler in a man than commitment to what he believes is righteous and true. So then, to hell with moderation in the panegyric!
Insulted, humiliated, ignobly persecuted, several times physically assaulted, Robert Faurisson has, in the ordeal, remained the courteous gent whom those who have taken the trouble to meet him know. Keen-spirited and at times scathing, he can often be observed showing an amazing patience with those who disagree with him. In the face of a challenge he has never been seen dodging it. His whole life has been marked by a taste for clarity and precision. He is direct and concise. He shuns jargon. His argumentation, backed by verifiable references and examples, is compelling because it gives one the impression of going to the heart of a work or an event, and of understanding it fully.
As an adolescent during the wartime occupation period, then the liberation and the post-war purge, he experienced intensely a time in history where “the French did not like one another”. He sought to understand, in its diversity and contradictions, the behaviour of the actors in that history so wrought with fury. He himself had happened to adopt a type of behaviour that he would later regret. [Example: the regret of having, in 1942, at the age of thirteen, carved with a knife into my desk at school the words “Mort à Laval!”. – RF]
In 2011 the historian Paul-Éric Blanrue devoted a film to him entitled A Man, providing an overview of an existence which, all told, has been given over to the University, in the noblest sense of that term.
In becoming committed to the physical and intellectual adventure of revisionism Robert Faurisson was fully conscious of the risks he ran. He felt he owed that commitment to his dignity as a man. Despite what such a decision would doubtless cost in terms of his family’s tranquillity and the development of his career, he could not conceive of any other choice. He knew that his boldness would not be forgiven. He could no longer count on the protection of what are called rights, well-founded rights, simple rights. A brilliant academic, acknowledged by his peers, he became overnight one of those “hard-headed liars”, those “gangsters of history” denounced as “deniers”. He became that black sheep whose conduct is not understood by the other sheep. For having wanted to stick to facts and, consequently, by his temerity, having imperilled one of the taboos that hamstring our society, he made himself an outcast from humanity. However, he remains open to debate. On April 26, 1983, at the end of a memorable legal case, the Paris Court of Appeal acknowledged the value of his research and writings on “the problem of the [Nazi] gas chambers”. It held that, contrary to the plaintiffs’ assertions, no-one could find him guilty of rashness, negligence, deliberate ignorance or lying and that, consequently, “the appraisal of the value of the findings defended by Mr Faurisson is a matter, therefore, solely for experts, historians and the public”. Which did not stop the same court from ruling against him, for… malevolence! Although incessantly beleaguered with police searches, trials, fines and other financial sanctions, he has never been imprisoned, unlike so many revisionists, in particular German, Austrian or Swiss ones and, as concerns France, Vincent Reynouard. When he addressed an international conference (in Tehran in 2006), the President of France in person, Jacques Chirac, immediately set his country’s justice system in motion against him! At the age of 86, exhausted by a decades-long commitment to the cause of historical truth and freedom of research, he remains devoted every hour of the day to the progress of free thought, the exposure of lies and hypocrisy and to the care, like the “prof” that he is through and through, of respect of the French language.
Tireless despite his age, he does not give up. If what Arthur Butz calls the hoax of the twentieth century is, in the world of historians, today doomed, it is indeed largely thanks to Robert Faurisson.
Will he be “rehabilitated” during his lifetime, his honour officially restored? That would only be right. In any event, when the hour of departure strikes he will at least be able to say to himself: “Mission accomplished!”. He will have led his life according to the categorical imperative of Kant, who, in substance, tells us: Conduct yourself in such a way that each of your actions can be elevated to the rank of universal maxim. Holding to Gandhi’s thinking, he has ever been aware that An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation.
Jacques Vecker, “Libre expression”, Château de Vaugran, F-30480 St Paul la Coste, May 29, 2015