Famous French sociologist Alain Besançon discovers “the religion of the Shoah”

Already in the late 1970s, at the first heavy blow I struck against them, the historians of “the Holocaust” (which today is often called “Shoah”) had shown their disarray. Whereas I had placed myself on scientific ground to demonstrate, in a way that admitted of no rebuttal, that their alleged homicidal gas chambers were technically inconceivable, they were reduced, abandoning reason for faith, to replying pitifully: “One must not ask oneself how, technically, such a mass murder was possible; it was technically possible, since it happened” (“La politique hitlérienne d’extermination: une déclaration d’historiens”, Le Monde, February 21, 1979, p. 23; for further details on that controversy of 1978-1979 see my book Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire, La Vieille Taupe, Paris 1980, p. 69-101). Consequently, as early as May 3, 1980, in a letter to Jean Daniel [real name Jean-Daniel Bensaïd, founder and executive editor of the weekly Nouvel Observateur] I spoke of  “the new religion” or “the upholders of the Holocaust religion”, and concluded: “No sudden change will arise when it becomes apparent that ‘the Holocaust’ is a historical lie. Besides, religions disappear only very slowly, to make way for other religions. As it happens, I myself prefer to go on from faith towards reason” (ibid., p. 261-263). I had perceived that, for want of any ability to resort to technical, scientific or historical argument, the other side was bound to seek a way out in religious-style invention, along with conducting witchcraft trials. The result is that these days, in 2009, the existence of a “Shoah religion” has become an obvious fact. Recently, an article in Le Monde dealt with “the Shoah’s” being “built up into a ‘State religion’ by Nicolas Sarkozy” (Gérard Courtois reviewing a book by Guy Konopnicki, April 4, 2009, p. 26). And now, in a study on “Benedict XVI and the fundamentalists” (“Benoît XVI et les intégristes”, Commentaire n° 125, Spring 2009, p. 5-11) from the pen of sociologist Alain Besançon, the following remarks are to be found:

On the scale of sacred things, there is nothing today that can challenge the Shoah for first place (p. 9 A);

At the top of scale, we thus have the Shoah. It may be assigned, going by external criteria, a near-religious rank (p. 10 A);

Having become universal [this religion] maintains the Jewish people’s standing as chosen, with the choosing done by the diabolical will of Hitler and not by the benevolent decision of God. It offers them up to the sympathy, in the strongest sense, of the Christian world. — Ensuing from all this are changes in the scale of dignity, in the list of objects that can be touched only with trembling hands, in the hierarchy of values and in the prestige of those who defend them. Thus, ranking first, undeniably, is the Shoah (p. 10 B);

One is tempted to put it that the religion of the Shoah and the humanitarian religion, in their various combinations, form the civil religion of the Western democracies […] The heroes of the Shoah religion, followed by those of the humanitarian religion [abbé Pierre, sister Emmanuelle,…], find themselves at the top of the scale (p. 11 B).

In the last two pages of his study (10-11) the author uses the expression “religion of the Shoah” seven times.

Born in 1932, having belonged to the Communist Party from 1951 to 1956, A. Besançon is a member of the Institut de France and director of studies both at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Institut d’histoire sociale. Raymond Aron, who founded the journal Commentaire in 1978, was – he tells us – his “teacher”. On December 13, 2004, Besançon paid a vibrant tribute to the memory of the late chief rabbi Jacob Kaplan at an exceptional gathering of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques. He is author of a number of books or studies where, in particular, he deals first with the “woe of the century”, caused – according to him – by Communism and Nazism, and then with “the uniqueness of the Shoah”. He is a Roman Catholic. Condemning the “négationniste fantasies”, he attacks “those who deny the Shoah and reject the overwhelming mass of positive evidence of its reality” (p. 6 A and 7 B) but does not describe a single one of those fantasies, or provide a single bit of that evidence. Not for an instant does he explain how and why, in such a short span of time, the Jewish version of Second World War history has become a religion and, better still, the religion of the whole Western world. He does not tell us how it is that in the 21st century the sensitive elements of that triumphant and domineering religion “can be touched only with trembling hands”.

Why did a sociologist of the calibre of Alain Besançon remain mute for so long on the existence of an extraordinary social phenomenon whose birth, in the late 1970s, he had been unable to discern at the time? And why does he persist, now in 2009, in holding back from explaining its prodigious growth in these past 30 years?

Jean-Marie Le Pen remarks, and not wrongly, that today we have got to the point where the Second World War has, in a way, become a detail of… “the Shoah”. Why and how did such an aberration ever come about? How is it possible that the zany, hair-raising stories of Father Patrick Desbois of “the Shoah by bullets” or “the Shoah by suffocation [under eiderdowns or cushions]” have in 2009 become, with the unction of Nicolas Sarkozy, Simone Veil and the bishops of France, material for catechism in our middle and secondary schools, both state-run and private? Any being endowed with reason can only blush on reading the phantasmagoria spouted by this devil of a prankster Father Desbois in his book The Holocaust by bullets: a priest’s journey to uncover the truth behind the murder of 1.5 million Jews (Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2008, 233 p.). Martin Gray and his ghost writer, Max Gallo, authors of For those I loved, have been outdone.

On August 7, 2008, I devoted an essay to the phenomenon of Shoatic fraud and gullibility entitled “The secular religion of the Holocaust, a tainted product of consumer society” (see attachment). In it I suggested a rational explanation for the mounting success enjoyed, especially since 1980, by the new “Holocaust” or “Shoah” religion. Now that, in his turn, he is finally discovering this religion, will Alain Besançon decide to explain its mystery to us rationally? If he did so, he would discover that the revisionists, far from engaging in “fantasies”, have accumulated “an overwhelming mass of positive evidence” to support their findings. But in order to become aware of this he would at least have to start reading their work. Having awoken in 1956 from the effects of the Communist opium, might Besançon also rise one day from the torpor into which the “Shoah religion” has sunk our world’s thinking faculties, this religion he is discovering now, nearly 30 years after the revisionists?

“The religion of the Shoah” tolerates other religions, particularly the Roman Catholic religion, only insofar as they accept subordination. Benedict XVI knows this, as he prostrates and humiliates himself before it. Especially lie-ridden, the “Shoah religion” calls for hatred and crusades. In this respect, repeating the image used by Jean Jaurès regarding capitalism, it can be said of the new religion that it “bears war within it just as thick clouds bear a storm.”

May 12, 2009