Letter to Mrs Deborah Lipstadt
Robert FAURISSON to Mrs Deborah LIPSTADT
Occidental College
Eagle Rock
Los Angeles, California 90041
June 28, 1989
Dear Mrs Lipstadt,
I received you yesterday from noon to 6 pm. I am afraid it was not worth the while.
On my table, right in front of you, I had (in your dossier, which I did not open in your presence) the paper that you presented at the Oxford Conference in July 1988. In this paper you clearly say that the revisionists are liars, denying established facts by antisemitism. For you, revisionism is a subtle form of antisemitism. In California, you teach the history of antisemitism and, for you, Faurisson as well as Butz and others are some sort of antisemite that a good teacher of your kind cannot ignore. Those views are perhaps rather simple but I think that they inspired most of the questions that you put to me. You spoke very little, but enough anyway to show what you had in mind.
What you had (and have) in mind is this:
- The genocide and the gas chambers are established facts;
- The revisionists deny those established facts;
- I have to find the motives of those revisionists for behaving in such a way.
And you are normally prone to believe, as many people do, that the motives are essentially those of antisemitism.
I agree with you that, when a person denies an established fact, there is something wrong with that person but, precisely in the case of the genocide and the gas chambers, are we facing “established facts”?
Let us suppose for one minute that they are NOT established facts but only, as I kept repeating to you, religious beliefs. In that case, don’t you think that the motive of those revisionists might be the most simple one that you can imagine, which is to say spontaneously: “The King is naked!”? Is it not normal, when you see that something is wrong, to say that it is wrong? As we say in French, why are you “looking for the midday sun at two o’clock”?
Now, don’t get me wrong! I know that in the mind of the man who shouts “The King is naked!” there might be ALSO some other feelings, impulses, passions, etc. Maybe he does not like the King, maybe he hates the courtiers, maybe he is pleased to find himself as a trouble maker but all those things are peripheral since the first, the essential and the central motive is the FACT that the king was naked.
You must begin at the beginning. When Arno J. Mayer writes: “Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable”, should you not wonder if this is not true before deciding that it is untrue and before looking for the “why” of this “untruthfulness”?
I noticed that you did not seem to know very much about the layout of the concentration camps and their gas chambers. As I told you, this is sadly the case of nearly all the exterminationists and of too many of the revisionists. Most of them are what I call “paper historians”. They have been at school all their life and they are used to thinking that papers are more than material items. A man like Ditlieb Felderer, knowing Auschwitz better than I know Vichy, is superior to any historian as far as Auschwitz, center of the “Holocaust” question, is concerned. You should go and visit carefully those camps and those so-called gas chambers. You need one second to see in the “gas chamber” of Krema-I the ridiculous little door with its window; you need two seconds to see the ridiculous “openings” in the roof which are not at all air-tight; you need one more second to notice that the space is so limited; one second to realise that there is no heating system, no evacuation system and no trace whatsoever of it; a few seconds to see that the doors are inward-opening (!) which means that, if bodies were there, you could not even open those doors; a few seconds to see that walls had been removed in order to make the place look more important, etc. I know of nothing so stupid as those alleged gas chambers that you can visit everywhere, including Struthof-Natzweiler which you visited and Sachsenhausen which you did not visit and where you can find exactly the same type of Leichenkeller which in Birkenau is called Gas Chamber! Excuse me, I know something more stupid: it is Treblinka.
I told you that my worst enemies were the Jewish organisations and I gave you many proofs of their impudent activities which aim to protect what I consider, after so much research, as a historical lie. You looked surprised. In your opinion, it seems that the Jewish organisations are not in the forefront of the repression of revisionism! Let me tell you that your surprise is surprising. Those organisations consider the problem of revisionism exactly as you consider it. For them, as well as for you, revisionism is a perverted form of antisemitism and, therefore, they fight against that form of antisemitism. What do you expect? That they would stop fighting antisemitism?
I asked you: “Did you ever ask yourself or your students if the Jews had some responsibility in antisemitism, as Bernard Lazare dared to say?” And your answer was: “No”!!! Is it wise or scientific not to ask that kind of question?
I wish FOR YOUR SAKE that the revisionists were antisemites. That would mean that they were inspired by passion. As you know, passion makes you say silly things.
When you asked to come and visit me in Vichy, I immediately accepted because I believe in human contacts. But I am afraid I was wrong.
Best wishes,
R. Faurisson
P.S. I told you something like three times that I do not believe in the “conspiracy theory” or, as you put it, in the “sinister conspiratorial forces” theory. I gave you my reasons and I called this theory “childish”. As a matter of fact, Jews are prone to believe in that theory, which they find satisfactory when it applies to antisemitism and absurd when it is invoked by antisemites.
June 28, 1989