Maria Poumier and Robert Faurisson
[On November 28, 2013, in the 17th chamber of the Paris correctional court, Robert Faurisson appeared for his suit against the newspaper Le Monde (Louis Dreyfus) and a female reporter (Ariane Chemin) for public insults (“professional liar”, “forger”, “falsifier of history”). Judgment is expected on January 16, 2014. Not one example of lying or falsification had been provided in the journalist’s long article of August 21, 2012 (p. 12-13). As for barrister Catherine Cohen-Richelet, she claimed three times to cite a lie, and one only, of Faurisson: according to her, he had not been a “[university] Professor” but only a “lecturer”; however, Faurisson was indeed accorded the status of “university professor” as of August 9, 1979 by ordinance of the ministry of universities (no. 00526, January 3, 1980).]
Statement by Maria Poumier
I am happy to greet Robert Faurisson at the close of this hearing, because it is always enjoyable to see a just cause triumph, and there is no doubt at all that we have won, we who are convinced that the truth makes people free. What he has fought to establish for fifty years is now irrefutable. The official version of the history of the Second World War, in particular its chapter on the persecution of the Jews, is tainted with monstrous voluntary lies (and not only with exaggeration on the number of victims), intended to spread terror amongst Jews and non-Jews, over several generations, and to prompt erratic reflexes in the face of any novel situation even remotely involving Jews. It was a question of perverting forever the meaning of true and false, of right and wrong in favour of a single human group, whose leaders are trying to see themselves accorded hereditary privileges, and thus to reconstitute a noble caste above the law. One may discuss at length the merits of Robert Faurisson’s strategic and tactical choices for the waging of his struggle. Still, his unshakeable constancy and total commitment centred exclusively on the results of his research are an outstanding example. It was astonishment and admiration that impelled me to write a book with him, published with the title En Confidence.* I was interested in understanding how he had gone from a vocation of letters to the sacrifice of all literary activity in favour of historical research on a single subject, in all respects arduous, accompanied by the struggle to defend the vital importance, for everyone, of this question on a scale that goes beyond geographical frontiers or the horizon of his contemporaries. I have come to the conclusion that he chose to become superhuman in the manner of the literary heroes he admires. He himself invokes Don Quixote; but Don Quixote is a madman and a comical character. All told, I would rather compare him to Prometheus of Greek tragedy, but with a revamping of the myth; in effect, Prometheus is a thief who goes against the gods; Faurisson is a human being attacking thieves who would like to be taken for gods: a bit different. The two come together in that they discover the fire that the mighty were denying them, and make a gift of it to humanity. The fact that he has had the strength to embody such a powerful and incendiary myth sets off a chain reaction: he helps each of us regain courage, on the personal level, and self-confidence facing the world. This strength of character makes him appear much bigger than the other intellectuals of his generation, who appear all the smaller. I have written that he sets himself amidst them like a block of marble. I uphold it! In fact, he never left the domain of poetry, that perpetual workshop of indispensable fairness and justice. His vital commitment goes well beyond science and history. He claims to defend only scientific exactitude but, whether he acknowledges it or not, the fecundity of his sense of poetry as vital commitment is there to be noted. It is thanks to Robert Faurisson, ultimately, that the juice of the pineapple, as extracted by the inimitable skill of Dieudonné, is now a special elixir, dreaded like an explosive by the warders who claim to keep us in line, promoted as a vaccine for the mind for those with the sense of humour of Mallarmé, one of a cool, invigorating and inebriating fragrance, against the nauseating odours of the sordid gas chamber sect’s adherents! Yes, poetry, provided it is served with full faith in the truth and in poetry’s capacity to produce the truth, is infinitely catching; subversive and generous, it distils and diffuses mental and moral health, ad infinitum! Thank you, Robert Faurisson, for having remained so perfectly faithful to it.
Comment by Robert Faurisson
What Maria Poumier said on November 28, 2013 at the Palais de Justice in Paris had already struck me quite soundly. In front of a video camera, she made a public statement that exposed her to the greatest risks: those provided against revisionists by the Fabius/Gayssot Act of July 13, 1990. She openly expressed her thoughts and even let her heart speak. She repeats her offence in the text above, dated December 20. She denounces a historical argument protected by a whole set of official authorities: the law, the judges, police, gendarmes, prison guards, media, academic bodies, political leaders, the European Union, UNESCO, the UN and the States of the Western world in general, along with a considerable number of wealthy and powerful organisations or institutions which, whether in France or abroad, decide on Good and Evil, including in the field of history. This argument, which still has force of law, was fixed by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg which, in total cynicism, had as its principle not to care the least about the quality of evidence (“The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence […]. The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof […]”: articles 19 and 21 of its “Charter”). This argument based on shoddy evidence is that of the genocide of the Jews, the Nazi gas chambers and the six million Jewish victims. No doubt, like me, Maria Poumier is aware that the propagators of this argument are not all liars; most of them can even be in good faith. Sancta simplicitas! (Blessed naivety!). So true is it that the best weapon of “the Holocaust” or “Shoah” religion is precisely this general credulity. Moreover, more than censorship, it is self-censorship that, up to the present, has allowed the advocates of a single Truth in history to suppress a right that had nonetheless been solemnly reaffirmed by the French justice system on April 26, 1983. On that day, having heard the case of both parties, it stated that in my own argumentation on “the problem of the gas chambers” it had detected no trace of levity, negligence, deliberate ignorance, or lying. Altogether logically it then concluded: “The worth of the findings defended by Mr Faurisson is therefore a matter solely for the appraisal of experts, historians and the public” (holding of François Grégoire, 1st chamber, section A, of the Paris court of appeal). That “therefore” would weigh heavily and that conclusion was to cause alarm amongst the Socialist friends of Laurent Fabius and in the ranks of Jean-Claude Gayssot’s Communist Party. Seven years later those people would finally get a very special law passed, one designed, above all, to keep the judges in check and compel their strict obedience, for they would henceforth be forbidden to allow the experts, the historians and the public to express themselves freely concerning one point, and one point alone, in the whole history of mankind. But even before the 1990 law everyone, in practice, already abided by the edict of those 34 French historians who, on February 21, 1979, had declared in the columns of Le Monde, on the subject of the problem of the Nazi gas chambers: “One must not ask oneself how, technically, such a mass-murder was possible. It was technically possible, since it happened”. Such was their response to a challenge that amounted to saying: “Your magical gas chambers are inconceivable for physical, chemical and technical reasons, and also taking into account documents that you kept hidden in the Auschwitz archives but that I have discovered and published; if you judge otherwise, explain to me how, for you, such a mass-murder was possible”.
But, since about 1995 and, in particular, thanks to the development of the Internet, even in poor subjected countries, history has really begun to reassert its rights. Today, although the revisionists still seem weak, revisionism itself has made leaps and bounds. Its victories are important and sometimes even resounding (see my studies The Victories of Revisionism and The Victories of Revisionism (continued)). They trigger a feeling of panic in an opponent who thought he could forever lay down his law to the entire world.
Maria Poumier has first struggled against the “unjust power of the law”. Then she has come to the defence of fundamental freedoms, including the right of judges to rule according to their conscience. Finally, she has contributed to the triumph of science and history over belief, superstition, hatred and intolerance.
December 20, 2013
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* En Confidence / Entretien avec l’Inconnue is dated December 2007. Published in April 2009 as a 78-page booklet, it is available from Éditions Akribeia, 45/3 Route de Vourles, F-69230 Saint-Genis -Laval for €10. On September 9, 2009 the Inconnue (“unknown woman”), that is, the academic Maria Poumier, revealed both her identity and her unbelief regarding “the Holocaust” or “the Shoah”; she did so in an open letter to Michèle Alliot-Marie, Minister of Justice, and Frédéric Mitterrand, Minister of Culture. On December 2, 2010, during Vincent Reynouard’s imprisonment, she re-offended in a new open letter to Michel Mercier, Minister of Justice, Brice Hortefeux, Minister of the Interior and, once again, Frédéric Mitterrand. In that second letter she stated her readiness to share the lot of the revisionists Faurisson and Reynouard, both prosecuted under the Fabius-Gayssot Act of July 13, 1990. So far those ministers and their successors have bravely held their tongues. Stay tuned.