Our Millenial Struggle

I approve of the project (“Input Wanted”, September 18, 1998).

Zündel’s first four paragraphs, beginning with “Revisionist(s)”, are excellent.

I approve, in particular, of the idea that it is necessary to begin by saying “We have solved the Holocaust riddle.”

But, in my opinion, we need to have the readers understand that they must nevertheless not harbour illusions. In any case, as I put it in my address to the IHR in September 1994, I personally do not believe that we shall one day be able to “bring that vastly expanded struggle to an end”. I fear that there will, unhappily, be no end.

My own opinion – which may be wrong, for no-one knows what tomorrow will be made of – is that, in the struggle between exterminationists and revisionists, nobody will ever definitively win, nor will anyone ever definitively lose. In effect, this struggle merely lies within the scope, the 20th century scope, of a very old conflict which began with the dawn of civilisation. It is the conflict that pits superstition against knowledge. Being a Frenchman, my thoughts turn especially to the efforts deployed by Voltaire in the mid-18th century to denounce what he called “the Vile” and which, for him, was to be found above all in the Old Testament and in Jewish beliefs. He used to say: Écrasons l’Infâme, “Let us crush the vile foe”. Two centuries on, we can see that Voltaire has not crushed the vile foe, and that the vile foe has not crushed Voltaire. The two go on battling one another.

On the whole, men seem to have as much need of superstition as of knowledge. They need darkness as much as light. And, despite their virtuous protestations, they are attracted as much by evil as by good.

I say: “men on the whole” and specify that these opposing tendencies are either conscious or unconscious, visible to all or camouflaged.

David Irving was right when, in 1992, he exclaimed: “The Auschwitz battleship is sunk!” but he was mistaken in believing that the religion which had been built up around the Auschwitz crematoria would thus be dealt a fatal blow. As I explained in 1994, these religions can manage quite well with the disappearance or the fading of the concrete realities onto which they are grafted. I cited the example of Massada. According to a Jewish legend, the Jews who had taken refuge in that Dead Sea fortress put up a furious armed resistance to the Romans who had, in 70 AD, just destroyed Jerusalem. In the 20th century, archeological digs carried out on the site came up with the proof that neither the siege nor the battle of Massada had taken place. What do you think happened then? The myth of “Massada”, that shrine of the Jewish people’s and martyrs’ heroic resistance, became all the more steadfast! The same goes for “Auschwitz”.

Those with a long experience of the revisionist adventure have, it seems to me, the duty to warn newcomers that this adventure in which, obviously, nobody achieves honours or wealth, will sadly not end, one bright morning, in definitive victory.

Let us be wary of an artificial optimism. Let us be equally wary – it goes without saying – of an artificial pessimism. Let us avoid over-enthusiasm in the same way that we avoid moroseness. And up to our very analysis of revisionism itself, let us endeavour to be revisionists, that is to say, exact.

September 30, 1998