The victory of the revisionists?
The cover of this week’s L’Evénement du jeudi (The event of Thursday) bears a photo of abbé Pierre and the title: “Holocaust: the victory of the revisionists”. The gist of the dossier on the topic is ten pages long (p. 16-25), with other elements on a few more pages (3, 5, 10, 13).
All the articles are uniformly hostile to the revisionists. They are never given the opportunity to express themselves directly and the writings or statements attributed to them are, in general, distorted or truncated.
The editor explains that the revisionists’ first victory lies in making him use the word “revisionists” on the cover so as to have people clearly grasp what the subject is. “Negationist” or “Holocaust denier” would not have suited.
It is acknowledged that the revisionists have had such success that, in their opponents’ camp, “disarray is vying with confusion”, and “panic has gained the ranks of the democrats” (p. 23).
Simone Veil thinks the government must now repeal the Gayssot Act (an essentially anti-revisionist law). Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pierre-André Taguieff no longer know what to do.
Pierre Vidal-Naquet – the same man who, in the past, has indeed attacked me in the law courts – declares: “I am willing to kill Faurisson but not to take him to court”[1] and, on the subject of abbé Pierre, he sees but one solution: he has to be made ridiculous, “made a mockery of, delegitimised”. The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut “is fuming” (sic). Jean-François Kahn quizzes himself about the constant accusations made against the revisionists in the media: “What’s the sense in this outrageous sort of witch-hunting, this inverted McCarthyism consisting, twice a week, in unmasking, hunting down, flushing out another ‘revisionist’ or ‘negationist’?”, adding that “A [revisionist’s] lynching is organised every week”. “Some great historians have been shaken by Faurisson”, admits P.-A. Taguieff.
Our opponents are convinced that, for more than fifteen years, we have, Pierre Guillaume, his friends and myself, acted as shrewd strategists.
The reality of it is different: the revisionists have piled up discoveries. These are their only true victories.
For we still cannot manage, at least in France, to get a debate with the opposing side and make our voices heard in the big media. On the very day of release of this Evénement du jeudi announcing “the revisionists’ victory”, the criminal court of Bordeaux sentenced bookshop owner Jean-Luc Lundi, a father of eleven, to one month’s imprisonment (suspended) and a fine of 5,000 francs for display and sale of revisionist books. In addition to five years’ probation, the court also ordered the destruction of the books seized in his shop: i.e. fifty-two copies of the Annales d’histoire révisionniste or the Revue d’histoire révisionniste.
“And if abbé Pierre was right?” The question has just appeared, in Paris, on posters in yellow capitals on a black background. Our censors at L’Evénement du jeudi are disturbed by this posting on public walls just as much as by the revisionists’ use of the Internet.
They know that, for them, the danger comes at present from abbé Pierre’s influence, on the one hand, and from the power of the Internet on the other.
Next two appointments at the 17th chamber of the Paris criminal court for cases brought under the Fabius-Gayssot Act:
– Tuesday September 24, 1996 at 1.30 pm, against barrister Eric Delcroix for his book La Police de la pensée contre le révisionnisme (The thought police against revisionism);
– Friday November 15 1996 at 1.30 pm, against me for my communiqué of April 19, 1996 to the Agence France-Presse about the Garaudy / abbé Pierre affair; my latest conviction dates from June 13, 1995 for my book Réponse à Jean-Claude Pressac.
June 27, 1996
_________________
[1] Interviewed in Paris on December 14, 1992 by a correspondent of the American network NPR (National Public Radio) about my conviction in court five days earlier, Vidal-Naquet had stated in English: “I hate Faurisson. If I could, I would kill him personally”.