27 June 1996
Robert FAURISSONA Victory for the Revisionists?
The front page of L'Événement du jeudi (The Thursday Event) (27 June to 3 July 1996 issue) shows a photo of abbé Pierre and the title says: "Holocaust: the Victory of the Revisionists". The gist of the feature articles is ten page long (p. 16-25); stuff on the same topic may also be found in some other pages (p. 3, 5, 10, 13).
All the articles are steadily hostile to the revisionists, who are never allowed to get a word in edgeways and whose statements are generally twisted or truncated.
According to the editor, the first victory for the revisionists is that they have in a way forced him to use the word "Revisionist" for the front page (instead of the word "Negationist" or "Denier") in order to make things quite clear.
It is admitted that the revisionists have been so successful that, in the camp of their opponents, "disarray compete with confusion" and "panick has gained the ranks of the democrats" (p. 23).
Simone Veil thinks that it is now time to rescind the Gayssot law (essentially an antirevisionist law). Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pierre-André Taguieff do not know anymore what to do. P. Vidal-Naquet who, in the past, charged me even in court, says: "I am willing to kill Faurisson but not to sue him in a court case" (*) and, about abbé Pierre, he sees only one solution: one must ridicule him, "make a caricature of him and delegitimate him". The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut "fumes" (sic) as much as P. Vidal-Naquet. Jean-François Kahn wonders what is the point for the medias in constantly accusing the revisionists: "What's the sense in this kind of wild witch hunting, this counter-McCarthyism consisting, twice a week, in unmasking, hunting down, chasing out another `revisionist' or `negationist'?" "Once a week", he adds, "the lynching [of a revisionist] is organized". J.-F. Kahn forgets he has been among those witch hunters.
"Great historians have been impressed by Faurisson", P.-A. Taguieff admits.
Our opponents are convinced that, for more than fifteen years, we have, Pierre Guillaume, his friends and myself, acted as clever strategists.
Reality is quite different: revisionists have accumulated discoveries. Those are their only true victories.
At least in France, we still cannot succeed in having a debate with the other side, neither can we express ourselves in the major medias. The very day L'Événement du jeudi was issued, announcing "the Victory of the Revisionists", the county court of Bordeaux sentenced the bookseller Jean-Luc Lundi, a father of eleven children, to a one month jail suspended sentence and a 5,000 F (1,000 $) fine for having put on display and sold revisionist books. Along with a five year probation, the court also ordered the destruction of the books seized by the police: i.e. fifty-two copies either of the AHR or of the remarkable RHR.
"And what if abbé Pierre was right?" The question just appeared on the walls in Paris on big posters with yellow block capitals on a black background. The censors of L'Événement du jeudi are shaken as much by this posting as by revisionists using the Net. They know that, for them, danger is coming today, on one hand, from abbé Pierre's influence and, on the other hand, from the power of the Net.
Next appointments at the XVIIth Chamber of the Paris Magistrate's Court (4, boulevard du Palais) for two cases based on the Fabius-Gayssot law:
- Tuesday 24 September 1996, at 1.30 p.m., against my lawyer Éric Delcroix for his book La Police de la pensée contre le révisionnisme (The Thought Police against Revisionism);
- Friday 15 November 1996, at 1.30 p.m., against myself because of my 19 April 1996 Press Release to the Agence France-Presse about the Garaudy/abbé Pierre affair; my last conviction was on 13 June 1995 for my book Réponse à Jean-Claude Pressac.
Those two books, both topical, may be ordered at: Diffusion R.H.R., B.P. 122, F-92704 COLOMBES Cedex (France).
(*) Interviewed in Paris on 14 December 1992 by a correspondent of the American National Public Radio station about my conviction of 9 December 1992, Pierre Vidal-Naquet had answered in English: "I hate Faurisson. If I could, I would kill him personally".