27 June 1996
Robert FAURISSON
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".