Robert Faurisson against the Kazharian Mafia to his last breath

by Jonas E. Alexis, Fredrick Toben, and Michael Hoffman

Michael Hoffman is the author of The Great Holocaust Trial: The Landmark Battle for the Right to Doubt the West’s Most Sacred Relic, which was banned by Amazon on August 13.

Fredrik Toben was born in Germany to a North German farming father and an Austrian mother in 1944. His parents emigrated to Australia at the end of 1954. He has a BA degree in English and German Literature and Philosophy from the University of Melbourne in 1969.  He studied Psychology and Economics at Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand.

Toben has a Ph.D. in philosophy (1974-77) from the University of Stuttgart. He completed his doctoral thesis on a comparison of philosopher CS Peirce’s principle of Fallibilism and Karl Popper’s theory of falsification. He has taught in New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Germany, Nigeria, and Victoria.

Jonas E. Alexis: Whatever you may want to say about the late Robert Faurisson, it should certainly be understood that he paid a huge price for standing against the Holocaust establishment, a vampire squid that wraps around the Western world, destroying any historical scholarship or inquiry about World War II in general and Nazi Germany in particular.

Do you want to ask important questions about gas chambers? Do you want to challenge the official narrative with counterarguments and serious evidence? Do you want people to respond to your arguments, doubts, and queries about Nazi Germany? Well, welcome to the anti-Semitic club.

Faurisson was called “the father of Holocaust denial” precisely because he did what people of reason should have done long ago: he challenged the Holocaust cult, the ideology which continues to suck the life out of anything that smells like serious historical scholarship. Noam Chomsky, to his credit, did not believe that Faurisson was an anti-Semite.  Chomsky declared then:

“Dr. Robert Faurisson has served as a respected professor of twentieth-century French literature and document criticism for over four years at the University of Lyon-2 in France. Since 1974 he has been conducting extensive historical research into the ‘Holocaust question.

“Since he began making his findings public, Professor Faurisson has been subject to a vicious campaign of harassment, intimidation, slander, and physical violence in a crude attempt to silence him. Fearful officials have even tried to stop him from further research by denying him access to public libraries and archives.

“We strongly protest these efforts to deprive Professor Faurisson of his freedom of speech and expression, and we condemn the shameful campaign to silence him. We strongly support Professor Faurisson’s just right of academic freedom and we demand that university and government officials do everything possible to ensure his safety and the free exercise of his legal rights.”

Chomsky was attacked by a number of Jewish academics for declaring that Faurisson had every right to pursue his academic research or historical inquiry. Chomsky again elaborated:

“Let me add a final remark about Faurisson’s alleged “anti-Semitism.” Note first that even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi — such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here — this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense of his civil rights.

“On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defense.

“Putting this central issue aside, is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read — largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him — I find no evidence to support either conclusion.

“Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort.”

I support Chomsky wholeheartedly here, for ideas should be refuted and rejected by counterarguments, empirical evidence, and intellectual honesty, not by harassing the person perpetuating those ideas.

Yet ever since World War II, the West has been inundated by ideological principles which stifle serious historical projects. If you want to disprove what your opponent is saying, all you have to do now is produce an ad hominem attack. French historian Valerie Igounet declared that Faurisson was an “anti-Semitic forger” who “lusted after scandal.”[1] And that settles the issue altogether!

In any event, Faurisson was not a violent man, even though he was beaten by a group called Sons of Jewish Memory way back in 1989. If conformist historians want us to take them seriously, then they need to stop producing ad hominem attacks on Faurisson and others and start responding to the serious issues.

Fredrick Toben: On Monday, 22 October 2018, the following message from France landed in my email box:

From: Faurisson Jean [mailto:faurisson.jean@orange.fr]

Sent: Monday, 22 October 2018 9:41 AM

Subject: Pr. Robert Faurisson is dead

I regret to inform you that my brother Robert passed away yesterday Sunday 21st of October at about 19:00h. Just as he entered through the door of his home in Vichy returning from a trip to his birthplace in Shepperton (UK), he collapsed presumably because of a massive heart stroke.

There had been meetings with friends which were interrupted twice violently by opponents of his views. A video from bocage-info here below shows. I was accompanying him on this occasion

His 90th birthday was due on 25th January next.

 >Message du 21/10/18 21:56

>De: “bocage info” <bocage-info@vtxnet.ch>

>A: “bocage info” <bocage-info@vtxnet.ch>

>Copie à :

>Objet : [RR] Dépêche No 161/18

>BOCAGE-INFO Le Professeur Faurisson donne une conférence dans sa ville natale.Une vidéo de Vincent >Reynouard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoFAjySwQ-Q

>Resistance Revisionniste — L’information doit rester libre.

 Best regards to everybody

Jean Faurisson

Robert Faurisson and a number of concerned European revisionist-nationalists had met in the English town of Shepperton for a conference, which an anti-racist hate group managed to sabotage by threatening the owner of the establishment, who quickly caved in and asked the conference organizers to vacate the premises. The video clip, which captures this event, speaks for itself.

Robert Faurisson, accompanied by his brother, Jean, on this trip to the UK for the conference, returned to his home in Vichy, then suffered a fatal heart attack. Admittedly, Robert was not in the best of health but the added stress of such a sabotage act must have drained him.

After all, his almost life-long legal court battles in matters “Holocaust” had taken their toll. Just in April 2018, he suffered a further defeat when a court hearing of the defamation action launched by Faurisson against Le Monde was found in the newspaper’s favor. The judgment followed the David Irving 2000 verdict that also found against Irving – branding him an “Antisemite”, “Holocaust denier” and a “Racist”. In Faurisson’s defamation loss he was, on 12 April 2018, declared to be a “professional liar” and a “falsifier of history”.

Earlier in 2007 Faurisson had lost a defamation action against French Justice Minister Robert Badinter, who had labeled Faurisson a “forger of history”, and well-known liar herself, US-based Professor Deborah Lipstadt, put the knife into Faurisson: “Believe me this man is nothing but a forger of history and a liar and an anti-Semite.”

Although such legal labeling would terminate anyone’s career – he was not dismissed from his university post until 1991 – Faurisson could smile at such a judgment’s folly. The very same newspaper had 40 years earlier given space to Faurisson’s thoughts by publishing an even then definitive essay: “The Problem of the Gas Chambers, or the Rumor of Auschwitz”. Perhaps this year’s legal judgment it was payback time for an “editorial mistake” so long ago.

Still, losing defamation actions merely reminded Faurisson of the nonsense statement published in Le Monde on 21 February 1979 and signed by 34 French historians:

It is not necessary to ask how, technically, such a mass murder was possible. It was possible technically since it took place. That is the necessary point of departure for any historical inquiry on this subject. It is our function simply to recall that truth: There is not, there cannot be, any debate about the existence of the gas chambers.

 In time such nonsensical statements would need to be tested in court, and when in 1984-5 the Toronto Zündel trial began, it was Faurisson who provided much of the ammunition that demolished Professor Raul Hilberg’s thesis as expressed in his book: The Destruction of the European Jews.

Hilberg became a witness for the prosecution, admitting among other things, that the Hitler order that began the extermination Holocaust did not exist, but which Hilberg had mentioned in his book. No wonder Hilberg refused to attend the second Holocaust trial that began in 1988 when the first trial’s guilty verdict was overturned on appeal and a new trial was set down. Hilberg refused to attend this second trial because it would be too stressful for him to answer trivial questions.

Prior to 1985, the world had been fed the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, which were anything but fair trials – outright victors’ justice were lying, cheating, torture, et al, ruled procedures. In May 1960 Adolf Eichman was kidnapped in Argentina and taken to Israel where, after a nonsense trial, he was hanged in 1962. Then followed the December 1963-August 1965 Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials where the foundations for the Holocaust religion were further smithied into legal form.

Also in 1985, as an act to counter the argument revealed during the 1985 Zündel trial, Claude Lanzmann made Shoah, the 9-hour long film, which took over a decade to make. The 1988 Zündel trial, at which the sensational Leuchter Report was tabled as forensic evidence, dented the Shoah film’s effect because it was the first time that in court a forensic report had been made to test the proposition that homicidal gas chambers existed at Auschwitz.

Following on from Lanzmann’s pioneering epic, Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was a sensation in itself. Unfortunately, however, by this time we had Adelaide Institute’s South Australian Associate tell a different version to what was depicted in Spielberg’s black-and-white film: David Brockschmidt’s father was involved in transporting in his trucks the Polish Schindler Jews to Auschwitz and beyond. For posterity’s sake, it must be acknowledged that Spielberg, in the shower scene, had a dramatic moment where naked Jewish women actually used showers that had water flowing from them.

Still, the film’s effect caused a frenzied reaction from those who had to date managed to cement the “Holocaust” narrative into legal concrete. In 1993 legal experts realized that the US Holocaust Museum would need further legal reinforcement to retain control of the “Holocaust” narrative, which Faurisson did not tire to point out had become a religion that must not be questioned.

On 13 July 1990, the Gayssot Law was enacted specifically to reign in Faurisson’s continued questioning of the existence or size of the category of crimes against humanity as defined in the London Charter of 1945, on the basis of which Nazi leaders were convicted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-46 (art.9).

The Holocaust proponents further felt deflated when in 1993 the Canadian Supreme Court dismissed Zündel’s 1988 conviction for “spreading false news”. It declared the law unconstitutional, and this legal defeat reverberated around the western world where matters Holocaust were fracturing and legally not protected.

Ten years earlier in Germany, in 1983, Judge Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich had his 1950s awarded doctorate in law revoked by his University of Göttingen. This sent a strong signal, especially to German academics, that matters Holocaust was off-limits and not up for debate. The religious dogma of the Holocaust gained firmer ground.  The Germans, like elsewhere in the world, did not enact and spell out specific “Holocaust denial” laws but softened the imprecise definition: “defaming the memory of the dead” – s130 of the Criminal Code.

Canada and Australia followed this trend of getting away from specific matters Holocaust and favored the highly charged emotional Human Rights approach in silencing Holocaust critics by enacting laws that attempt to protect individuals from hurt feelings generated by those “horrible Holocaust deniers”.

The peak of this legal thrusting we witnessed as an exact copy of Holocaust Human Rights legislation – where truth is no defense but where a hurt feeling settled the intellectual dispute of contrary opinions. The more emotional an accuser becomes the more it is guaranteed that action will succeed in court. Playing the victim has been developed to an absolute art form where truth has become totally irrelevant.

The global media, however, never tired of affixing to such legal judgments the terms “Holocaust denial”, “Antisemite”, “Hater”, “Nazi”, “Racist”, and even “Xenophobe”.

We witnessed this phenomenon in the recent US Congressional Supreme Court appointment hearings – where an accuser followed precisely the script developed by Holocaust survivors when making claims for reparations-revenge upon the German nation.

In the US case the accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, claimed Judge Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her some 30 years ago, while she was 14.5 and he was 16.5 years old. In her girlish-wimpish voice, she gave evidence, which was faithfully modeled on the typically full-blown emotional Holocaust survivor performance.

Fortunately for US President Trump’s endeavors of having Judge Kavanaugh appointed to the Supreme Court as a “conservative justice,” this emotional overload – of playing the victim card – did not fail to expose the serious contradictions and fabrications in Blasey-Ford’s evidence.

Likewise, Professor Robert Faurisson never tired of confronting individuals in his typical French rationalistic “naked” form, where emotional matters could not make physical facts and forensic evidence, disappear.

Faurisson was also one of the first to question the authenticity of The Diary of Anne Frank, again on forensic grounds. Some parts were written in ball-point pen and so could not have been written before the pen was invented in around 1951.

The legal battle continues for all those inspired by Robert Faurisson setting a personal example to all those who dare question any kind of orthodoxy, any belief system. I recall how in 1994 Professor Deborah Lipstadt came to Australia to talk about the Holocaust – and she signed for me her book: May Truth Prevail.

After her Melbourne talk, I rang Robert Faurisson and Ernst Zündel because some of the things she mentioned about the existence of the homicidal gas chambers contradicted what Faurisson and Zündel had been saying. Both reassured me that Lipstadt’s sophistry is exceptionally polished and emotionally charged so as to disconnect our critical faculties. This reassurance consisted of five words: The Story Keeps On Changing.

And so legally Faurisson was silenced, and now he has died, but the world is still waiting for someone to fulfill his numerous challenges. The most pressing one is this challenge: Show me or draw me the homicidal gas chamber at Auschwitz!

 Thank you Robert Faurisson for courageously standing your ground against those who are the real defamers, liars, and fabricators of history. You may have been legally defeated and paid a heavy price for standing your ground, and as Professor Arthur Butz also put it in his The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, one day the truth will emerge unhindered. And a big thank you to those who were a part of the close inner-core supporting and enabling Robert during his difficult challenges.

Michael Hoffman: French Professor Robert Faurisson died of heart failure at his longtime home in Vichy, France on October 21. His life was like something out of Alfred Jarry by way of André Breton, a surreal circus in which clowns and stage magicians, barkers, burlesquers, and fire-eaters, incessantly circled and mobbed the one sane person under the Big Top.

Faurisson’s sanity was an expression of his conscience and though an atheist, the historical parallels are unmistakable: Thomas More refusing on principle King Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn; Martin Luther rejecting submission to the commands of Emperor Charles V: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Faurisson could do no other. Compromise and surrender were not in his DNA. Above all, he admired men and women who would not recant their doubts in the face of the loss of a good name, bank account, career, freedom, and life itself.

Those who sneer at the professor for his “unforgivable” doubts about the existence of the holy execution gas chamber relic in Auschwitz, seldom deny that, with the exception of death, he suffered all of the other penalties for the “crime” of his skepticism. His enemies say that he merited those severities. They honor skepticism toward the dogmas they despise and despise skepticism toward the dogmas they honor. They have made a great saint of out Galileo and an evil cretin out of Faurisson. One need not be an “anti-Semite” to note the bankruptcy of this double standard.

 Faurisson’s Inspiration: Paul Rassinier

In the media’s search for the roots of Faurisson’s supposed “anti-semitism” and “neo-Nazism” (because no one can doubt The Holy Truth except anything other than impure motives), the name Paul Rassinier is seldom permitted to intrude on the cartoon-like demonization process. It was Rassinier who was Faurisson’s spiritual and intellectual mentor. A member of the anti-Nazi French resistance, he was arrested by the Nazis, brutalized, and interned in the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the war, Rassinier served briefly in the French National Assembly. In the 1950s he was deeply disturbed by what he regarded as unconscionable exaggerations of Nazi crimes, including claims of mass death by poison gas. He expressed his views in The Lie of Ulysses: A Glance at the Literature of Concentration Camp Inmates (1950), and The Drama of the European Jews (1964), among other works.

Faurisson’s study of Rassinier’s work led him to a passionate interest in his doubts and questions. To explain away this freethinking curiosity and healthy skepticism in terms of the pathology of Jew-hate is a cheap and pathetic trick. In the 1960s Rassinier admonished Faurisson, who was a dedicated amateur athlete, “Stop the tennis and the skiing and get to work.” And work he did, un travail de bénédictin, inspiring people on the Left and Right of all races and religions, from Henri Rocques and Roger Garaudy to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Dieudonné M’bala M’bala.

After obtaining his doctorate from the Sorbonne, Robert served as a Professor of French Literature at the University of Lyon, where he taught classes on the 19th-century symbolist poets such as Arthur Rimbaud, authenticated disputed texts, and became an authority on the misanthropic, 20th-century dystopian novelist, Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

Céline’s friend and factotum, Albert Paraz, the chemical engineer turned writer, penned an introduction to Rassinier’s Ulysses, which led Robert in 1980 to turn to a cache of Céline’s letters published by the distinguished Gallimard press in Paris as Lettres á Albert Paraz. In one of these, reproduced on p. 276 of the book, Céline wrote the following: “(Rassinier) tends to cast doubt on the magical gas chamber. That’s quite something!”

This is a seemingly minor observation, but Robert never forgot it and repeated it in one form or another throughout his life. Céline remains a towering presence in French literature and his early intuition that there was some fabulous superstition at the heart of the homicidal gas chamber allegations, led Faurisson to the actual gas chamber at San Quentin prison in California, where he contrasted the monumental gassing apparatus there, with its massive, submarine-like door, and extraordinary, hours-long measures for safely decontaminating the chamber, with the alleged gassing facility explained as having been in operation in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Robert considered the explanation for the supposed homicidal gas chambers in Poland “magical.” Céline’s witticism became part of his lexicon.

Faurisson entered the national scene in France in 1978 after its leading newspaper, Le Monde, published his incendiary essay, “The Problem of the Gas Chambers, or the Rumor of Auschwitz.” In the United States, this would be the equivalent of publication in the New York Times. Faurisson’s fate was sealed henceforth. He would either become the Doubting Thomas of Europe, or he would collapse and recant under the immense pressure and strain of the savage reaction of enraged true believers. As we know, he compounded his “heresy” further in the coming years and pressed onward with virile indifference toward the harassment and torment with which he was afflicted.

Faurisson and the Left

Though it is said by the fake news purveyors that he found a home on the extreme Right” (the New York Times of Oct. 22 writes, “His notoriety only grew through an endless cycle of articles in the far-right press”), Faurisson was promoted and published by a minority of notable Leftists as well, including Pierre Guillaume and Serge Thion, who welcomed his scholarship. His 1980 volume, Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’historie: la question des chambres de gaz, with a preface by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Noam Chomsky, was issued by the Marxist publishing house, La Vielle Taupe.

Why this support from some on the Left? They reasoned that the homicidal gas chamber genocide narrative serves to forever place every crime of capitalism in a trivialized and subordinate category. “No matter how many civilians the U.S. government killed in Iraq it can’t compare to what the Germans did to the Jews,” is the cliché. Certain Leftists consider the inculcation of this mindset a tactic for the perpetual minimization of the crimes of all other forces, in particular plutocracies and oligarchies. If the gas chambers said to have been used to execute a million human beings in Auschwitz were an imposture, then some on the Left believed it was necessary to say so.

Another of Robert’s friends and colleagues was Judaic-Austrian Ditlieb Felderer, an eccentric though brilliant forensic researcher who had been a refugee as a child in the Second World War. After obtaining residency in Sweden, Felderer as an adult converted to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He became a top researcher for them and was dispatched to study the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where Witnesses had been interned. He made more than a dozen trips, beginning in 1978, and took thousands of rare color photos of the museum’s “exhibits,” where he discovered to his shock, that many were fake. Felderer shared his research with Faurisson. (Felderer was excommunicated by the Witnesses for publishing his findings).

Attempting to force Faurisson into a political category to which he did not subscribe or belong, is a way of falsifying the reality that like Felderer, he was a pursuer of truth wherever it leads, and however, it may surprise or appall. Unjustly assigning to him a devotion to “far-Right” ideology is intended to buttress the propaganda that he had ulterior “Fascist” or “anti-Semitic” motives. This device was employed at its most asinine level on October 22 by one Ethan Epstein, associate editor of the neocon-Republican newspaper, The Weekly Standard, wherein Epstein hallucinated the following: “Faurisson took the usual Holocaust denial line: it never happened, but it should have. One of the ironies of Holocaust denial is that it is an allegedly ‘objective’ historical inquiry, yet is embraced exclusively by those with an animus towards Jews. That suggests that Holocaust deniers are fully aware that they are lying.”

Mr. Epstein puts forth enormities that we must accept on his authority: Prof. Faurisson believed Judaic people should have been exterminated. Everyone who denies that they were exterminated has “an animus toward Jews” and is “fully aware” that they were exterminated. This is the pattern of a carnival buffoon.

Zündel Trial, 1985

Confuting the “eyewitnesses” and the “expert”

Beginning in 1983, German-Canadian publisher Ernst Zündel came under intense pressure from the government of Canada for claiming that the crimes of the Nazis had been distorted out of all proportion to reality. In that year his right to mail literature was suspended by the government (he was forced to travel hundreds of miles from Toronto to Niagara Falls, New York to avail himself of a post office). In 1984 the government of Canada announced that Zündel would be prosecuted for “false news” for having published the booklet, Did Six Million Really Die? All the resources of the state were employed to assemble a formidable prosecution team consisting of “Holocaust survivor eyewitnesses,” and “one of the world’s leading experts on the Holocaust,” Dr. Raul Hiberg, author of the three-volume Destruction of European Jewry. The intent was to have Zündel imprisoned for two years.

The smart money put odds on Zündel being found guilty in a matter of days, his defense disgraced and debunked. After all, like the implanted meme says, “How can you deny the Holocaust?”

But that’s the wrong question to ask. Whether or not the fact of the mass murder of Judaic persons by the Nazis qualifies as planet earth’s only officially certified Holocaust™ is not the issue, it is rather a linguistic diversion—the product of the minting of an Orwellian neologism. The Soviets, Maoists, Protestants, Catholics, African animists, Aztecs, Conquistadors, Ottoman Turks, and Americans in Iraq, have all committed mass murder. The revisionist skeptic in actuality poses this question: was the murder of Judaics an unprecedented, mass chemical-industrial extermination employing poison gas?

If the answer is no, then there is very little that is unique about the Nazi mass murder. It is of the same barbarity as Soviet and Maoist massacres. Faurisson devoted his life to this question on scientific and technical grounds while doubting the official story, beginning with many of the principal fables upheld at the Nuremberg trials.

The odds-makers had it backward. The 1985 Zündel trial turned out to be an extraordinary overthrow of the pompous assumptions of the disciples of the Nazi gas chamber extermination dogma. The “eyewitnesses,” under expert cross-examination by Doug Christie, powered by Faurisson’s intricate knowledge and command of the facts, admitted that they had not seen what they had claimed to have seen. They confessed in court they had only heard rumors and seen nothing approaching a gassing. This was an astounding turnabout.

The chief witness for the prosecution, Prof. Hilberg, that giant of Holocaustianity, found himself debating Prof. Faurisson, through defense attorney Christie’s Faurisson-informed cross-examination. Robert sat at the defense table, regularly providing Christie with texts and documents which reduced Hilberg, the “authority” whose knowledge could not be questioned, to a quivering pile of self-contradictory nonsense, and simultaneous startling revelations (there is “no scientific evidence for the gassings” was one of his confessions). This writer reported the trial from the press gallery. The contest was one for the history books: the first debate on the homicidal gas chambers between a revisionist professor and a “Holocaust” professor, wherein the latter was defeated by the former, lending weight to the probability that the gassings’ imposture maintains credibility only in a vacuum where no contradictions, challenges or cross-examinations are permitted.

Faurisson was a man of the Enlightenment. He was no “hater.” While at Zündelhaus I remember sharing a snack with him and a couple of World War II German army veterans. Robert was talking and he paused to try and recall the name of Julius Streicher, the Nazi-era publisher in Germany of the infamous Jew-hating newspaper, Der Stürmer. He asked us, “Who was that man who wrote those disgusting things about the Jews?” There was no one at the table he was trying to impress or needing to deceive, just one American revisionist and two combat vets of the German military. He was at his ease. If it had been his custom to disparage Judaic people, he would have expressed it on that occasion as a matter of habit, or one of the other times I conversed with him or overheard his conversation out of camera and microphone range. On the contrary, this was the humane tenor of Robert’s private chats. The primitive antediluvians consumed by hatred for him made themselves believe that his soul was as shriveled as their own. They were wrong.

The 1985 Zündel trial will remain Robert Faurisson’s finest hour. He paid dearly for it. In 1989, at age 60, he was assaulted in a park near his home by what the New York Times on Oct. 22 described as “the Sons of Jewish Memory.” The Times reports without elaboration that he was “beaten.” In truth, Faurisson was severely beaten about the face and required reconstructive surgery. His attackers were not prosecuted. As soon as he was fully recovered, he was back on the barricades—becoming the Kafkaesque Man—always on trial, repeatedly prosecuted in dozens of cases in France for committing thought crimes and sacrilege against The Holy People (“offending the memory” etc.). He recounted to me his time in jail only in terms of the kindness and courtesy shown to him by his French-Muslim guards. He was more often fined than jailed. The financial toll was considerable. His life was in many respects impossible. Insults to his faithful wife, her expulsion from her Catholic choir, the reputational damage to his children and siblings—it was unending. Of course he became unemployable as a professor.

France’s “Faurisson Law”

In 1990, with him in mind, the French National Assembly passed the Faurisson law, otherwise known as the Fabius-Gayssot Act, criminalizing the expression of public doubts about the execution of gas chamber claims. There was a national law specifically legislated to gag one man!

After Robert was removed from his university professorship due to the enactment of Fabius-Gayssot, he challenged the legislation as a violation of his right to freedom of speech under the “International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” The “Human Rights Committee” upheld his condemnation, however, while the French courts ruled that the Gayssot Act was constitutional. This was from a nation that had criminalized Calvinist and Huguenot theology in the 16th and 17th centuries, and then turned around and made Catholic theology a capital offense in the late 18th century. It seems that in France the inquisitor’s ignominy is ineradicable. No wonder then that when Muslims are sanctimoniously lectured about their “misplaced” rage over blasphemy against Mohammed, they respond by wanting to know how it is that Faurisson’s “blasphemy” of the gas chambers is illegal in France while attacks on their Prophet are protected speech.

L’Affaire Garaudy/Abbé Pierre

By December of 1995 Faurisson’s research had become the basis for the celebrated French intellectual Roger Garaudy’s 1995 book, Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne (“The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics”; caveat: the second edition, published in March 1996 is self-censored). Garaudy feared citing Faurisson by name as the source for major portions of his book. This tactic did him little good. It was obvious to the enemies of freedom that Garaudy’s source was Faurisson’s published work. The Zionists and their media were exceedingly alarmed by this development, given Garaudy’s standing in French letters. He became the target of the usual libel and harassment. Their panic grew when an illustrious Catholic joined the fray.

In early 1996 the elderly Abbé Pierre, founder of the acclaimed philanthropic “Emmaus movement” and the among the most heralded and esteemed of Catholics in France, boldly came to Garaudy’s defense. It was a remarkable moment. This monk dared to say that the number of deaths at Auschwitz had been exaggerated and that there should be a debate on the question of the existence of Nazi homicidal gas chambers. Abbé Pierre informed the publication La Croix: “No longer to be able to speak a word about Jewish affairs across the millennia without being called an anti-Semite is intolerable.” In the newspaper Liberation, he was quoted as saying that after he offered support for Garaudy’s position, he had seen at the Brussels airport people coming spontaneously to meet and encourage him; he stated that these people told him: “Thank you for having the courage to challenge a taboo.” He added that he hoped, “People will no longer let themselves be called anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic for saying that a Jew is singing out of tune!”

Alas, his bravado was met with such a hurricane of hysteria that it wasn’t long before Abbé Pierre was compelled to leave France and go into hiding in an Italian monastery. He declared to the newspaper Corriere Della Serra, “The Church of France has…intervened so as to silence me through the pressure of the media, motivated by an international Zionist lobby.” A lynch mob atmosphere led to Abbé Pierre eventually requesting mercy by taking back his words and asking to be free from relentless harassment. He wrote:

“Anxious to Live the Truth, free of any duress, seeing my words relating to the works of Roger Garaudy, especially the book Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne…I have decided to retract my words, referring the matter entirely to the opinions of the Church experts; and, asking pardon of those whom I may have offended, I wish to leave it to God to be the sole judge of the rectitude of everyone’s intentions.”

Dr. Faurisson had been engaged with the storm of controversy swirling around Garaudy and the Abbé from early 1996, when Garaudy’s publisher had privately entreated him for documents and other evidence whereby Garaudy, whose contingency planning prior to publication of his book had been inadequate at best, could defend his thesis.

It is worth quoting at some length Robert’s analysis of the affair, beginning with the sorry spectacle of the Abbé ’s capitulation: “He thus retracted his words. He confessed his sins. He begged the world’s pardon and went to the point of describing himself as being ‘free of any duress.’…Later, he would say to Professor Léon Schwartzenberg: ‘I ask your pardon (Le Figaro, August 22, 1996). Later still he would choose a means typical of the media to try to obtain the pardon of the Jews and a return to grace with the press. In the issue of Faits & Documents (Facts and Documents]) of October 15, Emmanuel Ratier wrote: ‘Abbé Pierre has truly made his teshuva (Jewish penitence) regarding his support for Roger Garaudy.

“…The Garaudy/Abbé Pierre affair has created the usual witch-hunt climate maintained by the media in general and the newspaper Le Monde in particular. Over the past several months, all sorts of other ‘affairs’ of the same kind have followed on the heels of one another in France, in which the victims have been suspected of having committed the mortal sin of revisionism. Let us cite, by way of example, the case of Olivier Pernet, Professor of Philosophy in Lyon, of Marc Sautet, a promoter of philosophy cafés, that of Raymond Boudon and Bernard Bourgeois, members of the French Society of Philosophy, that of Noelle Schulman, teacher of physical chemistry at a college in the Yvelines…

“Nevertheless, on September 2nd and 3rd, Le Nouveau Quotidien (de Lausanne), published a well-informed study of revisionism in the light of the Garaudy and Abbé Pierre cause célèbre. The author J. Baynac confirmed that the revisionists, whom he called ‘negationists,’ had plenty of reason to rejoice over this scandal which had ‘changed the atmosphere in their favor.’ He noted that, as for the adversaries of the revisionists, ‘disarray has given over to consternation’…and that, since the beginning of ‘the Faurisson affair’ in 1978-1979, historians had preferred to opt-out: they ‘have scattered.’

“…Baynac considered that, in order to prove the existence of the Nazi gas chambers, they had depended too heavily on witnesses, something which was ‘ascientific.’ As for scientific proof, he recalled the statement by Jewish-American historian Arno Mayer in 1988: ‘Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable.’ Then, going even further, he said that it was necessary to have the frankness to recognize that on the matter of documents, traces, or other material evidence proving the existence of the said gas chambers, there was quite simply… nothing!”

Concerning Garaudy and Abbé Pierre, Faurisson, a seasoned veteran of the brutal Zionist war on free-thinking, added this trenchant and indeed profound observation: “Two octogenarians who believed that they knew about life and men, discovered suddenly with the surprise of children that their past existence had actually been, on the whole, rather easy. Both of them over the space of a few days had had to withstand an exceptional trial: that which Jewish organizations inflict as a matter of course on individuals who have the misfortune of provoking their wrath. There is in this, on the part of these organizations, neither plot nor conspiracy, but something in the order of ancestral reflex. The media, which are devoted to them and would have to pay dearly were they to do anything contrary to their wishes, know how to mobilize against the ‘anti-Semites,’ which is to say against persons who, with some exceptions, do not hate the Jews, but are hated by them.”

Faurisson and Revisionism in Iran

A decade later, in December 2006, Prof. Faurisson’s research had obtained so great a reception in the Islamic Republic of Iran that a World War II revisionist history symposium was hosted by that nation, led by Robert. It was a great success and made headlines around the world. In 2012 Faurisson achieved the unimaginable, being the first revisionist historian ever to be honored by a head of state, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, conferred upon him a medal for his “courage, resistance and fighting spirit.” More recently Dr. Faurisson was discovered by a new generation of the young French avant-garde, among them internationally known African-French satirist and comedian, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala.

French people are sometimes viewed as complicated, difficult, humorless, and prolix. But when the peculiar genius of the French manifests, it does so in a spectacular burst of defiant individualism personified by men I have dubbed the “The Four Musketeers” of the modern age: Antonin Artaud, L.F. Céline, Marcel Lefebvre, and Robert Faurisson.

There is a streak in the French national character that caused Le Monde to prominently publish Faurisson’s doubts in 1978, something that would have been nearly impossible in the New York Times, or any other major American newspaper. Robert garnered allies from elite ranks of French society: the aforementioned Pierre Guillaume and Serge Thion, and Henri Rocques, whose Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Nantes in 1985 challenged the claims of gas chambers in Belzec; Bernard Notin, Prof. of Economics at the University of Lyon; this writer’s French publisher, Jean Plantin, and others who shall for the present remain anonymous. Despite draconian laws, revisionism in France (prejudicially termed “negationisme”), has what Thomas Molnar termed “sociological presence,” perhaps more so than in any other country, including Britain and America. Faurisson did not achieve this alone, but it would not have been possible without him. Moreover, throughout the world the scholars and activists he has influenced and inspired are innumerable.

While in full command of his mind and body, for the better part of Robert’s last days on earth he was visiting his birthplace in Shepperton, England, where he gave a speech amid some seventy friends and well-wishers, after which he returned to his home in France, where he died peacefully and painlessly. What a tribute to him from that God in whom he did not believe.

First published in October 2018.

Robert Faurisson, 1929-2018. Requiescat in pace.

[1] “Robert Faurisson, a father of the Holocaust denial movement, dies at 89,” Times of Israel, October 22, 2018.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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