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4. JHR Volume 21

Open Season on Revisionists

Robert Faurisson

[Dr. Faurisson wrote this article some eight months ago. While some of the legal circumstances have changed (as the preceding article makes clear), his description of the continuing persecution of revisionists in France, Switzerland, and elsewhere in Europe has lost none of its freshness, acuity, or defiance. — Editor]

This very day, Serge Thion is being tried in Paris, while Vincent Reynouard answers a summons to appear before an examining magistrate in Limoges. I myself have been notified by Michel Favre, an examining magistrate in Fribourg (Switzerland), of his finding that I am guilty of violating Switzerland’s anti-revisionist law by writing a revisionist article. He has sentenced me to one month’s imprisonment without bail. My article had appeared in a booklet published in August 2000 by the society Vérité et Justice (CP 355, CH 1618 Châtel Saint Denis, Switzerland). The society’s three leaders currently face legal proceedings which will allow them to be heard in court.

As for me, I received no word whatsoever that I was being prosecuted. The examining magistrate neither warned me nor informed me. He didn’t send me a summons; he didn’t question me. What he did do, if I may say so, was to convict me by mail. Some will be astounded by this. They don’t know that when it comes to suppressing those who anger Jewish or Zionist organizations, trust, and law, and justice no longer matter. Those who have been designated “Holocaust deniers,” “war criminals,” “criminals against humanity,” or even “Palestinian terrorists” by these organizations have learned this to their cost.

Our Fribourg judge strikes me as less deceitful than such French justices as Simone Rozès, Pierre Drai, or Françoise Simon, who notify me, summon me to appear, pretend to listen to me, and convict me, no matter what arguments I make in my defense. Tomorrow, I shall inform Michel Favre by registered letter that I shall not appeal his ruling; I am ready to surrender to the Canton of Fribourg to serve my sentence. Were I naive enough to challenge his decision before a Swiss court, I would receive the same treatment as Swiss revisionists in the past: first, I would be told that mounting a revisionist defense would violate the law anew; thus my counsel could only raise legalistic quibbles, and plead mitigating circumstances; finally, any witness who testified on the heart of the case, historical accuracy, would, at the urging of the prosecution, be charged immediately. I would then be sentenced to twelve or fifteen months in prison, and my fines and costs would be considerable. To avail myself of the protection of my French nationality doesn’t even bear considering: French authorities, in their attempts to please the Grand Sanhedrin, would cooperate with Switzerland against me, as they did with a Dutch court in my Anne Frank case. Besides, I no longer have the time, the money, or the strength to compete in these unwinnable judicial marathons.

In Switzerland as in France, and a good number of other countries in the world, Jewish organizations have, through constant pressure, obtained the passage of special laws providing for the prosecution of those who don’t believe in the kosher version of the history of the Second World War, with its genocide of the Jews and its Nazi gas chambers (not to be confused with the crematory ovens, the existence and usefulness of which, in camps ravaged by epidemics, are contested by no one). The Fabius-Gayssot Act of July 13, 1990, provides for a prison term of from one month to a year, a fine of from two to three hundred thousand francs, and still other penalties against skeptics in France (it is a violation of this law merely to express doubt). An identical law has oppressed Switzerland since 1995. Needless to say, these laws are insolently labeled “anti-racist” by their authors and enforcers.

For the reader’s information, I should note here that, like my other revisionist articles, the piece that earned me today’s conviction was inspired by the sixty-word sentence that I uttered during an interview with Ivan Levaï on the Europe 1 radio network in December 1980:

In the jargon of our so-called examining judge in the land of the “glacious Swiss” (Céline: Suisses glacieux), “a favorable prognosis cannot be posited.” He means that no penance or repentance can be expected from me. Here for once is a clear-sighted judge! He must know that ten physical assaults and a stream of court convictions, writs of seizure, a recent police search of my house, banning from my profession, torrents of slander in the national and foreign press (particularly Le Monde, the oblique daily) have only strengthened me in my determination, especially because, in terms of scientific argumentation, we are still right where we were on February 21,1979, when a “historians' declaration” published in the self-same newspaper amounted to a declaration that there was no one who could answer me on the subject of the Nazi gas chambers.

I shall continue my revisionist intifada all the way to prison.

19 June 2001

NB: In Lyon, so virulent has been the campaign that Jewish organizations are waging against the Universities of Lyon II and III that the officials of those institutions, one after another, have groveled before them, in a display of the most shameful servility. Thus revisionist scholar Jean Plantin has been summoned by the president of the University of Lyon III to reappear before the jury which, eleven years ago, awarded him the mention “très bien” for his master’s thesis on Paul Rassinier. The Jewish groups, and those who follow their lead, are demanding that the thesis be invalidated — and thus the degree. In so doing, the president has cited no law, rule, or administrative regulation. Nothing finer was ever devised in the Kingdom of the Absurd.

Recently, Jean-Louis Berger lost his right to teach high school, and Serge Thion was expelled from the CNRS (Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique).

Registered letter addressed to Michel Favre

I was never notified, either by you or any other Swiss authority of your country, of the initiation of the proceedings against me. I see that, in the secrecy of your chambers, without having heard me, you have just sentenced me to a month in prison without bail and ordered me to pay 230 Swiss francs in “court costs.”

Your penal order of June 15, 2001, was delivered to me yesterday, June 19. I am ready to surrender to the Canton of Fribourg to serve my sentence. You must inform me as quickly as possible of the place and date of my incarceration.

I would like, if possible, to see your face.

Robert Faurisson

Vichy, Wednesday, June 20, 2001

About the author

Robert Faurisson is Europe’s foremost Holocaust revisionist scholar. Born in 1929, educated at the Sorbonne, Professor Faurisson taught at the University of Lyon from 1974 until 1990. Specializing in close textual analysis, Faurisson won widespread acclaim for his studies of poems by Rimbaud and Lautréamont. After years of private research and study, Faurisson revealed his skepticism of the “Holocaust” gas chambers in articles published in 1978 and 1979 in the French daily Le Monde. He has written numerous articles on all aspects of the “Holocaust,” many of which have appeared in this journal. A four-volume collection of many of his revisionist writings, Écrits Révisionnistes (1974-1998), was published in 1999.