2. Miscellaneous
3. Revisionism around the world

Revisionism in Iran, in France and in the World

by Robert Faurisson

With his recent statements on “the myth of the Holocaust,” the president of Iran has given new momentum to the development of historical revisionism, as is made plain by the following exchange between the Managing Director of the Neda Institute of Political Sciences (Teheran) and the author.

Professor Robert Faurisson
[France]

December 26, 2005

Dear Dr Sharbaf,

I heartily thank you for your message and your proposal concerning the organisation of an international revisionist conference. In November of 2000 I had the honour of being a guest for a week in Teheran at the invitation of an Iranian government agency. On that occasion, I made the acquaintance of your Institute where I was welcomed by Dr Soroush-Nejad and a group of professors, one of whom was then finishing the Persian translation of my Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire (1980). For these last five years, during which we have maintained contact, I have noted that your country’s political heads have been reluctant to denounce the lie of the alleged “Holocaust” of the Jews, a lie whose ravages, wrought for more than half a century now, and to the particular detriment of the Palestinian people, are a disaster that worsens from year to year. I was hoping that one day a high government official would have the courage to put it plainly to the world that that “Holocaust” was but a legend or a myth. On December 8, 2005, — a date that will be remembered — the President of your country, Mr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, — a name that will go down in history — dared to voice doubts on the historical reality of the alleged “Holocaust”. On December 12, he spoke of it as a “myth”. Moreover, he spoke in defense of the revisionists’ right to express themselves freely. On December 22, in Egypt, the general guide of the Moslem Brothers, Mohamed Mehdi Akef, also used the word “myth” in that regard but not without retracting in part two days later, potent and intimidating as that myth is. On December 23, an Iranian official, Mohamed-Ali Ramin, head of the association for the defense of the rights of Moslem minorities in the West, declared that your President wished to see the European governments let academics in their countries publish the results of their research into the “Holocaust”.

On November 1^st, unanimously and without a vote, the representatives of the 191 countries constituting the UN adopted an Israeli-drafted resolution proclaiming January 27^th “International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust”. Moreover, this text “Rejects any denial of the Holocaust as an historical event, either in full or part”. Thus are targeted all those who, like the revisionists, demand a re-examination of the evidence and testimonies on which the argument of the alleged “Holocaust” of the Jews is based. In the main, the upholders of that argument affirm that, during the Second World War, the Germans 1) had a policy of physical extermination of the Jews; 2) had designed, built and used great slaughterhouses for humans called gas chambers (not to be confused with the crematory ovens, which had nothing criminal about them) and 3) caused, by this means and others, the death of six million Jews.

The proposition was adopted through a sleight of hand that I have described in a text of which you are aware entitled “The UN Decides a Universal Ban on Revisionism”.

The accusation brought by the Jews against the German people constitutes a slander. Marked with the sign of Cain, that people has thus far had no other recourse than to lose itself in contrition for a crime that it never committed. Sixty years after the war, Germany is still in a state of subjection and has not yet had the right to a peace treaty. The German (and Austrian) leaders ceaselessly ask the Jews’ forgiveness and lay out colossal financial “reparations” to Jewish or Zionist organisations and the State of Israel. For sixty years, those countries’ rulers have lived in dread of arousing the Jews’ wrath; consequently they can be seen stifling any sign of historical revisionism. In Germany, in Austria but also in a good many other countries in Europe, the Jews have succeeded in getting special laws passed serving to protect their own version of the history of the Second World War from any challenge.

The imposture of the “Holocaust” is the sword and shield of the Jewish State, its no. 1 weapon. It enables the Jews and Zionists to indict the whole world: first Germany which, according to it, committed an abominable and unprecedented crime, then the rest of the world which had let that crime be committed. The Jewish extremists and the Zionists have gone on to charge Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman, Stalin, De Gaulle, Pope Pius XII, the International Committee of the Red Cross as well as all the countries that took part in the Second World War and even all the neutral countries, beginning with Switzerland. Each is accused of having been indifferent to the tragedy and of having let the Jewish people be exterminated as alleged!

So it is that in taking a position today against the lie of the “Holocaust,” Iran happens to be defending not only Palestine and the Arabo-Moslem world but also an entire part of the human race against a gigantic slander, blackmail, and extortion operation.

You inform me that, thanks to President Ahmadinejad, the occasion may finally have arisen to envisage the holding of an international conference on revisionism.

You surely know that the revisionists were, in 2001, preparing to hold such a conference in Beirut from March 31 to April 2 of that year. But Israeli and American pressures became so threatening that Lebanese President Rafik Hariri had to forbid the gathering. We should therefore be happy to turn to President Ahmadinejad and request his help in holding a conference in your country. However, in view of the circumstances, such a project seems, sad to say, unrealisable at this moment. Allow me to explain why.

At present the main revisionists who, in 2001, would have participated in the Beirut conference are either in prison, in exile or in a precarious situation that forbids them from crossing national borders and from boarding a flight at an international airport.

We may take the appalling case of Ernst Zündel. Married to an American lady and living peacefully in the State of Tennessee, he was arrested outside his house on February 5, 2003 and thrown in jail under a pretext made of lies. Then he was delivered to Canada where, for two years, he languished in degrading conditions of solitary confinement in a high-security prison. Finally, he was handed over to Germany, where he is now in prison (in Mannheim) awaiting trial for revisionism. In Canada, as in Germany, revisionists are deprived of the right to defend themselves. In those countries, when a man accused of revisionism stands before a judge, the latter begins, in line with the routine, by having him swear to tell the truth. But if, in the following minute, the accused says, for example: “I affirm that the alleged Nazi gas chambers did not exist because the truth — which I can well demonstrate — is that they could not exist”, the judge will interrupt him immediately. The Canadian judge will tell him: “Before this special court [christened ‘Human rights tribunal’] truth is no defence”. As for the German judge, he will tell him: “You have not the right to challenge obvious facts of common knowledge (‘offenkundig’).” Thus neither the revisionist in question nor his lawyers can present a defense on the merits of the case. In Canada, judge Pierre Blais, presiding alone without a jury over proceedings against Ernst Zündel admitting of no appeal, the special court went so far as to examine anonymous witnesses in closed session. Then, in Mannheim, the chief judge dismissed in succession the four lawyers whom Ernst Zündel had chosen, and this because he suspected them of revisionism.

Still in the United States, near Chicago, the German citizen Germar Rudolf was recently kidnapped in the same style, torn from his American wife and their child and delivered to Germany; he is in prison in Stuttgart.

The Belgian Siegfried Verbeke was arrested last summer at Amsterdam airport and handed over by the Netherlands to Germany; he is in prison in Heidelberg.

The British historian David Irving was arrested in November while travelling in Austria and is now in prison in Vienna.

These four persons risk being sentenced to years of imprisonment, except perhaps David Irving if, as his lawyer lets it be understood that he will do, he retracts, shows repentance and pleads for the court’s leniency.

Other revisionists are in prison in Germany or Austria, notably the barrister Manfred Roeder, the school headmaster Ernst G. Kögel and the chemist Wolfgang Fröhlich.

Germany has become Israel’s “Guantanamo Bay” by the intermediary of a sort of judicial and police mafia that, in the United States and Canada, lashes out at revisionists (and at certain Arabs or Moslems) within the so convenient framework of the “fight against terrorism.”

In Switzerland the revisionists Gaston-Armand Amaudruz (aged 84) and René-Louis Berclaz have recently got out of prison, but might well return there.

Some important revisionists are living in exile in difficult conditions. I shall refrain here from naming either them or the countries where they have found refuge.

There remains the case of those revisionists who are neither in prison nor in exile. Their existence is hardly more enviable. The police harass them, the courts convict them. To speak only of France, Jean Plantin (prosecuted in Lyon), Vincent Reynouard (prosecuted in Limoges) and Georges Theil (prosecuted in Grenoble, Limoges and Lyon) have been or are currently under diverse sentences, including that of imprisonment without remission. Bruno Gollnisch, member of the European parliament, is to be summoned before a court in Lyon simply for having said that he wished historians could express themselves freely on the problem of the Nazi gas chambers’ existence! I myself am to appear on June 20, 2006 at the 17^th chamber of the Paris criminal court for having given a telephone interview of revisionist substance to the Iranian television channel “Sahar”; charges were brought by Mr Dominique Baudis, president of the Conseil Supérieur de l’audiovisuel.

Fredrick Töben, an Australian national of German origin, had developed his revisionist activity in Australia and on the Internet. While travelling in Germany and seeking to inquire at the source about judicial repression of revisionism in that country, he soon found himself in prison there. Now back in Australia, he has been hit with a “gag order”, that is, he is in principle bound to silence on pain of summary conviction for contempt of court.

In Poland, the Czech republic, and other countries of Europe, revisionists are also prosecuted and convicted.

In Sweden, Ahmed Rami carries on with indomitable courage a struggle for both Islam and revisionism, which has earned him time in prison.

In Germany, the number of publications burned by the police because of revisionism is not officially known but it might be considerable. Likewise in Canada.

I shall not relate here the revisionists’ exclusions from professions of all sorts in various countries or the family tragedies and suicides provoked by the repression. In Munich on the 25^th of April 1995 the revisionist Reinhold Elstner burned himself to death as a protest, as he had written, against “the Niagara of lies” poured upon his people. The mainstream German press passed his heroic act over in silence and the police there, doing as ordered, confiscated the bouquets of flowers laid at the site of that sacrifice and proceeded to question those who, by that gesture of compassion, had shown their own anguish. In France, armed Jewish groups use violence with impunity even in the halls of the central courthouse in Paris. Personally, between 1978 and 1993, I suffered ten physical assaults on the part of Jews who, however, were never tried.

If the Jews and Zionists use physical violence and judicial repression in this way, it is because, on the level of scientific and historical argumentation, the revisionists have beaten them hands down. The drama of it for the Jews and Zionists is that they have been lying and that this fact is becoming known more and more. Certain Jews and even certain Israelis seem to be conscious of this. A minute few have had the courage to declare their scepticism concerning the reality of the “Holocaust” whereas others have been content to speak out against “the Holocaust religion,” “the Holocaust industry” or the “Shoah business.”

In conclusion, I think that, until things have changed somewhat, an international conference is, unfortunately, impossible. But, in accord with an idea put forth by professor Arthur Robert Butz, I shall say that we hope to see President Ahmadinejad create in Iran an international centre for revisionist studies whose first task would be to propagate historical revisionism’s attainments in the Arabo-Moslem world via the Internet or any other medium. Meanwhile, we request that Iran make repeated appeals to the Western world for the freeing of our prisoners of conscience.

In any case, we for our part consider that as long as in the United States, Canada, nearly all of Europe and as far away as Australia the revisionists are subjected either to special laws or tribunals, underhanded police procedures, or methodical vilification by media in the service of certain Jewish or Zionist pressure groups, the Western world will have ever less right to impose lessons of lawfulness, morality or democracy on others.

Yours respectfully,

Robert Faurisson