Ecrits révisionnistes (1974-1998) BY ROBERT FAURISSON Chapter 5: REVISIONISM'S SUCCESSES AND FAILURES

In 1998, an appraisal of the revisionist enterprise could be briefly put as follows: a sparkling success on the historical and scientific front (where our opponents capitulated in 1996) but a failure on the front of communication (our opponents have sealed off all access to the media except, for the time being, the Internet).

In the 1980s and at the beginning of the 90s, antirevisionist authors had attempted to cross swords with the revisionists on the terrain of historical science. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Nadine Fresco, Georges Wellers, Adalbert Rückerl, Hermann Langbein, Eugen Kogon, Arno Mayer, Serge Klarsfeld, each in turn tried to have the media believe that answers to the revisionists material or documentary arguments had been found. Even Michael Berenbaum, even the Holocaust Memorial Museum, in 1993 and in early 1994, wanted to pick up the gauntlet which I had thrown down and try to show just a single Nazi gas chamber, just a single proof of their own choosing that there had been a genocide of the Jews. But their failures were so stinging that thereafter they had progressively to abandon the fight on that turf. Quite recently, in 1998, M.Berenbaum has indeed published (with Abraham J.Peck) a fat book entitled The Holocaust and History(19) but in it, precisely, far from studying what he calls the Holocaust on the historical level (A.Mayer's express purpose in his 1988 work) he instead unintentionally shows us that the Holocaust is one thing and History quite another. The work, moreover, is quasi-immaterial, presenting neither photographs, nor drawings, nor the least attempt to represent physically any reality whatever. Only the dust jacket offers a view of a heap of shoes. These are reputed to possess a certain graphic eloquence, as at the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum where they tell us, supposedly: We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses. The book is merely a compilation of fifty-five contributions written and published under the watchful eye of Rabbi Berenbaum: in it even Raul Hilberg, even Yehuda Bauer, even Franciszek Piper abandon the idea of any real effort at scientific research, and the anathema is pronounced against Arno Mayer who, in the recent past, has tried to put the Holocaust back into the realm of history(20). The irrational has won out in the face of attempts at rationalisation. E.Wiesel, C.Lanzmann, Steven Spielberg (with a film, Schindler's List, inspired by a novel), have in the end triumphed over those in their own camp who used to try to prove the Holocaust.

In future years hindsight will let it be observed that it was in September 1996 that the death knell sounded for the hopes of those who had wanted to combat revisionism on historical and scientific grounds. The two long articles then put out by the antirevisionist historian J. Baynac in a Swiss daily definitively closed the chapter of attempts at a rational response to the revisionists arguments(21).

In the mid- and late 1970s, I offered my own contribution to the development of revisionism; I discovered and formulated what has since come to be known as the physical and chemical argument, that is, the physical and chemical reasons why the alleged Nazi gas chambers were quite simply inconceivable. At the time, I commended myself for having brought forth into the world a decisive argument which, until then, had never been expounded either by a German chemist (Germany is not short of chemists) or an American engineer (the United States has engineers who, given the forbidding complexities involved in the making of an American penitentiarys gas chamber, ought to have realised that the alleged Nazi gas chambers were, because of certain physical and chemical realities, impossible to produce). If, at that period, amidst the fracas prompted by my discovery, a clairvoyant had predicted that, twenty years on, in about 1994 or 1996, my adversaries, after many attempts to show that I was wrong, would, as J.Baynac has done, resign themselves to acknowledging that, in the end, there existed not the least evidence with which to prove the reality of a single Nazi gas chamber, I should surely have rejoiced. And I should perhaps have concluded that the myth of the Holocaust could never survive such a direct hit, that the media would then quit the employ of the Great Lie and that, quite naturally, the antirevisionist repression would disintegrate all by itself.

In so reckoning I should have committed an error both of diagnosis and of prognosis.

For superstitious belief lives of another spirit than that of science. It makes its own way in the world. The province of religion, of ideology, of illusion, of the media, and of fictional cinema can evolve at a certain remove from scientific realities. Even Voltaire never succeeded in crushing the vile foe. It might thus be said that, like Voltaire denouncing the absurdities of the Hebraic tales, the revisionists are doomed, despite their works scientific nature, never to carry the day against the wild imaginings of the Synagogue, while the Synagogue, for its part, will never succeed in stifling the voices of the revisionists. The Holocaust and Shoah-Business propaganda will continue to flourish. Today it remains for the revisionists to show how this belief, this myth came to be born, to grow, and to flourish before, perhaps, disappearing to make way, one day, not for reason but for other beliefs and other myths.

How are men deceived, and why do they deceive themselves so readily?