Paying Tribute to Jewish Power
'Ah, How Sweet It Is To
Be Jewish ...'
By Robert Faurisson
Robert Faurisson was educated at the Paris Sorbonne, and
served as a professor at the University of Lyon in France from
1974 until 1990. He was a specialist of text and document
analysis. His writings on the Holocaust issue have appeared in
four books and numerous scholarly articles, many of which have
appeared in this Journal.
Alain Finkielkraut is a professor of philosophy at France's elite
Ecole Polytechnique who for years has been a darling of a certain
section of the Parisian intelligentsia. In 1982, at the time of one
of my first trials for calling the Auschwitz gas chamber story a
historical lie, he revealed his concern about revisionism in a
muddled work entitled L'Avenir d'une négation ("The Future of
a Denial"). On the first page of this book he described me as being
"of the ilk of Big Brother," and on page 66 he wrote: "In terms of
method, the deniers of the gas chambers are the spiritual children of
the big Stalinists."
In 1987 I had a personal encounter with Finkielkraut in Paris'
Latin Quarter, when an anti-revisionist conference was being held at
the Sorbonne. Groups of young Jews were roaming the area, on the
lookout for potential revisionists. Finkielkraut was with one of
these groups. Together with three or four young Jews, he came into
the café where I happened to be. I greeted him with the words
"They're done for, your gas chambers!" a rash remark for which I was
to pay an hour later. But, at that moment, taken aback, he mumbled a
reply and quickly left the café with his friends.
Since then I have followed his activities. He has steadily made
something of a speciality of denouncing the "Jewish maximalism" of
such figures as Claude Lanzmann.
Last October, Finkielkraut wrote an essay defending Cardinal
Stepinac (1896-1960), who was being widely attacked for having
collaborated with Croatia's wartime "Ustasha" regime. The essay,
published in the leading French daily Le Monde, October 7,
1998 (p. 14), is entitled "Mgr Stepinac and Europe's Two Griefs"
("Mgr Stepinac et les deux douleurs de l'Europe"). In it Finkielkraut
defended both the late Cardinal's memory and the wartime Croatian
Roman Catholic Church. He recalled that, from 1941, the Church
defended the Jews against the Ustasha regime. Stepinac, he went on,
suffered personally as a victim of what he calls "Europe's two
griefs": Fascism and Communism.
But what especially catches the reader's attention are the essays
opening lines:
Ah, how sweet it is to be Jewish at the end of this 20th
century! We are no longer History's accused, but its darlings. The
spirit of the times loves, honors, and defends us, watches over
our interests; it even needs our imprimatur. Journalists draw up
ruthless indictments against all that Europe still has in the way
of Nazi collaborators or those nostalgic for the Nazi era.
Churches repent, states do penance, Switzerland no longer knows
where to stand ...
Obviously, it is "sweet" to be Jewish in these final years of the
century, but only a Jew has the right to say so. In effect, as
Finkielkraut acknowledges, it is no longer possible to publish
without the imprimatur of organized Jewry. In effect, I might add,
the Jew reigns unopposed.
Each year in France, the Interior Ministry and certain specialized
and generously subsidized agencies carefully note and tally every
incident in our country that might be regarded as anti-Semitic. Try
as they do to inflate their figures, the result is clear: practically
no anti-Semitic incidents can be detected in France.
If it is true that it is so sweet to be Jewish, then what right do
Jews have to complain of a (nearly non-existent) anti-Semitism, or to
demand, and obtain, ever harsher legal repression of revisionism,
which they have succeeded in identifying with anti-Semitism?
This same October 7 issue of Le Monde reports that Jean-Marie Le
Pen, leader of France's National Front party, must once again pay
dearly for having had the temerity, at a meeting in Munich in
December 1997, to state that the gas chambers are a detail of Second
World War history. [See "French Courts Punish Holocaust
Apostasy," March-April 1998 Journal, pp. 14-15.] The European
Parliament, by a huge majority, had just voted to suspend Le Pen's
parliamentary immunity. A German court may sentence him to five
years' imprisonment. In the European Parliament, German member Willy
Rothley, speaking for the Socialist faction, said that a goal of his
country's penal code is to "protect the young against falsifications
of history." He went on to warn: "If Mr. Le Pen does not answer the
summons of my country's courts, he will be imprisoned as soon as he
sets foot on German soil."
In Germany, repression has reached new heights. (Even Americans
traveling in Germany, or a neighboring country, can be thrown into a
German jail for revisionist felonies.) For the same offending remark,
Le Pen has been, and is again being, prosecuted in France. In 1991, a
French court ordered him to pay 1,200,000 francs (more than $200,000)
for his original "detail" remark, made in 1987. On the basis of an
emergency interim ruling of December 26, 1997, he is also currently
"under investigation" in Paris for his Munich "detail" remark. Thus,
for the same statement, he is being charged simultaneously in Munich
and in Paris.
Precisely a week after the publication of his Le Monde essay, in
which he conceded that Jews have nothing to complain about in France,
Finkielkraut had the chutzpah to appear as a witness in the Paris
Court of Appeal (11th chamber) to complain about the alleged threat
to French Jews posed by revisionists. On October 14 he testified
against Roger Garaudy, author of The Founding Myths of Israeli
Politics, and publisher Pierre Guillaume. Finkielkraut regarded
Garaudy an anti-Semite and a "Faurissonian." He declared his approval
of France's anti-revisionist "Fabius-Gayssot" law. The state,
Finkielkraut said, must punish hatred. (The first to call for the
introduction in France of an anti-revisionist law on the model of the
Israeli law of July 1981 was a group of Jewish historians including
Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Georges Wellers, united around
René-Samuel Sirat, Chief Rabbi of France [Bulletin
quotidien de l'Agence télégraphique juive, June 2,
1986, p. 1, 3]. This law, called the "Fabius-Gayssot Act," was
promulgated on July 13, 1990.)
Day by day, I follow with interest this mighty rise of Jewish
power. In my own modest way, I pay tribute to this power. Each month
I send my payment of 5,000 francs (about $900) to the "Paris Fines
Receiver," which collects the sums I am obliged regularly to hand
over for revisionism, that is to say, for having annoyed organized
Jewry.
I must constantly reckon with new charges and court battles.
In France, in Germany, in Palestine -- indeed, when one looks
closely, everywhere in the world, including Japan, it is prudent not
to offend, even indirectly or unwittingly, those who, like
Finkielkraut, can sigh: "Ah, how sweet it is to be Jewish at the end
of this 20th century!"
As for the rest of us, we do not even have the right publicly to
mutter: "Ah, how grievous it is not to be Jewish at the end of this
20th century!"
-- October 15, 1998
Reprinted from
The
Journal of Historical Review,
(Volume 17, number 6, November/December 1998)
The Journal of Historical Review:
P.O. Box 2739 , Newport Beach, CA 92659, USA. Subscription: $40 per
year (domestic).
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