The American government considers itself in a state of
worldwide war against what it calls international terrorism.
The Americans went to war with Iraq because, according to
them, Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction
that threatened the United States. In support of that charge
they have not, thus far, provided any real evidence but
instead only fallacious displays.
Some
observers think this absence of real evidence must be
embarrassing both for the White House and for those who, in
the international community, have chimed in with George W.
Bush and Tony Blair to assure us that Saddam Hussein had
such weapons. Those observers are mistaken. They are unaware
of the history of war propaganda; on this subject they ought
to consult the revisionist authors. Then they would learn
that, for the public at large, the best proof of the
existence of those weapons is precisely the fact that no
trace or evidence of them is to be found.
Lies of the past
Let us recall here the witch trials, the so-called “Nazi war crimes” trials and the cases brought against historical revisionists.
In centuries past – in particular from 1450 to 1650, but still towards the end of the 18th century – certain ecclesiastical tribunals and learned university men maintained that there were sixty places on a woman’s body where traces of sexual intercourse with the Devil could be detected. But other courts, and minds no less learned, deemed that, despite all the fine details furnished by experts, the best proof of said contact lay in the fact that the Devil had erased all traces of it; if he hadn’t, they asserted, he would not be the Devil.
In the
last century, especially in 1945-1946 with the show trials
at Nuremberg, then during an endless series of cases brought
– still today! – against “camp guards”, “war criminals”,
“collaborators” and, finally, in actions against
revisionists, a similar phenomenon could be observed as
regards the alleged genocide of the Jews and the alleged
Nazi gas chambers. Here the learned ones initially held
that, considering the abundance of evidence and witnesses,
it was enough to state that those horrors were “facts of
common knowledge” (Article 21 of the Charter of the
International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg). Then, in
their writings, other learned ones desired, all the same, to
carry out a demonstration, but in the end it emerged that,
all told, and by those experts’ own admission, only
“beginnings of proof” were to be discovered, accompanied by
testimonies to be received with caution (the case, for
example, of
Jean-Claude Pressac with his bulky book, in English, devoted
to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and of Robert Jan van
Pelt, author of two works on the same subject). Lastly, the
more cunning among them have chosen to declare: “Everyone
knows that the Nazis destroyed those gas chambers and
systematically eliminated all the witnesses”: this statement
comes from Simone Veil (France-Soir Magazine,
May 7, 1983, p. 47), who thus has us understand that Hitler
would simply not have been Hitler if he had left behind the
least trace of his gigantic crime. In fact, in the millions
of documents left in our world by that new Satan, one will
not find so much as a single order to kill Jews, nor
any plan to exterminate millions of them (not even in
the report of a certain
meeting held at Berlin-Wannsee), nor any directive stating
that the Jews had to be physically eliminated (not even as
concerns the Einsatzgruppen), nor any hint of a
budget for so vast an enterprise. Also, in all the
globe, there is nowhere to be seen even a single
execution gas van or a single execution gas
chamber, apart from some grotesque Potemkin village or
theatrical prop-style gas chambers clumsily “reconstituted”
after the war. When confronted with this utter void in the
way of evidence, such an authority as that most learned
among the “Holocaust” experts, the Jewish master Raul
Hilberg, ended up explaining, in desperation, that the
formidable slaughter had taken place thanks to “an
incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a
far-flung bureaucracy”, the German bureaucracy, that is.
More diabolical than Beelzebub himself, Adolf Hitler had not
been content with erasing all evidence of his crime but, the
better to fool everyone, he also left evidence meant to have
people believe he had never wanted, much less tried, to
exterminate the Jews to begin with. To take but three
examples: first, he had spared the lives of millions of
them; then, as the documents prove, he had sought, in order
to solve
“the Jewish question in Europe”, only a “final territorial solution”
(with the Madagascar plan, or some other one); finally, his
military courts convicted and sentenced to death Germans
guilty of killing just one Jew. And so on and so forth. As
for the magical gas chambers, he made them disappear so well
that afterwards nobody could take up the challenge of
historical revisionists demanding that one of the crime
weapons be shown or, at the very least, drawn or described.
It also proved impossible to explain how those chemical
slaughterhouses could function without killing the personnel
assigned to clear them of thousands of corpses infused with
cyanide, and therefore untouchable. So it was that Adolf
Hitler left the Jews incapable of proving their main
accusation against him, thus confirming his thoroughly
diabolical nature.
Today’s lie
At this
beginning of the 21st century, it seems we’re
being replayed the same script with Saddam Hussein and his
weapons of mass destruction. And I do say “seems”, for
stress needs to be laid on a sizeable difference. While
intercourse with the Devil was physically impossible and the
Nazi gas chamber was chemically inconceivable, one must
agree that the terrifying weapons of Saddam Hussein are, in
theory, perfectly possible, from the point of view of
physics and chemistry, if only because his accusers,
beginning with Ariel Sharon, are themselves in possession of
huge numbers of those very things, albeit known by the
innocuous name of “weapons of mass deterrence”.
The eternal big lie
In wartime all political regimes of whatever stripe, whether
Saddam Hussein’s or G. W. Bush’s, employ the coarsest of
lies. To launch a country into a war, maintain warlike
fervour or justify a military crusade after the fact, only a
good old-fashioned big lie will speak to the crowd. An
ingenious lie or a newly invented one will not do the trick.
There exist formulas for moving a mass of people to
indignation, anger, the desire to fight, formulas for
arousing, at least temporarily, the will to commit oneself
heart and soul to the war effort. The politician with
experience in handling the masses knows the powers of the
simplistic, and also knows that the ultimate skill consists
in elaborating on the theme “I love you; love me!”, or “I’m
good, you’re good and the others are wicked.” The
televangelist intones: “God is love, God is with us and
against the evil ones.” The first weapon of the ordinary
confidence man is not some genius for swindling but an
ability to gain sympathy when approaching the victim and to
proceed with the very simplest talk. These features and
these expedients of the politician, the televangelist and
the swindler will necessarily be found in a leader taking
his country into a war. From this standpoint, Franklin D.
Roosevelt will perhaps go down in history as the slyest of
20th century warmongers. Will Bush outdo him in
the new century?
The comfort of credulity
The perfect crime leaves no trace, no evidence. Likewise,
here the perfect accusation is not based on anything
verifiable. The war propagandist knows this. It will suffice
for him to launch the eternal atrocity stories about
opponents who spend most of their time killing babies, using
invisible weapons, operating corpse factories located near
mass graves. These accounts will win people over only if not
accompanied by any purported evidence, or if flanked merely
by “clues”, “testimonies” or references to unidentified
“sources.” Hard evidence has the drawback of restricting the
imagination and passions. With clues there is the advantage
of giving free rein to the fancy. As for testimonies, they
touch sensitive souls, especially if accompanied by tears or
scenes of fainting (a speciality of some Israeli witnesses).
A gratuitous and stereotyped slander will do the job better
than one with detailed accusations and supporting evidence.
One favourite recipe is a genuine photograph with a false
caption; for example, the photo will show dead bodies but
the caption will tell of the slain, the massacred, the
exterminated. Ideal witnesses provide no other information
on the crime than inexact bits of exactness: this allows
people who lend them credence to build the décor in their
own heads, and reconstitute the crime scene to their liking.
Without difficulty, as if on a magic carpet, the listeners,
in their minds, fly off towards Auschwitz, Timisoara or the
Kuwait City hospital where, according to Bush the elder, the
Iraqis had, in 1991, disconnected the incubators with
premature babies inside. Those who hear or see such a
witness feel delightfully flooded with compassion, and
thoroughly enjoy themselves: they satisfy all at once a
taste for the spectacle of horror (to which they could never
admit), their inner need to hate and their aspiration for
the finer feelings. The shrewd propagandist thus leaves
those he tricks with the illusion of a certain personal
freedom.
The need to believe
The common crowd is simple, and it will never be said too
often that a simple mind finds real charm in elementary
reasoning, particularly in circular reasoning. For instance,
people can be told that the proof that someone is wicked is
that he is wicked. The proof that the man is wicked is that
he doesn’t love us. If he doesn’t love us, it’s that he’s
barbaric. If he’s barbaric, it’s that he doesn’t see things
as we do. This wicked barbarian belongs to another world,
which can only be the nether world. If he is of the nether
world, it follows that we are of a higher world. And so it
is confirmed that, if we are good, our enemy is
fundamentally bad. The circle is complete: it’s perfect. Any
other proof is superfluous and, just as Henri IV’s white
horse is white because it’s white, it also ought not to be
wondered how the mass murder attributed to Hitler was technically possible:
“It was technically possible, since it happened.” That
extravagant asininity was proffered, in a joint declaration,
by Léon Poliakov, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Fernand Braudel and
about thirty French historians when
in 1978-1979 I had, in a way, beseeched those people to
explain how the gassings of Jews, such as they were
described to us, had been technically possible
(Le Monde, February 21, 1979, p.
23). As for Saddam Hussein’s weapons, if they aren’t in his
country, then they must be somewhere else. If they aren’t in
Iraq, it’s because they’re in Syria. Or in Iran. Or on the
moon. Or the Devil knows where! But what does it matter? The
masses have a short memory. They will not go and hold the
liars to account for anything. For them, with or without a
weapon, with or without any evidence, the crime of the
defeated side remains a crime and the defeated criminal, a
criminal. Circular reasoning delectably finds its place in
the cerebral convolutions of the simple-minded. It’s snug
and cosy there. Reptilian or not, isn’t the brain a more or
less soft, spongy, formless mass? Isn’t the heart basically
just a pump that sucks in and pushes out without one’s
having to think about it? Isn’t laziness voluptuous? And
thinking, tiring? The effort of memory, hard? Then why, in a
consumer society, complicate one’s life when it’s quite
enough to receive, absorb, regurgitate, then, with a
refilled belly and a brain full of air, feel good-hearted
alongside the winning killer?
The Third World War is recycling the old lies
American leaders have never shown much interest for nuance
or detail. And ever since 1898 at the latest, in order to
justify their incessant military expeditions they have
employed the same inventions. Why would they change them?
Those inventions have successfully covered over the horrors
that the boys piled up during the Second World War,
their war in Vietnam and in twenty other military
adventures. The same fakeries were used to justify the
masquerade of a trial at Nuremberg and are still found now
in the hideous holocaustic propaganda of which American Jews
have made themselves the champions. Just recently, the White
House and its Judeo-Israeli camarilla have done nothing more
than recycle the most worn-out concoctions of war propaganda
in making up and exploiting a fable about weapons of mass
destruction supposedly held by Saddam Hussein who, for that
matter – let it be said in passing –, forgot to put them to
use when the time came. Their second war against Iraq has
illustrated the progress of the Americans’ inventions in all
fields except, on the one hand, the fabrication of horrors
ascribed to the opponent and, on the other, the fabrication
of their own soldiers’ alleged prowess. Their propaganda may
have changed shape but the content has never varied. In an
accessory manner, we have now been treated to Saddam
Hussein’s doubles (six in all, of whom none has yet been
found) as well as a heroic, if purely fictional tale with
the young soldier Jessica Lynch’s rescue story.
The revisionists are lucky. Over the course of the new world war, their task will be easy. War propaganda will remain imperturbably the same. Jean Norton Cru, in dealing with the First World War, and Paul Rassinier, with the Second World War, have in a way already described for us the great deceptions of this Third World War. It should be enough to read these authors again. They have, if one dare say, recorded in advance the long-standing lies of Bush Sr., Bush Jr., Blair and Sharon. The Third World War will be quite different from the two great wars that have gone before and will innovate in a number of fields, but its propaganda based on atrocity stories will continue to abide by tradition. Crass and deeply cynical, it will continue to illustrate a truth borne out by experience: in time of war fever, the accusation that really carries with the masses is one that is not actually accompanied by evidence. The Americans will compensate for this absence of genuine evidence with spin doctors’ arrangements, further clownery à la Colin Powell (who made believe, for the cameras, to be waving a tube of Iraqi poison), or else with still more vile Hollywood productions in the Shoah Business and Holocaust Industry tradition. Applied to the history of the Third World War, the revisionist method will at least offer the benefit of flushing out this sort of fakery.
May 11, 2003
