The French anti-revisionist law
by Jessie Aitken
The French anti-revisionist law dates from July 13, 1990.
It is known by various names: “Gayssot law”, “Fabius-Gayssot law”, “Faurisson
law”, “lex Faurissonia” or “article 24bis” (of the law of July 29, 1881
on press freedom). It provides for a prison sentence of up to a year
as well as a maximum fine of €45,000 for anyone who publicly disputes
the reality of one or more “crimes against humanity” as defined
and ruled on, essentially, by the International Military Tribunal of
Nuremberg in 1945-1946. In addition to the prison sentence and fine
there can be an order to pay damages to Jewish or other associations
as well as the heavy costs of having the decision published in the media:
finally, the courts may order the confiscation of any work material,
along with books and papers, seized by the police.
It is inaccurate to say that this law forbids the questioning of
the entirety of the Nuremberg judgment for it forbids only the questioning
of the judgment’s word on crimes supposedly committed against “humanity”,
that is, first and foremost, against the Jews. However, the passages
in the judgment dealing with that subject amount to but 2% of the said
judgment as a whole. Thus one remains free, at least in principle, to
dispute publicly the other 98%. Consequently, only the crimes alleged
to have been committed, above all, against the Jews are decreed
legallyunquestionable. Let us salute here the granting of
an astonishing privilege to the exclusive benefit of God’s “chosen people”.
It was the Jews of France who, in May 1986, were the first to call
for the establishment of such a law. At the time the State of Israel
was preparing to pass an anti-revisionist bill which was finally to
be approved by the Knesset two months later, in July 1986. The promoter
of the French anti-revisionist law was the country’s chief rabbi René-Samuel
Sirat. It was under his guidance that in May 1986 some Jewish academics,
like Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and some Jewish propagandists, like Serge
Klarsfeld and Georges Wellers, called for a bill like the Israeli one
(Bulletin de l’Agence télégraphique juive, June 2, 1986, p. 1
and 3).
Laurent Fabius
Those Jews had to wait four years to obtain satisfaction. A Socialist-Communist
coalition government under the presidency of François Mitterrand at
last voted a pertinent bill into law in July 1990. But well before the
making of the legislation in question, historical revisionism was punishable
by law in France. The most various grounds were put forth: attempt to
justify a crime, racial discrimination, incitement to racial hatred,
publication of material considered dangerous for the youth, personal
injury etc. For example, it was on charges of “apologie de crime” that
Maurice Bardèche had been jailed for publishing his Nuremberg ou
la Terre promise (Nuremberg or the Promised Land)in 1948.
Jean-Claude Gayssot
The politician whose action was decisive in the preparation and passage
of the July 13, 1990 law is former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius. Today
a prospective candidate for the French presidency in 2007, Fabius is
a Jew, a millionaire and a Socialist. In 1990 he was president of the
National Assembly. In that Assembly was a rather uncouth and ill-educated
Communist, Jean-Claude Gayssot, then Minister of Transport. This man
wanted to present, in the name of the Communist party, an anti-racism
bill targeting Jean-Marie Le Pen, head of the Front National. But his
bill was badly drafted. It was then that Laurent Fabius made an arrangement
with his Communist colleague. He, Fabius, would replace the poorly constructed
text with one prepared by the Socialist party which targeted both Le
Pen, for “racism”, and professor Robert Faurisson, for “denial of the
extermination of the Jews”; Fabius would also grant Gayssot the privilege
of bringing this bill under his name, a bill that had become really
and truly both anti-racist and anti-revisionist. Once the deal had been
concluded between the Jew Fabius and the Communist Gayssot, there remained
the procedure of defending their bill before the National Assembly and
Senate. The task looked daunting. A number of jurists, academics and
politicians came out against the principal of such a law, deemed Stalinist,
but then, suddenly, a providential event enabled its passage by the
Socialist-Communist majority. In effect, on May 11, 1990 there exploded
in the world press the outrage of “desecrated” Jewish graves in a cemetery
in Carpentras, a small town in the south of France. Fabius took the
helm of a thundering propaganda operation meant to have people believe
that there was a resurgence of anti-semitism in France, an anti-semitism
fuelled by revisionism. Tens of thousands of demonstrators, many of
whom bearing Israeli flags, were to march in the streets, notably in
Paris where, for the first time since August 1944 and the city’s liberation,
the great bell of Notre Dame cathedral was set droning. The intimidation
was so strong that the required minimum of sixty members of either the
National Assembly or the Senate could not be mustered to put the bill
before the Constitutional Council for assessment to determine whether
or not it conformed to the French Republic’s constitution.
But once the anti-revisionist law was on the statute books, it proved
rather hard to apply. The first conviction under it was handed down
in Paris in April1991 against professor Faurisson and, in these past
fifteen years, it is likely that the total number of other definitive
guilty verdicts, whether concerning the professor or other revisionists,
adds up to about twenty. The financial penalties have at times been
very heavy and, in more recent years, sentences of imprisonment without
remission have been pronounced, but up to now no one has actually
been incarcerated in France on the sole grounds of the July 13, 1990
anti-revisionist law.
This law is of a Soviet nature. It especially suppresses the freedom
of research. However, this freedom cannot normally see itself assigned
boundaries in matters of history. The history of men is made up of
billions of events about which everyone, in principle, is allowed to
ask himself questions and freely put forth his interpretations. One
may therefore wonder how a point, and one alone, of that history, amongst
billions of others, can thus be singled out from the rest and declared
off-limits to researchers. For decreeing in advance the result at
which the researcher must arrive amounts to prohibiting true research.
It is a Stalinist act, for instance, to tell a researcher studying “the
problem of the Nazi gas chambers”: “1) You must conclude from your work
that the Nazi gas chambers really did exist and operate even though
we possess no forensic report establishing the existence of a single
one of those weapons of mass destruction; 2) You must, besides, conclude
that those chemical slaughterhouses had a real existence in such or
such camp and a fictitious existence in another; 3) You must, finally,
conclude that the total number of Jewish deaths in the Second World
Warremains invariably six million, as the judges at Nuremberg decreed
it ex cathedra without having been able to base their ruling
on any investigative report
*”.
It is astounding that a law of the French Republic should thus declare
the infallibility, in regard to history, of a mere tribunal, that of
Nuremberg. That tribunal called itself “military” when in fact it was
not. It called itself “international” when it was only inter-allied.
It was not even a tribunal in the proper sense for, composed exclusively
of victors in a recent wartrying exclusively their own vanquished opponents,
it was both judge of and party to the cases it heard. It tried those
matters with a self-bestowed supreme authority, its judgment thus admitting
of no appeal. It practised the retrospective application of laws. It
instituted the principle of collective responsibility. It was “not be
bound by technical rules of evidence” (Article 19 of its Charter). It
did not demand that any evidence be produced to prove “facts” that it
considered, without giving its reasons, as being “of common knowledge”,
and it automatically received as genuine evidence, rendered such by
its own “judicial notice”, any report submitted by the Allied powers’
various war crimes commissions accusing the defeated defendants (Article
21).
If, in France, this law was demanded by the most influential Jews
it is because those people were panic-stricken upon realising that the
historians in place were incapable of answering the revisionists on
the level of scientific, technical and historical argumentation. When,
in 1978-79, professor Faurisson made plain the technical impossibilities
of mass killings in gas chambers as alleged for the German wartime camps
and when he launched his challenge: “Explain to us how such mass murder
was, as you see it, technically possible”, he got the pitiful
reply: “It must not be asked how, technically, such mass-murder
was possible. It was technically possible, since it happened” (Le
Monde, February 21, 1979). R. Faurisson has in a like manner put
a whole series of very simple questions which those to whom they are
addressed have been unable to answer. Moreover, he has proved that photographs
and documents invoked by his accusers were, on the one hand, either
altered or falsified or, on the other hand, wrongly presented so as
to seem to show things that in fact they did not. He was answered with
physical assaults, a de facto ban from teaching and, above all,
by lawsuits and prosecution. But these court cases have not really taken
the course hoped for by the Jews. Certainly, the professor has been
held liable, for example, for “personal injury” but never, as the Jews
have requested, for “falsification of history”. On the contrary, on
April 23, 1983 the first chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal found
against him whilst at the same time paying solid tribute to the quality
of his work on what it called “the problem of the gas chambers”. That
court concluded that, in the work in question, there was no trace of
rashness, of negligence, of his having deliberately overlooked anything,
nor any trace of a lie and that, as a consequence, everyone must henceforth
be entitled to state that the Nazi gas chambers had never
existed! The decision bore words, in the language of superior judges,
to the precise effect that “the appraisal of the value of the findings
[on the gas chambers]defended by Mr Faurisson is a matter, THEREFORE,
solely for experts, historians and the public.”In the period leading
up to the “Gayssot Act’s” passage, the Jews were also aware that the
professor had been, on the historical and scientific plane, the instigator
and organiser of the defence of Ernst Zündel in that most valiant revisionist’s
two long trials in Toronto in 1985 and 1988. Those trials turned into
a particular catastrophe for the Jews Raul Hilberg and Rudolf Vrba.
The former could be considered as the Number One historian and the latter
as the Number One witness of the alleged “destruction of the European
Jews”.
The revisionists have thus piled up a long succession of victories.
But the general public are unaware of it. The Jews’ hold on the media
and their many means of intimidation are such that, until the appearance
and widespread development of the Internet, the public have largely
been kept in ignorance of those victories.
Today the French anti-revisionist law is still in force but those
who had the idea that it would be a rampart against revisionism’s progress
are disillusioned. By the very fact of its existence, this law has in
a way become one of the best pieces of proof that the official history
is powerless to defend itself with arguments, evidence and documents
in a free public debate.
That debate in the open is something the revisionists have never
ceased to propose and, however violent the repression exerted against
them is to be, they will not stop calling for it. The revisionists are
not afraid of the light; on the contrary, they seek it.
|