When speaking of a "historical lie" one is obviously within the province of metaphor. From the heights of our modest science today it can be observed that the intellectuals of the Renaissance who, working for the King or the Church of France, found the origin of the French people in the Trojans who had survived the sack of their city by the Greeks, thus committed an enormous historical error whose propagation for ideological purposes was a matter of lying.
Our era is not exempt either. A few twopenny prophets and the packs of hacks who follow them can proclaim the end of ideology all they like: false representations, irrational beliefs, and historical (and other) absurdities flourish still, perhaps even better than before. The "world of communication" peddles a thousand falsehoods and lies for every firmly established truth. In its game lies are far more profitable than the meagre, arid truth.
As concerns the Second World War, where the world political order under which we live today has its roots, the degree of acqaintance of our contemporaries is quite varied. It is likely that the main source of information nowadays is television and works of fiction and documentaries, veritable money-spinners exploited on a grand scale. Also, it is well known that nothing is easier for the media than to make displays of images that say whatever they want them to say. Images carry within them a sort of guaranty of truth that no other means of communication can pretend to give. One should note here that, although they teach pupils, as well as can be expected, to read, write, do sums, and even to approach written texts somewhat critically, none of our education systems shows its charges how to look critically at images. As the well known tale of the emperor's new clothes might suggest, no political regime could hold out for long.
It is therefore altogether normal that many people should believe that the Nazis sought to exterminate the Jews by means of a diabolical invention: the gas chamber. It is repeated everywhere. The authorities put all of their weight behind this assertion and, generally, people avoid defying the authorities, especially when the latter are in league with one another. Believing what everyone else seems to believe cannot make one pass for an adherent to a lie. It is a simple measure of prudence. One trusts in something because the President or the Bishop or the deputy commissioner or the gentleman on the television has said it. The phenomenon bears witness to a simple need of conformity.
But there also exists a small and very little known group of professionals of the business. I am not talking about the historians who, almost to a man, have refused to go through the historical records, which make up a huge dossier comprising hundreds of thousands of German documents of the period, miles of stacks of material in various archives in ten countries. No. I mean the professionals who elaborate, formulate, circulate, and monitor the orthodox version of what they have chosen to call, since the successful broadcast of the television film of the same name, the "Holocaust". Some of them prefer to show off a learning that they do not have by using a Hebrew word, shoah. These people work in independent institutions financed essentially by certain large Jewish fortunes in the U.S. The Yad Vashem Institute, for instance, in Jerusalem. It is truly hard for any scribbler who would like to write a book on the "Holocaust" and have it published in America to do so without the favourable appreciation of Yad Vashem or one of its countless henchmen and surgeons who populate the universities and publishing houses. The awful little fellow who writes under the name of Raul Hilberg found himself flunked out of the circuit for about ten years for want of that nod. Yad Vashem had not liked his implicating ever so slightly the Jewish authorities of the era who had, under duress, worked with the Nazis. In his latest book he gives an account of his own brushes with what one ought well to call a self-constituted authority, outgrowth of the Central European Jewish élites who easily survived Nazism because they knew how to buy their safety when necessary.
There now is a blossoming of university courses banded together in Departments of Holocaust Studies. The students, whatever their main fields of study, seldom escape these sessions of teaching of the orthodox line. The "Holocaust", in its obviously canonical version, is taught even in the primary schools. Hence the need of a specialised corps of masters to "train the trainers", as Chairman Mao used to say. And then there are the museums. Europeans are unaware of the colossal amounts collected by a few enterprising rabbis to create architectural monstrosities like the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance (MOT) in Los Angeles, or Washington's US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). It has taken the efforts of quite a big racket to have these financial chasms dug, but things have not stopped there, as the syndicate has also set up a bunch of smaller "Holocaust" museums in the other large American cities. Through these buildings pass classes of pupils of all ages, constantly, one after another; the indoctrination line runs as smoothly as the one at the slaughterhouse.
I have recently visited the MOT. It is made up of two separate sectors, the first of which is open to the individual visitor who may walk about amidst large signboards covered with historical images and watch various screens showing simplistic and often outdated material, which is supposed to promote tolerance by exposing the public to words, ideas, and sounds which are supposed to have been produced by hatred and intolerance. It is silly, confused, and practically incomprehensible, and this down-market psychology quickly becomes tiresome. Hatred? It is here that it is distilled in a solid acid concentrate.
The second sector is visited only in groups led by a specialised cow-puncher, usually a young African-American lady. This is the part devoted to the "Holocaust". Near-darkness reigns within. Glass cases set in the walls light up in succession, forcing the visitor to listen to the tape recordings which thus play in succession. Inside the cases are plaster-cast dummies representing various archetypes. In this way one finds oneself successively in different places and moments in the National-Socialist era in Germany. The commentary is, of course, extremely simplistic. From time to time the guide speaks to the group as if to a bunch of morons, putting questions to them so as to verify that certain of the recorded phrases have been correctly imprinted in the young visitors' virgin brains. I think that a more subtle and critical approach must have been used on the pupils of the Jesuits in the last century or the Soviet pioneers of the 1930's. Doltishness and a domineering attitude make a good pair here. And, let me repeat, the visitor cannot visit alone but must stay in a group. It is a collective undertaking. Nothing to make a fuss about, though. It is a bit further on, towards the end of the passage through the gloomy rooms, that the really sly trick is pulled. It lasts only two or three minutes. Before a case inside which a few silhouettes appear to be seated round a table the tape machine plays a conversation of several voices. We are at the Wannsee (Greater Berlin) conference, held on January 20, 1942 under the chairmanship of Heydrich. Some authors are inclined to establish this as the moment where the decision was taken to exterminate the Jews. I shall remind the reader that a text of the minutes of this meeting is extant (15 typewritten pages)[French translation available], albeit some doubts remain as to its authenticity. Like all those who have taken up this question, I know the text well and have worked with the original German version. The talk on the tape produced by the ideas-men at the Simon Wiesenthal Center is pure invention. They have not even distorted the Wannsee minutes, rather they have replaced them with words and sentences having no connection with any passage in the text. In other words it is, on the practical level, an unadulterated lie.
The people who have done this are not to be compared with the average man in the street who takes his assorted information as it comes, without bothering too much about most of it. No, they have most certainly looked over the existing documents. They have most certainly read the Wannsee minutes. The thing is, they cannot produce the actual words of the minutes without ruining their whole theory of extermination, and I do mean their theory, for the minutes themselves foresee big losses of life in the Jewish communities due mainly to overwork. These people have replaced the document that they are supposed to have put to use (no small matter, this: it is a question of the instance where, purportedly, the decision was taken to proceed to the "Holocaust") with talk that has been made up from beginning to end, and which says things altogether different from what the document contains; above all, it also betrays its inventors' mental system -- one which is diametrically opposed to the notion of tolerance. A brochure on sale at the museum shop describes the scene thus:
"At the Museum's re-creation of the Wannsee Conference, you eavesdrop on the secret meeting. The officials discuss extermination methods and agree on Hitler's Final Solution -- the systematic murder of the 11,000,000 Jews of Europe. Polish Jews would go first ; Jews from other countries would be deported to death camps after transportation problems were resolved. (p. 33)"
Every word of this paragraph is either a complete distorsion of the document's meaning or a plain and simple fabrication. It is wilful lying, and blatantly so. Why must they lie? The question must be put to them. Is this really the Jewish contribution to universal culture?
The phenomenal gall of these professional liars surprises even the forewarned visitor, who remains flabbergasted. There is nothing written, no printed notice beside the panes. Nothing. Only some words that were uttered by actors, and have vanished. I had no tape recorder with me. The dirty deed had been accomplished in two minutes, and I state with certainty that no-one can fight such a machination there on the spot. The poor black girl serving as a guide was as if hypnotised. She knew her cackle by heart but one must not throw her off track.
It is clear that in Washington, at the USHMM, the exhibition is equally stupefying. The master manipulators who designed this temple of the new Holocaustic religion well understood, as it is a quite ancient Jewish discovery, that the absence of images is stronger still than images themselves. It is well known that, in ancient times, the central part of the Temple in Jerusalem, reserved for the priests, was made up of ulam, the vestibule, hêkâl, the Holy, with the candelabra, the bread table, and the altar with the incense and, finally, debirthe Holy of Holies where only the High Priest entered, once a year, on the occasion of yom kippur. He was therefore the only one to know very concretely that the Holy of Holies was empty. The absence of representation validates mystery much better than the presence of representation. This is what the ancient Jews and their Christian iconoclast and Moslem successors, as well as Claude Lanzmann, have understood perfectly. And it is being served up to us again today.
We indeed find ourselves in a perfectly comparable symbolic situation. In an article in the Northern California Jewish Bulletin of April 18, 1997 devoted to the antirevisionist struggle in the classroom, one may read: "No gas chambers or crematoria were left standing. Only one film of actual killings -- four minutes long and housed in the Yad Vashem archives -- exists." Here we have the new debir, the Holy of Holies where the Sole Proof remains hidden from all eyes. Yad Vashem's vault. Nobody has ever seen this proof, and I hereby place my bet that nobody ever will. This four minutes' footage -- which Lanzmann would destroy if he could -- exists no more than the old priests' YHVH. If it were up there, it would obviously appear on television every evening at dinner time, on the five continents.
There is, then, a lie here, perhaps theological in nature, but a lie all the same. The article quoted above is, for its part, greatly revealing. It focusses on the responses to revisionism that can be made by the professionals of orthodoxy, and the photograph of one of these champions accompanies the text: Ephraïm Kaye, who is -- no joke! -- director of seminars for foreign teachers visiting Yad Vashem. He and his teammates, Shulamit Imber and Richelle Bud Caplan, have to train the "Holocaust" teachers specifically to answer the apparently growing number of revisionist objections in the classrooms. One wonders where indeed pupils might acquire a scepticism which could well banish them from the civilised world.
At Birkenau, says E. Kaye, "there are no crematoria, no gas chambers, no clothes. Nothing. Nothing of the effects of 2 million killed there. It's as if they evaporated into the thin air." That "nothing" weighs heavily on the Soviets of the 1950's who set up Auschwitz like a theatre. Kaye and the other guardians of the dogma's untouchability quit the field plainly and simply. "All this [in Auschwitz] provides fodder for deniers who claim less than a million Jews died during World War II, that there was no ''Final Solution'', that Jewish deaths were casualties of war and that the Holocaust is Zionist propaganda for Israel to secure dollars", he adds. Now there is a chap who knows what he is talking about! He states straightforwardly that the revisionists are right in denouncing the Auschwitz museum's fiddlings, and wants to take this weapon away from them. Auschwitz is finished. A bad blow to Polish tourism, but it has been well known for quite some time, especially since Alfred Jarry*, that Poland is nowhere.
Having abandoned the outer defences, what will the last handful of guardians use to try to withstand the siege? Documents! German, Russian, Jewish, and Polish ones, cited in that order. This Ephraïm must be suicidal, or completely cornered. He brings out long buried manuscripts, discovered in fact during the Soviet period by way of a sort of miracle, itself also Soviet. Pierre Vidal-Naquet had already tried to take shelter behind these papers which, by the way, are not to be found in works for the general reading public. It is a better idea to store them also inside the debir where nobody can look at them too closely. But, by and by, with a bit of literary sauce, something can be got out of them, believes Ephraïm Kaye: "This is Dante's hell on earth. This is a 'no-no' for less than 12th-graders." As for the Russian archives, they seem to contain 65,000 pages of testimony gathered by the Russian (he no longer says "Soviet") investigative commissions.
And then there are the trains. Four million Jews appear to have been transported by between 16,000 and 18,000 of them. My pocket calculator tells me that this would mean 222 persons per train, which seems a little curious.
Ephraïm gets enthusiastic. "In addition", he says, "Nazi archives hold blueprints for the gas chambers and crematoria made the Gertman company Topf Und Sohne." This is perfectly false, obviously, and he knows it. He goes still further, he climbs to the ceiling, this Ephraïm: Topf has provided documents, he tells us, showing "that a gas chamber could kill 6,000 to 8,000 people within five to eight minutes." Here he has reached sheer delirium, a huge lie, pure and simple. For the rest, one could accuse him of having ground up the contents of the texts and then interpreted them more or less crookedly. But here, on this crucial point, he invents outright. There exists no document that could be distorted to the point of producing such an outrage.
In France
In this country, the job of maintaining the dogma is essentially left in the hands of amateurs. Of course we have our little phalanx of professionals who specialise in their own sectors of lying, for example Léon Poliakov in fabricating documents, or the grim Vieworka in canonising the Nuremberg trials, not to mention the fat old dandy Vidal-Naquet who is always hammering away at whatever and whatnot. Apart from them, there are only funny people like the Klarsfelds, mushy octopuses like Bédarida, or the water-on-the-brain school, the Wellers types. When they need a hand they all summon the same Pantaloon, an apothecary called Pressac.
But the State watches over things. Our new P.M., just married to Bédarida's old wife, has decided to "facilitate" the opening up of the Vichy archives. The only ones to complain about this have been people like a certain Sonia Combes, specialist in "oral memory" (insofar as those words mean anything), who had not worked on these archives. No matter. The revisionists' most impressive works come straight from archives and we are for the opening of all of them. But the considerations pronounced by Jospin are worth their weight in caviar:
"For tomorrow and future generations", he exclaimed at the commemoration of the rounding up of the Jews housed in the Paris cycling arena, the "Vel' d'Hiv", in July 1942, " the Republic must, if it is not to fail itself, safeguard the truth."
A heavy task. One could smell the ideology coming: already Lionel was showing through Jospin....
"We know to what extent," he continued, "the work of historians is essential."
There, things must be hotting up. When the State starts calling historians to the rescue it can only be that it feels a pressing need of legitimisation.
"If it is important," he went on, with a rather Mussolinian thrust of the chin, "that the State lend its support to the organisation of commemorations like the one which has brought us together here today, it is they [the historians] who, day after day, through their research and publications, carry on the fundamental struggle for the truth against the 'assassins of memory'. [...] The atrocious images of the Shoah must always remain in our conscious minds. The Government, inspired with this purpose, shall aid in establishing in Paris, at the Memorial to the [Unknown] Jewish Martyr, a museum of the Shoah. This centre of information, of gatherings, and of debates, equipped with the most modern audio-visual technology, will be a new 'place of remembrance,' notably for the younger generations."
In other words, a cohort of professionals will have to be recruited to manage the fabulous "memory" and sock it good and hard to the "younger generations", the preferred target of all those who like a soft mark. It can be affirmed henceforth that these mercenaries of remembrance will be unable to solve the riddle which obliges the high authorities of Yad Vashem, the NeoWiesenthal men, and the rabbid museocrats of Washington to lie every day, to all their visitors, in order to validate the orthodox version of the "Holocaust". Compared to this, the cult of relics, the shroud of Turin, mother Henrouille's mummies, Fatima, and all the other holy hokum look like monuments of rationalism. It can at least be supposed that the clergies of those respective faiths believe in them. The case at hand, however, is one of conscious and organised lying and total cynicism. Voltaire, where are you now that we really need you?
There is where they stand, the professionals of Holocaustic orthodoxy: amidst miserable lies that the least competent revisionist can spot five miles off. It is hardly surprising that primary and secondary school pupils are reluctant to have their minds clogged with such asinine stuff. And the myth's whole maintenance hierarchy is of such extremely low intellectual quality! Anyone looking for an appointment as guardian of the "Holocaust" should be useless in everything else.
The revisionists are tired of asking for opponents who are up to the task. They have had enough of these childish lies.
(Translated from the French)
* Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), French author of plays, among which 'Ubu Roi', whose opening stage directions read: "The scene is Poland, that is to say, nowhere".back to text
[Sources: Beit Hashoah-Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, 1993, writer: Cheryl Crabtree; Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory, Chicago, 1996; Lesley Pearl, "Auschwitz diaries combat classroom revisionist rhetoric", Northern California Jewish Bulletin, 18 avril 1997. Le discours de Jospin: Le Monde, 22 juillet 1997.]
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